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Aim: This study was designed to investigate the prognostic value of the platelet volume index in patients with invasive breast cancer (IBC). Methods: A total of 524 patients with IBC were enrolled in this study, with a median follow-up time of 6.76 years. The relationship between platelet volume indices and breast cancer prognosis was analyzed. Results: There is a strong correlation between a higher platelet distribution width-to-platelet count ratio (PDW/P) and poorer disease-free survival (DFS) in patients with IBC. The DFS rate was significantly lower among individuals with elevated PDW/P ratios compared with those with lower ratios. Conclusion: The PDW/P ratio is an independent risk factor for predicting DFS in patients with IBC.

Neural chat translation (NCT) aims to translate a cross-lingual chat between speakers of different languages. Existing context-aware NMT models cannot achieve satisfactory performances due to the following inherent problems: 1) limited resources of annotated bilingual dialogues; 2) the neglect of modelling conversational properties; 3) training discrepancy between different stages. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multi-task multi-stage transitional (MMT) training framework, where an NCT model is trained using the bilingual chat translation dataset and additional monolingual dialogues. We elaborately design two auxiliary tasks, namely utterance discrimination and speaker discrimination, to introduce the modelling of dialogue coherence and speaker characteristic into the NCT model. The training process consists of three stages: 1) sentence-level pre-training on large-scale parallel corpus; 2) intermediate training with auxiliary tasks using additional monolingual dialogues; 3) context-aware fine-tuning with gradual transition. Particularly, the second stage serves as an intermediate phase that alleviates the training discrepancy between the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Moreover, to make the stage transition smoother, we train the NCT model using a gradual transition strategy, i.e., gradually transiting from using monolingual to bilingual dialogues. Extensive experiments on two language pairs demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed training framework.

Diabetes-induced advanced glycation end products (AGEs) overproduction would result in compromised osseointegration of titanium implant and high rate of implantation failure. 1α,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25VD3) plays a vital role in osteogenesis, whereas its effects on the osseointegration and the underlying mechanism are unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate that 1,25VD3 might promote the defensive ability of osseointegration through suppressing AGEs/RAGE in type 2 diabetes mellitus. In animal study, streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats accepted implant surgery, with or without 1,25VD3 intervention for 12 weeks. After sacrificed, the serum AGEs level, bone microarchitecture and biomechanical index of rats were measured systematically. In vitro study, osteoblasts differentiation capacity was analyzed by alizarin red staining, alkaline phosphatase assay and western blotting, after treated with BSA, AGEs, AGEs with RAGE inhibitor and AGEs with 1,25VD3. And the expression of RAGE protein was detected to explore the mechanism. Results showed that 1,25VD3 could reverse the impaired osseointegration and mechanical strength, which possibly resulted from the increased AGEs. Moreover, 1,25VD3 could ameliorate AGEs-induced damage of cell osteogenic differentiation, as well as downregulating the RAGE expression. These data may provide a theoretical basis that 1,25VD3 could work as an adjuvant treatment to against poor osseointegration in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.