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This multicenter retrospective study aimed to assess the efficacy, intrarenal pressure (IRP), and complications of retrograde intrarenal surgery (RIRS) using a flexible and navigable suction ureteral access sheaths (FANS-UAS) in the reverse Trendelenburg lithotomy position (RTLP) for treating kidney and upper ureteral stones measuring 2–6 cm. Conducted at six medical centers in Fujian Province from 2022 to 2024, the study included 231 patients with a median stone size of 26 mm. The immediate stone-free rate (ISFR) was 90.48%, while the SFR at postoperative day 30 was 95.67%. Only two patients developed postoperative fever, two patients had ureteral laceration and most experienced mild pain. Although surgical time increased with stone size, factors such as sex, infundibulopelvic angle (IPA), and stone density had little effect on duration, and there was no significant difference between ISFR and 30-day SFR. Importantly, all IRP measurements remained within normal limits. These findings suggest that RIRS with FANS-UAS in RTLP is a safe and effective approach for managing upper urinary tract stones of 2–6 cm, especially in 2–4 cm stones.

Abstract To validate the feasibility of a fiber-optic pressure sensor-based pressure measurement device for monitoring intrarenal pressure and to analyze the effects of ureteral acess sheath (UAS) type, surgical location, perfusion flow rate, and measurement location on intrarenal pressure (IRP). The measurement deviations and response times to transient pressure changes were compared between a fiber-optic pressure sensing device and a urodynamic device IRP in an in vitro porcine kidney and in a water tank. Finally, pressure measurements were performed in anesthetized female pigs using fiber-optic pressure sensing device with different UAS, different perfusion flow rates, and different surgical positions at different renal calyces and ureteropelvic junctions (UPJ). According to our operation, the result is fiber optic pressure sensing devices are highly accurate and sensitive. Under the same conditions, IRP varied among different renal calyces and UPJ (P

Abstract Fetal growth restriction (FGR), a leading cause of perinatal morbidity and mortality, is caused by fetal, maternal, and placental factors. Uniparental disomy (UPD) is a rare condition that leads to imprinting effects, low-level mosaic aneuploidies and homozygosity for pathogenic variants. In the present study, UPD events were detected in 5 women with FGR by trio exome sequencing (trio-WES) of a cohort of 150 FGR cases. Furthermore, noninvasive prenatal testing results of the 5 patients revealed a high risk of rare autosomal trisomy. Trio-WES showed no copy-number variations (CNVs) or nondisease-causing mutations associated with FGR. Among the 5 women with FGR, two showed gene imprinting, and two exhibited confined placental mosaicism (CPM) by copy number variant sequencing (CNV-seq). The present study showed that in FGR patients with UPD, the detection of imprinted genes and CPM could enhance the genetic diagnosis of FGR.

Fatigued driving is one of the main causes of road traffic accidents. In the process of fatigued driving detection, the evaluation based on a single sign is biased. To improve the adaptability and accuracy of fatigued driving detection, this paper proposes an improved D-S evidence theory-based algorithm for detecting facial fatigue signs. This algorithm uses the multi-thread-optimized Dlib to track and locate the image of the face, captures the 68 key points of the driver’s face with reference to the Dlib open-source library, and narrows the target areas to the eyes and mouth regions. Based on the video stream, it calculates the horizontal and vertical ratios of the eyes and mouth to determine the fatigue sign subsets based on the EAR and MAR within a unit cycle, and calculates the Pitch angle after converting the head pose from 2D images to 3D models, which is used for determining the status of the head pose. The algorithm then fuses multiple feature subsets and uses the improved D-S evidence theory to optimize the weights of the three subsets to mitigate the influence of the “general conflict” and “one veto” problems, and to increase the temporal correlation coefficient of a single fatigue sign. Experimental results show that the improved D-S face detection algorithm can effectively solve the problems of lighting and partial occlusion in complex environments, with an accuracy rate of 93.8% for detecting facial fatigue signs.

BackgroundMale breast cancer (MBC) is a rare disease, accounting for

Abstract The elemental analysis in disease diagnosis and biomedicine screening generally aims at alleviating the difficulties of sample pretreatment techniques, elucidating the distribution and speciation information of elements in bio‐samples as well as elevating resolution of multidimensional elemental profiling. The integration of microfluidic techniques with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP‐MS) has been demonstrated to possess great potential in these aspects due to the versatile microstructure design, rapid sample pretreatment, extremely low sample consumption, and high‐sensitivity/high‐throughput elemental detection capability. Herein, an overview of the advancements in microfluidic‐based ICP‐MS for precise biological elemental determination is provided. A few microfluidic approaches for multiplex and effective manipulation of clinical samples followed by detection with ICP‐MS are highlighted, that is, high spatiotemporal resolution sampling, high‐purity elemental microextraction device, and high signal‐to‐noise ratio elemental analysis. In addition, other front‐end techniques are discussed for converting various types of samples into a suitable form for detection, for example, laser ablation and time of flight MS. The opportunities and outstanding challenges of microfluidic‐based ICP‐MS elemental investigations in clinical diagnosis and biomedical studies are also depicted.

Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides L.) is generally considered to comprise two subspecies, Florida bass (M. floridanus) and Northern Largemouth bass (M. salmoides), which have biological characteristic differences because of their geographical distribution. In this study, whole-genome re-sequencing was performed among 10 Florida and 10 Northern largemouth bass, respectively. In total, 999,793 SNPs and 227,797 InDels were finally identified, and 507,401 SNPs (50.75%) and 116,213 InDels (51.01%) were successfully mapped to annotated 18,629 genes and 14,060 genes, respectively. KEGG classification indicated that most of these genes were focused on the pathways including signal transduction, transport and catabolism, and endocrine system. Genetic diversity analysis indicated that Florida largemouth bass had higher genetic diversity than Northern largemouth bass, indicating that the germplasm quality of Northern largemouth bass had markedly reduced in China. To examine the accuracies of the identified markers, 23 SNPs and eight InDels (the insertions or deletions of more than 45 bp) were randomly selected and detected among Florida largemouth bass, Northern largemouth bass, and their F1 hybrids. The detection efficiencies of all the markers were higher than 95%; nineteen SNPs and three InDels could accurately distinguish the two subspecies and their F1 hybrids with 100% efficiencies. Moreover, the three InDel markers could clearly distinguish the two subspecies and their F1 hybrids with a PCR-based agarose gel electrophoresis. In conclusion, our study established a simple PCR-based method for the germplasm identification of largemouth bass, which will be useful in the germplasm protection, management, and hybridization breeding of largemouth bass.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the protective effect of kaempferol (KAE), the main active monomer from Penthorum chinense Pursh, on hepatic ischemia/reperfusion injury (HI/RI) and its specific mechanism. HI/RI is a common complication closely related to the prognosis of liver surgery, and effective prevention and treatment methods are still unavailable. Ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury is caused by tissue damage during ischemia and sustained oxidative stress and inflammation during reperfusion. Penthorum chinense Pursh is a traditional Chinese medicine widely used to treat liver disease since ancient times. Kaempferol (KAE), a highly purified flavonoid active monomer isolated and extracted from Penthorum chinense Pursh, was investigated for its protective effect on HI/RI. Our study indicates that KAE pretreatment alleviated I/R-induced transaminase elevation and pathological changes. Further analysis revealed that KAE pretreatment attenuates I/R-induced oxidative stress (as measured by the content of MDA, SOD and GSH) in vivo and reduces hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R) -induced reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation in vitro. Meanwhile, KAE inhibits activation of NF-κB/p65 and reduces the release of pro-inflammatory factors (TNF-α and IL-6) to protect the liver from I/R-induced inflammation. Nuclear erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) is a crucial cytoprotection regulator because it induces anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and cytoprotective genes. Therefore, we analyzed the protein levels of Nrf2 and its downstream heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) in the liver of mice and hepatocytes of humankind, respectively, and discovered that KAE pretreatment activates the Nrf2/HO-1 signaling pathway. In summary, this study confirmed the hepatoprotective effect of KAE on HI/RI, which inhibits oxidative stress and inflammation by activating the Nrf2/HO-1 signaling pathway.

ObjectivesThis study was conducted in order to design and develop a framework utilizing deep learning (DL) to differentiate papillary renal cell carcinoma (PRCC) from chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (ChRCC) using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a small set of computed tomography (CT) images and provide a feasible method that can be applied to light devices.MethodsTraining and validation datasets were established based on radiological, clinical, and pathological data exported from the radiology, urology, and pathology departments. As the gold standard, reports were reviewed to determine the pathological subtype. Six CNN-based models were trained and validated to differentiate the two subtypes. A special test dataset generated with six new cases and four cases from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) was applied to validate the efficiency of the best model and of the manual processing by abdominal radiologists. Objective evaluation indexes [accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and area under the curve (AUC)] were calculated to assess model performance.ResultsThe CT image sequences of 70 patients were segmented and validated by two experienced abdominal radiologists. The best model achieved 96.8640% accuracy (99.3794% sensitivity and 94.0271% specificity) in the validation set and 100% (case accuracy) and 93.3333% (image accuracy) in the test set. The manual classification achieved 85% accuracy (100% sensitivity and 70% specificity) in the test set.ConclusionsThis framework demonstrates that DL models could help reliably predict the subtypes of PRCC and ChRCC.

Traditional Tibetan medicine (TTM) is major component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Over thousands of years, the Tibetan people have gradually established a comprehensive theoretical system for Tibetan medicine and obtained rich clinical experience in the snow-covered plateau. The history of TTM has developed rapidly, especially since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, and remarkable achievements have been made with the great support for ethnic medicines from the Communist Party of China and the central government. In this paper, we give an overview of the history, theoretical system, common treatment methods, current development, and prospects for the future development of TTM.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) image often contains mottle noise and streak artefacts, which seriously interfere with clinical diagnosis. In this study, the separation-based (SEPB) method is proposed for mottle noise and streak artefacts suppression and structure preservation. In it, the LDCT image is decomposed into the structural image with residual mottle noise and the streak artefacts image with residual structural details by the image decomposition structural-preserving image smoothing method. The structural image is filtered by the K-singular value decomposition algorithm to remove the residual mottle noise, and the structural details in the streak artefacts image are extracted by the morphological component analysis theory. The extracted structural details are added to the filtered structural image to get the LDCT result image. Meanwhile, in the process of extracting the structural details, the streak artefacts dictionary learned from the streak artefacts image is corrected by the local intuitional fuzzy entropy to remove its structural atoms. The experiments are conducted on the modified Shepp–Logan phantom, the pelvis phantom and the clinical abdominal data to evaluate the proposed SEPB method. Compared to several comparative denoising methods, the experimental results show that the SEPB method has better performance in subjective visual effect and objective indicators.

The largemouth bass is an important species, and its culture has risen sharply with the surge in fish aquaculture in China. Due to the lack of selective breeding technology for the largemouth bass, the growth rate and disease resistance are low, its sexual maturation is slow, and other serious problems are contributing to a sharp decline in the safety and quality of largemouth bass products in recent decades. Therefore, comprehensive breeding programs to improve the economic performance and promote the modern industrial development of largemouth bass must be considered a priority. Here, a total of 152 adult largemouth bass, including two parents and 150 progenies, were selected to produce the genetic mapping family. Then, a high-density linkage map was constructed based on restriction site–associated DNA sequencing using 6,917 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located in 24 linkage groups (LGs). The total genetic length of the linkage map was 1,261.96 cM, and the length of each LG varied from 24.72 cM for LG02 to 117.53 cM for LG16, with an average length of 52.58 cM and an average SNP number of 286. Thirteen significant quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for sex determination were located on LG04, LG05, LG08, LG12, LG15, LG21, and LG23. An informative QTL cluster that included six QTLs was detected on LG12. However, one notable QTL, which accounted for 71.48% of the total phenotypic variation, was located in the region of 1.85 cM on LG05. In addition, 32 identified QTLs were related to growth, including body weight, body length, body height, and head length. The QTLs for these growth-related traits are located in 13 LG regions and have little effect on phenotypic variation. This high-density genetic linkage map will enable the fine-mapping of economic traits and support the future genome assembly of the largemouth bass. Additionally, our study will be useful for future selective culture of largemouth bass and could potentially be used in molecular-assisted breeding of largemouth bass for aquaculture.