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Highlights • Stent-graft placement is a viable option for treatment of portal vein hemorrhage. • Postoperative hemorrhage was caused by extrahepatic portal vein pseudoaneurysm formation. • Portal vein pseudoaneurysm occurred at the reconstructed portion., Introduction Potential curative therapy for perihilar cholangiocarcinoma requires extensive surgical treatment, which can still be associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Postoperative hemorrhage from the portal vein is a rare but life-threatening complication. We herein report postoperative hemorrhage from an extrahepatic portal vein pseudoaneurysm successfully treated by stent graft placement late after surgical treatment for perihilar cholangiocarcinoma. Presentation of case An 83-year-old man was referred to our hospital with a chief complaint of jaundice. Based on radiological findings, we diagnosed the patient with hilar cholangiocarcinoma. After endoscopic retrograde biliary drainage, resection of the extrahepatic bile duct combined with extended left hemi-hepatectomy, including the caudate lobe, lymphadenectomy of the hepatoduodenal ligament, partial resection and reconstruction of the portal vein, and right hepaticojejunostomy was performed. Fourteen days postoperatively, bleeding through the abdominal drain around the portal vein was observed. Twenty days postoperatively, abdominal computed tomography revealed a portal vein pseudoaneurysm that had formed at the portion of reconstruction. Therefore, 24 days postoperatively, a stent graft placement of the pseudoaneurysm through the ileocolic vein was performed. Subsequently, the portal vein hemorrhage ceased. Discussion Our present postoperative extrahepatic portal vein hemorrhage case was caused by an extrahepatic portal vein pseudoaneurysm that had formed at the reconstructed portion by erosion due to the chemical effect of the leaking bile and mechanical irritation of the surgical drain adjacent to the portal vein. Conclusion Stent-graft placement is a minimally-invasive, safe, and effective treatment option for hemorrhage from postoperative portal vein pseudoaneurysm.

A 78-year-old man without hepatitis virus B or C underwent right hemi-hepatectomy and lymph node dissection for a tumor 5 cm in diameter located in the hepatic hilum of the posterior segment of the liver with portal vein thrombi extending into the main portal trunk and a tumor 1.5 cm in diameter in the peripheral side of segment 5 of the liver. Histopathologically, the former was diagnosed as intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma and the latter as hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC). Five months after the surgery, intrahepatic and lymph node metastases were diagnosed based on computed tomography(CT); therefore, chemotherapy with S-1 for 3 months and gemcitabine and cisplatin(GC)for 5 months was administered, after which the metastatic lesions were not detected. Nineteen months after the surgery, partial resection of segment 2 of the liver was performed for a tumor 3 cm in diameter, which was diagnosed as HCC histopathologically. Two years after the second surgery, 2 recurrent nodules in the liver in segments 3 and 4 were detected on CT. Platinum-based hepatic arterial infusion chemotherapy(HAIC)and transcatheter arterial chemoembolization(TACE)were performed, and chemotherapy with GC was then administered for 7 months. For a new tumor detected in segment 1 in the liver, TACE was performed 17 months after initial HAIC. Seventy-four months after the initial surgery, 5 new nodules less than 1 cm in diameter were detected, and chemotherapy with sorafenib was administered for 5 months, after which the patient died of coronavirus disease 2019.

A woman in her late 70s with fatigue, nausea, and epigastric discomfort was found to have a tumor at the papilla of Vater through endoscopy. We performed subtotal stomach-preserving pancreaticoduodenectomy with regional lymph node dissection. The immunohistological analysis showed positive staining for chromogranin A, synaptophysin, and CD56. The definitive diagnosis was neuroendocrine carcinoma of the papilla of Vater. Although the patient declined adjuvant chemotherapy, she had to start chemotherapy with carboplatin and etoposide because multiple liver metastases, lymph node metastasis, and peritoneal dissemination occurred 6 months after surgery. We performed 6 courses of chemotherapy. However, progressive disease(PD)was assessed, and she died of cancer 13 months after the surgery. The prognosis of the disease is poor when surgery alone is performed. Adjuvant chemotherapy, in addition to surgery, may be necessary.

A 76-year-old woman had underwent 5-fluorouracil(5-FU), oxaliplatin(L-OHP)combination therapy(mFOLFOX6)as first-line chemotherapy for peritoneal recurrence after resection of sigmoid colon cancer. She showed severe general fatigue and disturbance of consciousness on the second day of the 12th course of chemotherapy. Computed tomography of the head detected no abnormal findings in the central nervous system. The laboratory results revealed a marked hyperammonemia. She was diagnosed as a disturbance of consciousness due to hyperammonemia and treated her with branched- chain amino acid solution. Then the disturbance of consciousness resolved on the following day. After changing the regimen of chemotherapy, the disturbance of consciousness was not found. Recently, it has been reported that high-dose 5-FU regimen such as mFOLFOX6 causes hyperammonemia as a rare adverse event. We should take hyperammonemia into account when disturbance of consciousness occurs during high-dose 5-FU chemotherapy.

A 75-year-old woman underwent transcatheter chemoembolization(TACE)for 2 small hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC) lesions associated with severe alcoholic liver cirrhosis that necessitated management for ascites. Over 5 years after the initial TACE, she received multidisciplinary therapies with TACE, transcatheter arterial infusion of anticancer agents, percutaneous ethanol injections, or percutaneous radiofrequency ablation performed on 5 occasions for small recurrent HCC lesions. Computed tomography performed after the last therapy for HCC revealed a solitary lymph node swelling(39 mm in diameter) around the common hepatic artery. Magnetic resonance imaging performed 3 months later revealed that the lymph node had enlarged to 45 mm, without recurrence of the primary HCC, and after 4 months, to 60 mm; she then underwent laparoscopic lymph node resection. Histopathological examination of the resected specimen showed HCC metastasis. A recurrent metastatic lymph node(30 mm in diameter)was detected around the common hepatic artery and was resected laparoscopically 17 months postoperatively. Pancreatic head cancer was diagnosed 22 months after the second surgery; however, the patient refused cancer therapy and died 16 months after this diagnosis. No recurrence of the primary HCC or lymph node metastasis was observed over the 38 months after the second surgery.

A 45-year-old man with unresectable locally advanced pancreas head cancer with multiple synchronous liver metastases was treated with gemcitabine plus nab-paclitaxel therapy as a first-line chemotherapy. During 24 months of 30 courses of this therapy, the primary lesion remained stable and liver metastases were completely disappeared on CT. Three months later, however, solitary relapse of liver metastasis occurred in segment 2. Therefore, we changed the chemotherapy regimen to the second-line treatment, FOLFIRINOX. After 3 courses of FOLFIRINOX, the primary lesion was kept well-controlled, but the solitary metastatic liver lesion was enlarged. An interdisciplinary team suggested surgical resection of the liver metastasis to control disease progress. We performed laparoscopic lateral segmentectomy of the liver. The postoperative course was uneventful, and the patient was discharged on postoperative day 8. The patient underwent another round of gemcitabine therapy owing to the good response of the primary pancreatic lesion to this drug. Three years after starting the first-line chemotherapy, the patient is still alive with well-controlled PDAC without distant metastasis. Surgical intervention for liver metastases may be a promising treatment option when unresectable primary PDAC is well controlled by chemotherapy.

Following the earthquake in East Japan and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, the safety of highly technical projects such as those for chemical weapons destruction has come under scrutiny. This review includes consideration of the impact of outlier events on the recovery and destruction of sea-disposed munitions.At Port Kanda, Japan, a project for detection, recovery, and destruction of sea-dumped chemical munitions is ongoing, and approximately 3,000 items have been cleaned up as of the end of July 2011. In light of the recent earthquake and accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, the authors review the safety design criteria for the system, including transportation based on the International Atomic Energy Agency spent-fuel transportation cask design and detonation chamber based on the new ASME design Code Case 2564 for impulsively loaded vessels. One of the important lessons learned from the disaster is that risks from earthquake and tsunami can be reduced when destruction of chemical weapons is done at the recovery site.

The rotational isomeric state analysis of poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) was carried out by using parameters adjusted so as to reproduce the experimental results of ' H NMR and dipole moment measurements on ethylene glycol dibenzoate. The central OC-CO bond of the ethyleneglycol unit prefers to be in the gauche form at lower temperatures, suggesting that the PET chains should contain many kink conformations in the amorphous state. In the following part, the nematic conformation of the same C-C bond was studied by preparing a model compound which is capable of forming an enantiotropic nematic liquid crystalline (LC) phase. IR studies indicate that the trans fraction of the C-C bond increases from ∼15% in the isotropic liquid to ∼50% in the nematic LC state at the phase boundary. For this drastic change in the conformation at the transition, the C-C bond should be required to pay certain entropy penalty. These results are however compatible with the recent observations by SAXS and DPLS that the formation of nematic LC-like domains proceeds prior to the evolution of primary crystal nucleation during the cold-crystallization of PET. The PET chain is known to take the planar all-trans conformation in the crystalline state. Finally a possible mechanism leading to the nematic order in the amorphous PET is presented. Growth of the nematic LC-like domains in the amorphous phase may lead to a spinodal microphase separation, as suggested by Kaji et al.

A four-step regioselective synthesis of multisubstituted isoquinoline derivatives from 3-bromopyridines was developed by the Diels-Alder (DA) reactions of 2-silyl-3,4-pyridynes with furans, followed by functional-group transformations. In particular, the silyl group at the C2-position of the 3,4-pyridynes played two important roles: firstly, it functioned as the directing group for the DA reaction, and secondly, it served to introduce diverse substituents at the C1-position of the isoquinolines by electrophilic ipso-substitution.

This paper presents a robot system for handling various objects in home or office environments. A fixed manipulator utilizes marks on objects. A mark consists of two parts. One is the outer part, which indicates its 3 D pose, and the other is a QR code, which is stored information of an object (e.g. its size). A QR code is a kind of 2D barcode. A user attaches several marks on objects. The manipulator accesses the information using a camera on its hand. The manipulator estimates pose of objects measuring marks and using least-squares method. Then, the robot can handle and convey the objects through planning a sequence of conveyance and a pose for grasp that is based on the pose of objects, candidates for grasp pose informed by the mark, and signals from proximity sensors. Experiments are conducted to verify the whole system.

This paper proposes AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) navigation methodology by using two cameras and artificial landmarks. This method doesn't need high cost sensors and doesn't have to model motion errors of AGV. It is proposed that (a) a landmark arrangement planning algorithm in a given working environment of the AGV, and (b) a landmark observation planning algorithm along a given path of the AGV. Navigation experiments with a real AGV show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

A four-step regioselective synthesis of multisubstituted isoquinoline derivatives from 3-bromopyridines was developed by the Diels-Alder (DA) reactions of 2-silyl-3,4-pyridynes with furans, followed by functional-group transformations. In particular, the silyl group at the C2-position of the 3,4-pyridynes played two important roles: firstly, it functioned as the directing group for the DA reaction, and secondly, it served to introduce diverse substituents at the C1-position of the isoquinolines by electrophilic ipso-substitution.

The first method for the nucleophilic deoxyfluorination of one of the two hydroxyl groups of catechols and related compounds is reported.

Nucleophilic deoxyfluorinaiton of one of the two hydroxyl groups of catechols has been developed via the Umpolung concept. This method was successively applied to naturally occurring catechols, such as catechins and dopamine, to produce novel fluorinated analogues.

Benzynes were generated from o-(trimethylsilyl)phenols using nonafluorobutanesulfonyl fluoride (NfF) by a domino process, i.e., the nonaflation of the phenolic hydroxyl group of o-(trimethylsilyl)phenols by NfF followed by the attack of the produced fluoride ion on the trimethylsilyl group. The generated benzyne immediately underwent various reactions to give polysubstituted benzenes.

In this paper, the authors aim at realizing an accurate navigation system of automated guided vehicles (AGV). The authors propose a way of estimating positioning error with magnetic tape, which is widely used in a factory as an external sensor. However, flexibility for path relocation is insufficient, because, in general, the tape should be laid down on the floor from a start point to a goal point so that AGV can reach their target. To overcome this inefficiency, the authors firstly propose a semi-guided navigation methodology by means of two kinds of magnetic tapes based on an error analysis. The semi-guided navigation means that magnetic tapes are only placed at the start and the goal points individually. Therefore, this system enables us to remove most of the magnetic tape. Moreover, the authors attempt a fixed model learning to prevent stationary error while AGV run iteratively. Finally, the authors carry out experiments to evaluate and verify the efficiency of the proposed method.

The fluorination of substituted benzenes using fluoride ions under mild reaction conditions has been one of the most important challenges for the synthesis of biologically active fluorinated aromatic compounds; however, only a few synthetically useful methods are known. In this paper, it is reported that the nucleophilic fluorination of benzynes, generated from either 2-(trialkylsilyl)phenyl nonafluorobutanesulfonates or 2-(trialkylsilyl)phenols, meets this challenge. In particular, the fluorination starting from 2-(trialkylsilyl)phenols for fabricating aryl fluorides involves three sequential reactions in one-pot: the nonaflylation of phenols, benzyne generation, and nucleophilic fluorination of the benzynes. The regioselectivities of these reactions are controlled by the substituents at the C3-position of the benzynes.

The design for an artificial mark attached to small objects is presented in this paper. Three conditions are required for the design of the marks: (1) short calculation time, (2) easy attachment, and (3) individual calculation for each item. The marks are obtained by using three different extraction methods. The experiments determine the best mark. The mark using the method that extract colors and calculated the gravity has good results. We analyze the errors of the mark that has best experiment. The appropriateness of the experimental results is then confirmed. We have the experiment that the manipulator handles the objects with the best mark. The experiment is successful. Therefore, the usability of the mark is verified.

Recently the activity of robots has been remarkable, and robots are branching out into general environment such as home or office. Although robots are active, planners uniquely decide the action method of robots when robots operate missions. Therefore, the most suitable approach is not assured. So, in this report we propose a method that we evaluate robots' actions from the viewpoint of both reliability and time, when robots operate missions. Then we calculate the most suitable approach for robots. To be concrete, by using a diagram we evaluate robots' actions and calculate the most suitable approach. In addition, we evaluate them not from all the actions immediately, but from the action units by making an evaluation index. So, we can shorten the time for evaluation. Finally, we realize the operations by a real robot with the most appropriate approach.

This paper presents a robot system for handling various objects in home or office environments (see video). A fixed manipulator utilizes marks on objects for handling and motion planning. A mark consists of two parts. One is the outer part, which indicates its pose (In this paper, "pose" denotes 3D position and orientation.), and the other is a QR code, which is a kind of 2D barcode. A QR code is stored information of an object (e.g. its name). A user attaches several marks on each object. The manipulator accesses the information using a camera in its hand. The robot can decide its complex handling motion based on the information in QR codes, pose of the objects, which are estimated from pose of marks, and signals from proximity sensors. Experiments are conducted to verify the whole system. Manipulation, Motion planning, Artificial mark, Sensor, Measurement.

To achieve smooth motion of car-like robots, it is necessary to generate paths that satisfy the following conditions: maximum curvature, maximum curvature derivative, and curvature continuity. Another requirement is that human operators can manipulate the robots with ease. In this paper, a path expression methodology consisting of line segments, circular arcs and clothoid arcs is presented. In addition, a method of global path generation with a visibility graph is proposed. To establish this method, the following steps are proposed: (a) the arrangement of subgoals (middle points) and (b) the construction of the graph for path generation. By using the proposed method, the paths were shortened 14% on average.