OBJECTIVETo establish a modified rat model of liver cancer with concurrent cirrhosis for the study of carcinogenesis characteristics and drug intervention of liver cancer.

METHODSFifty male Wistar rats weighing 100-120 g were randomly divided into normal control group (20 rats) and model group (30 rats). In the model group, the rats were subjected to intraperitoneal injection of 50 mg/kg DEN N-diethylnitrosamine (DEN) twice a week for 4 consecutive weeks, followed then by weekly injections for another 10 weeks. The control rats received injections of 0.1 ml saline in the same manner. At 2, 4, 8, 12, 14, and 18 weeks, 3 rats from each group were sacrificed for assessing tumor formation and liver cirrhosis.

RESULTSLiver cancer with concurrent cirrhosis was induced successfully after 14 weeks of DEN injections. At the 14th week, 3 out of the 5 rats were found to have cirrhosis and LC, and at the 18th week, all the 3 rats examined had cirrhosis and liver cancer. The total carcinogenesis rate in the rats was 75% at 18 weeks with an overall mortality of 33%.

CONCLUSIONThis approach to establishing rat models of liver cancer with concurrent cirrhosis requires simple operation, shortens the time of carcinogenesis, and ensures a high success rate of carcinogenesis and a low mortality rate. The carcinogenesis characteristics in this model are similar to those in human.

Animals ; Liver Cirrhosis, Experimental ; complications ; pathology ; Liver Neoplasms, Experimental ; etiology ; pathology ; Male ; Rats ; Rats, Wistar

OBJECTIVETo compare the effects of different approaches to establishing rat models of acute liver failure (ALF).

METHODSSixty-eight Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into 3 groups for establishing ALF models using 3 different approaches, namely conventional hepatectomy for resecting 90% liver tissue as described by Higgins and Anderson, modified bloodless hepatectomy for resecting 90% liver tissue, and intraperitoneal injections of 700 mg/kg D-galactosamine (D-gal) and 5 µg/kg lipopolysaccharide (LPS). The mortality of the rats due to postoperative bleeding and survival rate at 7 days after the surgery were recorded. The levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), total bilimbin (Tbil), albumin (ALB), NH3, glucose (Glu) and prothrombin time (PT) were monitored, and histopathologies of the liver were examined at 24 and 72 h after the surgery.

RESULTSThe mortality rate due to postoperative bleeding was higher in conventional hepatectomy group than in the modified surgical group (15% vs 0). The survival rate at 7 days was 25%, 0%, 15% in conventional surgical group, modified surgical group and drug injection group, respectively. In the latter two groups, significant changes of ALT, Tbil, ALB, NH3, Glu, and PT were recorded at 24 and 72 h after the modeling (P<0.05), and these changes were the most obvious at 24 h in modified surgical group and at 72 h in the drug injection group; ALB in both groups declined to the lowest at 7 days and then increased gradually. Liver cell degeneration and necrosis were found in modified surgical group and drug injection group at 24 h and 72 h after the modeling.

CONCLUSIONBoth the modified 90% bloodless hepatectomy and injections of D-gal and LPS can be used to establish ideal rat models of ALF to suit different ALF-related researches.

Animals ; Disease Models, Animal ; Galactosamine ; adverse effects ; Hepatectomy ; Injections, Intraperitoneal ; Lipopolysaccharides ; adverse effects ; Liver Failure, Acute ; chemically induced ; pathology ; Rats ; Rats, Sprague-Dawley

Eyelid tumor is a serious eye disease that leads to vision loss or even blindness.The similarity between benign and malignant characteristics makes it difficult for ophthalmologists lacking clinical experience to distinguish between them.To address the problem,a method(ResNet101_CBAM)based on two-stage target localization using fully convolutional one-stage object detection(FCOS)and residual network incorporating a dual attention mechanism is proposed to realize the automatic diagnosis of benign and malignant eyelid tumors.FCOS is used to automatically localize the overall contour of the orbit,removing the background and surrounding noise,and then finely localize the tumor lesion inside the orbit.The obtained lesion region is input into ResNet101_CBAM for the automatic diagnosis of benign and malignant eyelid tumors.The experimental results show that the average precision of the target localization algorithm for tumor lesion is 0.821,and that compared with ResNet101,ResNet101_CBAM improves the sensitivity and accuracy in eyelid tumor classification by 4.7%and 3.0%,respectively,indicating that the proposed model has superior performances in the automatic diagnosis of benign and malignant eyelid tumors.