OBJECTIVETo explore the value of application of support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) method in Raman spectroscopy for differential diagnosis of benign and malignant breast diseases.

METHODSFresh breast tissue samples of 168 patients (all female; ages 22-75) were obtained by routine surgical resection from May 2011 to May 2012 at the Department of Breast Surgery, the First Hospital of Jilin University. Among them, there were 51 normal tissues, 66 benign and 51 malignant breast lesions. All the specimens were assessed by Raman spectroscopy, and the SVM-RFE algorithm was used to process the data and build the mathematical model. Mahalanobis distance and spectral residuals were used as discriminating criteria to evaluate this data-processing method.

RESULTS1 800 Raman spectra were acquired from the fresh samples of human breast tissues. Based on spectral profiles, the presence of 1 078, 1 267, 1 301, 1 437, 1 653, and 1 743 cm(-1) peaks were identified in the normal tissues; and 1 281, 1 341, 1 381, 1 417, 1 465, 1 530, and 1 637 cm(-1) peaks were found in the benign and malignant tissues. The main characteristic peaks differentiating benign and malignant lesions were 1 340 and 1 480 cm(-1). The accuracy of SVM-RFE in discriminating normal and malignant lesions was 100.0%, while that in the assessment of benign lesions was 93.0%.

CONCLUSIONSThere are distinct differences among the Raman spectra of normal, benign and malignant breast tissues, and SVM-RFE method can be used to build differentiation model of breast lesions.

Algorithms ; Breast Diseases ; diagnosis ; Breast Neoplasms ; diagnosis ; Diagnosis, Differential ; Female ; Humans ; Spectrum Analysis, Raman ; Support Vector Machine

ObjectiveTo investigate the living condition of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) after Tangshan earthquake.MethodsA questionnaire was designed for the investigation with 41 items including resident environment, income, mood, etc. The faculty of surveillance was composed of trained professionals. 1261 SCI patients living in Tangshan at present, 420 of which live in the sanatoriums and others live in the common families. The patients of four sanatoriums were chosen randomly from fourteen sanatoriums to be investigated in detail, and patients in the common families in two communities, one from city, another from countryside, were also chosen. This investigation was performed in 2003.The results are compared with that of 1988' survey.ResultsGreat improvements in the living condition of SCI patients in Tangshan were shown by the comparison of these two surveys, they were mainly in: the progress in the housing environments (100% SCI patients now live in the specially designed reconstructed houses); better medical services provided (the ratio of wheelchair available from 38.1% to 100%); the majority of the patients in acceptance stage of their disability; the increase of income (21.1% takes up various occupation) with a vigorous spare time; decrease in the common complications with SCI patients; although uremia was still the first death cause of the SCI patients, the percentage was decreased apparently; cardiovascular accident had a higher percentage in the death cause(the second leading cause), implies that the death cause of the SCI survivors had approached the normal person.ConclusionThe improvements reflect the social progress in China. However, still there are some problems to be remained for further solution: the ratio of employment is low; the insurance of living and medical rehabilitation needs further improvement.

Fatty acid metabolism, including fatty acid oxidation (FAO) and fatty acid synthesis, plays critical roles in signal transduction, energy production and inflammation regulation.Acute kidney injury (AKI), chronic kidney disease (CKD) and renal cell carcinoma (RCC) are typical renal diseases with complex pathogenesis, susceptibility to multiple complications, and still no effective measure for clinical intervention.Current studies reveal that fatty acid metabolism is closely related to the occurrence and development of a variety of kidney diseases.This article reviews the metabolic characteristics of fatty acid in the kidney, the relationship between fatty acid metabolism disorder and renal diseases (i.e., AKI, CKD and RCC), and summarizes traditional Chinese medicines and related active ingredients targeting fatty acid metabolic pathway to alleviate renal diseases, aiming to provide theoretical reference for the in-depth study of mechanisms related to fatty acid metabolism in renal diseases as well as the development of effective interventions.

Crossmodal information processing in sensory cortices has been reported in sparsely distributed neurons under normal conditions and can undergo experience- or activity-induced plasticity. Given the potential role in brain function as indicated by previous reports, crossmodal connectivity in the sensory cortex needs to be further explored. Using perforated whole-cell recording in anesthetized adult rats, we found that almost all neurons recorded in the primary somatosensory, auditory, and visual cortices exhibited significant membrane-potential responses to crossmodal stimulation, as recorded when brain activity states were pharmacologically down-regulated in light anesthesia. These crossmodal cortical responses were excitatory and subthreshold, and further seemed to be relayed primarily by the sensory thalamus, but not the sensory cortex, of the stimulated modality. Our experiments indicate a sensory cortical presence of widespread excitatory crossmodal inputs, which might play roles in brain functions involving crossmodal information processing or plasticity.
Animals ; Auditory Cortex/physiology* ; Neuronal Plasticity/physiology* ; Neurons ; Rats ; Thalamus ; Visual Cortex/physiology*

Targeting immune checkpoints such as programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) and programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) have been approved for treating melanoma, gastric cancer (GC) and bladder cancer with clinical benefit. Nevertheless, many patients failed to respond to anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatment, so it is necessary to seek an alternative strategy for traditional PD-1/PD-L1 targeting immunotherapy. Here with the data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and our in-house tissue library, PD-L1 expression was found to be positively correlated with the expression of ubiquitin-specific processing protease 7 (USP7) in GC. Furthermore, USP7 directly interacted with PD-L1 in order to stabilize it, while abrogation of USP7 attenuated PD-L1/PD-1 interaction and sensitized cancer cells to T cell killing