Objective To systematically review the sex differences in efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Methods We conducted a computer search of Medline, The Cochrane Library, and EMbase from inception to November 2022 to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the efficacy of ICIs in patients with NSCLC. A meta-analysis was performed using RevMan 5.4 software. Results Finally 16 RCTs with a total of 9 653 patients were included, and the modified Jadad scale score was≥4 points. Meta-analysis results showed that in female NSCLC patients receiving immune therapy, the median overall survival (OS) [HR=0.72, 95%CI (0.61, 0.85), P<0.001] was longer than that in males [HR=0.73, 95%CI (0.69, 0.78), P<0.001]. Males [HR=0.64, 95%CI (0.58, 0.71), P<0.001] had an advantage over females [HR=0.76, 95%CI (0.57, 1.03), P=0.760] in median progression-free survival (PFS). Conclusion Females receiving ICIs have an advantage over males in terms of median OS. However, males tend to derive greater benefit from ICIs in terms of median PFS.

Purpose To construct a nomogram model based on conventional ultrasound(US)and contrast-enhanced ultrasound(CEUS)features for predicting extrathyroidal extension(ETE)of papillary thyroid carcinoma,and to evaluate its diagnostic performance.Materials and Methods A retrospective analysis of clinical and ultrasound data from 715 papillary thyroid carcinoma patients in the First Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital from January 2017 to December 2022 was conducted.The patients were divided into two groups based on the presence or absence of ETE.Univariate and Multivariate analyses was performed to identify independent risk factors associated with ETE.Three models were established:clinical,clinical+US and clinical+US+CEUS.The nomogram of the best model was constructed and validated.Results The model based on clinical+US+CEUS features performed the best,the area under the curve was 0.885.Multivariate analysis indicated that older age(OR=1.029,95%CI 1.011-1.047),higher body mass index(OR=1.108,95%CI 1.049-1.171),capsular contact<25%(OR=4.716,95%CI 2.079-10.701),capsular contact 25%-50%(OR=21.320,95%CI 8.240-55.160),capsular contact>50%(OR=24.045,95%CI 6.792-85.126),nodules adjacent to the lateral side(OR=4.265,95%CI 1.366-13.318),nodules adjacent to the medial side(OR=6.416,95%CI 2.067-19.920)and interrupted capsular enhancement(OR=6.044,95%CI 3.588-10.180)were independent risk factors for ETE(all P<0.05).Decision curve analysis and clinical impact curve indicated high net benefit and strong clinical utility of the model.Ten-fold cross-validation showed good model stability.Conclusion The nomogram model constructed based on US and CEUS features demonstrates good predictive performance and holds significant clinical utility.

Objective To explore the possibility and genetic identification method of constructing a hepatocyte-specific NLRP3 gene knockout mouse model by using Cre-LoxP system gene knockout technology.Methods Phase one:mice specifically expressing the albumin promoter-Cre(AlbCre)recombinase in hepatocytes were mated with NLRP3flox/flox mice,and the hepatocyte-specific NLRP3 gene knockout mice with the genotype of NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre+/-(hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group)and the control mice in the same litter with the genotype of NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre-/-(control group in the same litter)were obtained after two generations of selection and mating.The second stage was the mass reproduction stage.Mating NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre+/-target mice with NLRP3flox/flox mice could quickly obtain a large number of experimental target mice and control mice in the same litter.The DNA was extracted from the tails of mice after numbering,and the offspring genotype was identified by PCR.qPCR and Western blot were used to detect the mRNA and protein expression levels of NLRP3 gene in the liver tissue.HE staining was used to observe the morphological changes in liver tissues,and serum liver transaminases and inflammatory factors were detected.The changes in body weight,liver-to-body ratio and special circumstances during reproduction and development of mice in the two groups were observed.Results The offspring genotype of the target mice in the F2 generation was consistent with theoretical result of NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre+/-.The mRNA and protein levels of NLRP3 in liver tissues of mice in the hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group were significantly lower than those in the control group in the same litter(P<0.05).The mice in the hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group was not affected in terms of growth,development and reproduction after the NLRP3 gene knockout.There were no statistically significant differences in the body weight,liver-to-body ratio,liver tissue morphology,serum liver transaminase or inflammatory factors between the hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group and the control group in the same litter(P>0.05).Conclusion The Cre-LoxP gene knockout technology can be used to successfully construct a hepatocyte-specific NLRP3 gene knockout mouse model,providing an important technical support for the next step of studying the function of the NLRP3 gene in the liver at the animal level.

Meditation aims to guide individuals into a state of deep calm and focused attention, and in recent years, it has shown promising potential in the field of medical treatment. Numerous studies have demonstrated that electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns change during meditation, suggesting the feasibility of using deep learning techniques to monitor meditation states. However, significant inter-subject differences in EEG signals poses challenges to the performance of such monitoring systems. To address this issue, this study proposed a novel model-calibrated multi-source adversarial adaptation network (CMAAN). The model first trained multiple domain-adversarial neural networks in a pairwise manner between various source-domain individuals and the target-domain individual. These networks were then integrated through a calibration process using a small amount of labeled data from the target domain to enhance performance. We evaluated the proposed model on an EEG dataset collected from 18 subjects undergoing methamphetamine rehabilitation. The model achieved a classification accuracy of 73.09%. Additionally, based on the learned model, we analyzed the key EEG frequency bands and brain regions involved in the meditation process. The proposed multi-source domain adaptation framework improves both the performance and robustness of EEG-based meditation monitoring and holds great promise for applications in biomedical informatics and clinical practice.
Humans ; Electroencephalography/methods* ; Meditation ; Calibration ; Neural Networks, Computer ; Brain/physiology* ; Rest/physiology* ; Deep Learning ; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted

Objective To systematically evaluate the short-term efficacy and safety of McKeown and Sweet methods in the treatment of esophageal cancer. Methods PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Wanfang, VIP, CNKI and Chinese Biomedical Literature database were searched for literature on the short-term efficacy and safety of McKeown and Sweet methods in the treatment of esophageal cancer published from the establishment to May 2023. Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was used to evaluate the quality of researches, and meta-analysis was performed using RevMan5.4. Results A total of 9 articles were included, involving 3687 patients including 1019 in the McKeown group and 2668 in the Sweet group. NOS score was 8-9 points. There were no statistical differences in the age, sex or American Joint Committee on Cancer stage between the two groups (P>0.05). Patients in the McKeown group had longer operative time and hospital stay, more intraoperative blood loss, and higher Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group scores than those in the Sweet group (P<0.05). However, the McKeown operation could remove more lymph nodes (P=0.001). In terms of safety, the incidences of pulmonary complications [OR=2.20, 95%CI (1.40, 3.46), P=0.001] and postoperative anastomotic leakage [OR=2.06, 95%CI (1.45, 2.92), P=0.001] were higher in the McKeown group than those in the Sweet group. In addition, there were no statistical differences between the two groups in the Karnofsky score, cardiac complications, vocal cord injury or paralysis, chylous leakage, or gastric emptying (P>0.05). Conclusion Compared with McKeown, Sweet method has advantages in operation time, intraoperative blood loss and hospital stay, and has lower incidence of postoperative pulmonary complications and anastomotic leakage. However, McKeown has more lymph node dissection.

Objective To explore the possibility and genetic identification method of constructing a hepatocyte-specific NLRP3 gene knockout mouse model by using Cre-LoxP system gene knockout technology.Methods Phase one:mice specifically expressing the albumin promoter-Cre(AlbCre)recombinase in hepatocytes were mated with NLRP3flox/flox mice,and the hepatocyte-specific NLRP3 gene knockout mice with the genotype of NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre+/-(hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group)and the control mice in the same litter with the genotype of NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre-/-(control group in the same litter)were obtained after two generations of selection and mating.The second stage was the mass reproduction stage.Mating NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre+/-target mice with NLRP3flox/flox mice could quickly obtain a large number of experimental target mice and control mice in the same litter.The DNA was extracted from the tails of mice after numbering,and the offspring genotype was identified by PCR.qPCR and Western blot were used to detect the mRNA and protein expression levels of NLRP3 gene in the liver tissue.HE staining was used to observe the morphological changes in liver tissues,and serum liver transaminases and inflammatory factors were detected.The changes in body weight,liver-to-body ratio and special circumstances during reproduction and development of mice in the two groups were observed.Results The offspring genotype of the target mice in the F2 generation was consistent with theoretical result of NLRP3flox/flox/AlbCre+/-.The mRNA and protein levels of NLRP3 in liver tissues of mice in the hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group were significantly lower than those in the control group in the same litter(P<0.05).The mice in the hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group was not affected in terms of growth,development and reproduction after the NLRP3 gene knockout.There were no statistically significant differences in the body weight,liver-to-body ratio,liver tissue morphology,serum liver transaminase or inflammatory factors between the hepatocyte NLRP3 knockout group and the control group in the same litter(P>0.05).Conclusion The Cre-LoxP gene knockout technology can be used to successfully construct a hepatocyte-specific NLRP3 gene knockout mouse model,providing an important technical support for the next step of studying the function of the NLRP3 gene in the liver at the animal level.

Purpose To construct a nomogram model based on conventional ultrasound(US)and contrast-enhanced ultrasound(CEUS)features for predicting extrathyroidal extension(ETE)of papillary thyroid carcinoma,and to evaluate its diagnostic performance.Materials and Methods A retrospective analysis of clinical and ultrasound data from 715 papillary thyroid carcinoma patients in the First Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital from January 2017 to December 2022 was conducted.The patients were divided into two groups based on the presence or absence of ETE.Univariate and Multivariate analyses was performed to identify independent risk factors associated with ETE.Three models were established:clinical,clinical+US and clinical+US+CEUS.The nomogram of the best model was constructed and validated.Results The model based on clinical+US+CEUS features performed the best,the area under the curve was 0.885.Multivariate analysis indicated that older age(OR=1.029,95%CI 1.011-1.047),higher body mass index(OR=1.108,95%CI 1.049-1.171),capsular contact<25%(OR=4.716,95%CI 2.079-10.701),capsular contact 25%-50%(OR=21.320,95%CI 8.240-55.160),capsular contact>50%(OR=24.045,95%CI 6.792-85.126),nodules adjacent to the lateral side(OR=4.265,95%CI 1.366-13.318),nodules adjacent to the medial side(OR=6.416,95%CI 2.067-19.920)and interrupted capsular enhancement(OR=6.044,95%CI 3.588-10.180)were independent risk factors for ETE(all P<0.05).Decision curve analysis and clinical impact curve indicated high net benefit and strong clinical utility of the model.Ten-fold cross-validation showed good model stability.Conclusion The nomogram model constructed based on US and CEUS features demonstrates good predictive performance and holds significant clinical utility.

The maintenance of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) is a complex process involving numerous cell-extrinsic and -intrinsic regulators. The first member of the cyclin-dependent kinase family of inhibitors to be identified, p21, has been reported to perform a wide range of critical biological functions, including cell cycle regulation, transcription, differentiation, and so on. Given the previous inconsistent results regarding the functions of p21 in HSCs in a p21-knockout mouse model, we employed p21-tdTomato (tdT) mice to further elucidate its role in HSCs during homeostasis. The results showed that p21-tdT+ HSCs exhibited increased self-renewal capacity compared to p21-tdT- HSCs. Zbtb18, a transcriptional repressor, was upregulated in p21-tdT+ HSCs, and its knockdown significantly impaired the reconstitution capability of HSCs. Furthermore, p21 interacted with ZBTB18 to co-repress the expression of cKit in HSCs and thus regulated the self-renewal of HSCs. Our data provide novel insights into the physiological role and mechanisms of p21 in HSCs during homeostasis independent of its conventional role as a cell cycle inhibitor.
Animals ; Hematopoietic Stem Cells/cytology* ; Cyclin-Dependent Kinase Inhibitor p21/genetics* ; Mice ; Cell Self Renewal ; Repressor Proteins/genetics* ; Mice, Inbred C57BL ; Mice, Knockout ; Humans ; Gene Expression Regulation

Objective:To explore the feasibility and application value of an automated method for generation of surgical records for resection of benign soft tissue tumor based on dense video descriptions.Methods:The Transformer deep learning model was used to establish an automated surgical record generation system to analyze the surgical videos of 30 patients with benign soft tissue tumor who had been admitted to Department of Orthopedics, Xijing Hospital, Air Force Military Medical University from September 2021 to August 2023. The patient data were randomly divided into training sets, validation sets, and test sets in a ratio of 8∶1∶1. In the test sets, 7 evaluation indexes, BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, BLEU-4, Meteor, Rouge, and CIDEr, were used to evaluate the text quality of surgical records generated by the model. The text of surgical records was compared with the classical algorithm, dense video captioning with paralled decoding (PDVC) in the field of video-intensive description.Results:The automated surgical record generation system running in the test sets showed the following: BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, BLEU-4, Rouge, Meteor, and CIDEr were 16.80, 15.23, 13.01, 11.68, 16.01, 12.67 and 62.30, respectively. The operation of the classical algorithm PDVC showed the following: BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, BLEU-4, Rouge, Meteor, and CIDEr were 15.63, 14.17, 11.90, 10.45, 12.97, 11.99 and 53.64, respectively. The automated surgical record generation system resulted in significant improvements compared with PDVC in all evaluation indexes. The BLEU-4, Rouge, Meteor, and CIDEr were improved by 1.23, 3.04, 0.68 and 8.66, respectively, demonstrating that the system proposed can better capture the key data in the video to help generate more effective text records.Conclusion:As the automated surgical record generation system shows good performance in generating surgical records for resection of benign soft tissue tumor based on intensive video descriptions, it can be applied in clinical practice.

Objective To evaluate the short-term outcome of robot-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (RATS) for the treatment of posterior mediastinal neurogenic tumour. Methods The clinical data of consecutive patients with mediastinal neurogenic tumors who received RATS treatment completed by the same operator in the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Gansu Provincial People's Hospital from June 2016 to June 2022 were retrospectively analyzed. The tumors were preoperatively localized and evaluated using magnetic resonance imaging or enhanced CT. Results A total of 35 patients were enrolled, including 19 males and 16 females with a mean age of 34.9±7.1 years. All patients successfully completed the resection of posterior mediastinal neurogenic tumors under RATS, and no conversion to thoracotomy occurred during the operation. The average operative time was 62.3±18.0 min, docking time was 10.3±2.6 min, intraoperative bleeding was 33.9±21.6 mL, postoperative 24-hour chest drainage was 69.0±28.9 mL, postoperative chest drainage time was 2.0 (1.0, 3.0) d and the postoperative hospital stay was 3.0 (2.0, 4.0) d. Postoperative complications occurred in 3 patients, including 2 patients with transient Honor syndrome and 1 patient with transient anhidrosis of the affected upper limb. Conclusion RATS for posterior mediastinal neurogenic tumours is safe, effective and feasible, and allows the full benefit of the robotic surgical system to be exploited.