Ossification of the spinal ligaments (OSL) is characterized by the appearance of pathologic bone tissue within the spinal ligamentous tissue. OSL tends to occur in the cervical and thoracic segments with important cause of spinal stenosis. Compression of the spinal cord or nerve roots by ossified masses can lead to severe neurological dysfunction, which has a tremendous impact on the quality of life of patients. However, the exact etiology and pathogenesis of OSL are still unclear. Epigenetic regulation is widespread in organisms and refers to the appearance of heritable changes in gene expression without alteration in genomic DNA sequence. As an important form of biodiversity regulation, epigenetic regulation plays an important role in development of several diseases. Epigenetic regulation has multiple manifestations in OSL, including DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNA regulation. Sequencing tools, such as gene microarrays, have revealed significant differences in DNA methylation profiles and non-coding RNA expression between ossified and normal spinal ligaments. These differences can cause abnormal expression of osteogenesis-related target genes through direct or indirect pathways, thus affecting the ossification process of spinal ligaments. In addition, interactions between these epigenetic regulatory mechanisms constitute a large and complex regulatory network. Consequently, an in-depth understanding of the role of different epigenetic regulatory mechanisms and the linkages between them in the initiation and progression stages of OSL is expected to provide a valuable reference for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of OSL-related diseases.

Background: Replacing damaged anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs) with tissue-engineered artificial ligaments is challenging because ligament scaffolds must have a multiregional structure that can guide stem cell differentiation. Here, we designed a biphasic scaffold and evaluated its effect on human marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) under dynamic culture conditions as well as rat ACL reconstruction model in vivo. Methods: We designed a novel dual-phase electrospinning strategy wherein the scaffolds comprised randomly arranged phases at the two ends and an aligned phase in the middle. The morphological, mechanical properties and scaffold degradation were investigated. MSCs proliferation, adhesion, morphology and fibroblast markers were evaluated under dynamic culturing. This scaffold were tested if they could induce ligament formation using a rodent model in vivo. Results: Compared with other materials, poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide)/poly(ε-caprolactone) (PLGA/PCL) with mass ratio of 1:5 showed appropriate mechanical properties and biodegradability that matched ACLs. After 28 days of dynamic culturing, MSCs were fusiform oriented in the aligned phase and randomly arranged in a paving-stone-like morphology in the random phase. The increased expression of fibroblastic markers demonstrated that only the alignment of nanofibers worked with mechanical stimulation to promote effective fibroblast differentiation. This scaffold was a dense collagenous structure, and there was minimal difference in collagen direction in the orientation phase. Conclusion Dual-phase electrospun scaffolds had mechanical properties and degradability similar to those of ACLs. They promoted differences in the morphology of MSCs and induced fibroblast differentiation under dynamic culture conditions. Animal experiments showed that ligamentous tissue regenerated well and supported joint stability.

Objective:To summarize the experience and technical difficulties of complete thoracoscopic lobectomy(segmental) in the treatment of congenital pulmonary airway malformation in children.Methods:The clinical data, surgical videos and follow-up results of 38 children suffering from congenital pulmonary airway malformation and underwent complete thoracoscopic lobectomy in Children′s Hospital of Fudan University Xiamen Branch from January 2017 to December 2019 were retrospectively analyzed.A statistical comparisons of operative time, intraoperative blood loss, postoperative pain (the first time of getting out of bed), incision length and postoperative pulmonary complications were made between 28 children who underwent the total thoracoscopic lobectomy and 21 children who accepted open surgical lobectomy before January 2017 in Children′s Hospital of Fudan University Xiamen Branch.Results:Thirty-eight children with congenital pulmonary airway malformation were successfully operated by complete thoracoscopy.There were 28 lobectomies, 6 segmental lobectomies and 4 wedge lobectomies.Postoperative follow-up was conducted for more than 3 months, and no serious surgical complications occurred.Chest radiograph of 2 children with the right lower lobectomy at 48 hours after surgery had the elevation of the right diaphragm (2-3 intercostal), and it returned to normal 3 months after surgery.The CT review of 1 child with pulmonary wedge resection 1 month after surgery displayed a little residual lesion.Thoracoscopic lobectomy was significantly different from open surgery in terms of incision length[(2.0±0.5) cm vs. (10.0±0.5) cm], postoperative pain (the first time of getting out of bed)[(24.0±2.0) h vs. (48.0±1.5) h] and pulmonary complications (0 vs. 5 cases). The operative time of single lung ventilation was remarkably different from that of double lung ventilation in thoracoscopic lobectomy[(96.0±6.0) min vs. (118.0±7.0) min, t=106.501, P<0.001]. Compared with thoracoscopic lobectomy, thoracoscopic pulmonary segmentectomy has a long time and a large amount of blood loss. Conclusions:Complete thoracoscopic lobectomy (segmental) is the first choice for the treatment of congenital pulmonary airway malformation in children, with clear operative field, little trauma, less postoperative pain, quick recovery and fewer respiratory complications.Single-lung ventilation is beneficial for surgical completion.

Background: Replacing damaged anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs) with tissue-engineered artificial ligaments is challenging because ligament scaffolds must have a multiregional structure that can guide stem cell differentiation. Here, we designed a biphasic scaffold and evaluated its effect on human marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) under dynamic culture conditions as well as rat ACL reconstruction model in vivo. Methods: We designed a novel dual-phase electrospinning strategy wherein the scaffolds comprised randomly arranged phases at the two ends and an aligned phase in the middle. The morphological, mechanical properties and scaffold degradation were investigated. MSCs proliferation, adhesion, morphology and fibroblast markers were evaluated under dynamic culturing. This scaffold were tested if they could induce ligament formation using a rodent model in vivo. Results: Compared with other materials, poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide)/poly(ε-caprolactone) (PLGA/PCL) with mass ratio of 1:5 showed appropriate mechanical properties and biodegradability that matched ACLs. After 28 days of dynamic culturing, MSCs were fusiform oriented in the aligned phase and randomly arranged in a paving-stone-like morphology in the random phase. The increased expression of fibroblastic markers demonstrated that only the alignment of nanofibers worked with mechanical stimulation to promote effective fibroblast differentiation. This scaffold was a dense collagenous structure, and there was minimal difference in collagen direction in the orientation phase. Conclusion Dual-phase electrospun scaffolds had mechanical properties and degradability similar to those of ACLs. They promoted differences in the morphology of MSCs and induced fibroblast differentiation under dynamic culture conditions. Animal experiments showed that ligamentous tissue regenerated well and supported joint stability.

Compared with the previous automatic segmentation neural network for the target area which considered the target area as an independent area, a stacked neural network which uses the position and shape information of the organs around the target area to regulate the shape and position of the target area through the superposition of multiple networks and fusion of spatial position information to improve the segmentation accuracy on medical images was proposed in this paper. Taking the Graves' ophthalmopathy disease as an example, the left and right radiotherapy target areas were segmented by the stacked neural network based on the fully convolutional neural network. The volume Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and bidirectional Hausdorff distance (HD) were calculated based on the target area manually drawn by the doctor. Compared with the full convolutional neural network, the stacked neural network segmentation results can increase the volume DSC on the left and right sides by 1.7% and 3.4% respectively, while the two-way HD on the left and right sides decrease by 0.6. The results show that the stacked neural network improves the degree of coincidence between the automatic segmentation result and the doctor's delineation of the target area, while reducing the segmentation error of small areas. The stacked neural network can effectively improve the accuracy of the automatic delineation of the radiotherapy target area of Graves' ophthalmopathy.
Algorithms ; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted ; Neural Networks, Computer ; Tomography, X-Ray Computed

Objective:To investigate and analyze the somatic symptom disorder, anxiety and depression in patients with myocardial bridge.Methods:A total of 276 patients with myocardial bridge diagnosed by coronary angiography (CAG) were enrolled in the department of cardiology of Renji hospital in Shanghai from June to December in 2016. There were 151 cases of simple myocardial bridge (no coronary stenosis or coronary artery stenosis <30%) and 125 cases of complex myocardial bridge (combined with coronary stenosis >30%). A total of 1067 patients with myocardial bridge without coronary angiography were collected at the same time. Self-rating somatic symptom scale (SSS), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD-7) and patient health questionnaire (PHQ -9) were given to these patients during hospitalization. At the same time, somatic symptoms disorder and anxiety and depression in the myocardial bridge group and non-myocardial bridge group were compared.Results:The prevalence of somatic symptom disorder in patients with myocardial bridge was higher than that in non-myocardial bridge patients (35.86% vs 28.30%, P<0.05). There was significant correlation between somatic symptom disorder and depression and anxiety, with correlation coefficients of 0.629 and 0.565, respectively. The prevalence of depression and anxiety in myocardial bridge patients was higher than that in non-myocardial bridge patients (depression: 23.91% vs 22.11%. P=0.467; anxiety: 17.02% vs 14.15%, P=0.22), but there was no statistical difference. For male patients or female patients, the prevalence of somatic symptom disorder, depression and anxiety in the simple myocardial bridge patients were higher than those in the complex myocardial bridge patients, but there was no statistical difference. The most common non-specific somatic symptoms disorder in patients with myocardial bridge were fatigue (64.5%), followed by sleep disorders (63.8%) and decreased attention (63.0%). Conclusion:The somatic symptom disorder in patients with myocardial bridge is significantly higher than that in non-myocardial bridge group. Especially for patients with myocardial bridge with non-specific somatic symptoms, early identification of somatic symptoms disorder of myocardial bridge patients will be beneficial to proper clinical invitation.

Objective To explore the CT dominant phase and optimal classification model in differenting clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) from fat‐poor angiomyolipoma (fpAML) through quantitative multiple‐phase CT radiomic features analysis. Methods Clinical and imaging data of 195 cases pathologically confirmed ccRCC (n=131) and fpAML (n=64) were retrospectively studied. All the patients underwent non‐contrast enhanced CT scans and dynamic multi‐phase (corticomedullary phase, medullary phase and excretion phase) contrast‐enhanced CT scans. Regions of interest (ROIs) were manually delineated based on the selected image slices with the maximal diameter of the lesion using ITK‐SNAP software, followed by the acquisition of candidate CT radiomic feature sets from each phase with statistically significant differences by using Mann‐Whitney U test. Then, using the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), 232 classification models which are composed of 29 different feature selection algorithms (top 10 features were chosen by the backward elimination method) and 8 different classifiers were constructed. Employing the 5‐fold cross‐validation method, the performance of each classification models for each phase was evaluated using accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE) and area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), to acquire dominant CT phases and the optimal classification models for distingushing ccRCC and fpAML, along with the key imaging radiomic features. Results In this study, the mean maximal diameter of ccRCC and fpAML lesions were (3.9±1.4) cm, and (3.5±1.7) cm, respectively, and there was no statistically significant difference in the size of the tumor between two groups (P>0.05). From 102 initial imaging feature sets, the total number of candidate imaging feature sets (P<0.05) were:non‐enhanced phase (n=26), corticomedullary phase (n=71), medullary phase (n=68), excretion phase (n=62). Among the 232 classification models through different combination of classifiers and feature selectors, the amount of classification models which achieved the maximum of AUC value (AUCmax) from different CT phases were: non‐enhanced phase (n=106, 45.7%), corticomedullary phase (n=94, 40.5%), medullary phase (n=23, 9.9%), excretion phase (n=9, 3.9%). Imaging features from non‐enhanced phase and corticomedullary phase yielded higher performance compared with medullary phase and excretion phase, with the corresponding optimal prediction models were SVM‐fisher_score (AUC: 0.897, ACC: 83%, SEN: 84%, SPE:80%) and Logistic Regression‐RFS (AUC: 0.891, ACC: 83%, SEN: 81%, SPE: 89%), respectively. Conclusions The quantitative imaging features from non‐enhanced and corticomedullary phase have better performance among proposed classification models than that from medullary phase and excretion phase. Furthermore, it is feasible to acquire proper combination of feature selection and classifiers to achieve high performance in identifying ccRCC and fpAML.

Objective There are few researches for the serum betatrophin level and diabetic nephropathy (DN) recently.The aim of this study was to investigate the change of serum betatrophin level and the correlation of serum betatrophin and urinary albumin-to-creatintine ratio (UACR) in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).Methods A total of 150 Chinese subjects from Mar 2013 to Jul 2016 were enrolled in the study, including 90 patients with type 2 diabetes and 60 healthy controls.According to the level of UACR, the diabetic patients were divided into two groups:normal UACR group (UACR<30 mg/g, n=60) and abnormal UACR group(UACR>30 mg/g, n=30).Serum betatrophin was measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).UACR was measured by turbidimetric inhibition immune assay.Blood glucose blood lipid were measured simultaneously.Results The serum betatrophin level was significantly higher in abnormal UACR group than that in normal UACR group[677.37±59.02 vs 486.13±41.22 pg/mL, P<0.05];Serum betatrophin level in T2DM patients was positively correlated with age (r=0.246), waist hip ratio (WHR) (r=0.240), fasting blood glucose (FPG) (r=0.234), 2 hour plasma glucose (2hPG) (r=0.363), glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) (r=0.346), fasting insulin (FINS) (r=0.249), insulin resistance index (HOMA-IR) (r=0.309), blood urea nitrogen (BUN) (r=0.223), creatinine (CREA) (r=0.277) and UACR (r=0.244) (P<0.05),and negatively correlated with glomerular filtration rate (GFR) (r=0.308) (P<0.01).Serum betatrophin level in normal UACR group was positively correlated with age, HbA1c and UACR (P<0.05);Serum betatrophin level in abnormal UACR group was positively correlated with WHR (r=0.504), 2hPG (r=0.600), HbA1c (r=0.449), HOMA-IR (r=0.395) (P<0.05).The WHR, HbA1c, HOMA-IR and GFR were the influential factors of the serum betatrophin level.Conclusion The level of serum betatrophin was significantly increased in T2DM patients with albuminuria, which suggests that the betatrophin might play an important role in the pathogenesis of DN.