Jaasmit Khurana¹, Vivian Ip¹, Gerald Todd², Rakesh V. Sondekoppam¹

Canadian Journal of Urology, Vol.25, No.6, pp. 9623-9626, 2018

Abstract Pain control following major abdominal surgery remains a significant barrier to patient comfort. Although thoracic epidurals have been used to provide analgesia for these surgeries, the transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block is gaining popularity. The TAP catheter insertion method has transformed over the past two decades from a blinded technique to one conducted primarily under ultrasound guidance by anesthesiologists. Recently, however, interest has increased on the potential for direct surgical insertion of catheters into the TAP plane following flank incisions due to anatomical considerations. Proposed advantages include a reduction in operating time, requirement of minimal More >

Xiaolin Miao^*1, Yiqi Chen^*1, Ke Hao^†1, Meiqin Zheng^‡, Bingyu Chen^†, Kaiqiang Li^†, Ying Wang^†, Wei Zhang^§, Yu Zhang^§, Xiaozhou Mou^§, Shanshan Jiang^¶, Zhen Wang^‡§

Oncology Research, Vol.26, No.2, pp. 173-182, 2018, DOI:10.3727/096504017X14841698396865

Abstract Glioblastoma is a lethal disease featuring a high proliferation of tumor cells, excessive angiogenesis, and heavy drug resistance. The overall survival of glioblastoma patients has been dismal, even with an intensive standard of care. Recent advances in immune checkpoint blockades are changing the treatment of cancers. However, the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockades in glioblastoma is still unclear. Here we investigated the roles of CD103⁺ cells in regulating the effect of immune checkpoint blockades in glioblastoma mouse models. Our findings indicated that the murine glioblastoma model was not sensitive to immune checkpoint blockades. Flt3L, a growth More >

Omar Meziab, Dominic J. Abrams, Mark E. Alexander, Laura Bevilacqua, Vassilios Bezzerides, Doug Y. Mah, Edward P. Walsh, John K. Triedman

Congenital Heart Disease, Vol.13, No.3, pp. 419-427, 2018, DOI:10.1111/chd.12589

Abstract Objective: This study evaluates the ability of experienced pediatric electrophysiologists (EPs) to reliably classify incomplete right bundle branch block (IRBBB) and assesses its clinical utility as an isolated ECG finding in a group of healthy outpatient children without prior cardiac evaluation.
Design: We performed a retrospective analysis of all electrocardiographic and echocardiographic records at Boston Children’s Hospital between January 1, 2005, and December 31, 2014. Echocardiographic diagnoses were identified if registered between the date of the index electrocardiogram and the ensuing year. A selected subset of 473 ECGs was subsequently reanalyzed in a blinded manner by six… More >

Claudio Gioia*, Maria Barbara Banella, Grazia Totaro, Micaela Vannini, Paola Marchese, Martino Colonna, Laura Sisti, Annamaria Celli

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.1, pp. 126-135, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2017.634191

Abstract New fully biobased polyether/esters have been synthesized by a one-pot polymerization reaction of ricinoleic acid (RA), vanillic acid (VA) and ethylene carbonate (EC). In particular, EC selectively reacts with the phenolic group of VA to obtain in-situ 4-(2-hydroxyethoxy)-3-methoxybenzoate (EV), suitable for subsequent copolymerization with RA. The procedure was carried out in a single step, without any solvent. Chemical structure and thermal properties of the new materials were studied in order to explore relationships between composition and final performances. The combination of EV, bearing a rigid aromatic structure, with RA, characterized by high flexibility and potential More >

Guoyuan Lin^1,2,*, Bowen Liu¹, Pengcheng Xiao³, Min Lei⁴, Wei Bi^5,6

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.57, No.3, pp. 533-547, 2018, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2018.03720

Abstract Anti-detection is becoming as an emerging challenge for anti-phishing. This paper solves the threats of anti-detection from the threshold setting condition. Enough webpages are considered to complicate threshold setting condition when the threshold is settled. According to the common visual behavior which is easily attracted by the salient region of webpages, image retrieval methods based on texton correlation descriptor (TCD) are improved to obtain enough webpages which have similarity in the salient region for the images of webpages. There are two steps for improving TCD which has advantage of recognizing the salient region of images: More >

Daofu Gong^1,2, Yan Chen^1,2, Haoyu Lu^1,*, Zhenyu Li³, Yibing Han¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.57, No.2, pp. 243-260, 2018, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2018.03781

Abstract To detect and recover random tampering areas, a combined-decision-based self-embedding watermarking scheme is proposed herein. In this scheme, the image is first partitioned into 2×2 size blocks. Next, the high 5 bits of a block’s average value is embedded into its offset block. The tampering type of block is detected by comparing the watermarks of its pre-offset and post-offset blocks. The theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only has a lower ratio of false detection but also better performance with regard to avoiding random tampering. More >

Wenjia Xu¹, Shijun Xiang^1,*, Vasily Sachnev²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.55, No.2, pp. 285-295, 2018, DOI:10.3970/cmc.2018.01719

Abstract With the rapid development of information network, the computing resources and storage capacity of ordinary users cannot meet their needs of data processing. The emergence of cloud computing solves this problem but brings data security problems. How to manage and retrieve ciphertext data effectively becomes a challenging problem. To these problems, a new image retrieval method in ciphertext domain by block image encrypting based on Paillier homomophic cryptosystem is proposed in this paper. This can be described as follows: According to the Paillier encryption technology, the image owner encrypts the original image in blocks, obtains… More >

Ram A. Pathak¹, David D. Thiel¹, Alexander Parker², Michael G. Heckman³, Julia E. Crook³, Nancy N. Diehl³, Andrea Tavlarides², Scott W. Alford¹, Todd C. Igel¹

Canadian Journal of Urology, Vol.24, No.3, pp. 8795-8801, 2017

Abstract Introduction: To compare visual analog scale (VAS) pain scores between patients with a 2-minute versus 10-minute delay of peri-prostatic lidocaine injection prior to transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsies (TRUS-bx).
Materials and methods: Eighty patients who underwent standard 12-core TRUS-bx by a single surgeon were prospectively randomized into four different treatment arms: bibasilar injection with a 2-minute delay, bibasilar injection plus a single apical injection with a 2-minute delay, bibasilar injection with a 10-minute delay, and bibasilar injection plus a single apical injection with a 10-minute delay. Patients were asked to report their level of pain on the VAS… More >

Tao Wang, Fan Shi, JiQuan Wang, Zi Liu, Jin Su

Oncology Research, Vol.25, No.5, pp. 809-817, 2017, DOI:10.3727/096504016X14799180778233

Abstract Kallistatin has been recognized as an endogenous angiogenesis inhibitor and exerts pleiotropic effects in inhibiting tumor growth, migration, apoptosis, and inflammation. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the potential role and mechanisms of kallistatin in cervical cancer. We demonstrated that kallistatin effectively inhibited cell proliferation and enhanced apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner. Additionally, kallistatin suppressed migration and invasion activities and markedly reduced the expression of matrix-degrading metalloproteinases, progelatinase (MMP-2), MMP-9, and urokinase-type PA (uPA). Kallistatin reversed the epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) and caused the upregulation of epithelial markers such as E-cadherin and inhibited… More >

Xuyang Wen^*, Xiaoping He^†, Feng Jiao^‡, Chunhui Wang^§, Yang Sun^‡, Xuequn Ren^¶, Qianwen Li^*

Oncology Research, Vol.25, No.4, pp. 629-640, 2017, DOI:10.3727/096504016X14768383625385

Abstract Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the main causes of cancer death. The tumor microenvironment has a profound effect on inducing tumor growth, metastasis, and immunosuppression. Fibroblast activation protein-a (FAP) is a protein that is usually expressed in fibroblasts, such as cancer-associated fibroblasts, which are major components of the tumor microenvironment. However, the role of FAP in GC progression and treatment is still unknown. In this study, we explored these problems based on GC patient samples and experimental models. We found that high FAP expression was an independent prognosticator of poor survival in GC patients. More >