Management of Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer and the second most common cause of cancer death worldwide. More than 50% of the patients have advanced disease at diagnosis and in this case the disease has a poor outcome. The staging of gastric cancers is based on endoscopic ultrasound, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, in addition to the laparoscopic staging. Many improvements in the surgical techniques have been seen in the last decade. Laparoscopic surgery is an emerging approach which offers important advantages: less blood loss, reduced postoperative pain, accelerated recovery, early return to normal bowel function and reduced hospital stay. D1 lymphadenectomy, with a goal of examining 15 or greater lymph nodes is a standard. D2 dissection is considered as a standard in several institutions especially in eastern Asia. Perioperative chemotherapy and adjuvant concurrent radiochemotherapy are recognized as standards treatments. Palliative chemotherapy is the mainstay treatment of advanced stages of the disease (metastatic and non-operable tumors). Despite these treatment advances, the prognosis of gastric cancer remains poor with a 5-year survival ranging from 10 to 15% in all stages combined

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS OF A POTENZIATED PIEZOSURGERGICAL DEVICE AT THE RABBIT SKULL

The number of available ultrasonic osteotomes has remarkably increased. In vitro and in vivo studies have revealed differences between conventional osteotomes, such as rotating or sawing devices, and ultrasound-supported osteotomes (Piezosurgery®) regarding the micromorphology and roughness values of osteotomized bone surfaces. Objective: the present study compares the micro-morphologies and roughness values of osteotomized bone surfaces after the application of rotating and sawing devices, Piezosurgery Medical® and Piezosurgery Medical New Generation Powerful Handpiece. Methods: Fresh, standard-sized bony samples were taken from a rabbit skull using the following osteotomes: rotating and sawing devices, Piezosurgery Medical® and a Piezosurgery Medical New Generation Powerful Handpiece. The required duration of time for each osteotomy was recorded. Micromorphologies and roughness values to characterize the bone surfaces following the different osteotomy methods were described. The prepared surfaces were examined via light microscopy, environmental surface electron microscopy (ESEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) and atomic force microscopy. The selective cutting of mineralized tissues while preserving adjacent soft tissue (dura mater and nervous tissue) was studied. Bone necrosis of the osteotomy sites and the vitality of the osteocytes near the sectional plane were investigated, as well as the proportion of apoptosis or cell degeneration. Results and Conclusions: The potential positive effects on bone healing and reossification associated with different devices were evaluated and the comparative analysis among the different devices used was performed, in order to determine the best osteotomes to be employed during cranio-facial surgery

Oncologic Thermoradiotherapy: Need for Evidence, Harmonisation, and Innovation

The road of acceptance of oncologic thermotherapy/hyperthermia as a synergistic modality in combination with standard oncologic therapies is still bumpy. This is partially due to the lack of level I evidence from international, multicentric, randomized clinical trials including large patient numbers and a long term follow-up. Therefore we need more level I EVIDENCE from clinical trials, we need HARMONISATION and global acceptance for existing technologies and a common language understood by all stakeholders and we need INNOVATION in the fields of biology, clinics and technology to move thermotherapy/hyperthermia forward. This is the main focus of this reprint. In this reprintyou find carefully selected and peer-reviewed contributions from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. The published papers from leading scientists from all over the world covering a broad range of timely research topics might also help to strengthen thermotherapy on a global level

Mitochondria and Brain Disorders

The mitochondrion is a unique and ubiquitous organelle that contains its own genome, encoding essential proteins that are major components of the respiratory chain and energy production system. Mitochondria play a dominant role in the life and function of eukaryotic cells including neurons and glia, as their survival and activity depend upon mitochondrial energy production and supply. Besides energy production, mitochondria also play a vital role in calcium homeostasis and may induce apoptosis by excitotoxicity. Mitochondrial dysfunction is related to common neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Friedreich's ataxia, Huntington's disease, and Multiple Sclerosis. An efficient treatment of mitochondrial dysfunction would open new horizons in the therapeutic perspectives of a substantial number of inflammatory and degenerative neurological disorders

Neural activity during a simple reaching task in macaques is counter to gating and rebound in basal ganglia–thalamic communication

Task-related activity in the ventral thalamus, a major target of basal ganglia output, is often assumed to be permitted or triggered by changes in basal ganglia activity through gating- or rebound-like mechanisms. To test those hypotheses, we sampled single-unit activity from connected basal ganglia output and thalamic nuclei (globus pallidus-internus [GPi] and ventrolateral anterior nucleus [VLa]) in monkeys performing a reaching task. Rate increases were the most common peri-movement change in both nuclei. Moreover, peri-movement changes generally began earlier in VLa than in GPi. Simultaneously recorded GPi-VLa pairs rarely showed short-time-scale spike-to-spike correlations or slow across-trials covariations, and both were equally positive and negative. Finally, spontaneous GPi bursts and pauses were both followed by small, slow reductions in VLa rate. These results appear incompatible with standard gating and rebound models. Still, gating or rebound may be possible in other physiological situations: simulations show how GPi-VLa communication can scale with GPi synchrony and GPi-to-VLa convergence, illuminating how synchrony of basal ganglia output during motor learning or in pathological conditions may render this pathway effective. Thus, in the healthy state, basal ganglia-thalamic communication during learned movement is more subtle than expected, with changes in firing rates possibly being dominated by a common external source

Structured parallelism discovery with hybrid static-dynamic analysis and evaluation technique

Parallel computer architectures have dominated the computing landscape for the past two decades; a trend that is only expected to continue and intensify, with increasing specialization and heterogeneity. This creates huge pressure across the software stack to produce programming languages, libraries, frameworks and tools which will efficiently exploit the capabilities of parallel computers, not only for new software, but also revitalizing existing sequential code. Automatic parallelization, despite decades of research, has had limited success in transforming sequential software to take advantage of efficient parallel execution. This thesis investigates three approaches that use commutativity analysis as the enabler for parallelization. This has the potential to overcome limitations of traditional techniques. We introduce the concept of liveness-based commutativity for sequential loops. We examine the use of a practical analysis utilizing liveness-based commutativity in a symbolic execution framework. Symbolic execution represents input values as groups of constraints, consequently deriving the output as a function of the input and enabling the identification of further program properties. We employ this feature to develop an analysis and discern commutativity properties between loop iterations. We study the application of this approach on loops taken from real-world programs in the OLDEN and NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) suites, and identify its limitations and related overheads. Informed by these findings, we develop Dynamic Commutativity Analysis (DCA), a new technique that leverages profiling information from program execution with specific input sets. Using profiling information, we track liveness information and detect loop commutativity by examining the code’s live-out values. We evaluate DCA against almost 1400 loops of the NPB suite, discovering 86% of them as parallelizable. Comparing our results against dependence-based methods, we match the detection efficacy of two dynamic and outperform three static approaches, respectively. Additionally, DCA is able to automatically detect parallelism in loops which iterate over Pointer-Linked Data Structures (PLDSs), taken from wide range of benchmarks used in the literature, where all other techniques we considered failed. Parallelizing the discovered loops, our methodology achieves an average speedup of 3.6× across NPB (and up to 55×) and up to 36.9× for the PLDS-based loops on a 72-core host. We also demonstrate that our methodology, despite relying on specific input values for profiling each program, is able to correctly identify parallelism that is valid for all potential input sets. Lastly, we develop a methodology to utilize liveness-based commutativity, as implemented in DCA, to detect latent loop parallelism in the shape of patterns. Our approach applies a series of transformations which subsequently enable multiple applications of DCA over the generated multi-loop code section and match its loop commutativity outcomes against the expected criteria for each pattern. Applying our methodology on sets of sequential loops, we are able to identify well-known parallel patterns (i.e., maps, reduction and scans). This extends the scope of parallelism detection to loops, such as those performing scan operations, which cannot be determined as parallelizable by simply evaluating liveness-based commutativity conditions on their original form

Diagnostic Significance of Exosomal miRNAs in the Plasma of Breast Cancer Patients

Poster Session AbstractsBackground and Aims: Emerging evidence that microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in cancer development has opened up new opportunities for cancer diagnosis. Recent studies demonstrated that released exosomes which contain a subset of both cellular mRNA and miRNA could be a useful source of biomarkers for cancer detection. Here, we aim to develop a novel biomarker for breast cancer diagnosis using exosomal miRNAs in plasma. Methods: We have developed a rapid and novel isolation protocol to enrich tumor-associated exosomes from plasma samples by capturing tumor specific surface markers containing exosomes. After enrichment, we performed miRNA profiling on four sample sets; (1) Ep-CAM marker enriched plasma exosomes of breast cancer patients; (2) breast tumors of the same patients; (3) adjacent non-cancerous tissues of the same patients; (4) Ep-CAM marker enriched plasma exosomes of normal control subjects. Profiling is performed using PCR-based array with human microRNA panels that contain more than 700 miRNAs. Results: Our profiling data showed that 15 miRNAs are concordantly up-regulated and 13 miRNAs are concordantly down-regulated in both plasma exosomes and corresponding tumors. These account for 25% (up-regulation) and 15% (down-regulation) of all miRNAs detectable in plasma exosomes. Our findings demonstrate that miRNA profile in EpCAM-enriched plasma exosomes from breast cancer patients exhibit certain similar pattern to that in the corresponding tumors. Based on our profiling results, plasma signatures that differentiated breast cancer from control are generated and some of the well-known breast cancer related miRNAs such as miR-10b, miR-21, miR-155 and miR-145 are included in our panel list. The putative miRNA biomarkers are validated on plasma samples from an independent cohort from more than 100 cancer patients. Further validation of the selected markers is likely to offer an accurate, noninvasive and specific diagnostic assay for breast cancer. Conclusions: These results suggest that exosomal miRNAs in plasma may be a novel biomarker for breast cancer diagnosis.link_to_OA_fulltex