Masking and Mixing Adversarial Training

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent performances in various computer vision tasks, they often misclassify with malicious samples, a.k.a. adversarial examples. Adversarial training is a popular and straightforward technique to defend against the threat of adversarial examples. Unfortunately, CNNs must sacrifice the accuracy of standard samples to improve robustness against adversarial examples when adversarial training is used. In this work, we propose Masking and Mixing Adversarial Training (M2AT) to mitigate the trade-off between accuracy and robustness. We focus on creating diverse adversarial examples during training. Specifically, our approach consists of two processes: 1) masking a perturbation with a binary mask and 2) mixing two partially perturbed images. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 dataset demonstrate that our method achieves better robustness against several adversarial attacks than previous methods

Suplatast tosilate alleviates nasal symptoms through the suppression of nuclear factor of activated T-cells-mediated IL-9 gene expression in toluene-2,4-diisocyanate-sensitized rats

Histamine H1 receptor (H1R) gene is upregulated in patients with pollinosis; its expression level is highly correlated with the nasal symptom severity. Antihistamines are widely used as allergy treatments because they inhibit histamine signaling by blocking H1R or suppressing H1R signaling as inverse agonists. However, long-term treatment with antihistamines does not completely resolve toluene-2,4-diisocyanate (TDI)-induced nasal symptoms, although it can decrease H1R gene expression to the basal level, suggesting additional signaling is responsible for the pathogenesis of the allergic symptoms. Here, we show that treatment with suplatast tosilate in combination with antihistamines markedly alleviates nasal symptoms in TDI-sensitized rats. Suplatast suppressed TDI-induced upregulation of IL-9 gene expression. Suplatast also suppressed ionomycin/phorbol-12-myristate-13-acetate-induced upregulation of IL-2 gene expression in Jurkat cells, in which calcineurin (CN)/nuclear factor of activated T-cells (NFAT) signaling is known to be involved. Immunoblot analysis demonstrated that suplatast inhibited binding of NFAT to DNA. Furthermore, suplatast suppressed ionomycin-induced IL-9 mRNA upregulation in RBL-2H3 cells, in which CN/NFAT signaling is also involved. These data suggest that suplatast suppressed NFAT-mediated IL-9 gene expression in TDI-sensitized rats and this might be the underlying mechanism of the therapeutic effects of combined therapy of suplatast with antihistamine

The Current Role of Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT) in Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC)

The role of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), which can deliver high radiation doses to focal tumors, has greatly increased in not only early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but also in portal vein or inferior vena cava thrombi, thus expanding this therapy to pre-transplantation and the treatment of oligometastases from HCC in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). In early-stage HCC, many promising prospective results of SBRT have been reported, although SBRT is not usually indicated as a first treatment potion in localized HCC according to several guidelines. In the treatment of portal vein or inferior vena cava tumor thrombi, several reports using various dose-fraction schedules have shown relatively good response rates with low toxicities and improved survival due to the rapid advancements in systemic therapy. Although SBRT is regarded as a substitute therapy when conventional bridging therapies to transplantation, such as transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) and radiofrequency ablation (RFA), are not applicable or fail in controlling tumors, SBRT may offer advantages in patients with borderline liver function who may not tolerate TACE or RFA, according to several reports. For oligometastases, the combination of SBRT with ICI could potentially induce an abscopal effect in patients with HCC, which is expected to provide the rationale for SBRT in the treatment of oligometastatic disease in the near future

Transclival clipping for giant vertebral artery aneurysm: A case report

Background: Endovascular treatment often achieves complete obliteration of VA giant aneurysm; however, retreatmentmay be required because of late recanalization. We report a case of giant VA aneurysm that showedregrowth after endovascular treatment and was treated with VA clipping using the endoscopic endonasaltransclival approach.Case description: A 47-year-old man with chief complaint of ataxia underwent endovascular treatment of giantVA aneurysm. One year later, he needed additional treatment to regrowth of the aneurysm. We were not able toaccomplish aneurysmectomy via the transcondylar fossa approach because of difficulty in achieving hemostasisand ended with partial thrombectomy. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) performed after 4 months revealedcoil compaction and distal flow due to recanalization. Right VA elongation and position of anterior spinal artery(ASA), these factors made possible for us to perform transclival approach to VA. Despite the limited indicationsfor its use, endonasal endoscopic transclival clipping may be effective in limited anatomical cases.Conclusion: We report the use of endonasal endoscopic transclival clipping for giant VA aneurysm. This endonasalendoscopic treatment may be an optional alternative in only limited cases depending upon the anatomicallocation of the lesion because of limitations of vascular control and the inability to visualize the field in thepresence of major bleeding. For treatment of progressive giant VA aneurysm, it is very important to avoidoptimistic strategy for giant VA aneurysm initially

Transclival clipping for giant vertebral artery aneurysm: A case report

Background: Endovascular treatment often achieves complete obliteration of VA giant aneurysm; however, retreatment may be required because of late recanalization. We report a case of giant VA aneurysm that showed regrowth after endovascular treatment and was treated with VA clipping using the endoscopic endonasal transclival approach. Case description: A 47-year-old man with chief complaint of ataxia underwent endovascular treatment of giant VA aneurysm. One year later, he needed additional treatment to regrowth of the aneurysm. We were not able to accomplish aneurysmectomy via the transcondylar fossa approach because of difficulty in achieving hemostasis and ended with partial thrombectomy. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) performed after 4 months revealed coil compaction and distal flow due to recanalization. Right VA elongation and position of anterior spinal artery (ASA), these factors made possible for us to perform transclival approach to VA. Despite the limited indications for its use, endonasal endoscopic transclival clipping may be effective in limited anatomical cases. Conclusion: We report the use of endonasal endoscopic transclival clipping for giant VA aneurysm. This endonasal endoscopic treatment may be an optional alternative in only limited cases depending upon the anatomical location of the lesion because of limitations of vascular control and the inability to visualize the field in the presence of major bleeding. For treatment of progressive giant VA aneurysm, it is very important to avoid optimistic strategy for giant VA aneurysm initially. Keywords: Transclival clipping, Giant vertebral artery aneurysm, Vasa vasorum, Cerebrospinal fluid leakage, Flow diverter sten