Survival Predictive Nomograms for Non-Surgical Brain Metastases Patients From Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Receiving Radiotherapy: A Population-Based Study

OBJECTIVE: A high number of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) patients with brain metastasis who have not had surgery often have a negative outlook. Radiotherapy remains a most common and effective method. Nomograms were developed to forecast the cancer-specific survival (CSS) and overall survival (OS) in NSCLC individuals with nonoperative brain metastases who underwent radiotherapy. METHODS: Information was gathered from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database about patients diagnosed with NSCLC who had brain metastases not suitable for surgery. Nomograms were created and tested using multivariate Cox regression models to forecast CSS and OS at intervals of 1, 2, and 3 years. RESULTS: The research involved 3413 individuals diagnosed with NSCLC brain metastases who had undergone radiotherapy but had not experienced surgery. These participants were randomly divided into two categories. The analysis revealed that gender, age, ethnicity, marital status, tumor location, tumor laterality, tumor grade, histology, T stage, N stage, chemotherapy, tumor size, lung metastasis, bone metastasis, and liver metastasis were significant independent predictors for OS and CSS. The C-index for the training set for predicting OS was .709 (95% CI, .697-.721), and for the validation set, it was .705 (95% CI, .686-.723), respectively. The C-index for predicting CSS was .710 (95% CI, .697-.722) in the training set and .703 (95% CI, .684-.722) in the validation set, respectively. The nomograms model, as suggested by the impressive C-index, exhibits outstanding differentiation ability. Moreover, the ROC and calibration curves reveal its commendable precision and distinguishing potential. CONCLUSIONS: For the first time, highly accurate and reliable nomograms were developed to predict OS and CSS in NSCLC patients with non-surgical brain metastases, who have undergone radiotherapy treatment. The nomograms may assist in tailoring counseling strategies and choosing the most effective treatment method

You Can Mask More For Extremely Low-Bitrate Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) methods have experienced significant progress during recent years. However, these methods are primarily dedicated to optimizing the rate-distortion (R-D) performance at medium and high bitrates (> 0.1 bits per pixel (bpp)), while research on extremely low bitrates is limited. Besides, existing methods fail to explicitly explore the image structure and texture components crucial for image compression, treating them equally alongside uninformative components in networks. This can cause severe perceptual quality degradation, especially under low-bitrate scenarios. In this work, inspired by the success of pre-trained masked autoencoders (MAE) in many downstream tasks, we propose to rethink its mask sampling strategy from structure and texture perspectives for high redundancy reduction and discriminative feature representation, further unleashing the potential of LIC methods. Therefore, we present a dual-adaptive masking approach (DA-Mask) that samples visible patches based on the structure and texture distributions of original images. We combine DA-Mask and pre-trained MAE in masked image modeling (MIM) as an initial compressor that abstracts informative semantic context and texture representations. Such a pipeline can well cooperate with LIC networks to achieve further secondary compression while preserving promising reconstruction quality. Consequently, we propose a simple yet effective masked compression model (MCM), the first framework that unifies MIM and LIC end-to-end for extremely low-bitrate image compression. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in R-D performance, visual quality, and downstream applications, at very low bitrates. Our code is available at https://github.com/lianqi1008/MCM.git.Comment: Under revie

Effect of Vacuum Pre-cooling on the Circulation and Shelf Quality of Postharvest Baby Cabbage

To optimize the treatment conditions for vacuum pre-cooling of baby cabbage and maintain the fresh quality of postharvest baby cabbage, a central composite response surface experiment with two factors and three levels was conducted on the basis of analyzing the effects of different vacuum pre-cooling final temperature (0, 2 and 4 ℃) and different vacuum pre-cooling final pressure (400, 600, 800 and 1000 Pa) on the pre-cooling of postharvest baby cabbage. The results showed that compared with the control without pre-cooling and the pre-cooling group with final temperature of 0 ℃, the pre-cooling with final temperature of 2~4 ℃ at the final pressure of 600 Pa could better maintain the appearance quality of postharvest baby cabbage, inhibit the increase of respiratory rate and malondialdehyde (MDA) content. Under the condition of final temperature of 2 ℃, compared with the control without pre-cooling and the pre-cooling group with a final pressure of 1000 Pa, pre-cooling with final pressures of 400~800 Pa could also better maintain the appearance quality of postharvest baby cabbage, inhibit the increase of respiratory rate and MDA content. Further central composite response surface experiments showed that the optimal conditions for vacuum pre-cooling of postharvest baby vegetables were final temperature of 4.0 ℃ and final pressure of 600 Pa. The vacuum pre-cooling condition not only maintained good quality of postharvest baby vegetable, but also increased the content of soluble protein, total phenols, and ascorbic acid by 18.78%, 18.47% and 33.23%, respectively. Therefore, appropriate vacuum pre-cooling treatment is a highly potential commercialization technology that could effectively maintain the good quality of postharvest baby vegetable during circulation and shelf life

Effects of Ultrasonic Atomization of Slightly Acidic Electrolyzed Water on the Circulation and Shelf Quality of Postharvest Baby Cabbage

To check the effect of slightly acidic electrolyzed water (SAEW) on the shelf quality of postharvest baby cabbage, the effects of ultrasonic atomization fumigation of SAEW with different concentrations (0, 50, 100 and 150 mg/L) on the postharvest preservation of baby cabbage were analyzed under low temperature circulation (4±1) ℃and shelf conditions (25±1) ℃. The results showed that, compared with the control and other concentrations of SAEW (50 and 150 mg/L), the ultrasonic atomization fumigation treatment of SAEW at 100 mg/L treatment significantly suppressed the increase in malondialdehyde content and the decrease in total glucosinolate content of baby cabbage at the 6th and 9th days of shelf life (P<0.05). Further circulation and shelf simulation results indicated that, compared with the control, the 100 mg/L SAEW ultrasonic atomization fumigation treatment reduced the total number of colonies by 17.04% and increased the total glucosinolate content by 30.11% in baby cabbage; In addition, this treatment significantly inhibited the accumulation of nitrite and malondialdehyde content (P<0.05), delayed the decline of soluble sugar, soluble protein, total phenol, ascorbic acid and isothiocyanate content, and increased the activity of myrosinase in postharvest baby cabbage. It was clear that ultrasonic atomization fumigation treatment of SAEW at 100 mg/L could not only effectively inhibit the growth of the total number of colonies in baby cabbage during circulation and shelf life, but also effectively slow down the degradation of nutritional quality in baby cabbage during this process, thus improving the preservation effect of baby cabbage

TerrainNet: Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation

Effective use of camera-based vision systems is essential for robust performance in autonomous off-road driving, particularly in the high-speed regime. Despite success in structured, on-road settings, current end-to-end approaches for scene prediction have yet to be successfully adapted for complex outdoor terrain. To this end, we present TerrainNet, a vision-based terrain perception system for semantic and geometric terrain prediction for aggressive, off-road navigation. The approach relies on several key insights and practical considerations for achieving reliable terrain modeling. The network includes a multi-headed output representation to capture fine- and coarse-grained terrain features necessary for estimating traversability. Accurate depth estimation is achieved using self-supervised depth completion with multi-view RGB and stereo inputs. Requirements for real-time performance and fast inference speeds are met using efficient, learned image feature projections. Furthermore, the model is trained on a large-scale, real-world off-road dataset collected across a variety of diverse outdoor environments. We show how TerrainNet can also be used for costmap prediction and provide a detailed framework for integration into a planning module. We demonstrate the performance of TerrainNet through extensive comparison to current state-of-the-art baselines for camera-only scene prediction. Finally, we showcase the effectiveness of integrating TerrainNet within a complete autonomous-driving stack by conducting a real-world vehicle test in a challenging off-road scenario

Causal relationships between lung cancer and sepsis: a genetic correlation and multivariate mendelian randomization analysis

BackgroundFormer research has emphasized a correlation between lung cancer (LC) and sepsis, but the causative link remains unclear.MethodThis study used univariate Mendelian Randomization (MR) to explore the causal relationship between LC, its subtypes, and sepsis. Linkage Disequilibrium Score (LDSC) regression was used to calculate genetic correlations. Multivariate MR was applied to investigate the role of seven confounding factors. The primary method utilized was inverse-variance-weighted (IVW), supplemented by sensitivity analyses to assess directionality, heterogeneity, and result robustness.ResultsLDSC analysis revealed a significant genetic correlation between LC and sepsis (genetic correlation = 0.325, p = 0.014). Following false discovery rate (FDR) correction, strong evidence suggested that genetically predicted LC (OR = 1.172, 95% CI 1.083–1.269, p = 8.29 × 10−5, Pfdr = 2.49 × 10−4), squamous cell lung carcinoma (OR = 1.098, 95% CI 1.021–1.181, p = 0.012, Pfdr = 0.012), and lung adenocarcinoma (OR = 1.098, 95% CI 1.024–1.178, p = 0.009, Pfdr = 0.012) are linked to an increased incidence of sepsis. Suggestive evidence was also found for small cell lung carcinoma (Wald ratio: OR = 1.156, 95% CI 1.047–1.277, p = 0.004) in relation to sepsis. The multivariate MR suggested that the partial impact of all LC subtypes on sepsis might be mediated through body mass index. Reverse analysis did not find a causal relationship (p &gt; 0.05 and Pfdr &gt; 0.05).ConclusionThe study suggests a causative link between LC and increased sepsis risk, underscoring the need for integrated sepsis management in LC patients

Quality and Flavor Analysis of Six Commercially Available Stewed Pork Balls

In order to clarify the quality differences of existing commercially available stewed pork ball products, this study comprehensively analyzed the quality traits of commercially available stewed pork ball of six different brands (A1-Mouth Edge, A2-Wutting Bridge, A3-Kijin, A4-Lao Yangcheng, A5-Sanzhenzhai, and A6-Huangjue) on the physicochemical indices of organoleptic, colour and lustre, textural characteristics, water loss rate and fat oxidation, combined with the free fatty acids and volatile flavour compounds to characterize. The results showed that the sensory score of the A1 stewed pork ball was as high as 34 points, and the redness value of A4 was as high as 3.46±0.08 among the six types of commercially available stewed pork balls, while the fat oxidation value of A1 was the lowest at 0.44 mg MDA/kg, and the masticatory of A5 and A6 was lower at 0.21±0.02 and 0.32±0.11 mJ, respectively. The free fatty acids composition of the six commercially available stewed pork balls, which were mainly composed of oleic acid and secondly composed of saturated fatty acids such as palmitic acid and stearic acid. The polyunsaturated fatty acids in stewed pork balls were decomposed into aldehydes and other substances by a large number of oxidation reactions, while the content of saturated fatty acids was significantly increased. γ-Pinene, hexanal, linalool, nonanal, etc. were the common volatile flavor substances, in addition, the main key volatile flavor substances of A1 were 2-pentyl furan, the main volatile flavor compounds of A2 were Valencia orange alkene, methyl heptane, isovaleraldehyde, while A4 was ethyl caprylate, A5 was 4-terpineol, undecyl alcohol, methyl mercaptan, furfuryl alcohol, furfural, methyl stearate, anethole, and A6 was undecyl alcohol, phenylpropanoid. Thus, hydrocarbons and aldehydes, along with alcohols and ketones, might be the major factors affecting the flavor quality of various commercially available stewed pork ball products. The results of this study may provide a theoretical reference for the construction of the product quality evaluation system for commercially available stewed pork ball products, as well as flavor unification and product development and production

Transcriptome analysis of osmotic-responsive genes in ABA-dependent and -independent pathways in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) roots

Bread wheat is one of the most important crops in the world. However, osmotic stress significantly inhibits wheat growth and development, and reduces crop yield and quality. Plants respond to osmotic stress mainly through abscisic acid (ABA)-dependent and -independent pathways. In this study, root transcriptome profiles of wheat seedlings exposed to osmotic stress and exogenous ABA were analysed to identify osmotic-responsive genes belonging to the ABA-dependent or -independent pathways. We found that osmotic stress promoted proline biosynthesis in the ABA-dependent pathway, and trehalose biosynthesis is likely promoted among soluble sugars to maintain protein bioactivity under osmotic stress. In wheat roots subjected to osmotic stress, calcium ions, and glutathione exert their functions mainly through calcium-binding protein (CaM/CML) and glutathione-S-transferase, respectively, depending on both pathways. In addition, a complex relationship among phytohormones signal transduction was observed in response to osmotic stress. The findings of this study deepen our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of osmotic-stress resistance, and provide several candidate osmotic-responsive genes for further study

LncRNA KCNQ1OT1 Mediates Pyroptosis in Diabetic Cardiomyopathy

Background/Aims: Diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a common complication of diabetes and can cause heart failure, arrhythmia and sudden death. The pathogenesis of DCM includes altered metabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, inflammation, cell death and extracellular matrix remodeling. Recently, pyroptosis, a type of programmed cell death related to inflammation, was proven to be activated in DCM. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying pyroptosis in DCM remain elusive. The long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) Kcnq1ot1 participates in many cardiovascular diseases. This study aims to clarify whether Kcnq1ot1 affects cardiac pyroptosis in DCM. Methods: AC16 cells and primary cardiomyocytes were incubated with 5.5 and 50 mmol/L glucose. Diabetic mice were induced with streptozotocin (STZ). Kcnq1ot1 was silenced both in vitro and in vivo. qRT-PCR was used to detect the expression level of Kcnq1ot1. Immunofluorescence, qRT-PCR and western blot analyses were used to detect the degree of pyroptosis. Echocardiography, hematoxylin and eosin staining, and Masson’s trichrome staining were used to detect the cardiac function and morphology in mice. Cell death and function were detected using TUNEL staining, immunofluorescence staining and Ca2+ measurements. Results: The expression of Kcnq1ot1 was increased in patients with diabetes, high glucose-induced cardiomyocytes and diabetic mouse cardiac tissue. Silencing Kcnq1ot1 alleviated pyroptosis by targeting miR-214-3p and caspase-1. Furthermore, silencing Kcnq1ot1 reduced cell death, cytoskeletal structure abnormalities and calcium overload in vitro and improved cardiac function and morphology in vivo. Conclusion: Kcnq1ot1 is overexpressed in DCM, and silencing Kcnq1ot1 inhibits pyroptosis by influencing miR-214-3p and caspase-1 expression. We clarified for the first time that Kcnq1ot1 could be a new therapeutic target for DCM

The Tet2–Upf1 complex modulates mRNA stability under stress conditions

Introduction: Environmental stress promotes epigenetic alterations that impact gene expression and subsequently participate in the pathological processes of the disorder. Among epigenetic regulations, ten–eleven Translocation (Tet) enzymes oxidize 5-methylcytosine (5mC) to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in DNA and RNA and function as critical players in the pathogenesis of diseases. Our previous results showed that chronic stress increases the expression of cytoplasmic Tet2 in the hippocampus of mice exposed to chronic mild stress (CMS). Whether the cytoplasmic Tet2 alters RNA 5hmC modification in chronic stress-related processes remains largely unknown.Methods: To explore the role of cytoplasmic Tet2 under CMS conditions, we established CMS mice model and detected the expression of RNA 5hmC by dot blot. We verified the interaction of Tet2 and its interacting protein by co-immunoprecipitation combined with mass spectrometry and screened downstream target genes by cluster analysis of Tet2 and upstream frameshift 1 (Upf1) interacting RNA. The expression of protein was detected by Western blot and the expression of the screened target genes was detected by qRT-PCR.Results: In this study, we found that increased cytoplasmic Tet2 expression under CMS conditions leads to increase in total RNA 5hmC modification. Tet2 interacted with the key non-sense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) factor Upf1, regulated the stability of stress-related genes such as Unc5b mRNA, and might thereby affect neurodevelopment.Discussion: In summary, this study revealed that Tet2-mediated RNA 5hmC modification is involved in stress-related mRNA stability regulation and may serve as a potential therapeutic target for chronic stress-related diseases such as depression