Radiofrequency ablation versus hepatic resection for hepatocellular carcinoma within the Milan criteria – A comparative study

AbstractBackgroundTo compare the results of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) with hepatic resection in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) within the Milan criteria.MethodsA nonrandomized comparative study was performed with 111 consecutive patients who underwent laparoscopic RFA (n = 31) or curative hepatic resection (n = 80) for HCC within Milan criteria.ResultsProcedure related complications were less often and severe after RFA than resection (3.2% vs. 25%). There was no significant difference in hospital mortality (0% vs. 3.8%). Hospital stay was significantly shorter in the RFA group than in the resection group (mean, 3.8 vs. 6.8 days). The 1-, 3-, and 5-year disease-free survival rates for the RFA group and the resection group were 76%, 40%, 40% and 76%, 60%, 60%, respectively. Disease-free survival was significantly lower in the RFA group than in the resection group. The corresponding 1-, 3-, and 5-year overall survival rates for the RFA group and the resection group were 100%, 92%, 84%, and 92%, 75%, 71%, respectively. The overall survival for RFA and resection were not significantly different.ConclusionsOur result showed comparable overall survival between RFA and surgery, although RFA was associated with a significantly higher tumor recurrence rate. RFA had the advantages over surgical resection in being less invasive and having lower morbidity

Gene functionality's influence on the second codon: A large-scale survey of second codon composition in three domains

AbstractThe second codon of a transcript, besides encoding for an amino acid, is now known to also have multiple molecular functions and is involved in translation efficiency and protein turn-over and maturation processing. These multiple purposes therefore make the selection constraints on this codon's composition more complex. To examine the biological significance of various permutations of the second codon, we conducted a systematic survey of second codon composition from 442 selected genomes across three domains. The amino acid bias of the second codon is associated with specific protein functions. The most common amino acids (S, A, K and T) are significantly avoided in Cell Envelope-related genes but preferred in Translation or Energy Metabolism-related genes, suggesting that the function of a gene product is a significant factor influencing the composition of the second codon

Sensitivity analysis of distributed photovoltaic system capacity estimation based on artificial neural network

Residential solar photovoltaic (PV) system installations are expected to continue increasing due to their growing cost competitiveness and supportive government policies. However, excessive installations of unknown behind-the-meter solar panels present a challenge for accurate load prediction and reliable operations of power networks. To address such growing concerns of distribution network operators (DNOs), this research proposes a novel model for distributed PV system capacity estimations. Innovative extracted features from 24-hour substation net load curves were fed into a deep neural network to estimate the PV capacity linked to the substation feeder. A comprehensive study into the sensitivity of the model’s accuracy to specific temporal scales of data collection, number of households served by a substation, and proportion of PV-equipped properties was conducted. This study revealed that a model developed to be used exclusively in summer achieved a 18.1% decrease in estimation root mean squared error (RMSE) compared to an all-year model, whilst using only a third of the training data amount. Similarly, compared to an all-year model, RMSE decreased by 26.9% when only data from Mondays to Thursdays were used to train and test the model. Also, for the all-year model, the most accurate estimations occur when 20% to 80% of households have PV systems installed and estimation percentage error tend to remain constant at around 10% when more than 20% of households have PV systems installed. A machine learning-ready dataset of substations with known PV capacity and experiment results are both useful to inform DNOs on the potential of the proposed method in reducing grid operation costs

Quantum secure communication scheme with W state

Recently, Cao et al. proposed a new quantum secure direct communication scheme using W state. In their scheme, the error rate introduced by an eavesdropper who takes intercept-resend attack, is only 8.3%. Actually, their scheme is just a quantum key distribution scheme because the communication parties first create a shared key and then encrypt the secret message using one-time pad. We then present a quantum secure communication scheme using three-qubit W state. In our scheme, the error rate is raised to 25% and it is not necessary for the present scheme to use alternative measurement or Bell basis measurement. We also show our scheme is unconditionally secure.Comment: Comments are welcom

REMOVED: Study on Separation Properties of Aquaporin-Based Proteoliposomes and Synthesizing of High Performance Aquaporin Based Biomimetic Membrane

This article has been removed: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).This article has been removed at the request of the Executive Publisher.This article has been removed because it was published without the permission of the author(s)

High frame rate contrast enhanced ultrasound imaging for slow flow: influence of ultrasound pressure and flow rate on bubble disruption and image persistence

Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) utilising microbubbles shows great potential for visualising lymphatic vessels and identifying sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) which are valuable for axillary staging in breast cancer patients. However, current CEUS imaging techniques have limitations that affect the accurate visualisation and tracking of lymphatic vessels and SLN. (i) Tissue artefacts and bubble disruption can reduce the image contrast. (ii) Limited spatial and temporal resolution diminishes the amount of information that can be captured by CEUS. (iii) The slow lymph flow makes Doppler-based approaches less effective. This work evaluates on a lymphatic vessel phantom the use of high frame rate (HFR) CEUS for the detection of lymphatic vessels where flow is slow. Specifically, the work particularly investigates the impact of key factors in lymphatic imaging, including ultrasound pressure and flow velocity as well as probe motion during vessel tracking, on bubble disruption and image contrast. Experiments were also conducted to apply HFR CEUS imaging on vasculature in a rabbit popliteal lymph node (LN). Our results show that (i) HFR imaging and singular value decomposition (SVD) filtering can significantly reduce tissue artefacts in the phantom at high clinical frequencies; (ii) the slow flow rate within the phantom makes image contrast and signal persistence more susceptible to changes in ultrasound amplitude or mechanical index (MI), and an MI value can be chosen to reach a compromise between images contrast and bubble disruption under slow flow condition; (iii) probe motion significantly decreases image contrast of the vessel, which can be improved by applying motion correction before SVD filtering; (iv) the optical observation of the impact of ultrasound pressure on HFR CEUS further confirms the importance of optimising ultrasound amplitude and (v) vessels inside rabbit LN with blood flow less than 3 mm/s are clearly visualised

Test for entanglement using physically observable witness operators and positive maps

Motivated by the Peres-Horodecki criterion and the realignment criterion we develop a more powerful method to identify entangled states for any bipartite system through a universal construction of the witness operator. The method also gives a new family of positive but non-completely positive maps of arbitrary high dimensions which provide a much better test than the witness operators themselves. Moreover, we find there are two types of positive maps that can detect 2xN and 4xN bound entangled states. Since entanglement witnesses are physical observables and may be measured locally our construction could be of great significance for future experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, revtex4 styl