Multicenter Study of Presentation, Management, and Postoperative and Long-Term Outcomes of Septegenerians and Octogenerians Undergoing Gastrectomy for Gastric Cancer

Background: The optimal treatment strategy for elderly patients with gastric cancer is still controversial. This study aimed to assess the impact of age on short- and long-term outcomes after treatment for primary gastric cancer. Methods: From January 2004 to December 2014, a total of 507 patients underwent gastrectomy for gastric adenocarcinoma at two high-volume upper gastrointestinal (GI) centers. The patients were classified into three groups as follows: group A (patients ≤ 69 years old, n = 266), group B (patients 70–79 years old, n = 166), and group C (patients ≥ 80 years old, n = 75). Clinicopathologic characteristics as well as, short- and long-term outcomes were compared between the groups. Results: The patients in groups B and C had more comorbidities, whereas the younger subjects (group A) had more advanced tumor stages. Less extensive surgery was performed in the groups B and C. Older patients (age ≥ 70 years) had more postoperative medical complications. Moreover, group C had a higher postoperative mortality rate (8.1%) than group A (1.8%) or group B (1.9%). In the multivariable analysis, age older than 80 years (group C) was a negative independent factor for overall survival (OS) (hazard ratio [HR], 2.36) compared with group A, whereas group B seemed to have a comparable risk (HR, 1.37). Notably, the three groups did not show significant differences in disease-related survival (DRS). Conclusion: The data suggest that patients 70–79 years of age show a risk of postoperative death comparable with that of younger subjects. However, patients older than 80 years should be carefully selected for surgical treatment due to the increased risk of postoperative mortality

Culturally Adapted Motivational Interviewing with Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention for Substance Use Disorder in Pakistan (CAMAIB): Protocol of a feasibility factorial randomised controlled trial.

Background: The use of psychoactive substances significantly impacts the health, social and economic aspects of families, communities and nations. There is a need to develop and test psychological interventions aimed for individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs), such as in Pakistan. The aim of this exploratory trial is to test the feasibility and acceptability of two culturally adapted psychological interventions in a factorial randomised controlled trial (RCT). Methods: The proposed project will be conducted in three phases. The first phase of the study will focus on cultural adaptation of the interventions through qualitative interviews with key stakeholders. The second phase will be to refine and produce manually assisted interventions. Third and last stage would be to assess the feasibility of the culturally adapted interventions through a factorial RCT. The study will be carried out in Karachi, Hyderabad, Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Recruitment of participants will take place from primary care and volunteer organisations/drug rehabilitation centres. A total of 260 individuals diagnosed with SUD (n = 65) in each of the four arms will be recruited. The intervention will be delivered weekly over a period of 12 weeks in both individual and group settings. Assessments will be carried out at baseline, at 12th week (after completion of intervention) and 24th week post-randomisation. The analysis will determine the feasibility of recruitment, randomisation, retention and intervention delivery. Acceptability of intervention will be determined in terms of adherence to intervention, i.e. the mean number of sessions attended, number of home assignments completed, attrition rates, as well as through process evaluation to understand the implementation process, context, participants’ satisfaction, and impact of the study intervention. The health resource use and impact on the quality of life will be established through health economic data. Discussion: This study will provide evidence for feasibility and acceptability of culturally adapted manually assisted psychological interventions for individuals with SUD in the context of Pakistan. The study will have clinical implications if intervention is proven feasible and acceptable. Trial registration: Name of the registry: ClinicalTrials.gov, Trial registration number: NCT04885569, Date of registration: 25th April 2021

Hybrid laparoscopic versus fully robot-assisted minimally invasive esophagectomy:an international propensity-score matched analysis of perioperative outcome

Background: Currently, little is known regarding the optimal technique for the abdominal phase of RAMIE. The aim of this study was to investigate the outcome of robot-assisted minimally invasive esophagectomy (RAMIE) in both the abdominal and thoracic phase (full RAMIE) compared to laparoscopy during the abdominal phase (hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE). Methods: This retrospective propensity-score matched analysis of the International Upper Gastrointestinal International Robotic Association (UGIRA) database included 807 RAMIE procedures with intrathoracic anastomosis between 2017 and 2021 from 23 centers. Results: After propensity-score matching, 296 hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE patients were compared to 296 full RAMIE patients. Both groups were equal regarding intraoperative blood loss (median 200 ml versus 197 ml, p = 0.6967), operational time (mean 430.3 min versus 417.7 min, p = 0.1032), conversion rate during abdominal phase (2.4% versus 1.7%, p = 0.560), radical resection (R0) rate (95.6% versus 96.3%, p = 0.8526) and total lymph node yield (mean 30.4 versus 29.5, p = 0.3834). The hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE group showed higher rates of anastomotic leakage (28.0% versus 16.6%, p = 0.001) and Clavien Dindo grade 3a or higher (45.3% versus 26.0%, p &lt; 0.001). The length of stay on intensive care unit (median 3 days versus 2 days, p = 0.0005) and in-hospital (median 15 days versus 12 days, p &lt; 0.0001) were longer for the hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE group. Conclusions: Hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE and full RAMIE were oncologically equivalent with a potential decrease of postoperative complications and shorter (intensive care) stay after full RAMIE.</p

Methods for conducting international Delphi surveys to optimise global participation in core outcome set development: a case study in gastric cancer informed by a comprehensive literature review

Copyright © 2021, The Author(s) Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.Background: Core outcome sets (COS) should be relevant to key stakeholders and widely applicable and usable. Ideally, they are developed for international use to allow optimal data synthesis from trials. Electronic Delphi surveys are commonly used to facilitate global participation; however, this has limitations. It is common for these surveys to be conducted in a single language potentially excluding those not fluent in that tongue. The aim of this study is to summarise current approaches for optimising international participation in Delphi studies and make recommendations for future practice. Methods: A comprehensive literature review of current approaches to translating Delphi surveys for COS development was undertaken. A standardised methodology adapted from international guidance derived from 12 major sets of translation guidelines in the field of outcome reporting was developed. As a case study, this was applied to a COS project for surgical trials in gastric cancer to translate a Delphi survey into 7 target languages from regions active in gastric cancer research. Results: Three hundred thirty-two abstracts were screened and four studies addressing COS development in rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, vascular malformations and polypharmacy were eligible for inclusion. There was wide variation in methodological approaches to translation, including the number of forward translations, the inclusion of back translation, the employment of cognitive debriefing and how discrepancies and disagreements were handled. Important considerations were identified during the development of the gastric cancer survey including establishing translation groups, timelines, understanding financial implications, strategies to maximise recruitment and regulatory approvals. The methodological approach to translating the Delphi surveys was easily reproducible by local collaborators and resulted in an additional 637 participants to the 315 recruited to complete the source language survey. Ninety-nine per cent of patients and 97% of healthcare professionals from non-English-speaking regions used translated surveys. Conclusion: Consideration of the issues described will improve planning by other COS developers and can be used to widen international participation from both patients and healthcare professionals.This study is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Doctoral Research Fellowship Grant (DRF-2015-08-023). JMB is partially funded by the NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre and the MRC ConDUCT-II Hub for Trials Methodology Research. PRW was funded by the MRC North West Hub for Trials Methodology Research (Grant ref: MR/K025635/01).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Neuro-evolution computing for nonlinear multi-singular system of third order Emden-Fowler equation

In this paper, a neuro-evolution based numerical computing approach is presented for the solution of nonlinear third order multi-singular Emden-Fowler system of differential equations (MS-EF-SDEs) by manipulating the proficiency of continuous mapping through exploitation of feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANN). The weights or decision variables of these networks are optimized with genetic algorithms (GAs) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP), i.e., ANN-GA-SQP. An error based figure of merit is introduced using the differential model of MS EF-SDE along with corresponding boundary conditions. The objective/cost function is optimized by integrating capability of global and local search with GA and SQP, respectively. The competency of the designed ANN-GA-SQP approach in terms of significance, efficiency and consistency is perceived by solving MS-EF-SDEs. Moreover, statistical based investigations are implemented to validate the correctness of ANN-GA-SQP. (C) 2021 International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Improved maximum average correlation height filter with adaptive log base selection for object recognition

Sensitivity to the variations in the reference image is a major concern when recognizing target objects. A combinational framework of correlation filters and logarithmic transformation has been previously reported to resolve this issue alongside catering for scale and rotation changes of the object in the presence of distortion and noise. In this paper, we have extended the work to include the influence of different logarithmic bases on the resultant correlation plane. The meaningful changes in correlation parameters along with contraction/expansion in the correlation plane peak have been identified under different scenarios. Based on our research, we propose some specific log bases to be used in logarithmically transformed correlation filters for achieving suitable tolerance to different variations. The study is based upon testing a range of logarithmic bases for different situations and finding an optimal logarithmic base for each particular set of distortions. Our results show improved correlation and target detection accuracy

Hybrid laparoscopic versus fully robot-assisted minimally invasive esophagectomy:an international propensity-score matched analysis of perioperative outcome

Background: Currently, little is known regarding the optimal technique for the abdominal phase of RAMIE. The aim of this study was to investigate the outcome of robot-assisted minimally invasive esophagectomy (RAMIE) in both the abdominal and thoracic phase (full RAMIE) compared to laparoscopy during the abdominal phase (hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE). Methods: This retrospective propensity-score matched analysis of the International Upper Gastrointestinal International Robotic Association (UGIRA) database included 807 RAMIE procedures with intrathoracic anastomosis between 2017 and 2021 from 23 centers. Results: After propensity-score matching, 296 hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE patients were compared to 296 full RAMIE patients. Both groups were equal regarding intraoperative blood loss (median 200 ml versus 197 ml, p = 0.6967), operational time (mean 430.3 min versus 417.7 min, p = 0.1032), conversion rate during abdominal phase (2.4% versus 1.7%, p = 0.560), radical resection (R0) rate (95.6% versus 96.3%, p = 0.8526) and total lymph node yield (mean 30.4 versus 29.5, p = 0.3834). The hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE group showed higher rates of anastomotic leakage (28.0% versus 16.6%, p = 0.001) and Clavien Dindo grade 3a or higher (45.3% versus 26.0%, p &lt; 0.001). The length of stay on intensive care unit (median 3 days versus 2 days, p = 0.0005) and in-hospital (median 15 days versus 12 days, p &lt; 0.0001) were longer for the hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE group. Conclusions: Hybrid laparoscopic RAMIE and full RAMIE were oncologically equivalent with a potential decrease of postoperative complications and shorter (intensive care) stay after full RAMIE.</p