Combined effect of dydrogesterone and letrozole on humoral immune function, sex hormone levels and serology-related indices in patients with endometriosis

Purpose: To investigate the combined effect of dydrogesterone and letrozole on humoral immunity, and levels of sex hormones and serology-related indices in patients with endometriosis.Methods: Patients with endometriosis (98 cases) were randomly assigned to two groups of 49 patients each: control group and study group. The control group received dydrogesterone (10 mg/kg) orally from the fifth day to the twenty-fifth day of the patient's menstrual cycle, twice daily; while the study group, in addition to dydrogesterone (10 mg/kg), received letrozole (2.5 mg/kg). Treatment in both groups lasted one month, and changes in the levels of humoral immunity, sex hormones and serology-related indices were evaluated before and after treatment. Clinical effectiveness and adverse reactions in both groups were also assessed.Results: After treatment, total effectiveness was markedly higher in the study group (91.84 %) than in control group (77.55 %, p < 0.05). Post-treatment, humoral immunity (IgM, IgG and C3) levels were significantly higher in the study group than in control group (p < 0.05) while estradiol (E2) level in both groups were significantly reduced; however, E2 level was markedly lower in the study group than in control group (p < 0.05).Conclusion: These results suggest that the combination of dydrogesterone with letrozole alleviates clinical symptoms of endometriosis, improves humoral immune function, and maintains sex hormone levels.Keywords: Endometriosis, Dydrogesterone, Letrozole, Humoral immunity, Sex hormones, Serologicalrelated indice

Toward efficient indexing structure for scalable content-based music retrieval

Pretendemos problematizar arte e loucura, inicialmente discutindo a experiência do pesquisador em relação às imagens do mundo, com o testemunho e a figura do louco e, consequentemente, com o fora que ela evoca. Em seguida nos colocamos diante do muro, situação-limite na qual a loucura enquanto catástrofe e a arte enquanto via poética vêm compor um limiar, ausência que Blanchot transpõe à linguagem para dar a ver outras constelações possíveis, tanto de palavras quanto de seus inomináveis. Por fim, com Walter Benjamin, pomos a história da loucura a contrapelo, e, mergulhados no Ateliê de Escrita do Hospital Psiquiátrico São Pedro, desvelamos que a arte pode, na relação com a loucura, tornar-se a linguagem essencial na perigosa travessia em direção à experiência, transpondo a vivência desse estado assustador para trazer ao mundo outro sentido, reconhecendo outros modos de existência que podem vir a ser outras poéticas de vida.We intend to problematize art and madness. We begin by discussing the experience of the researcher in relation to images of the world, to witnessing and to the image of the insane, and then inevitably to the outside they evoke. Subsequently, we stand before a wall, a limit situation in which madness as catastrophe and art as poetics compose a threshold, an absence which Blanchot transposes to language to bring other possible constellations into view, both as words and as their unnamable others. Finally, with Walter Benjamin, we touch upon the grain of the history of madness – immersed in the Writing Workshop at the São Pedro Psychiatric Hospital, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we reveal that, in relation to madness, art can become the essential language of the perilous passage towards experience, transposing the experience of this horrific state to bring another sense to the world, recognizing other modes of existence which may come to be other poetics of life.Nous désirons problématiser l’art et la folie, initialement en discutant l’expérience du chercheur par rapport aux images du monde, avec le témoignage et l’image du fou, et, par conséquent, l’extérieur qu’elle évoque. Puis, on se pose devant le mur, situation extrême dans laquelle la folie comme catastrophe et l’art comme voie poétique composent un seuil viennent à construire un seuil, absence que Blanchot transpose en langage afin de révéler d’autres constellations possibles tant comme des mots, tant comme ses innombrables. Enfin, avec Walter Benjamin, nous prenons l’histoire de la folie à contre-poil, et plongés dans l’Atelier d’écriture de l’Hôpital psychiatrique de São Pedro, à Porto Alegre au Brésil, nous révélons que l’art, par rapport à la folie, peut devenir le langage essentiel de la traversée dangereuse vers l’expérience, en transposant le vécu de cet état terrifiant, afin de donner un autre sens au monde, tout en reconnaissant d’autres modes d’existence qui pourraient devenir d’autres poétiques de vie.Nuestra intención es de problematizar el arte y la locura, inicialmente discutiendo la experiencia del investigador en relación con las imágenes del mundo, el testimonio y la figura del loco, y por lo tanto con el afuera que ella evoca. Seguidamente, nos ponemos delante de un muro, una situación extrema en la que la locura como catástrofe y el arte como vía poética componen un umbral, una ausencia que Blanchot transpone en lenguaje para revelar las otras constelaciones posibles tanto como palabras, tanto como innombrables otros. Por último, con Walter Benjamin, ponemos la historia de la locura a contra pelo, y sumergidos en el Taller de escritura del Hospital Psiquiátrico São Pedro de Porto Alegre, Brasil, desvelamos que, en relación con la locura, el arte puede convertirse en el lenguaje esencial de ese peligroso pasaje que nos conduce a la experiencia, que transpone lo vivido en este estado aterrador para dar otro sentido al mundo, reconociendo otros modos de existencia que pueden llegar a ser otras poéticas de vida

METSP: A Maximum-Entropy Classifier Based Text Mining Tool for Transporter-Substrate Identification with Semistructured Text

The substrates of a transporter are not only useful for inferring function of the transporter, but also important to discover compound-compound interaction and to reconstruct metabolic pathway. Though plenty of data has been accumulated with the developing of new technologies such as in vitro transporter assays, the search for substrates of transporters is far from complete. In this article, we introduce METSP, a maximum-entropy classifier devoted to retrieve transporter-substrate pairs (TSPs) from semistructured text. Based on the high quality annotation from UniProt, METSP achieves high precision and recall in crossvalidation experiments. When METSP is applied to 182,829 human transporter annotation sentences in UniProt, it identifies 3942 sentences with transporter and compound information. Finally, 1547 confidential human TSPs are identified for further manual curation, among which 58.37% pairs with novel substrates not annotated in public transporter databases. METSP is the first efficient tool to extract TSPs from semistructured annotation text in UniProt. This tool can help to determine the precise substrates and drugs of transporters, thus facilitating drug-target prediction, metabolic network reconstruction, and literature classification

BMD: A General Class-balanced Multicentric Dynamic Prototype Strategy for Source-free Domain Adaptation

Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a pre-trained source model to the unlabeled target domain without accessing the well-labeled source data, which is a much more practical setting due to the data privacy, security, and transmission issues. To make up for the absence of source data, most existing methods introduced feature prototype based pseudo-labeling strategies to realize self-training model adaptation. However, feature prototypes are obtained by instance-level predictions based feature clustering, which is category-biased and tends to result in noisy labels since the visual domain gaps between source and target are usually different between categories. In addition, we found that a monocentric feature prototype may be ineffective to represent each category and introduce negative transfer, especially for those hard-transfer data. To address these issues, we propose a general class-Balanced Multicentric Dynamic prototype (BMD) strategy for the SFDA task. Specifically, for each target category, we first introduce a global inter-class balanced sampling strategy to aggregate potential representative target samples. Then, we design an intra-class multicentric clustering strategy to achieve more robust and representative prototypes generation. In contrast to existing strategies that update the pseudo label at a fixed training period, we further introduce a dynamic pseudo labeling strategy to incorporate network update information during model adaptation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model-agnostic BMD strategy significantly improves representative SFDA methods to yield new state-of-the-art results. The code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/BMD.Comment: Camera-ready version of ECCV 2022. Code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/BM

High-intensity focused ultrasound as a pretreatment combined with hysteroscopic resection for gestational trophoblastic neoplasia with chemotherapy intolerance: a case report

AbstractBackground Due to resistance and intolerance to chemotherapy, localized lesion resection may be required in some patients with Gestational trophoblastic neoplasia (GTN), which may lead to massive bleeding. In this case report, we describe the successful use of high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) as an effective pretreatment method for surgical procedure in a patient with GTN to reduce the perioperative risk and the impact on fertility.Case presentation A 26-year-old woman was diagnosed with high-risk GTN (FIGO Stage III: 12 prognostic scores) after a hydatidiform mole. The fifth chemotherapy cycle was interrupted due to severe chemotherapy toxicity. However, the uterine lesion was still present and the beta-human chorionic gonadotropin (β-hCG) level was not restored to normal. Therefore, ultrasound-guided HIFU was performed as a pretreatment method to shrink the lesion and prevent massive bleeding during localized lesion resection. The effectiveness of ablation was evaluated immediately using contrast-enhanced ultrasound and Color Flow Doppler ultrasonography. One month after HIFU treatment, the uterine lesion was completely resected under hysteroscopic surgery. During the surgery, HIFU was found to have shrunk the lesion and there was minimal bleeding (5 mL). The uterine cavity morphology and menstruation returned to normal after surgery. The patient has showed no signs of recurrence as of one-year follow-up.Conclusion Ultrasound-guided HIFU ablation may be a new choice for high-risk GTN patients with chemoresistance or chemo-intolerance. As a noninvasive pretreatment method, HIFU can shrink the uterine lesion, and reduce the risk of bleeding with no obvious effect on fertility