The Value of Autofluorescence Bronchoscopy Combined with White Light Bronchoscopy Compared with White Light Alone in the Diagnosis of Intraepithelial Neoplasia and Invasive Lung Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

ObjectiveTo compare the accuracy of autofluorescence bronchoscopy (AFB) combined with white light bronchoscopy (WLB) versus WLB alone in the diagnosis of lung cancer.MethodsThe Ovid, PubMed, and Google Scholar databases from January 1990 to October 2010 were searched. Two reviewers independently assessed the quality of the trials and extracted data. The relative risk for sensitivity and specificity on a per-lesion basis of AFB + WLB versus WLB alone to detect intraepithelial neoplasia and invasive cancer were pooled by Review Manager.ResultsTwenty-one studies involving 3266 patients were ultimately analyzed. The pool relative sensitivity on a per-lesion basis of AFB + WLB versus WLB alone to detect intraepithelial neoplasia and invasive cancer was 2.04 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.72–2.42) and 1.15 (95% CI 1.05–1.26), respectively. The pool relative specificity on a per-lesion basis of AFB + WLB versus WLB alone was 0.65 (95% CI 0.59–0.73).ConclusionsAlthough the specificity of AFB + WLB is lower than WLB alone, AFB + WLB seems to significantly improve the sensitivity to detect intraepithelial neoplasia. However, this advantage over WLB alone seems much less in detecting invasive lung cancer

Complete chloroplast genome sequence of Holoparasite Cistanche Deserticola (Orobanchaceae) reveals gene loss and horizontal gene transfer from Its host Haloxylon Ammodendron (Chenopodiaceae)

The central function of chloroplasts is to carry out photosynthesis, and its gene content and structure are highly conserved across land plants. Parasitic plants, which have reduced photosynthetic ability, suffer gene losses from the chloroplast (cp) genome accompanied by the relaxation of selective constraints. Compared with the rapid rise in the number of cp genome sequences of photosynthetic organisms, there are limited data sets from parasitic plants. The authors report the complete sequence of the cp genome of Cistanche deserticola, a holoparasitic desert species belonging to the family Orobanchaceae

Three-dimensional biofabrication of nanosecond laser micromachined nanofibre meshes for tissue engineered scaffolds

There is a high demand for bespoke grafts to replace damaged or malformed bone and cartilage tissue. Three-dimensional (3D) printing offers a method of fabricating complex anatomical features of clinically relevant sizes. However, the construction of a scaffold to replicate the complex hierarchical structure of natural tissues remains challenging. This paper reports a novel biofabrication method that is capable of creating intricately designed structures of anatomically relevant dimensions. The beneficial properties of the electrospun fibre meshes can finally be realised in 3D rather than the current promising breakthroughs in two-dimensional (2D). The 3D model was created from commercially available computer-aided design software packages in order to slice the model down into many layers of slices, which were arrayed. These 2D slices with each layer of a defined pattern were laser cut, and then successfully assembled with varying thicknesses of 100 μm or 200 μm. It is demonstrated in this study that this new biofabrication technique can be used to reproduce very complex computer-aided design models into hierarchical constructs with micro and nano resolutions, where the clinically relevant sizes ranging from a simple cube of 20 mm dimension, to a more complex, 50 mm-tall human ears were created. In-vitro cell-contact studies were also carried out to investigate the biocompatibility of this hierarchal structure. The cell viability on a micromachined electrospun polylactic-co-glycolic acid fibre mesh slice, where a range of hole diameters from 200 μm to 500 μm were laser cut in an array where cell confluence values of at least 85% were found at three weeks. Cells were also seeded onto a simpler stacked construct, albeit made with micromachined poly fibre mesh, where cells can be found to migrate through the stack better with collagen as bioadhesives. This new method for biofabricating hierarchical constructs can be further developed for tissue repair applications such as maxillofacial bone injury or nose/ear cartilage replacement in the future

Effect of sarcopenia on survival of patients with cirrhosis: A meta-analysis

The association between sarcopenia and prognosis in patients with cirrhosis remains to be determined. In this study, we aimed to quantify the association between sarcopenia and the risk of mortality in patients with cirrhosis, by sex, underlying liver disease etiology, and severity of hepatic dysfunction.PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, and major scientific conference sessions were searched without language restriction through 13 January 2021 with additional manual search of bibliographies of relevant articles. Cohort studies of ?100 patients with cirrhosis and ?12 months of follow-up that evaluated the association between sarcopenia, muscle mass and the risk of mortality were included.22 studies with 6965 patients with cirrhosis were included. The pooled prevalence of sarcopenia in patients with cirrhosis was 37.5% overall (95% CI 32.4%-42.8%), higher in male patients, patients with alcohol associated liver disease (ALD), patients with CTP grade C, and when sarcopenia was defined in patients by lumbar 3- skeletal muscle index (L3-SMI). Sarcopenia was associated with the increased risk of mortality in patients with cirrhosis (adjusted-hazard ratio [aHR] 2.30, 95% CI 2.01-2.63), with similar findings in sensitivity analysis of cirrhosis patients without HCC (aHR 2.35, 95% CI 1.95-2.83) and in subgroup analysis by sex, liver disease etiology, and severity of hepatic dysfunction. The association between quantitative muscle mass index and mortality further supports the poor prognosis for patients with sarcopenia (aHR 0.95, 95% CI 0.93-0.98). There was no significant heterogeneity in all analyses.Sarcopenia was highly and independently associated with higher risk of mortality in patients with cirrhosis.The prevalence of sarcopenia and its association with death in patients with cirrhosis remain unclear. This meta-analysis indicated that sarcopenia affected about one-third of patients with cirrhosis and up to 50% in patients with ALD or Child's class C cirrhosis. Sarcopenia was independently associated with about 2-fold higher risk of mortality in patients with cirrhosis. The mortality rate increased with greater severity or longer period of having sarcopenia. Increasing awareness about the importance of sarcopenia in patients with cirrhosis among stakeholders must be prioritized

AN5D: Automated Stencil Framework for High-Degree Temporal Blocking on GPUs

Stencil computation is one of the most widely-used compute patterns in high performance computing applications. Spatial and temporal blocking have been proposed to overcome the memory-bound nature of this type of computation by moving memory pressure from external memory to on-chip memory on GPUs. However, correctly implementing those optimizations while considering the complexity of the architecture and memory hierarchy of GPUs to achieve high performance is difficult. We propose AN5D, an automated stencil framework which is capable of automatically transforming and optimizing stencil patterns in a given C source code, and generating corresponding CUDA code. Parameter tuning in our framework is guided by our performance model. Our novel optimization strategy reduces shared memory and register pressure in comparison to existing implementations, allowing performance scaling up to a temporal blocking degree of 10. We achieve the highest performance reported so far for all evaluated stencil benchmarks on the state-of-the-art Tesla V100 GPU

On waveform correlation measurement uncertainty with implications for temporal changes in inner core seismic waves

We address the uncertainty related to cross-correlation waveform time shift measurements, particularly related to temporal changes in inner core seismic waves. Details of the cross-correlation measurement, including data processing, window length, pick time, sampling rate and the algorithm itself, all affect the calculated time shift. By systematically varying measurement parameters for a set of earthquake doublets we find time shift uncertainties of 0.01 s and 0.02 s for differential times and double differential times respectively. The uncertainty is of a similar magnitude to reported double differential times of PKIKP and PKiKP inner core phases. Accounting for measurement uncertainty results in 80% of values published in a recent study being below the measurement resolution (Yang and Song 2020a). While the temporal variations in inner core phases is not in dispute, properly accounting for uncertainties is needed for robust data interpretation. A re-assessment for the origin of inner core temporal changes is therefore warranted and future studies should account for measurement uncertainty.Nanyang Technological UniversityPublished versionThis work is supported by a Nanyang Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to K.L. (No. 04INS000845A620)