Emerging Role of Circulating Tumor Cells in Gastric Cancer

With over 1 million incidence cases and more than 780,000 deaths in 2018, gastric cancer (GC) was ranked as the 5th most common cancer and the 3rd leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Though several biomarkers, including carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), cancer antigen 19-9 (CA19-9), and cancer antigen 72-4 (CA72-4), have been identified, their diagnostic accuracies were modest. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), cells derived from tumors and present in body fluids, have recently emerged as promising biomarkers, diagnostically and prognostically, of cancers, including GC. In this review, we present the landscape of CTCs from migration, to the presence in circulation, biologic properties, and morphologic heterogeneities. We evaluated clinical implications of CTCs in GC patients, including diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic management, as well as their application in immunotherapy. On the one hand, major challenges in using CTCs in GC were analyzed, from the differences of cut-off values of CTC positivity, to techniques used for sampling, storage conditions, and CTC molecular markers, as well as the unavailability of relevant enrichment and detection techniques. On the other hand, we discussed future perspectives of using CTCs in GC management and research, including the use of circulating tumor microembolies; of CTC checkpoint blockade in immunotherapy; and of organoid models. Despite the fact that there are remaining challenges in techniques, CTCs have potential as novel biomarkers and/or a non-invasive method for diagnostics, prognostics, and treatment monitoring of GC, particularly in the era of precision medicine

First Observation of Self-Amplified Spontaneous Emission in a Free-Electron Laser at 109 nm Wavelength

We present the first observation of Self-Amplified Spontaneous Emission (SASE) in a free-electron laser (FEL) in the Vacuum Ultraviolet regime at 109 nm wavelength (11 eV). The observed free-electron laser gain (approx. 3000) and the radiation characteristics, such as dependency on bunch charge, angular distribution, spectral width and intensity fluctuations all corroborate the existing models for SASE FELs.Comment: 6 pages including 6 figures; e-mail: [email protected]

Anomalies Detection in Chest X-Rays Images Using Faster R-CNN and YOLO

Lungs are crucial parts of the human body and can be captured as Chest x-ray images for disease diagnosis. Unfortunately, in many countries, hospitals and healthcare centers lack qualified doctors for medical images-based diagnosis. Recent numerous advancements in artificial intelligence have deployed with many medical applications to support doctors for disease diagnosis. In our research, we have leveraged YOLOv5s to identify and extract lungs and performed segmentation tasks with Fast R-CNN and YOLOv5 for comparison. The lung region abnormality detection models have pretty good average precision. For example, the YOLOv5 model outperforms both in terms of training time, prediction, and accuracy, with the [email protected] and [email protected]:.95 metric values, 0.616 and 0.322 on 2,500 images of 5 abnormalities (aortic enlargement, cardiomegaly, lung opacity, pleural effusion, and pulmonary fibrosis)

Recognition and 3D Visualization of Human Body Parts and Bone Areas Using CT Images

The advent of medical imaging significantly assisted in disease diagnosis and treatment. This study introduces to a framework for detecting several human body parts in Computerised Tomography (CT) images formatted in DICOM files. In addition, the method can highlight the bone areas inside CT images and transform 2D slices into a visual 3D model to illustrate the structure of human body parts. Firstly, we leveraged shallow convolutional Neural Networks to classify body parts and detect bone areas in each part. Then, Grad-CAM was applied to highlight the bone areas. Finally, Insight and Visualization libraries were utilized to visualize slides in 3D of a body part. As a result, the classifiers achieved 98 % in F1-score in the classification of human body parts on a CT image dataset, including 1234 slides capturing body parts from a woman for the training phase and 1245 images from a male for testing. In addition, distinguishing between bone and non-bone images can reach 97 % in F1-score on the dataset generated by setting a threshold value to reveal bone areas in CT images. Moreover, the Grad-CAM-based approach can provide clear, accurate visualizations with segmented bones in the image. Also, we successfully converted 2D slice images of a body part into a lively 3D model that provided a more intuitive view from any angle. The proposed approach is expected to provide an interesting visual tool for supporting doctors in medical image-based disease diagnosis

Household Dietary Diversity among the Ethnic Minority Groups in the Mekong Delta: Evidence for the Development of Public Health and Nutrition Policy in Vietnam

Poor household dietary diversity has been linked to malnutrition in individuals, households, and cumulatively in populations. High rates of malnutrition among Khmer ethnic children aged five years and younger have been reported in Tri Ton district, Vietnam. This paper aims to further investigate household dietary diversity and associated factors among Khmer ethnic minority populations in Vietnam. A cross sectional study was conducted from October 2018 to April 2019 in Tri Ton District, An Giang Province. By employing a multistage sampling technique, a total of 402 (99.8% response rate) participants were interviewed to measure household dietary diversity using a structured and validated questionnaire developed by FAO. Both bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were carried out to identify factors associated with household dietary diversity. The results showed that the prevalence of low, medium and high dietary diversity scores were 21.4%, 70.4% and 8.2%, respectively. Male-headed households, literacy level, household income, exposure to mass media on nutrition and health information, and frequency of eating were positively associated with household dietary diversity (p < 0.05). However, owning a vegetable and rice farm was not statistically related to households’ dietary diversification. The paper concludes that the magnitude of household diversified dietary intakes was essentially low to medium in participants’ households. These findings have provided evidence to inform the development of the National Nutrition Strategy—2021–2030 in Vietnam, to be revised in 2045. This national strategy proposes appropriate interventions, programs and policies to improve socioeconomic status in ethnic groups and in mountainous areas to enhance populations’ health and well-being including controlling childhood malnutrition. In order to improve population health and wellbeing in Tri Ton District, further actions to address effective dietary practices including strengthening nutrition and health communication about the need to improve household dietary diversity to high levels are recommended

A simple questionnaire to detect chronic kidney disease patients from Long An province screening data in Vietnam

Background: The prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in rural Vietnam is unknown. We wished to determine the prevalence of CKD and determine whether a simple questionnaire was able to detect individuals at high risk of CKD before expensive confirmatory laboratory testing. Methods: A cross sectional study was performed. We recruited 2037 participants from 13 communes of Long An province, Vietnam, for CKD screening with urine albumin/creatinine ratio (ACR) measured by immunoturbidimetric method and serum creatinine to estimate glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). CKD was defined as either ACR ≥ 30 mg/g or eGFR MDRD < 60 ml/min/1.73 m2. A two page questionnaire with 23 variables was administered to each participant with queries postulated to be correlated with risk of CKD. Results: Of the 2037 participants, 260 (12.76%) were found to have CKD. Five questionnaire variables (age more than 50, measured hypertension, history of diabetes, history of hypertension, and history of a low salt diet) were correlated with CKD, and used to construct a risk score for CKD. Conclusions: CKD is common in Vietnam. Our questionnaire and risk score tool can be used to detect individuals with a higher likelihood of CKD, and who can then be more economically screened with routine laboratory confirmatory tests