Up-regulation of CNDP2 facilitates the proliferation of colon cancer

BACKGROUND: Cytosolic nonspecific dipetidase (CN2) belongs to the family of M20 metallopeptidases. It was stated in previous articles that higher expression levels of CN2 were observed in renal cell carcinoma and breast cancer. Our study explored the correlation between CN2 and colon carcinogenesis. METHODS: We analysed the relationship between 183 patients clinicopathological characteristics and its CN2 expression. To detect the levels of CN2 in colon cancer cell lines and colon cancer tissues by western blot. To verify cell proliferation in colon cancer cells with knockdown of CNDP2 and explore the causes of these phenomena. RESULTS: The expression levels of CN2 in clinical colon tumors and colon cancer cell lines were significantly higher than that in normal colon mucosa and colon cell lines. The difference in CN2 levels was associated with tumor location (right- and left-sided colon cancer), but there was no significant association with age, gender, tumor size, tumor grade, tumor stage or serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA). Knockdown of CNDP2 inhibited cell proliferation, blocked cell cycle progression and retarded carcinogenesis in an animal model. The signaling pathway through which knockdown of CNDP2 inhibited cell proliferation and tumorigenesis involved in EGFR, cyclin B1 and cyclin E. CONCLUSIONS: Knockdown of CNDP2 can inhibit the proliferation of colon cancer in vitro and retarded carcinogenesis in vivo

Comprehensive comparative analysis of prognostic value of serum systemic inflammation biomarkers for colorectal cancer: Results from a large multicenter collaboration

BackgroundThe incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) is common and reliable biomarkers are lacking. We aimed to systematically and comprehensively compare the ability of various combinations of serum inflammatory signatures to predict the prognosis of CRC. Moreover, particular attention has been paid to the clinical feasibility of the newly developed inflammatory burden index (IBI) as a prognostic biomarker for CRC.MethodsThe discrimination capacity of the biomarkers was compared using receiver operating characteristic curves and Harrell’s C-index. Kaplan-Meier curves and log-rank tests were used to compare survival differences between the groups. Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was used to determine the independent prognostic factors. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the relationship between IBI, short-term outcomes, and malnutrition.ResultsIBI had the optimal prediction accuracy among the systemic inflammation biomarkers for predicting the prognosis of CRC. Taking IBI as a reference, none of the remaining systemic inflammation biomarkers showed a gain. Patients with high IBI had significantly worse overall survival than those with low IBI (56.7% vs. 80.2%; log-rank P<0.001). Multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that continuous IBI was an independent risk factor for the prognosis of CRC patients (hazard ratio = 1.165, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.043–1.302, P<0.001). High IBI was an independent risk factor for short-term outcomes (odds ratio [OR] = 1.537, 95% CI = 1.258–1.878, P<0.001), malnutrition (OR = 2.996, 95% CI = 1.471–6.103, P=0.003), and recurrence (OR = 1.744, 95% CI = 1.176–2.587, p = 0.006) in CRC patients.ConclusionsIBI, as a reflection of systemic inflammation, is a feasible and promising biomarker for assessing the prognosis of CRC patients

Key Words: Energy-aware, Quality of Service, Application

The proliferation of heterogeneous devices and diverse networking technologies demands flexible models to guarantee the quality-of-service(QoS) at the application session level, which is a common behavior of many network-centric applications, e.g., Web browsing and Instant messaging. Several QoS models have been proposed for heterogeneous wired/wireless environments. However, we envision that the missing part, which is also a big challenge, is taking energy, a scarce resource for mobile and energy-constrained devices, into consideration. In this paper we propose a novel energy-aware QoS model, e-QoS, for application sessions that might across multiple protocol domains, which will be common in the future Internet, rather than an exception. The model provides QoS guarantee by dynamically selecting and adapting application protocols. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first attempt to address QoS adaptation at the application session level by introducing a new QoS metric called session lifetime. To show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we have implemented two case studies: Web browsing from a PocketPC to a regular Web server, and an instant messaging application between two PocketPCs. In the former case study, our approach outperforms the conventional approach without energy-aware QoS by more than 30 % in terms of the session lifetime. In the second case study, we also successfully extend the session lifetime to the value negotiated by two PocketPCs with very diverse battery capacities

On the effects of bandwidth reduction techniques in distributed applications

Communication optimization plays an important role in building networked distributed applications. In this paper, we systematically evaluate four bandwidth reduction algorithms, namely direct sending, delta-encoding, fix-sized blocking, and vary-sized blocking, using five types of documents including source code, images, Web contents, Microsoft Word documents, and Latex files. The experiments were performed under four representative network connection technologies. Performance evaluation results show that different approaches have different performance in terms of different metrics. Completely different results can be achieved by the same algorithm with respect to different types of documents. Network condition can affect some algorithms substantially. Furthermore, the effect of block size to the system performance was also studied.

Towards Ubiquitous Access of Computer-Assisted Surgery Systems

Abstract — Traditional stand-alone computer-assisted surgery (CAS) systems impede the ubiquitous and simultaneous access by multiple users. With advances in computing and networking technologies, ubiquitous access to CAS systems becomes possible and promising. Based on our preliminary work, CASMIL, a stand-alone CAS server developed at Wayne State University, we propose a novel mobile CAS system, UbiCAS, which allows surgeons to retrieve, review and interpret multimodal medical images, and to perform some critical neurosurgical procedures on heterogeneous devices from anywhere at anytime. Furthermore, various optimization techniques, including caching, prefetching, pseudo-streaming-model, and compression, are used to guarantee the QoS of the UbiCAS system. UbiCAS enables doctors at remote locations to actively participate in remote surgeries, share patient information in real time before, during, and after the surgery. I