Dual-Reference Source-Free Active Domain Adaptation for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Tumor Segmentation across Multiple Hospitals

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a prevalent and clinically significant malignancy that predominantly impacts the head and neck area. Precise delineation of the Gross Tumor Volume (GTV) plays a pivotal role in ensuring effective radiotherapy for NPC. Despite recent methods that have achieved promising results on GTV segmentation, they are still limited by lacking carefully-annotated data and hard-to-access data from multiple hospitals in clinical practice. Although some unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been proposed to alleviate this problem, unconditionally mapping the distribution distorts the underlying structural information, leading to inferior performance. To address this challenge, we devise a novel Sourece-Free Active Domain Adaptation (SFADA) framework to facilitate domain adaptation for the GTV segmentation task. Specifically, we design a dual reference strategy to select domain-invariant and domain-specific representative samples from a specific target domain for annotation and model fine-tuning without relying on source-domain data. Our approach not only ensures data privacy but also reduces the workload for oncologists as it just requires annotating a few representative samples from the target domain and does not need to access the source data. We collect a large-scale clinical dataset comprising 1057 NPC patients from five hospitals to validate our approach. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the UDA methods and achieves comparable results to the fully supervised upper bound, even with few annotations, highlighting the significant medical utility of our approach. In addition, there is no public dataset about multi-center NPC segmentation, we will release code and dataset for future research

Genotype imputation in winter wheat using first-generation haplotype map SNPs improves genome-wide association mapping and genomic prediction of traits

Genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variation allows for the capture of haplotype structure in populations and prediction of unobserved genotypes based on inferred regions of identity-by-descent (IBD). Here we have used a first-generation wheat haplotype map created by targeted re-sequencing of low-copy genomic regions in the reference panel of 62 lines to impute marker genotypes in a diverse panel of winter wheat cultivars from the U.S. Great Plains. The IBD segments between the reference population and winter wheat cultivars were identified based on SNP genotyped using the 90K iSelect wheat array and genotyping by sequencing (GBS). A genome-wide association study and genomic prediction of resistance to stripe rust in winter wheat cultivars showed that an increase in marker density achieved by imputation improved both the power and precision of trait mapping and prediction. The majority of the most significant marker-trait associations belonged to imputed genotypes. With the vast amount of SNP variation data accumulated for wheat in recent years, the presented imputation framework will greatly improve prediction accuracy in breeding populations and increase resolution of trait mapping hence, facilitate cross-referencing of genotype datasets available across different wheat populations

Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance for the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) Among Women Newly Diagnosed With Breast Cancer

BackgroundGiven that emotion regulation counts for much in breast cancer, it is important to fully understand its construct. The cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire (CERQ) is a widely applied instrument for measuring conscious cognitive coping strategies in both general and clinical samples; however, there are no data on its factor structure in women with breast cancer, not to mention evidence of measurement invariance (MI) across sociodemographic variables. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine the latent factor structure and MI between different sociodemographic groups for CERQ in specific patients.MethodsThe sample consisted of 1032 women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, with a mean age of 47.54 years (SD = 8.51). The latent factor structure for CERQ was tested using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Further, MI various sociodemographic variables was evaluated by a series of multiple-group CFA process.ResultsThe nine-factor CFA model was an adequate fit for the data collected in women with breast cancer. Also, this nine-factor structure had strong factorial invariance across age, place of residence, educational levels, and employment status.ConclusionThis study firstly examined the latent factor structure for CERQ among Chinese women with malignancy and MI across various sociodemographic variables, which deepens the understanding of the construct for CERQ as a useful tool for assessing patients’ conscious cognitive component of emotion regulation based on self-report

Effects of Self-Esteem on the Association between Negative Life Events and Suicidal Ideation in Adolescents

Negative life events (NLEs) increase the risk of suicidal ideation (SI) in adolescents. However, it is not known whether the association between NLEs and SI can be moderated by self-esteem and varies with gender. The aim of the current paper was to examine gender differences in the association of SI with NLEs in adolescents, and assess the effects of self-esteem on the association and their gender variations. We conducted a school-based health survey in 15 schools in China between November 2013 and January 2014. A total of 9704 participants aged 11–19 years had sociodemographic data reported and self-esteem (Rosenberg self-esteem scale), NLEs, and SI measured. Multivariate-adjusted logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratio (OR) of having SI in relation to NLEs. Increased risk of SI was significantly associated with NLEs (adjusted OR 2.19, 95%CI 1.94–2.47), showing no gender differences (in females 2.38, 2.02–2.80, in males 1.96, 1.64–2.36, respectively). The association was stronger in adolescents with high esteem (2.93, 2.34–3.68) than those with low esteem (2.00, 1.65–2.42) (ORs ratio 1.47, p = 0.012). The matched figures in females were 3.66 (2.69–4.99) and 2.08 (1.61–2.70) (1.76, p = 0.006), while in males these figures were 2.27(1.62–3.19) and 1.89 (1.41–2.53) (1.20, p = 0.422), respectively. Self-esteem had moderate effects on the association between NLEs and SI in adolescents, mainly in females. NLEs, self-esteem, and gender need to be incorporated into future intervention programs to prevent SI in adolescents

Genetic and pathogenic characterizations of a naturally occurring reassortant and homologous recombinant strain of the classical infectious bursal disease virus re-emerging in chickens in southern China

Infectious bursal disease (IBD) classical virus strain (cIBDV) can cause morbidity and mortality in young chickens with severe long-term immunosuppression. However, since the emergence and widespread prevalence of very virulent strain (vvIBDV) in China from 1991, reports of cIBDV have become rare. A novel reassortant and recombinant strain GXYL211225 (genotype A1aB1a) with segment A originating from the classical strain (A1a) and segment B from the attenuated vaccine strain (B1a) was characterized in the study. Notably, segment A resulted from recombination between the cIBDV strains 150127-0.2 and Faragher52-70, expressing as a backbone from 150127-0.2, where a fragment located at the position of nucleotide (nt) 519-1 410 was replaced by the corresponding region of Faragher52-70. The infection of GXYL211225 caused mortality in SPF chicken embryos, despite lacking the critical amino acid (aa) residues 253H, 279 N and 284A associated with the cellular tropism, and induced significant cytopathic effect (CPE) on a wide range of cells, confirming its natural cell-adapted character. Furthermore, the challenge experiment of GXYL211225 was performed on the commercial Three-yellow chickens of 4-week-old, and with the vvIBDV HLJ-0504-like strain NN1172 and the novel variant (nv) IBDV strain QZ191002 as the comparison. All the challenged birds experienced reduced body-weight gain. QZ191002 infected birds showed no obvious clinical symptoms or mortality, while those of NN1172 and GXYL211225 showed typical IBD symptoms and resulted in 20% (2/10) and 10% (1/10) of mortality rates, respectively. At 7 days post-challenge (dpc), the damages of bursal of Fabricius (BF) varied among groups, with NN1172 causing the most severe lesions, followed by GXYL211225, and then QZ191002. It was also found that the pathogenicity was correlated positively with the viral load, aligning with the histopathological severity in BF. The study confirms the rapid and diverse evolution of the re-emerged classical strains in the field and emphasizes the need to monitor the changes of IBDV on both the genetic and pathogenic aspects for the effective control of the disease

High-density SNP-based association mapping of seed traits in fenugreek reveals homology with clover

Fenugreek as a self-pollinated plant is ideal for genome-wide association mapping where traits can be marked by their association with natural mutations. However, fenugreek is poorly investigated at the genomic level due to the lack of information regarding its genome. To fill this gap, we genotyped a collection of 112 genotypes with 153,881 SNPs using double digest restriction site-associated DNA sequencing. We used 38,142 polymorphic SNPs to prove the suitability of the population for association mapping. One significant SNP was associated with both seed length and seed width, and another SNP was associated with seed color. Due to the lack of a comprehensive genetic map, it is neither possible to align the newly developed markers to chromosomes nor to predict the underlying genes. Therefore, systematic targeting of those markers to homologous genomes of other legumes can overcome those problems. A BLAST search using the genomic fenugreek sequence flanking the identified SNPs showed high homology with several members of the Trifolieae tribe indicating the potential of translational approaches to improving our understanding of the fenugreek genome. Using such a comprehensively-genotyped fenugreek population is the first step towards identifying genes underlying complex traits and to underpin fenugreek marker-assisted breeding programs