Concomitant treatment of brain metastases with whole brain radiotherapy and temozolomide protects neurocognitive function and improve quality of life

Purpose: To study the protective effects of a combination of temozolomide (TMZ) and whole brain radiotherapy (WBT) on neurocognition, and its effect on the quality of life (QoL) in patients with brain metastasis (BM) from solid tumors, relative to WBT alone.Methods: A total of 256 BM patients were enrolled and divided into two groups treated with either WBT plus TMZ, or WBRT alone. All patients received 30 Gy WBT, with or without concomitant TMZ (75 mg/m2/day) during the irradiation period, and subsequently up to six cycles of TMZ (150 mg/m2/day).Results: The mean intracranial objective response (IOR) for all patients was 44.80 % while the IOR for WBT arm and WBT+TMZ group arm were 32.48 and 56.56 %, respectively (p = 0.03). The median intracranial overall survival (OS) for all the patients was 7.70 months. The median OS for WBT alone group (6.53 months) was significantly shorter than that of the WBT + TMZ arm (9.57 months). Statistically significant difference in quality of life (QoL) was observed between both arms at six months. Moreover, WBT+TMZ group had higher incidence of toxicity, when compared to WBT-only group.Conclusion: These results suggest that co-application of WBT and TMZ improves intracranial ORR and median OS in BM patients, relative to the use of WBT alone. Although the side effects may be increased as a result of addition of TMZ, toxicity is tolerable and manageable.Keywords: Brain metastasis, Temozolomide, Whole brain radiotherapy, Neurocognitio

Market Reaction To Top Executive Turnover In China Growth Enterprises Market: Focus On Difference Of Executive Characteristics

As China\u27s capital market matures, any event that occurs in an enterprise may have an impact on the stock price of a listed company. When a company changes its executives, it usually brings different degrees of fluctuations in the company\u27s stock price. Generally speaking, the background characteristics of the executive\u27s educat[1]ion, age, and social relations will contain a certain amount of information, and according to relevant information, the stock price can be impacted. This study will use event analysis method which obtain a three-day period before and after the occurrence of executive change to study whether the background characteristics of the previous and next executives of the company\u27s executive turnover affect the degree of stock price changes. This article focuses on companies listed on the China Growth Enterprises Market, because the volatility of such companies\u27 stock price fluctuations for executives will be more significant

ElixirNet: Relation-aware Network Architecture Adaptation for Medical Lesion Detection

Most advances in medical lesion detection network are limited to subtle modification on the conventional detection network designed for natural images. However, there exists a vast domain gap between medical images and natural images where the medical image detection often suffers from several domain-specific challenges, such as high lesion/background similarity, dominant tiny lesions, and severe class imbalance. Is a hand-crafted detection network tailored for natural image undoubtedly good enough over a discrepant medical lesion domain? Is there more powerful operations, filters, and sub-networks that better fit the medical lesion detection problem to be discovered? In this paper, we introduce a novel ElixirNet that includes three components: 1) TruncatedRPN balances positive and negative data for false positive reduction; 2) Auto-lesion Block is automatically customized for medical images to incorporate relation-aware operations among region proposals, and leads to more suitable and efficient classification and localization. 3) Relation transfer module incorporates the semantic relationship and transfers the relevant contextual information with an interpretable the graph thus alleviates the problem of lack of annotations for all types of lesions. Experiments on DeepLesion and Kits19 prove the effectiveness of ElixirNet, achieving improvement of both sensitivity and precision over FPN with fewer parameters.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure, AAAI202