Validation of radiographic response evaluation criteria of preoperative chemotherapy for bone and soft tissue sarcomas: Japanese Orthopaedic Association Committee on Musculoskeletal Tumors Cooperative Study

AbstractBackgroundThe radiographic evaluation of the response to preoperative chemotherapy for bone and soft tissue sarcomas is based mostly on the change in primary tumor size before and after chemotherapy, as is done for many solid cancers. Its prognostic correlation, however, has hardly been validated.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective validation study of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) radiographic response evaluation criteria of preoperative chemotherapy for bone and soft tissue sarcomas as a JOA Committee on Musculoskeletal Tumors cooperative study. A total of 125 consecutive patients with high-grade bone (n = 77) and soft tissue (n = 48) sarcomas treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy and definitive surgery in 25 tertiary referral hospitals were selected for the study. We investigated the correlation between the tumor size-based radiographic response evaluation criteria of preoperative chemotherapy for bone and soft tissue sarcomas provided by the JOA Committee on Musculoskeletal Tumors (hereafter called the JOA criteria) and the patients’ overall survival using the Kaplan-Meier method and the log-rank test.ResultsThe JOA criteria correlated relatively well with survival for malignant bone tumors (mostly comprising osteosarcoma and Ewing’s sarcoma) but not for soft tissue sarcomas, suggesting that the tumor size-based radiographic evaluation criteria for the response to preoperative chemotherapy in patients with soft tissue sarcomas is invalid.ConclusionsThe JOA criteria, based on the change in primary tumor size, is valid for malignant bone tumors but invalid for soft tissue sarcomas. Other new evaluation modalities of the response to preoperative chemotherapy using innovative functional imaging techniques are needed for soft tissue sarcomas

Silkworm Cocoon Waste Revitalization: Regenerated Fibers Using Higher-Molecular-Weight Fibroin Achieve High Strength and Toughness

Silkworm cocoons are removed in the industrial process when the cocoons are stained or reeled as dupion. Furthermore, a tremendous amount of used silk clothes is discarded worldwide. An artificial spinning of regenerated silk fibroin solution is a candidate to recycle silk waste. However, the mechanical strength of the regenerated silk fiber has often been lower than that of the natural counterpart, limiting the industrial use of regenerated silk fibers. Silkworm silk fibroin consists of heavy chains, light chains, and glycoproteins. The molecular weight of the heavy chain is more than 10 times higher than that of the light chain and glycoprotein. In this study, we extracted the heavy chain from the silkworm cocoon waste and applied artificial silk spinning to produce regenerated silk fibers with few structural defects with the aim of obtaining high tensile strength. The regenerated silk fibers revealed tensile strength comparable to the natural silk fibers. Furthermore, the modulus of elasticity in tension was 1.7-fold higher than that of the native counterpart. The present study will contribute not only to recycling silk waste but also to designing high-strength protein-based structural materials along with the context of sustainable development goals

An Inflammatory Pseudotumor Arising from Pterygopalatine Fossa with Invasion to the Maxillary Sinus and Orbital Cavity

We report a patient who had an inflammatory pseudotumor (IPT) that invaded to the maxillary sinus and orbital cavity, with the left pterygopalatine fossa as the principal site; this is a very rare case. The patient was an 83-year-old woman who suddenly became aware of impairment in the eyesight and visual field of the left eye. CT images showed a neoplastic lesion that invaded to the maxillary sinus and orbital cavity, with the left pterygopalatine fossa as the principal site, and also showed contrast effects. To obtain a definitive diagnosis from histopathological analysis, the lesion was biopsied, and she was diagnosed as the inflammatory pseudotumor with the immunohistochemical study and multiplex polymerase chain reaction-based clonality assays. The patient had a lymphoid-predominant lesion that responded to radiotherapy but corticosteroids were not effective. It is important to scrutinize the pathology to avoid unnecessary and mutilating surgery

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION 1 Efficient Decision Fusion for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Based on OR-rule

Abstract-In this paper, we consider an efficient decision fusion technique for cooperative spectrum sensing based on the logical OR-rule for dynamic spectrum sharing among primary and secondary users (PUs and SUs, respectively). If the OR-rule is employed, the fusion center (FC) only needs to be informed if any of the local decisions is a "1". In this case, it may be a waste of resources to communicate each local decision in an orthogonal channel, as is commonly assumed. To reduce resource consumption, we consider that SUs with local decisions "1" transmit simultaneously in the same channel using continuous wave (CW) signaling, and that the FC declares that the PU is present if it detects the summed CWs. However, since phase synchronization may not be practical, the summed CWs may suffer from destructive interference. Theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that even with a very large channel gain to noise power ratio (CNR) between the SUs and FC, the system may not achieve error-free signaling. To address this problem, we propose power control (PC) to reduce the effects of destructive interference. This technique makes it possible to guarantee that the CWs will not fully cancel each other. We also propose a phase shifting (PS) technique designed to improve worst-case detection performance by achieving diversity gain. These proposed methods are very simple and, although suboptimal, they provide good detection probabilities. Numerical results indicate that these proposals make it possible to practically attain the upper bound of error-free signaling, even with moderate CNR values