The Impact of Smoking Status on the Efficacy of Erlotinib in Patients with Advanced Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Background and objective Erlotinib is a targeted treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Smoking status may be one of influencing factors of the efficacy of erlotinib. The aim of this study is to explore the impact of smoking status on the efficacy of erlotinib in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Methods Patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer who had been previously treated with at least one course of platinum based chemotherapy received 150 mg oral doses of erlotinib once daily until disease progression. Response rate, progression-free survival, overall survival were analyzed in the different smoking status groups. Kaplan-Meier method was used to analyze the survival rate. Results Fortyeight patients were enrolled into the study from December 2005 to September 2006. We followed up these patients until 28th December, 2008. Median follow up time was 30 months. The compliance rate was 100%. The response rate was 32.1% in the smoking group and 35% in the never smoking group (P=0.836); The median progression-free survival was 3 months and 9 months, respectively (P=0.033). The median overall survival was 5 months and 17 months, respectively (P=0.162). Conclusion Erlotinib is an effective drug for advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients with different smoking status. Progressionfree survival is better in the never smoking patients than the smoking patients

Quantitative Optimization of Hand-Held Probe External Pressure on Dermatological Microvasculature Using Optical Coherence Tomography based Angiography

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)-based angiography (OCTA) is a high-resolution, high-speed, and non-invasive imaging method that can provide vascular mapping of subcutaneous tissue up to approximately 2 mm. In dermatology applications of OCTA, handheld probes are always designed with a piece of transparent but solid contact window placed at the end of the probe to directly contact the skin for achieving better focusing between the light source and the tissue, reducing noise caused by minor movements. The pressure between the contact window and the skin is usually uncontrollable, and high external pressure affects the quality of microvascular imaging by compressing the vessels and obstructing the underlying blood flow. Therefore, it is necessary to determine a pressure range to ensure that the vessels can be fully imaged in high-quality images. In this paper, two pressure sensors were added to the existing handheld OCT probe, and the imaging probe was fixed to a metal stand and adjusted vertically to change the pressure between the probe and the tested skin site, a gradient of roughly 4 kPa (with 1–2 kPa error) increase was applied in each experiment, and the impact of pressure to the vessel was calculated. The experiment involved a total of five subjects, three areas of which were scanned (palm, back of the hand, and forearm). The vessel density was calculated to evaluate the impact of external pressure on angiography. In addition, PSNR was calculated to ensure that the quality of different tests was at a similar level. The angiography showed the highest density (about 10%) when the pressure between the contact window on the probe and the test area was between 3 and 5 kPa. As the pressure increased, the vascular density decreased, and the rate of decrease varied in different test areas. After fitting all the data points according to the different sites, the slope of the fitted line, i.e., the rate of decrease in density per unit value of pressure, was found to be 4.05% at the palm site, 6.93% at the back of the hand, and 4.55% at the forearm site. This experiment demonstrates that the pressure between the skin and contact window is a significant parameter that cannot be ignored. It is recommended that in future OCTA data collection processes and probe designs, the impact of pressure on the experiment be considered

Robust Ultrafast Projection Pipeline for Structural and Angiography Imaging of Fourier-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

The current methods to generate projections for structural and angiography imaging ofFourier-Domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) are significantly slow for prediagnosisimprovement, prognosis, real-time surgery guidance, treatments, and lesion boundary definition.This study introduced a robust ultrafast projection pipeline (RUPP) and aimed to develop and evaluate the efficacy of RUPP. RUPP processes raw interference signals to generate structural projectionswithout the need for Fourier Transform. Various angiography reconstruction algorithms were utilized for efficient projections. Traditional methods were compared to RUPP using PSNR, SSIM, andprocessing time as evaluation metrics. The study used 22 datasets (hand skin: 9; labial mucosa: 13)from 8 volunteers, acquired with a swept-source optical coherence tomography system. RUPP significantly outperformed traditional methods in processing time, requiring only 0.040 s for structuralprojections, which is 27 times faster than traditional summation projections. For angiography projections, the best RUPP variation took 0.15 s, making it 7518 times faster than the windowed eigendecomposition method. However, PSNR decreased by 41–45% and SSIM saw reductions of 25–74%.RUPP demonstrated remarkable speed improvements over traditional methods, indicating its potential for real-time structural and angiography projections in FD-OCT, thereby enhancing clinicalprediagnosis, prognosis, surgery guidance, and treatment efficacy

Robust Ultrafast Projection Pipeline for Structural and Angiography Imaging of Fourier-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

The current methods to generate projections for structural and angiography imaging ofFourier-Domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) are significantly slow for prediagnosisimprovement, prognosis, real-time surgery guidance, treatments, and lesion boundary definition.This study introduced a robust ultrafast projection pipeline (RUPP) and aimed to develop and evaluate the efficacy of RUPP. RUPP processes raw interference signals to generate structural projectionswithout the need for Fourier Transform. Various angiography reconstruction algorithms were utilized for efficient projections. Traditional methods were compared to RUPP using PSNR, SSIM, andprocessing time as evaluation metrics. The study used 22 datasets (hand skin: 9; labial mucosa: 13)from 8 volunteers, acquired with a swept-source optical coherence tomography system. RUPP significantly outperformed traditional methods in processing time, requiring only 0.040 s for structuralprojections, which is 27 times faster than traditional summation projections. For angiography projections, the best RUPP variation took 0.15 s, making it 7518 times faster than the windowed eigendecomposition method. However, PSNR decreased by 41–45% and SSIM saw reductions of 25–74%.RUPP demonstrated remarkable speed improvements over traditional methods, indicating its potential for real-time structural and angiography projections in FD-OCT, thereby enhancing clinicalprediagnosis, prognosis, surgery guidance, and treatment efficacy

Effects of Excitation Angle on Air-Puff-Stimulated Surface Acoustic Wave-Based Optical Coherence Elastography (SAW-OCE)

Increased stiffness of tissues has been recognised as a diagnostic feature of pathologies. Tissue stiffness characterisation usually involves the detection of tissue response from mechanical stimulation. Air-puff optical coherence elastography (OCE) can generate impulse surface acoustic waves (SAWs) on tissue surface without contact and evaluate the mechanical properties of tissue. This study endeavours to explore the optimal excitation angle for air-puff OCE, a parameter that lacks standardisation at present, by investigating the relationship between the frequency bandwidth and peak-to-peak signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of SAWs for different excitation angles (relative to the normal surface) of air-puff on the sample, from 5° to 85°, with an interval of 5° applied on the phantom. Due to the unevenness of human hands, 20°, 45° and 70° angles were employed for human skin (10 healthy adults). The results show that a smaller excitation angle could produce higher wave frequency bandwidth; a 5° angle generated an SAW with 1747 Hz frequency bandwidth, while an 85° angle produced an SAW with 1205 Hz. Significant differences were not shown in peak-to-peak SNR comparison between 5° and 65° on the phantom, but between 65° and 85° at the excitation position, a reduction of 48.6% was observed. Furthermore, the group velocity of the SAWs was used to evaluate the bulk Young’s modulus of the human tissue. The outcomes could provide essential guidance for air-puff-based elastography studies in clinical applications and future tissue research.<br/

Dauricine Attenuates Vascular Endothelial Inflammation Through Inhibiting NF-κB Pathway

Endothelial cells are the fundamental components of blood vessels that regulate several physiological processes including immune responses, angiogenesis, and vascular tone. Endothelial dysfunction contributes to the development of various diseases such as acute lung injury, and endothelial inflammation is a vital part of endothelial dysfunction. Dauricine is an extract isolated from Menispermum dauricum DC, a traditional Chinese medical plant that can be used for pharyngitis. In this work, we found that IL-1β-induced overexpression of intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1), and E-selectin was inhibited by dauricine in primary human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Correspondingly, adhesion of human acute monocytic leukemia cell line (THP-1) to HUVECs was decreased by dauricine. Further studies showed that dauricine inhibited the activation of nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) pathway in HUVECs stimulated with IL-1β. In vivo, dauricine protected mice from lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced acute lung injury. In lung tissues, the activation of NF-κB pathway and the expression of its downstream genes (ICAM-1, VCAM-1, and E-selectin) were decreased by dauricine, consistent with what was found in vitro. In summary, we concluded that dauricine could alleviate endothelial inflammation by suppressing NF-κB pathway, which might serve as an effective candidate for diseases related with endothelial inflammation