Synchronous double primary malignant tumor of the gallbladder and liver: a case report

We report a case of synchronous double primary tumor of gallbladder and liver. A 63-year-old male was admitted to the hospital complaining of abdominal discomfort. Enhanced computed tomography of the abdomen showed acute cholecystitis with tiny gallbladder stones and a 2.2 cm size enhanced nodule in the left lobe of the liver. Under the impression of acute cholecystitis with gall bladder stones and hepatocellular carcinoma of the left Liver, the patient underwent a laparotomy. At laparotomy, a mass was palpated on the surface of the neck portion of the gall bladder. Intraoperative frozen diagnosis revealed adenocarcinoma of the gall bladder. The patient was diagnosed as having gall bladder cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma, so extended cholecystectomy with dissection of regional lymph nodes and left hemihepatectomy were performed. Histological examination revealed moderated differentiated adenocarcinoma of gallbladder and hepatocellular carcinoma of liver. To our knowledge, the simultaneous occurrence of primary malignant tumor of the gallbladder and liver has never been published before. The patient is doing well with no evidence of recurrence 17 months after surgery

Potential redox-sensitive Akt activation by dopamine activates Bad and promotes cell death in melanocytes

Dopamine (DA) is a well known oxidative neurotoxin. In addition, Akt has been reported to deliver a survival signal that inhibits apoptosis. However, it has also been reported that chronic Akt activation leads to apoptosis in response to oxidative stress. The objective of the present study was to investigate the possible role of the Akt pathway in vitiligo and its possible relationship with DA-induced cell death using Mel-Ab cells. Cultured Mel-Ab cells were treated with DA with and without N-Acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC), which is known to have antioxidative properties. Cell viability was then assessed by a crystal violet assay and Annexin staining was performed. The changes in the expression of Akt were analyzed by western blot analysis. The cell viability was reduced by approximately 60% in response to treatment with 500 µM DA, and NAC effectively prevented this cytotoxic effect. Likewise, treatment with DA produced numerous Annexin positive cells, while treatment with NAC prevented this apoptotic cell death. Akt was slowly phosphorylated after treatment with DA, while NAC clearly inhibited the DA-induced Akt activation. Western blot analysis also showed that treatment with DA induced the activation of Bad. Finally, LY294002 exerted a protective effect against DA-induced apoptotic cell death. DA may induce redox-sensitive Akt activation and increase the level of Bad, which can promote cell death by heterodimerization with survival proteins. Moreover, NAC effectively protects against DA-induced melanocyte death via inhibition of DA-induced Akt activation

Co-occurrence matrix analysis-based semi-supervised training for object detection

One of the most important factors in training object recognition networks using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the provision of annotated data accompanying human judgment. Particularly, in object detection or semantic segmentation, the annotation process requires considerable human effort. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning (SSL)-based training methodology for object detection, which makes use of automatic labeling of un-annotated data by applying a network previously trained from an annotated dataset. Because an inferred label by the trained network is dependent on the learned parameters, it is often meaningless for re-training the network. To transfer a valuable inferred label to the unlabeled data, we propose a re-alignment method based on co-occurrence matrix analysis that takes into account one-hot-vector encoding of the estimated label and the correlation between the objects in the image. We used an MS-COCO detection dataset to verify the performance of the proposed SSL method and deformable neural networks (D-ConvNets) as an object detector for basic training. The performance of the existing state-of-the-art detectors (DConvNets, YOLO v2, and single shot multi-box detector (SSD)) can be improved by the proposed SSL method without using the additional model parameter or modifying the network architecture.Comment: Submitted to International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 201

Acute Cerebral Infarction Following Intravenous Glycoprotein IIb/IIIa Inhibitor for Acute Myocardial Infarction

Stroke is a rare but serious complication of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Currently, glycoprotein (GP) IIb/IIIa inhibitor is used in clinical practice for acute coronary syndromes and percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs). The incidence of stroke in patients receiving GP IIb/IIIa inhibitor during PCIs is very low. We report the case of a 47-year-old man who presented with AMI and suffered an acute cerebral infarction after infusion of a GP IIb/IIIa inhibitor following primary PCI

Transcortical Alterations in Na+-K+ ATPase and Microtubule-Associated Proteins Immunoreactivity in the Rat Cortical Atrophy Model Induced by Hypoxic Ischemia

To identify the chronological transcortical change in the contralateral hemisphere following ischemic insults, we investigated the changes in microtubule associated protein (MAP) and Na+-K+ ATPase expressions in the peri-infarct zone and contralateral hemisphere, including the hippocampus. Two days after hypoxic ischemia, Na+-K+ ATPase immunoreactivity was significantly enhanced in the contralateral cortex and was maintained up to 7 days after ischemia, whereas Na+-K+ ATPase immunoreactivity in the peri- and infarct zones was unaffected by hypoxic ischemia. In contrast, 2 to 7 days after ischemia, MAP1A and MAP2 immunoreactivity in the ipsi- and contralateral cortex significantly decreased, whereas in layer V, MAP1 immunoreactivity obviously accumulated in the neurons and their processes. In the hippocampus, 2 days after insults both MAP1A and MAP2 immunoreactivity was significantly reduced within the ipsi- and contralateral hippocampus. In the contralateral hippocampus, however, the distribution of MAP2 immunoreactivity recovered to the sham level 7 days after ischemia, whereas MAP1A immunoreactive axons remained 2 months after ischemia. The results suggest that the unilateral elevation of Na+-K+ ATPase immunoreactivity reflects elevated neuronal activity. In addition, this asymmetric hyperexcitability might play an important role in the recovery or the reorganization of the brain, accompanied by transcortical changes in MAPs expression