CARE: A Large Scale CT Image Dataset and Clinical Applicable Benchmark Model for Rectal Cancer Segmentation

Rectal cancer segmentation of CT image plays a crucial role in timely clinical diagnosis, radiotherapy treatment, and follow-up. Although current segmentation methods have shown promise in delineating cancerous tissues, they still encounter challenges in achieving high segmentation precision. These obstacles arise from the intricate anatomical structures of the rectum and the difficulties in performing differential diagnosis of rectal cancer. Additionally, a major obstacle is the lack of a large-scale, finely annotated CT image dataset for rectal cancer segmentation. To address these issues, this work introduces a novel large scale rectal cancer CT image dataset CARE with pixel-level annotations for both normal and cancerous rectum, which serves as a valuable resource for algorithm research and clinical application development. Moreover, we propose a novel medical cancer lesion segmentation benchmark model named U-SAM. The model is specifically designed to tackle the challenges posed by the intricate anatomical structures of abdominal organs by incorporating prompt information. U-SAM contains three key components: promptable information (e.g., points) to aid in target area localization, a convolution module for capturing low-level lesion details, and skip-connections to preserve and recover spatial information during the encoding-decoding process. To evaluate the effectiveness of U-SAM, we systematically compare its performance with several popular segmentation methods on the CARE dataset. The generalization of the model is further verified on the WORD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed U-SAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on these two datasets. These experiments can serve as the baseline for future research and clinical application development.Comment: 8 page

Exome Sequencing Identifies ZNF644 Mutations in High Myopia

Myopia is the most common ocular disorder worldwide, and high myopia in particular is one of the leading causes of blindness. Genetic factors play a critical role in the development of myopia, especially high myopia. Recently, the exome sequencing approach has been successfully used for the disease gene identification of Mendelian disorders. Here we show a successful application of exome sequencing to identify a gene for an autosomal dominant disorder, and we have identified a gene potentially responsible for high myopia in a monogenic form. We captured exomes of two affected individuals from a Han Chinese family with high myopia and performed sequencing analysis by a second-generation sequencer with a mean coverage of 30× and sufficient depth to call variants at ∼97% of each targeted exome. The shared genetic variants of these two affected individuals in the family being studied were filtered against the 1000 Genomes Project and the dbSNP131 database. A mutation A672G in zinc finger protein 644 isoform 1 (ZNF644) was identified as being related to the phenotype of this family. After we performed sequencing analysis of the exons in the ZNF644 gene in 300 sporadic cases of high myopia, we identified an additional five mutations (I587V, R680G, C699Y, 3′UTR+12 C>G, and 3′UTR+592 G>A) in 11 different patients. All these mutations were absent in 600 normal controls. The ZNF644 gene was expressed in human retinal and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Given that ZNF644 is predicted to be a transcription factor that may regulate genes involved in eye development, mutation may cause the axial elongation of eyeball found in high myopia patients. Our results suggest that ZNF644 might be a causal gene for high myopia in a monogenic form

3% diquafosol sodium eye drops in Chinese patients with dry eye: a phase IV study

IntroductionThe efficacy and safety of 3% diquafosol sodium eye drops in Chinese patients with dry eye in the real-world setting remains unclear.Methods3099 patients with dry eye symptoms were screened according to Asia Dry Eye Society latest recommendation. Among them, 3000 patients were enrolled for a phase IV study. We followed up with multiple clinical characteristics including corneal fluorescein staining, tear break up time, Schirmer’s tests, visual acuity, intraocular pressure, and others. The follow ups were performed at baseline, 2 weeks and 4 weeks after treatment.ResultsBased on the results of corneal fluorescein staining and tear break up time, all age and gender subgroups exhibited obvious alleviation of the symptoms among the patients with dry eye, and the data in elderly group showed the most significant alleviation. All the adverse drug reactions (ADRs, 6.17%) were recorded, among which 6% local ocular ADRs were included. Meanwhile, mild ADRs (91.8%) accounted for the most. Most of the ADRs (89.75%) got a quick and full recovery, with an average time at 15.6 days. 1.37% of patients dropped out of the study due to ADRs.DiscussionThe use of 3% diquafosol sodium eye drop is effective and safe in the treatment of dry eye, with a low incidence of ADRs showing mild symptoms. This trial was registered at Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ID: ChiCTR1900021999 (Registration Date: 19/03/2019)

Conceptual Modeling for Competitive Intelligence Hiding in the Internet

Mladi potrošači značajan su dio istraživanju kupovine proizvoda i usluga a njihovo ponašanje važno je u kreiranju marketinških strategija te u osmišljavanju novih proizvoda i usluga. Komercijalni proizvodi nisu isporučeni djeci isključivo na tradicionalan način. Ponašanje potrošača mladih često se proučava kao dio paradigme koja se bavi potrošačima, odnosno proces u kojem dijete usvaja vještine, znanja, navike, kompetencije i stavove koji su važni za ulogu potrošača. Znanstvena literatura ne daje jedinstvenu definiciju ponašanja potrošača. Cilj izrade ovog završnog rada je utvrditi kako se mladi potrošači ponašaju kod potrošnje. Istražiti njih kao potrošače je zahtjevno i u većini istraživanja zbog malog uzorka neprecizno. bitno je naglasiti da je bitna iskrenost mladih kroz ankete kako bi rezultati bili precizniji i konkretniji. U budućnosti kroz napredak tehnologije i bolje analize moglo bi doći do jasnijih i kvalitetnijih rezultata istraživanja mladih kao potrošača

Adaptive Multi-Grained Buffer Management for Database Systems

The traditional page-grained buffer manager in database systems has a low hit ratio when only a few tuples within a page are frequently accessed. To handle this issue, this paper proposes a new buffering scheme called the AMG-Buffer (Adaptive Multi-Grained Buffer). AMG-Buffer proposes to use two page buffers and a tuple buffer to organize the whole buffer. In this way, the AMG-Buffer can hold more hot tuples than a single page-grained buffer. Further, we notice that the tuple buffer may cause additional read I/Os when writing dirty tuples into disks. Thus, we introduce a new metric named clustering rate to quantify the hot-tuple rate in a page. The use of the tuple buffer is determined by the clustering rate, allowing the AMG-Buffer to adapt to different workloads. We conduct experiments on various workloads to compare the AMG-Buffer with several existing schemes, including LRU, LIRS, CFLRU, CFDC, and MG-Buffer. The results show that AMG-Buffer can significantly improve the hit ratio and reduce I/Os compared to its competitors. Moreover, the AMG-Buffer achieves the best performance on a dynamic workload as well as on a large data set, suggesting its adaptivity and scalability to changing workloads