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Purpose: Breast lymphedema after post-lumpectomy radiation therapy (RT) is poorly defined and difficult to treat. The aim of this study was to define the incidence of breast lymphedema and identify factors associated with the risk of developing breast lymphedema (BL) in women undergoing breast-conserving therapy., Methods: A retrospective cohort study of patients with early-stage breast cancer who underwent breast-conserving surgery (lumpectomy) followed by RT between January 1, 2014 and July 31, 2019 at a single institution. Women who developed BL, defined as swelling of the breast persisting ≥1 year after RT, were compared with women who did not. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were used to identify factors associated with risk of BL., Results: A total of 1052 patients were included in the study: 99 (9.6 %) developed BL and 953 (90.6 %) did not develop BL. The mean ± standard deviation age was 62.9 ± 11.1 years and the mean breast volume was 1352.0 ± 744.9 cm 3 . Patients with breast volume ≥1500 cm 3 (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 2.34; 95 % CI, 1.40-3.91; p = 0.001), Black patients (aOR = 1.78; 95 % CI, 1.12-2.82; p = 0.015), those who received neoadjuvant (aOR = 3.05; 95 % CI, 1.28-7.30; p = 0.012) or adjuvant chemotherapy (aOR = 2.14; 95 % CI, 1.29-3.55; p = 0.003), those with postoperative cellulitis (aOR = 3.94; 95 % CI, 2.20-7.06; p < 0.001), and women who developed arm lymphedema (aOR = 2.94; 95 % CI, 1.50-5.77; p = 0.002) had significantly higher odds of developing BL., Conclusion: Patients with larger breast volumes, Black patients, those receiving chemotherapy, and those who develop arm lymphedema or cellulitis may be at higher risk of BL after lumpectomy and RT, suggesting that patients with these risk features may benefit from complementary or alternative surgical approaches and heightened monitoring to avoid BL., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest Dr. Dunya Atisha is a senior medical consultant for MTF Biologics. The rest of authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this article., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Biochar was used as a heterogeneous activator for peroxymonosulfate (PMS), and the activation performance strongly depended on the structure, functional groups, and modification of the biochar. In this study, a new type of modified biochar was synthesized by utilizing the Mn(II) adsorption capacity of bacteria. After one-step pyrolysis of Mn(II)-adsorbed bacterial cells at 800 °C, a Mn-incorporated bacterial-derived biochar (Mn-BBC) was successfully produced. It exhibited structural heterogeneity, with MnO located at the surface of the BBC matrix, as shown on the result of SEM and XRD. Compared to BBC, Mn-BBC showed a 10-fold increase (0.0727 min -1 versus 0.0069 min -1 ) of pollutant removal rate. In addition, it also showed anti-interference capacity against common water matrix (except 10 mM CO 3 2- ) and great stability/reusability. Chemical quenching, electron spin resonance, and pyrophosphate trapping indicated an indirect but important role of the superoxide, formed during the self-decomposition of PMS. The MnO on Mn-BBC can be oxidized by superoxide to produce surface Mn(III), which then binds to PMS and forms a surface complex. This complex promotes electron transfer from the pollutant to the Mn-BBC, facilitating the oxidation of the contaminants. Overall, this study confirmed the PMS activation capacity and mechanism of Mn-BBC, which expands the application of BBC-based materials derived from metal-adsorbed microbes., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Heterogeneous sulfate radical-based advanced oxidation processes (SR-AOPs) have been widely reported over the last decade as a promising technology for pollutant removal from wastewater. In this study, a novel peroxymonosulfate (PMS) activator was obtained by visible-light-driven Mn(II) oxidation in the presence of nitrate. The photochemically synthesized manganese oxides (PC-MnO x ) were polymorphic amorphous nanoparticles and nanorods, with an average oxidation state of approximately 3.0. It possesses effective PMS activation capacity and can remove 20 mg L -1 acid organic II (AO7) within 30 min. The AO7 removal performance of PC-MnO x was slightly decreased in natural waterbodies and in the presence of CO 3 2- , while it showed an anti-interference capacity for Cl - , NO 3 - and humic acid. Chemical quenching, reactive oxygen species (ROS) trapping, X-ray photoelectric spectroscopy (XPS), in-situ Raman spectroscopy, and electrochemical experiments supported a nonradical mechanism, i.e., electron transfer from AO7 to the metastable PC-MnO x -PMS complex, which was responsible for AO7 oxidation. The PC-MnO x -PMS system also showed substrate preferences based on their redox potentials. Moreover, PC-MnO x could activate periodate (PI) but not peroxydisulfate (PDS) or H 2 O 2 . Overall, this study provides a new catalyst for PMS activation through a mild and green synthesis approach., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This paper relates the post-analysis of the first edition of the HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) challenge. This challenge was held as a satellite event of the 23rd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2020, and was the first of its kind focusing on lesion segmentation in combined FDG-PET and CT image modalities. The challenge's task is the automatic segmentation of the Gross Tumor Volume (GTV) of Head and Neck (H&N) oropharyngeal primary tumors in FDG-PET/CT images. To this end, the participants were given a training set of 201 cases from four different centers and their methods were tested on a held-out set of 53 cases from a fifth center. The methods were ranked according to the Dice Score Coefficient (DSC) averaged across all test cases. An additional inter-observer agreement study was organized to assess the difficulty of the task from a human perspective. 64 teams registered to the challenge, among which 10 provided a paper detailing their approach. The best method obtained an average DSC of 0.7591, showing a large improvement over our proposed baseline method and the inter-observer agreement, associated with DSCs of 0.6610 and 0.61, respectively. The automatic methods proved to successfully leverage the wealth of metabolic and structural properties of combined PET and CT modalities, significantly outperforming human inter-observer agreement level, semi-automatic thresholding based on PET images as well as other single modality-based methods. This promising performance is one step forward towards large-scale radiomics studies in H&N cancer, obviating the need for error-prone and time-consuming manual delineation of GTVs., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Periodate (PI)-based advanced oxidation processes are a newly discovered approach for effective pollutant elimination. In this study, we demonstrated that biochar obtained from pyrolysis of anaerobic sewage sludge without any pretreatment can be used for PI activation. The biochar obtained at 800 °C (SBC-800) exhibited the best PI activation capacity using acid organic II (AO7) as substrate. The PI activation was strongly dependent on pH and exhibited the highest AO7 removal rate at pH 3.0. Meanwhile, the anti-interference capacity with common wastewater components and reusability of the SBC-800/PI system were confirmed. Combined with the results of chemical quenching, reactive oxygen species (ROS) trapping, X-ray photoelectric spectroscopy (XPS), electrochemical and density function theory (DFT)-based calculations, singlet oxygen production and electron transfer mediated by the SBC-800-PI complex were the dominant AO7 oxidation mechanisms. This study provides easily prepared catalysts for PI activation and paves the way for solid waste recycling and reuse., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: Evaluate clinical outcomes in patients with vestibular schwannoma (VS) treated with fractionated proton therapy (PT) at a single institution., Materials and Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of patients treated with fractionated PT for definitive management of VS between November 2007 and December 2013 at our institution. No patient had received prior treatment for VS. Patients received 50.4 Gy in 28 fractions using passively scattered PT. Pretreatment and posttreatment hearing status, tumor dimensions, and cranial nerve V and VII function were evaluated. Hearing status was graded as nonserviceable or serviceable, defined as Gardner-Robertson grade I or II and the ability to use a telephone with the treated ear. Toxicities were prospectively evaluated using Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events, version 4.0., Results: Fourteen patients with 14 lesions (8 men, 6 women) were included in the analysis. Median age at treatment was 60 years (range, 24-74 years). Median clinical follow-up for living patients was 68 months (range, 36-106 months). Mean maximal tumor dimension was 2.1 cm (range, 0.5-3.8 cm). Mean tumor volume was 6.4 cm 3 (range, 0.3-16.0 cm 3 ). One patient died of unrelated causes 5 months after treatment, and 2 had subsequent surgical resections due to radiographic and/or clinical progression. The actuarial 3-year local control rate was 85%. There were no cranial nerve V or VII injuries. Two of 6 patients (33%) with serviceable hearing at the time of treatment retained serviceable hearing. Three patients (21%) demonstrated radiographic tumor regression on brain magnetic resonance imaging after a median of 26 months (range, 2-113 months). No acute toxicity of grade 3 or above was reported., Conclusion: Fractionated PT for VS is well tolerated and provides good local control. Improvements in proton delivery techniques and patient selection may enable improved outcomes., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest: Dr William Mendenhall is operating editor of the International Journal of Particle Therapy. The authors have no other conflicts of interest to disclose., (© Copyright 2018 International Journal of Particle Therapy.)