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Thyroidectomy is the first-line treatment for papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC), but often involves aggressive overtreatment. Thermal ablation (TA) has been gradually used for the treatment of recurrent PTMC. However, it is not recommended for the treatment of primary PTMC according to the Korean and Italian guidelines. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to analyse the indications, efficacy, and safety of TA in the treatment of PTMC.Systematic review PATIENTS AND MEASUREMENTS: A search strategy was developed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. A total of 27 articles were included in this study until January 2022.According to current guidelines and studies, we divided the indications of TA for PTMC into six primary and three secondary indications. Laser ablation (LA) has the advantages of a small needle, accurate output energy, and precision ablation, and it is safe to important organs around the lesion. The patients recover quickly after radiofrequency ablation (RFA), with no major complications, recurrence, or lymph node metastasis. The volume reduction rate after RFA was the highest, followed by microwave ablation and LA, and the improvement in patient quality of life after TA was significantly better than after thyroidectomy.TA is an effective alternative method for surgery in the treatment of low-risk PTMC and has the advantages of being minimally invasive, economical, having less bleeding, and having a high postoperative quality of life. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Curcumin, an active component of the rhizomes of Curcumin longa L., possesses broad anti-inflammation and anti-cancer properties. Curcumin was previously reported to be capable of protecting ovariectomized rats against osteoporosis. However, the effect of curcumin on glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis (GIO) is not yet clear. The present study investigated the effects of curcumin on dexamethasone (Dex)-induced osteoporosis in vivo and Dex-induced osteoblast apoptosis in vivo and in vitro. The GIO rat model was induced by subcutaneous injection of Dex for 60 days and verified to be successful as evidenced by the significantly decreased bone mineral density (BMD) determined using dual X-ray absorptiometry. Subsequently, curcumin administration (100 mg/kg) for 60 days obviously increased BMD and bone-alkaline phosphatase, decreased carboxy-terminal collagen cross links, enhanced bone mechanical strength, and improved trabecular microstructure, thereby alleviating Dex-induced osteoporosis. Mechanically, curcumin remarkably reversed Dex-induced femoral osteoblast apoptosis in vivo. In cultured primary osteoblasts, pretreatment with curcumin concentration-dependently decreased the number of Dex-induced apoptotic osteoblasts by down-regulating the ratio of Bax/Bcl-2 as well as the levels of cleaved caspase-3 and cleaved poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP). Moreover, curcumin pretreatment activated extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK) signalling in Dex-induced osteoblasts by up-regulating the expression level of p-ERK1/2. Taken together, our study demonstrated that curcumin could ameliorate GIO by protecting osteoblasts from apoptosis, which was possibly related to the activation of the ERK pathway. The results suggest that curcumin may be a promising drug for prevention and treatment of GIO.

A typical solid-state drive contains several independent channels that can be operated in parallel. To exploit this channel-level parallelism, a variety of works proposed to split consecutive write sequences into small segments and schedule them to different channels. This scheme exploits the parallelism but breaks the spatial locality of write traffic; thus, it is able to significantly degrade the efficiency of garbage collection. This paper proposes a channel-aware write reordering (CAWR) mechanism to schedule write requests to different channels more intelligently. The novel mechanism encapsulates correlated pages into a cluster beforehand. All pages belonging to a cluster are scheduled to the same channels to exploit spatial locality, while different clusters are scheduled to different channels to exploit the parallelism. As CAWR covers both garbage collection and I/O performance, it outperforms existing schemes significantly. Trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that the CAWR mechanism reduces the average response time by 26% on average and decreases the valid page copies by 10% on average, while achieving a similar hit ratio to that of existing mechanisms.