Search

Objective: To explore the appropriate treatment strategies, clinical outcomes, and prognostic factors of patients with pulmonary‐limited metastases derived from colorectal cancer (CRC), usually manifested as a less aggressive course. Methods: A retrospective review was conducted in 331 CRC patients diagnosed with pulmonary‐limited metastases at a single institution between January 2011 and November 2017. The Kaplan–Meier method was used to calculate the overall survival (OS). Further analysis was conducted according to treatment modalities. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to determine potential prognostic factors influencing OS. Results: With a median follow‐up time of 38.6 months, the median OS in all patients was 45.2 months. A total of 163 patients received intensive local treatment with a median OS of 76.4 months, whereas 168 patients received palliative systemic treatment with a median OS of 29.7 months. The median OS was 68.9 months for patients treated with radiotherapy/radiofrequency ablation, with similar efficacy compared to surgery group, whose OS had not reached yet. No survival benefits were observed from the additional targeted therapy in systemic treatment group. The prognostic analysis demonstrated unilateral/bilateral lesions, synchronous/metachronous metastases, intensive local treatment, and resection of primary lesion that were significantly associated with survival of patients. Conclusions: Intensive local treatment alone for pulmonary lesions was associated with excellent survival in certain patients with CRC presented with metastases confined to lungs. Doublet systemic chemotherapy as the first‐line treatment also revealed satisfied efficacy and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Droplet impingement and anisotropic wetting on chemically heterogeneous stripe‐patterned surfaces is simulated by means of many‐body dissipative particle dynamics. The ratio of the stripe width and initial droplet diameter, defined as β, ranges from 0.5 to 1.0 so that the wetting process is in the Beyond–Cassie–Baxter regime and is highly anisotropic. At zero Weber number (that is, without considering droplet inertia) and with superhydrophobic stripes, β is the only factor affecting the droplet perpendicular contact angle and aspect ratio. For inertial droplets, β and the Weber number are found to have an effect on the eventual droplet morphology on multi‐striped surfaces. These morphologies include elongated shape, split‐off, and "butterfly" shape. A correlation for critical split‐off conditions has been determined. An energy analysis of droplet impingement shows that the normalized surface energy of the droplet is independent of the Weber number if the droplet is elongated or butterfly‐shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Capecitabine plus oxaliplatin (XELOX) as adjuvant therapy for gastric cancer (GC) reduces cancer recurrence and improves survival. S‐1 plus oxaliplatin (SOX) is well‐tolerated and effective against advanced GC, and also be used widely in adjuvant treatment. However, data comparing SOX and XELOX as adjuvant treatments are lacking. Method: Data on treatment modalities, adverse events, recurrence and metastasis were collected from 180 patients with stage II and III GC, who received SOX or XELOX after D2 gastrectomy between January 2012 and December 2015, and analyzed retrospectively. The primary endpoint was 3‐year disease‐free survival (DFS) rate. Results: Median follow was 52.9 months; 3‐year DFS rate and overall survival (OS) rate were 75.2% and 67.6% (P = 0.359) and 81.2% and 83.3% (P = 0.77) in the SOX and XELOX groups, respectively. There was no significant difference in peritoneal metastasis rates in the SOX and XELOX groups (8.6% vs 15%, respectively; P = 0.232). Compound recurrent disease was associated with significantly shorter OS. Multivariate analysis identified metastatic lymph node ratio (LNR) as an independent prognostic factor for OS (P = 0.036; hazard ratio = 2.875; 95% confidence interval, 1.069–7.729); the LNR ≥17% group had inferior 3‐year OS rate to the LNR <17% group (P = 0.001). The incidence of grades 3 and 4 adverse events was similar in both groups; however, grade ≥2 hand–foot syndrome was significantly less frequent in the SOX group (P = 0.01). Conclusion: SOX has similar survival benefits to XELOX and is well‐tolerated in Chinese patients with GC following D2 gastrectomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The matched-pairs design enables researchers to efficiently infer causal effects from randomized experiments. In this paper, we exploit the key feature of the matched-pairs design and develop a sensitivity analysis for missing outcomes due to truncation by death, in which the outcomes of interest (e.g., quality of life measures) are not even well defined for some units (e.g., deceased patients). Our key idea is that if 2 nearly identical observations are paired prior to the randomization of the treatment, the missingness of one unit's outcome is informative about the potential missingness of the other unit's outcome under an alternative treatment condition. We consider the average treatment effect among always-observed pairs (ATOP) whose units exhibit no missing outcome regardless of their treatment status. The naive estimator based on available pairs is unbiased for the ATOP if 2 units of the same pair are identical in terms of their missingness patterns. The proposed sensitivity analysis characterizes how the bounds of the ATOP widen as the degree of the within-pair similarity decreases. We further extend the methodology to the matched-pairs design in observational studies. Our simulation studies show that informative bounds can be obtained under some scenarios when the proportion of missing data is not too large. The proposed methodology is also applied to the randomized evaluation of the Mexican universal health insurance program. An open-source software package is available for implementing the proposed research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the identifiability and estimation of causal effects of a continuous treatment on a binary response when the treatment is measured with errors and there exists a latent categorical confounder associated with both treatment and response. Under some widely used parametric models, we first discuss the identifiability of the causal effects and then propose an approach for estimation and inference. Our approach can eliminate the biases induced by latent confounding and measurement errors by using only a single instrumental variable. Based on the identification results, we give guidelines for determining the existence of a latent categorical confounder and for selecting the number of levels of the latent confounder. We apply the proposed approach to a data set from the Framingham Heart Study to evaluate the effect of the systolic blood pressure on the coronary heart disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a SIR model with two delays and general nonlinear incidence rate is considered. The local and global asymptotical stabilities of the disease-free equilibrium are given. The local asymptotical stability and the existence of Hopf bifurcations at the endemic equilibrium are also established by analyzing the distribution of the characteristic values. Furthermore, the sufficient conditions for the permanence of the system are given. Some numerical simulations to support the analytical conclusions are carried out. At last, some conclusions are given. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this paper, an anti-windup bumpless transfer ( AWBT) control structure combined with linear interpolation method is proposed for smooth switching control. By choosing an appropriate scheduling signal, different controllers can be switched smoothly under a unified framework. Meanwhile, some robust specifications including H2/ H∞ performance, pole placement constraint, and passivity of the closed-loop system can be preserved through controller switching. Furthermore, for the linear system subject to input saturation, the stability and L2 gain of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed. Finally, a cart-spring pendulum system is simulated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]