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Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the United States. Exploring the mechanism of HCC and identifying ideal targets is critical. In the present study, we demonstrated metabolism dysfunction might be a key diver for the development of HCC. The mitochondrial amidoxime reducing component 2 (MARC2) as a newly discovered molybdenum enzyme was downregulated in human HCC tissues and HCC cells. Downregulated MARC2 was significantly associated with clinicopathological characteristics of HCC, such as tumor size, AFP levels, and tumor grade and was an independent risk factor of poor prognosis. Both in vitro and in vivo studies suggested that MARC2 suppressed the progression of HCC by regulating the protein expression level of p27. The Hippo signaling pathway and RNF123 were required for this process. Moreover, MARC2 regulated expression of HNF4A via the Hippo signaling pathway. HNF4A was recruited to the promoter of MARC2 forming a feedback loop. MARC2 levels were downregulated by methylation. We demonstrated the prognostic value of MARC2 in HCC and determined the mechanism by which MARC2 suppressed the progression of HCC in this study. These findings may lead to new therapeutic targets for HCC.

Objective Understanding the three-dimensional (3D) spatial position and orientation of vessels and tumor(s) is vital in laparoscopic liver resection procedures. Augmented reality (AR) techniques can help surgeons see the patient's internal anatomy in conjunction with laparoscopic video images. Method In this paper, we present an AR-assisted navigation system for liver resection based on a rigid stereoscopic laparoscope. The stereo image pairs from the laparoscope are used by an unsupervised convolutional network (CNN) framework to estimate depth and generate an intraoperative 3D liver surface. Meanwhile, 3D models of the patient's surgical field are segmented from preoperative CT images using V-Net architecture for volumetric image data in an end-to-end predictive style. A globally optimal iterative closest point (Go-ICP) algorithm is adopted to register the pre- and intraoperative models into a unified coordinate space; then, the preoperative 3D models are superimposed on the live laparoscopic images to provide the surgeon with detailed information about the subsurface of the patient's anatomy, including tumors, their resection margins and vessels. Results The proposed navigation system is tested on four laboratory ex vivo porcine livers and five operating theatre in vivo porcine experiments to validate its accuracy. The ex vivo and in vivo reprojection errors (RPE) are 6.04 ± 1.85 mm and 8.73 ± 2.43 mm, respectively. Conclusion and Significance Both the qualitative and quantitative results indicate that our AR-assisted navigation system shows promise and has the potential to be highly useful in clinical practice.

This study aimed to investigate the safety and efficacy of S-l combined with cisplatin plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy (SCCC) versus cisplatin plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCC) for Chinese patients with advanced gastric cancer (AGC). Between April 2008 and June 2010, 144 eligible patients with AGC were included and divided randomly into 2 groups. Seventy-two patients in the SCCC group received with S-1 on days 1–14 of a 21-day cycle, 24-h cisplatin infusion (70 mg/m2 on day 1) every 4 weeks for 2 cycles, and concurrent chemoradiotherapy (30-Gy radiotherapy over 4 weeks) beginning on day 1. The other 72 patients in the CCC group were administered cisplatin and concurrent chemoradiotherapy as for SCCC. The primary outcome was overall survival. Secondary outcomes were progression-free survival and adverse events. The median overall survival durations were 11.7 months (range 1.7–29.7 months) and 9.5 months (range 1.2–25.4 months) in SCCC and CCC groups, respectively (P = 0.041). The median progression-free survival durations were 10.6 months for SCCC (range 1.3–24.7 months) and 8.8 months (range 0.7–22.3 months) for CCC (P = 0.046). The toxicity profile was similar in both groups. In summary, SCCC showed more promising safety and efficacy than CCC in Chinese patients with AGC. In addition, the toxicities were also acceptable in both groups.