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Major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) are two major mood disorders with partly overlapped symptoms but different treatments. However, their misdiagnosis and mistreatment are common based on the DSM-V criteria, lacking objective and quantitative indicators. This study aimed to develop a novel approach that accurately classifies MDD and BD based on their resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals during euthymic phases. A revisited 3D CNN model, Semi-CNN, that could automatically detect brainwave patterns in spatial, temporal, and frequency domains was implemented to classify wavelet-transformed MEG signals of normal controls and MDD and BD patients. The model achieved a test accuracy of 96.05% and an average of 95.71% accuracy for 5-fold cross-validation. Furthermore, saliency maps of the model were estimated using Grad-CAM++ to visualize the proposed classification model and highlight disease-specific brain regions and frequencies. Clinical Relevance - Our model provides a stable pipeline that accurately classifies MDD, BD, and healthy individuals based on resting-state MEG signals during the euthymic phases, opening the potential for quantitative and accurate brain-based diagnosis for the highly misdiagnosed MDD/BD patients.

Objective In this prospective cohort study, we aimed to evaluate the association between dietary habits and the risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg)-positive carriers in Qidong, an hepatitis B virus (HBV)-epidemic area in China. Methods A total of 3199 HBsAg carriers aged 30-70 years in a prospective cohort in Qidong, China from 2007 to 2011 were included in the study. At baseline, all participants self-reported their dietary habits in a questionnaire interview. A follow-up check-up was performed every 6 months to identify HCC cases until November 2017. Cox's regression analysis and an interaction analysis were performed to estimate the relative risks of HCC in terms of baseline diet. Results Among 3199 HBsAg-positive participants, 270 developed HCC (143.86/100 000 person-years [PYs]). Compared with participants who rarely consume garlic, the risk of HCC in those who consumed it ≥ once per week decreased along with the increase in frequency (HR = 1.00, 0.90 and 0.62 in those who consumed it rarely vs those who consumed it 1-6 times per week and ≥ 7 times per week, respectively). This study found a synergistic effect between garlic and tea consumption on the risk of HCC (P = 0.039 for a multiplicative interaction). Conclusions HBsAg carriers should improve their diet. Regular consumption of garlic and tea drinking may reduce the HCC incidence in HBsAg carriers.

Vocal expression is essential for conveying the emotion during social interaction. Although vocal emotion has been explored in previous studies, little is known about how perception of different vocal emotional expressions modulates the functional brain network topology. In this study, we aimed to investigate the functional brain networks under different attributes of vocal emotion by graph-theoretical network analysis. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments were performed on 36 healthy participants. We utilized the Power-264 functional brain atlas to calculate the interregional functional connectivity (FC) from fMRI data under resting state and vocal stimuli at different arousal and valence levels. The orthogonal minimal spanning trees method was used for topological filtering. The paired-sample t-test with Bonferroni correction across all regions and arousal–valence levels were used for statistical comparisons. Our results show that brain network exhibits significantly altered network attributes at FC, nodal and global levels, especially under high-arousal or negative-valence vocal emotional stimuli. The alterations within/between well-known large-scale functional networks were also investigated. Through the present study, we have gained more insights into how comprehending emotional speech modulates brain networks. These findings may shed light on how the human brain processes emotional speech and how it distinguishes different emotional conditions.

Non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) is a first-line imaging technique for determining treatment options for acute ischemic stroke (AIS). However, its poor contrast and signal-to-noise ratio limit the diagnosis accuracy for radiologists, and automated AIS lesion segmentation using NCCT also remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose R2U-RNet, a novel model for AIS lesion segmentation using NCCT.We used an in-house retrospective NCCT dataset with 261 AIS patients with manual lesion segmentation using follow-up diffusion-weighted images. R2U-RNet is based on an R2U-Net backbone with a novel residual refinement unit. Each input image contains two image channels from separate preprocessing procedures. The proposed model incorporates multiscale focal loss to mitigate the class imbalance problem and to leverage the importance of different levels of details. A proposed noisy-label training scheme is utilized to account for uncertainties in the manual annotations.The proposed model outperformed several iconic segmentation models in AIS lesion segmentation using NCCT, and our ablation study demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed model. Statistical analysis of segmentation performance revealed significant effects of regional stroke occurrence and side of the stroke, suggesting the importance of region-specific information for automated segmentation, and the potential influence of the hemispheric difference in clinical data.This study demonstrated the potentials of R2U-RNet model for automated NCCT AIS lesion segmentation. The proposed model can serve as a tool for accelerating AIS diagnoses and improving the treatment quality of AIS patients.

Objective: To investigate the effeciency of autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (auto.HSCT) combined with rituximab(R) to treat CD20From January 2005 to December 2013, 83 patients with refractory/recurrent CD20All the patient achieved complete response. The median follow.up time was 39 months. Both the two groups collected peripheral blood stem cells successfully, and had no difference in hematopoietic reconstitution time. Three patients in treatment group and six patients in control group relapsed and the three year overall survival and EFS in treatment group was significantly higher than that in control group, that is（93.0% vs 73.1%, P=0.037） and （89.5% vs 65.4%, P=0.034）, respectively. Subgroup analysis showed that: compared with the treatment group in which using R in the whole courses(before and after transplantation, and collection of stem cells) was superior to the control group in both OS and EFS, with the OS 97% vs 87.5% (P0.05) and EFS 97% vs 76.2% (P=0.05) respectively. While stratified by the different courses of rituximab, the OS was 88.9% (1-2 courses, 9 cases), 93.1% (3-4 courses, 29 cases), 94.7%(more than 5 courses,19 cases), and EFS was 77.8%, 89.7% and 94.7%, respectively.For the patients with refractory/recurrent CD20利妥昔单抗联合自体外周血造血干细胞移植治疗高危侵袭及难治复发性B.NHL的疗效分析.探讨利妥昔单抗（R）联合自体外周血造血干细胞移植(auto.HSCT)治疗高危侵袭性及难治复发CD20选取本中心2005年1月-2013年12月确诊为高危侵袭性及难治复发CD20移植成功后所有患者均达完全缓解（CR），中位随访时间39(2-113)个月。观察组和对照组患者均成功采集了自体外周血干细胞，造血重建时间两组无差异。观察组3年总生存（OS）率明显高于对照组（93.0% vs 73.1%，P=0.037），无事件生存（EFS）率显著高于对照组（89.5% vs 65.4%，P=0.034）；观察组患者死亡4例，复发3例（其中1例复发死亡，2例经巩固化疗后达CR2）；对照组患者死亡7例，复发6例（其中4例复发死亡，2例经巩固化疗后达CR2）。亚组分析： 移植前、采集前及移植后全程均使用R的32例患者与仅移植前化疗使用R的22例患者相比，OS、EFS率分别为97.0% vs 87.5%（P0.05）和97.0% vs 76.2%（P=0.05）；全程均使用R者与对照组比较，OS和EFS均有显著性差异（P=0.031， P=0.008）；按R使用频次不同，其OS率依次为：1-2次（9例）88.9%，3-4次（29例）93.1%，≥5次（19例）94.7%，EFS率分别为77.8%、89.7%、94.7.在治疗高危侵袭及难治复发性CD20

Objective. Neural communication or the interactions of brain regions play a key role in the formation of functional neural networks. A type of neural communication can be measured in the form of phase-amplitude coupling (PAC), which is the coupling between the phase of low-frequency oscillations and the amplitude of high-frequency oscillations. This paper presents a beamformer-based imaging method, beamformer-based imaging of PAC (BIPAC), to quantify the strength of PAC between a seed region and other brain regions.Approach. A dipole is used to model the ensemble of neural activity within a group of nearby neurons and represents a mixture of multiple source components of cortical activity. From ensemble activity at each brain location, the source component with the strongest coupling to the seed activity is extracted, while unrelated components are suppressed to enhance the sensitivity of coupled-source estimation.Main results. In evaluations using simulation data sets, BIPAC proved advantageous with regard to estimation accuracy in source localization, orientation, and coupling strength. BIPAC was also applied to the analysis of magnetoencephalographic signals recorded from women with primary dysmenorrhea in an implicit emotional prosody experiment. In response to negative emotional prosody, auditory areas revealed strong PAC with the ventral auditory stream and occipitoparietal areas in the theta-gamma and alpha-gamma bands, which may respectively indicate the recruitment of auditory sensory memory and attention reorientation. Moreover, patients with more severe pain experience appeared to have stronger coupling between auditory areas and temporoparietal regions.Significance. Our findings indicate that the implicit processing of emotional prosody is altered by menstrual pain experience. The proposed BIPAC is feasible and applicable to imaging inter-regional connectivity based on cross-frequency coupling estimates. The experimental results also demonstrate that BIPAC is capable of revealing autonomous brain processing and neurodynamics, which are more subtle than active and attended task-driven processing.

ObjectiveThe association between ABO blood group and risk of liver cancer is unclear, although few studies have reported positive results. This study examined the relationship between ABO blood group and liver cancer in hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg)-positive individuals.DesignA high-risk population-based cohort study.SettingThe study was started in 2007 and closed in 2019; the number of observed person-years as obtained by ABO blood group.ParticipantsThe study included 3663 individuals with positive HBsAg, including men aged 30–70 and women aged 40–70.Outcome measuresThe frequencies of ABO group in the cohort population and patients with liver cancer were calculated, respectively. χ2 test was used to compare differences, and the relative risk (95% CI) for development of liver cancer was evaluated.ResultsThe frequency distribution of blood types A, B, O and AB was 1118 (30.52%), 1073 (29.29%), 1104 (30.14%) and 368 (10.05%), respectively, among 3663 cohort individuals. In the cohort, patients with liver cancer (n=336) were of the following frequencies: type A: 104 (30.95%); type B: 97 (28.87%); type O: 95 (28.27%); and type AB: 40 (11.90%). No significant difference was found between patients with liver cancer and other individuals. The annual incidence rate of liver cancer was 906.34 per 100 000 person-years, and for blood type A, B, O and AB the rates were 917.76, 893.78, 846.02 and 1093.43 per 100 000 person-years, respectively. The relative risk (95% CI) was 0.97 (0.74 to 1.29), 0.92 (0.70 to 1.22) and 1.19 (0.82 to 1.72) for blood types B, O and AB, respectively, compared with blood type A.ConclusionThere were no significant differences in the frequency distribution of ABO blood groups in patients with liver cancer within this high-risk cohort, which demonstrates lack of positive association between ABO blood group and risk of liver cancer.

Decoding the neural representations of pain is essential to obtaining an objective assessment as well as an understanding of its underlying mechanisms. The complexities involved in the subjective experience of pain make it difficult to obtain a quantitative assessment from the induced spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity of high dimensionality. Most previous studies have investigated the perception of pain by analyzing the amplitude or spatial patterns in the response of the brain to external stimulation. This study investigated the decoding of endogenous pain perceptions according to resting-state magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings. In our experiments, we applied a beamforming method to calculate the brain activity for every brain region and examined temporal and spectral features of brain activity for predicting the intensity of perceived pain in patients with primary dysmenorrhea undergoing menstrual pain. Our results show that the asymmetric index of sample entropy in the precuneus and the sample entropy in the left posterior cingulate gyrus were the most informative characteristics associated with the perception of menstrual pain. The correlation coefficient (ρ=0.64, p

Alzheimer's disease (AD), an irreversible neurodegenerative disease, is the most common type of dementia in elderly people. This present study incorporated multiple structural and functional connectivity metrics into a graph theoretical analysis framework and investigated alterations in brain network topology in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD. By using this multiparametric analysis, we expected different connectivity metrics may reflect additional or complementary information regarding the topological changes in brain networks in MCI or AD. In our study, a total of 73 subjects participated in this study and underwent the magnetic resonance imaging scans. For the structural network, we compared commonly used connectivity metrics, including fractional anisotropy and normalized streamline count, with multiple diffusivity-based metrics. We compared Pearson correlation and covariance by investigating their sensitivities to functional network topology. Significant disruption of structural network topology in MCI and AD was found predominantly in regions within the limbic system, prefrontal and occipital regions, in addition to widespread alterations of local efficiency. At a global scale, our results showed that the disruption of the structural network was consistent across different edge definitions and global network metrics from the MCI to AD stages. Significant changes in connectivity and tract-specific diffusivity were also found in several limbic connections. Our findings suggest that tract-specific metrics (e.g., fractional anisotropy and diffusivity) provide more sensitive and interpretable measurements than does metrics based on streamline count. Besides, the use of inversed radial diffusivity provided additional information for understanding alterations in network topology caused by AD progression and its possible origins. Use of this proposed multiparametric network analysis framework may facilitate early MCI diagnosis and AD prevention., Highlights • Alzheimer's disease alters structural network mainly in limbic and superior frontal regions. • Altered global network topology may occur in earlier stage during mild cognitive impairment. • The capability of proposed multiparametric network analysis has been demonstrated. • The potential of inversed radial diffusivity on network analysis has been shown.

Theta oscillation (4–7 Hz) is well documented for its association with neural processes of memory. Pronounced increase of theta activity is commonly observed in patients with chronic neurogenic pain. However, its association with encoding of pain experience in patients with chronic pain is still unclear. The goal of the present study is to investigate the theta encoding of sensory and emotional information of long-term menstrual pain in women with primary dysmenorrhea (PDM). Forty-six young women with PDM and 46 age-matched control subjects underwent resting-state magnetoencephalography study during menstrual and periovulatory phases. Our results revealed increased theta activity in brain regions of pain processing in women with PDM, including the right parahippocampal gyrus, right posterior insula, and left anterior/middle cingulate gyrus during the menstrual phase and the left anterior insula and the left middle/inferior temporal gyrus during the periovulatory phase. The correlations between theta activity and the psychological measures pertaining to pain experience (depression, state anxiety, and pain rating index) implicate the role of theta oscillations in emotional and sensory processing of pain. The present study provides evidence for the role of theta oscillations in encoding the immediate and sustained effects of pain experience in young women with PDM.

This study investigates the cortical abnormalities of early emotion perception in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) using gamma oscillations. Twenty-three MDD patients, twenty-five BD patients, and twenty-four normal controls were enrolled and their event-related magnetoencephalographic responses were recorded during implicit emotional tasks. Our results demonstrated abnormal gamma activity within 100 ms in the emotion-related regions (amygdala, orbitofrontal (OFC) cortex, anterior insula (AI), and superior temporal pole) in the MDD patients, suggesting that these patients may have dysfunctions or negativity biases in perceptual binding of emotional features at very early stage. Decreased left superior medial frontal cortex (smFC) responses to happy faces in the MDD patients were correlated with their serious level of depression symptoms, indicating that decreased smFC activity perhaps underlies irregular positive emotion processing in depressed patients. In the BD patients, we showed abnormal activation in visual regions (inferior/middle occipital and middle temporal cortices) which responded to emotional faces within 100 ms, supporting that the BD patients may hyperactively respond to emotional features in perceptual binding. The discriminant function of gamma activation in the left smFC, right medial OFC, right AI/inferior OFC, and the right precentral cortex accurately classified 89.6% of patients as unipolar/bipolar disorders.

This study investigates the distinct patterns of local and long-range gamma oscillations between patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). Twenty BD patients, twenty MDD patients, and twenty normal controls participated in this study. For each participant, the event-related magnetoencephalographic responses while performing an implicit emotional task were recorded and processed with time-frequency analysis. Compared to normal controls, the BD patients exhibited the gamma power decease at the right frontal and prefrontal regions and yet gamma power increase at the right posterior temporal region. The abnormal long-range gamma oscillation between the right frontal and parietal-occipital region was also found. These results indicate that the BD patients may have hyperactivity in perceptual binding of emotional features and tend to be oversensitive to facial features. On the other hand, MDD patients displayed increased early gamma activity at the left anterior temporal region, which may imply their hyperactivated binding process of emotional features at corticolimbic regions. The distinct alterations of gamma patterns between the BD and MDD patients implicate that their impairments of binding processes are located at different regions. Gamma activity in the parietal and left posterior temporal regions may be a potential index to differentiate BD patients from MDD patients.

We propose a human object inpainting scheme that divides the process into three steps: 1) human posture synthesis; 2) graphical model construction; and 3) posture sequence estimation. Human posture synthesis is used to enrich the number of postures in the database, after which all the postures are used to build a graphical model that can estimate the motion tendency of an object. We also introduce two constraints to confine the motion continuity property. The first constraint limits the maximum search distance if a trajectory in the graphical model is discontinuous, and the second confines the search direction in order to maintain the tendency of an object's motion. We perform both forward and backward predictions to derive local optimal solutions. Then, to compute an overall best solution, we apply the Markov random field model and take the potential trajectory with the maximum total probability as the final result. The proposed posture sequence estimation model can help identify a set of suitable postures from the posture database to restore damaged/missing postures. It can also make a reconstructed motion sequence look continuous.

One of several challenges in design of clinical chemoprevention trials is the selection of the dose, formulation, and dose schedule of the intervention agent. Therefore, a cross-over clinical trial was undertaken to compare the bioavailability and tolerability of sulforaphane from two of broccoli sprout–derived beverages: one glucoraphanin-rich (GRR) and the other sulforaphane-rich (SFR). Sulforaphane was generated from glucoraphanin contained in GRR by gut microflora or formed by treatment of GRR with myrosinase from daikon (Raphanus sativus) sprouts to provide SFR. Fifty healthy, eligible participants were requested to refrain from crucifer consumption and randomized into two treatment arms. The study design was as follows: 5-day run-in period, 7-day administration of beverages, 5-day washout period, and 7-day administration of the opposite intervention. Isotope dilution mass spectrometry was used to measure levels of glucoraphanin, sulforaphane, and sulforaphane thiol conjugates in urine samples collected daily throughout the study. Bioavailability, as measured by urinary excretion of sulforaphane and its metabolites (in approximately 12-hour collections after dosing), was substantially greater with the SFR (mean = 70%) than with GRR (mean = 5%) beverages. Interindividual variability in excretion was considerably lower with SFR than with GRR beverage. Elimination rates were considerably slower with GRR, allowing for achievement of steady-state dosing as opposed to bolus dosing with SFR. Optimal dosing formulations in future studies should consider blends of sulforaphane and glucoraphanin as SFR and GRR mixtures to achieve peak concentrations for activation of some targets and prolonged inhibition of others implicated in the protective actions of sulforaphane. Cancer Prev Res; 4(3); 384–95. ©2011 AACR.

Background: Although patients with bipolar I and II disorders exhibit heterogeneous clinical presentations and cognitive functions, it remains unclear whether these two subtypes have distinct neural substrates. This study aimed to differentiate the fiber abnormalities between bipolar I and II patients using diffusion tensor images. Method: Fourteen bipolar I patients, thirteen bipolar II patients, and twenty-one healthy subjects were recruited. Fractional anisotropy (FA) values calculated from diffusion tensor images were compared among groups using two-sample t-test analysis in a voxel-wise manner. Correlations between the mean FA value of each survived area and the clinical characteristics as well as the scores of neuropsychological tests were further analyzed. Results: Patients of both subtypes manifested fiber impairments in the thalamus, anterior cingulate, and inferior frontal areas, whereas the bipolar II patients showed more fiber alterations in the temporal and inferior prefrontal regions. The FA values of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortices for both subtypes correlated with the performance of working memory. The FA values of the right inferior frontal area of bipolar I and the left middle temporal area of bipolar II both correlated with executive function. For bipolar II patients, the left middle temporal and inferior prefrontal FA values correlated with the scores of YMRS and hypomanic episodes, respectively. Conclusions: Our findings suggest distinct neuropathological substrates between bipolar I and II subtypes. The fiber alterations observed in the bipolar I patients were majorly associated with cognitive dysfunction, whereas those in the bipolar II patients were related to both cognitive and emotional processing.

Primary dysmenorrhea (PDM) is the most prevalent gynecological disorder for women in the reproductive age. PDM patients suffer from lower abdominal pain that starts with the onset of the menstrual flow. Prolonged nociceptive input to the central nervous system can induce functional and structural alterations throughout the nervous system. In PDM, a chronic viscero-nociceptive drive of cyclic nature, indications of central sensitization and altered brain metabolism suggest a substantial central reorganization. Previously, we hypothesized that disinhibition of orbitofrontal networks could be responsible for increased pain and negative affect in PDM. Here, we further tested this hypothesis. We used an optimized voxel-based morphometry (VBM) approach to compare total and regional gray matter (GM) increases and decreases in 32 PDM patients with 32 healthy age and menstrual cycle matched (peri-ovulatory phase) controls. Abnormal decreases were found in regions involved in pain transmission, higher level sensory processing, and affected regulation while increases were found in regions involved in pain modulation and in regulation of endocrine function. Moreover, GM changes in regions involved in top-down pain modulation and in generation of negative affect were related to the severity of the experienced PDM pain. Our results demonstrate that abnormal GM volume changes are present in PDM patients even in the absence of pain. These changes may underpin a combination of impaired pain inhibition, increased pain facilitation and increased affect. Our findings highlight that longer lasting central changes may occur not only in sustained chronic pain conditions but also in cyclic occurring pain conditions.

Background Bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) have distinct pathophysiologies but similar depressive appearances. The present study aimed at the differentiation of the brain responses between BD and MDD patients. We hypothesized that different affective disorder patients may have distinct patterns of oscillatory cortical activities in response to negative emotional stimuli. Methods Twenty BD patients, twenty MDD patients, and twenty age- and gender-matched healthy normal subjects were recruited. We adopted an implicit emotional task with facial image stimuli. The acquired event-related magnetoencephalographic signals were processed by the time-frequency analysis and beamformer-based source imaging techniques followed by statistical inference. Results We found that there were gamma oscillation decreases in the frontal regions of both BD and MDD patients, gamma oscillation increases in the bilateral temporal regions of MDD, and alpha-beta rhythm increases in BD patients. Relative to the cortical activation in the control group, the BD patients displayed more widely increased oscillatory activities over the fronto-parieto-occipital regions than MDD patients. Conclusions Our results demonstrate the distinct neuropathological patterns of emotional responses in BD and MDD patients. The findings suggest that the dysfunction of emotion regulation in BD may result from the increased sensitivity to emotionally salient information, implicating the potential cause of the emotion lability. The present study also suggests that the implicit emotional task is an effective approach to differentiate bipolar from unipolar disorders and their distinct neuropathological patterns to emotional stimuli may provide objective and quantitative measures for potential diagnostic significance.

Optimization of quality of life is an important goal in the management of patients with unresectable peri-ampullary cancer. Herein, we share our two cases to demonstrate the feasibility of scarless transumbilical single-incision laparoscopic cholecystojejunostomy using conventional instruments in the management of unresectable peri-ampullary cancer.Two 58-year-old patients (one male) underwent transumbilical single-incision laparoscopic cholecystojejunostomies: The male and female patients were diagnosed with duodenal papillary carcinoma and pancreatic cancer, respectively. The hepatocystic junction was confirmed patent preoperatively in both patients. A 2-cm periumbilical incision was made for the placement of three trocars. Conventional rigid laparoscopic instruments were solely used throughout the procedure, and operative techniques were carried out in the same fashion as for conventional laparoscopic cholecystojejunostomy.The procedures were completed uneventfully in 190 and 155 min, respectively, with no complications, and the blood loss was estimated at 80 and 20 ml, respectively. Postoperative pain scores on postoperative day 1 were 4/10 and 3/10. The patients were discharged from the hospital on postoperative days 3 and 5 with resolving jaundice.Transumbilical single-incision laparoscopic cholecystojejunostomy appears to be a technically feasible alternative to standard laparoscopic procedure and can be performed using conventional laparoscopic instruments.

Brain extraction from head magnetic resonance (MR) images is a classification problem of segmenting image volumes into brain and non-brain regions. It is a difficult task due to the convoluted brain surface and the inapparent brain/non-brain boundaries in images. This paper presents an automated, robust, and accurate brain extraction method which utilizes a new implicit deformable model to well represent brain contours and to segment brain regions from MR images. This model is described by a set of Wendland's radial basis functions (RBFs) and has the advantages of compact support property and low computational complexity. Driven by the internal force for imposing the smoothness constraint and the external force for considering the intensity contrast across boundaries, the deformable model of a brain contour can efficiently evolve from its initial state toward its target by iteratively updating the RBF locations. In the proposed method, brain contours are separately determined on 2D coronal and sagittal slices. The results from these two views are generally complementary and are thus integrated to obtain a complete 3D brain volume. The proposed method was compared to four existing methods, Brain Surface Extractor, Brain Extraction Tool, Hybrid Watershed Algorithm, and Model-based Level Set, by using two sets of MR images as well as manual segmentation results obtained from the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach outperformed these four methods when jointly considering extraction accuracy and robustness.

Objective Determining the means by which perceived stimuli are compactly represented in the human brain is a difficult task. This study aimed to develop techniques for the construction of the neural manifold as a representation of visual stimuli. Approach We propose a supervised locally linear embedding method to construct the embedded manifold from brain activity, taking into account similarities between corresponding stimuli. In our experiments, photographic portraits were used as visual stimuli and brain activity was calculated from magnetoencephalographic data using a source localization method. Main results The results of 10 × 10-fold cross-validation revealed a strong correlation between manifolds of brain activity and the orientation of faces in the presented images, suggesting that high-level information related to image content can be revealed in the brain responses represented in the manifold. Significance Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable to investigation into the inherent patterns of brain activity.

Background Lung cancer has been a major health problem in developed countries for several decades, and has emerged recently as the leading cause of cancer death in many developing countries. The incidence of lung cancer appears to be increasing more rapidly in rural than in urban areas of China. This paper presents the trends of lung cancer incidence and survival derived from a 40-year population-based cancer monitoring program in a rural area, Qidong, China. Materials and methods The Qidong cancer registration data of 1972- 2011 were used to calculate the crude rate, age-standardized rate by Chinese population (CASR) and by world population (WASR), birth cohort rates, and other descriptive features. Active and passive methods were used to construct the data set, with a deadline of the latest follow-up of April 30, 2012. Results The total number of lung cancer cases was 15,340, accounting for 16.5% of all sites combined. The crude incidence rate, CASR and WASR of this cancer were 34.1, 15.7 and 25.4 per 100,000, respectively. Males had higher crude rates than females (49.7 vs 19.0). Rapidly increasing trends were found in annual percent change resulting in lung cancer being a number one cancer site after year 2010 in Qidong. Birth cohort analysis showed incidence rates have increased for all age groups over 24 years old. The 5 year observed survival rates were 3.55% in 1973-1977, 3.92 in 1983-1987, 3.69% in 1993-1997, and 6.32% in 2003-2007. Males experienced poorer survival than did females. Conclusions Lung cancer has become a major cancer-related health problem in this rural area. The rapid increases in incidence likely result from an increased cigarette smoking rate and evolving environmental risk factors. Lung cancer survival, while showing some improvement in prognosis, still remains well below that observed in the developed areas of the world.

Background There have been few reports on long-term survival of gastric cancer patients. This study analyzed the survival data of gastric cancer patients obtained from the population-based Qidong Cancer Registry between 1972 and 2011, providing a basis for evaluation of gastric cancer treatment and prognosis. Methods The cumulative observed survival rate and relative survival rate of gastric cancer patients were calculated using Hakulinen’s method via the SURV3.01 software, which was developed by the Finnish Cancer Registry. The date of the last follow-up for the survival status of the 15,401 registered cases was April 30, 2012. Results The 1-, 5-, 10-, 20-, and 30-year observed survival rates were 33.82%, 14.18%, 10.35%, 6.63%, and 4.19%, respectively, and the 1-, 5-, 10-, 20-, and 30-year relative survival rates were 35.43%, 18.13%, 17.50%, 21.96%, and 32.84%, respectively. For males, the corresponding observed survival rates were 34.50%, 14.40%, 10.42%, 6.46%, and 4.05%, and the corresponding relative survival rates were 36.23%, 18.67%, 18.28%, 23.73%, and 38.61%. For females, the corresponding observed survival rates were 32.62%, 13.80%, 10.22%, 6.95%, and 4.46%, and the corresponding relative survival rates were 34.03%, 17.21%, 16.28%, 19.70%, and 26.78%. Significant differences in relative survival rates were observed between sexes (P = 0.003). For the 15–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, and 75+ age groups, the 5-year relative survival rates were 16.13%, 21.77%, 18.63%, 12.61%, 7.99%, and 2.94%, respectively, and the 10-year relative survival rates were 16.49%, 22.83%, 20.50%, 15.97%, 15.88%, and 15.73%, respectively. Remarkable improvement could be observed for the 5-, 10-, and 15-year relative survival rates in Qidong beginning in the 1980s. Conclusion The survival outcome of registered gastric cancer cases in Qidong showed gradual progress over the past two decades.

Phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) between neural oscillations of different frequencies plays a crucial role in cognitive processing. Assessing the PAC at both sensor and source levels may encounter the problem of spurious coupling because of the volume conduction, field spread, and source leakage. This paper presents a novel method, beamformer-based imaging of PAC (BIPAC), to estimate PAC between sources from electromagnetic signals. For each targeted brain region, this method can extract the source component with the maximum PAC to the reference signal. The results from two simulated MEG data sets demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve high localization accuracy and low spurious coupling.

The amygdala has been regarded as a key substrate for emotion processing. However, the engagement of the left and right amygdala during the early perceptual processing of different emotional faces remains unclear. We investigated the temporal profiles of oscillatory gamma activity in the amygdala and effective connectivity of the amygdala with the thalamus and cortical areas during implicit emotion-perceptual tasks using event-related magnetoencephalography (MEG). We found that within 100 ms after stimulus onset the right amygdala habituated to emotional faces rapidly (with duration around 20–30 ms), whereas activity in the left amygdala (with duration around 50–60 ms) sustained longer than that in the right. Our data suggest that the right amygdala could be linked to autonomic arousal generated by facial emotions and the left amygdala might be involved in decoding or evaluating expressive faces in the early perceptual emotion processing. The results of effective connectivity provide evidence that only negative emotional processing engages both cortical and subcortical pathways connected to the right amygdala, representing its evolutional significance (survival). These findings demonstrate the asymmetric engagement of bilateral amygdala in emotional face processing as well as the capability of MEG for assessing thalamo-cortico-limbic circuitry.

Visual decoding and encoding are crucial aspects in investigating the representation of visual information in the human brain. This paper proposes a bidirectional model for decoding and encoding of visual stimulus based on manifold representation of the temporal and spatial information extracted from magnetoencephalographic data. In the proposed decoding process, principal component analysis is applied to extract temporal principal components (TPCs) from the visual cortical activity estimated by a beamforming method. The spatial distribution of each TPC is in a high-dimensional space and can be mapped to the corresponding spatiotemporal component (STC) on a low-dimensional manifold. Once the linear mapping between the STC and the wavelet coefficients of the stimulus image is determined, the decoding process can synthesize an image resembling the stimulus image. The encoding process is performed by reversing the mapping or transformation in the decoding model and can predict the spatiotemporal brain activity from a stimulus image. In our experiments using visual stimuli containing eleven combinations of checkerboard patches, the information of spatial layout in the stimulus image was revealed in the embedded manifold. The correlation between the reconstructed and original images was 0.71 and the correlation map between the predicted and original brain activity was highly correlated to the map between the original brain activity for different stimuli (r = 0.89). These results suggest that the temporal component is important in visual processing and manifolds can well represent the information related to visual perception.

To study the trend of mortality changes on lung cancer during the period 1972 to 2011 in Qidong.Cancer registration data from 1972 - 2011 in Qidong was used to analyze the following information as: crude mortality rate (CR) of lung cancer, the age-standardized rates by China population (CASR) and the World population (WASR), the truncated mortality rate of 35 - 64, the accumulative rate of age from 0 to 74 years old, the accumulative risk, and the total percentage over all sites of cancers. The changes on the trend of mortality by gender, age and period were analyzed.The CR of lung cancer was 31.15 per 100 000 (males: 45.68, females: 16.95). While CASR and WASR were 14.04, and 22.95 per 100 000, respectively. The truncated rate was 31.82 per 100 000. Accumulative rate, accumulative risk, and total percentage were 2.93%, 2.89%, and 20.50% respectively. The mortality rate of lung cancer in males was significantly higher than that in females, with a sex ratio of 2.69:1. CRs increased remarkably with age among those 30-year-olds, with P value being 0.000. When compared with 9 periods of 1972, 1973 - 1977, 1978 - 1982, 1983 - 1987, 1988 - 1992, 1993 - 1997, 1998 - 2002, 2003 - 2007, and 2008 - 2011, the CRs, CASRs and WASRs increased 6.78-folds, 1.60-folds and 1.92-folds, respectively, with the average annual percentage changes (APC) as 4.78%, 1.86% and 2.04%, respectively.The mortality rate of lung cancer among residents during the last four decades in Qidong had been increasing remarkably, suggesting that special attention on lung cancer trend should be highly paid.

Functional connectivity calculated using multiple channels of electromagnetic brain signals is often over- or underestimated due to volume conduction or field spread. Considering connectivity measures, coherence is suitable for the detection of rhythmic synchronization, whereas temporal correlation is appropriate for transient synchronization. This paper presents a beamformer-based imaging method, called spatiotemporal imaging of linearly-related source component (SILSC), which is capable of estimating connectivity at the cortical level by extracting the source component with the maximum temporal correlation between the activity of each targeted region and a reference signal. The spatiotemporal correlation dynamics can be obtained by applying SILSC at every brain region and with various time latencies. The results of six simulation studies demonstrated that SILSC is sensitive to detect the source activity correlated to the specified reference signal and is accurate and robust to noise in terms of source localization. In a facial expression imitation experiment, the correlation dynamics estimated by SILSC revealed the regions with mirror properties and the regions involved in motor control network when performing the imitation and execution tasks, respectively, with the left inferior frontal gyrus specified as the reference region.

To describe and analyze the charecteristics and trends of liver cancer mortality during the past fifty years in Qidong, China.Retrospective mortality survey was conducted to get the data on liver cancer death in the period of 1958-1971, and the data from 1972 to 2007 were obtained from the records of cancer registration in Qidong. The crude mortality rate (CR) of liver cancer, and age-standardized rate by Chinese population (CASR) and by world population (WASR) were calculated and analyzed. The total percent changes (PC) and annual percent changes (APC) were used for evaluating the increasing trends of the mortality. The sex-specific rate, age-specific rate, truncated rate of the age group 35 - 64, cumulative rate of the age group 0-74, cumulative risk, period-rate, and the rate for age-birth cohort were compared.The natural death rate in Qidong residents for the past five-decade period experienced a wave interval of 8.62‰ in 1958 down to 5.37‰ in 1979, and up to 7.75‰ in 2007. The mortality rate for all-site cancers was increased from 56.69 per 100, 000 to 234.97 per 100, 000. The mortality rate of liver cancer, being 20.45 per 100, 100 in 1958 was increased to 49.04 per 100, 000 in 1972, and up to 69.29 per 100, 000 in 2007. According to the registration data of 1972 - 2007, the death from liver cancer was accounted for 34.88% of all deaths due to cancers, with a CR of 58.86 per 100, 000, CASR of 38.36 per 100, 000, and WASR, 49.37 Per 100, 000 in Qidong. The truncated rate for the age group 35 - 64 was 117.08 per 100, 000, and the cumulative rate for the age group 0-74 and the cumulative risk were 5.15% and 5.02%, respectively. The CRs for males was 90.52 per 100, 000 and for females was 27.93 per 100, 000, with a sex ratio of 3.24:1. For the period of 1972 - 2007, the PC for CR was 49.71%, and APC was +1.41%, showing an increasing variation tendency. The APCs for CASR and WASR, however, were decreasing, with a percentage of -1.11%, and -0.84%, respectively. The age-specific mortality rates by period showed a decreasing trend for those under age of 44. Moreover, age-birth cohort analysis showed a more rapid lowering mortality in the age groups 35-, 30-, 25-, and 15-, that is, those born after 1950's.Liver cancer remains the leading death cause due to cancers in Qidong, with a continuing higher crude mortality rate. Yet the age-standardized mortality rate has presented a declining posture. The liver cancer mortality in young people in Qidong demonstrates a continuously falling trend. The campaign for the control of liver cancer in Qidong has achieved initial success.

Independent component analysis (ICA) has been widely used to attenuate interference caused by noise components from the electromagnetic recordings of brain activity. However, the scalp topographies and associated temporal waveforms provided by ICA may be insufficient to distinguish functional components from artifactual ones. In this work, we proposed two component selection methods, both of which first estimate the cortical distribution of the brain activity for each component, and then determine the functional components based on the parcellation of brain activity mapped onto the cortical surface. Among all independent components, the first method can identify the dominant components, which have strong activity in the selected dominant brain regions, whereas the second method can identify those inter-regional associating components, which have similar component spectra between a pair of regions. For a targeted region, its component spectrum enumerates the amplitudes of its parceled brain activity across all components. The selected functional components can be remixed to reconstruct the focused electromagnetic signals for further analysis, such as source estimation. Moreover, the inter-regional associating components can be used to estimate the functional brain network. The accuracy of the cortical activation estimation was evaluated on the data from simulation studies, whereas the usefulness and feasibility of the component selection methods were demonstrated on the magnetoencephalography data recorded from a gender discrimination study.

Synchrony is a phenomenon of local-scale and long-range integrations within a brain circuit. Synchronous activities manifest themselves in similar temporal structures that can be statistically quantified by temporal correlation. In previous studies, synchronous activities were estimated by calculating the correlation coefficient or coherence between a single reference signal and the activity in a brain region. However, a brain circuit may involve multiple brain regions and these regions may communicate to each other through different temporal patterns. Therefore, temporal correlation to multiple reference signals is effective in quantify the source connectivities in the brain. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to calculate the maximum multiple-correlation for each brain region which has an activity estimated by a beamformer. Furthermore, this algorithm can accommodate various latencies of activities in a circuit. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately detect source activities correlated to the given multiple reference signals, even when unknown latencies exist between the source and references.

To develop a method to measure trihexyphenidyl, chlorpromazine and clozapine in human blood with GC-MS.The specimens were alkalized (pH10) and extracted with V (benzene):V(ethyl acetate) = 1:1, and qualitatively analyzed using GC-MS-Full Scan with internal standard SKF525A. The specimens were alkalized (pH10) and extracted with V(benzene):V(ethyl acetate) = 1:1, and quantitatively analyzed using GC-MS-SIM with internal standard diazepam-d5.The lowest detection limits of trihexyphenidyl, chlorpromazine and clozapine were 0.3, 0.3 and 0.7 ng/mL (S/Nor = 3) respectively. The calibration curve in 20-10 000 ng/mL showed a good linear distribution. The recovery rate was 79.9% to 85.5%. The RSDs of intraday and interday were less than 5.1%.The established method was simple, sensitive and accurate for simultaneous determination of trihexyphenidyl, chlorpromazine and clozapine in human blood, and can be applied in forensic toxicological cases.

Type I CD36 deficiency is defined by the absence of CD36 on both platelets and monocytes. Pseudothrombocytopenia (PTCP) is characterized by a false reduction in the number of platelets in ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA)-anticoagulated blood. Here we report a rare case of concomitant CD36 deficiency and PTCP. The patient was a 7-year-old boy who suffered comminuted fractures of the left humeral condyle. In the pre-operative examination, he was found to have thrombopenia and assumed to have idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. After immunotherapy and platelet transfusion, the platelet count remained low, suggesting that the patient was refractory to platelet transfusion. Serum was collected for the detection of platelet antibodies, and antibodies against CD36 were found. Flow cytometry verified the absence of CD36 on both the platelets and monocytes of this patient. However, the platelet count was normal when capillary blood smears were analysed; in addition, platelet coagulation was noted under the microscope when EDTA-anticoagulated peripheral blood was used. The patient underwent surgery without platelet transfusion and recovered uneventfully.

The clinical characteristics of 357 patients with hemoglobin H (HbH) disease from the Guangxi province of Southern China were studied. One hundred and ninety-one (53.3%) patients were diagnosed with HbH-Constant Spring, 19 were diagnosed with HbH Westmead. Ten patients were shown to have coinherited HbH-Constant Spring/QS with a β-thalassemia mutation. Coinheritance of the β-thalassemia gene does not alleviate anemia (8.2 ± 2.3 vs. 7.6 ± 1.7 g/dl, p = 0.276), or influence age at diagnosis (20.2 ± 19.6 vs. 12.9 ± 11.0 years, p = 0.276). Ferritin levels were significantly higher in the group of patients with the nondeletional form of the disease (475 ± 719 vs. 249 ± 264 ng/ml, p = 0.005).

Registration of magnetic resonance brain images is a geometric operation that determines point-wise correspondences between two brains. It remains a difficult task due to the highly convoluted structure of the brain. This paper presents novel methods, Brain Image Registration Tools (BIRT), that can rapidly and accurately register brain images by utilizing the brain structure information estimated from image derivatives. Source and target image spaces are related by affine transformation and non-rigid deformation. The deformation field is modeled by a set of Wendland’s radial basis functions hierarchically deployed near the salient brain structures. In general, nonlinear optimization is heavily engaged in the parameter estimation for affine/non-rigid transformation and good initial estimates are thus essential to registration performance. In this work, the affine registration is initialized by a rigid transformation, which can robustly estimate the orientation and position differences of brain images. The parameters of the affine/non-rigid transformation are then hierarchically estimated in a coarse-to-fine manner by maximizing an image similarity measure, the correlation ratio, between the involved images. T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance images were utilized for performance evaluation. Our experimental results using four 3-D image sets demonstrated that BIRT can efficiently align images with high accuracy compared to several other algorithms, and thus is adequate to the applications which apply registration process intensively. Moreover, a voxel-based morphometric study quantitatively indicated that accurate registration can improve both the sensitivity and specificity of the statistical inference results.

To investigate the efficacy and safety of adefovir dipivoxil (ADV) in treating hepatic cirrhosis complicated with hepatitis B virus associated glomerulonephritis.Six hepatic cirrhosis (Child-Pugh A grade, liver function compensated) patients complicated with hepatitis B virus associated glomerulonephritis diagnosed by renal biopsy, real time PCR and urinary protein tests were treated with ADV for one year in addition to a routine treatment. The dosage of ADV was 100mg daily.After 3 and 6 months treatment the negative conversion rates of HBV-DNA were 33.3% and 83.3%; the negative conversion rates of HBeAg were 16.7% and 66.7%; the positive conversion rates of HBeAb were both 16.7%; the recovery rates of ALT were 83.3% and 100.0%; and the recovery rates of TBil were 66.7% and 83.3% respectively. Protein in the urine of two patients was decreased to 0.3 g/d and in three patients it was 50% of the original values. After 1 year treatment the disease subsided fully in 3 and partially in 2 patients.Treating hepatic cirrhosis complicated with hepatitis B virus associated glomerulonephritis using adefovir dipivoxil is effective and safe.

To clarify the clinical significance of vibration-induced nystagmus (VIN) and to calculate the sensitivity and the specificity of the vibration test.One hundred and twelve patients with unilateral peripheral vestibular disorders and 30 normal subjects were enrolled into this study. However, patients with spontaneous nystagmus were excluded. Vibratory stimuli (approximately 92Hz) were presented to the mastoids and the forehead. Patients and normal subjects also underwent head shaking testing and caloric testing.Of the 112 patients, 91 (81%) showed VIN which were mainly horizontal. VIN was more frequently evoked on the mastoids than on the forehead. In the majority of patients (76 cases), the direction of VIN was toward the healthy side, whereas patients with Meniere's disease (15 cases), showed nystagmus toward the affected side. None of 30 normal subjects showed VIN. Whereas, HSN was found in 70 (63%) patients and 9 (30%) in normal subjects. Of 112 patients, 10 showed a canal paresis (CP) value of caloric test less than 25% ,while 32 with a CP value between 25% and 40%, 48 with a CP value between 40% and 70%, and 22 with a CP value more than 70%. It is notable that with increasing canal paresis value on caloric testing, VIN was more likely to be evoked.VIN testing is a simple, non-invasive and well-tolerated clinical test that indicates unilateral peripheral vestibular dysfunction. VIN testing had greater sensitivity and the specificity than HSN testing in the diagnosis of unilateral peripheral vestibular disorders.

Beamforming technique can be applied to map the neuronal activities from magnetoencephalographic/electroencephalographic (MEG/EEG) recordings. One of the major difficulties of the scalar-type MEG/EEG beamformer is the determination of accurate dipole orientation, which is essential to an effective spatial filter. This paper presents a new beamforming technique which exploits a maximum contrast criterion to maximize the ratio of the neuronal activity estimated in a specified active state to the activity estimated in a control state. This criterion leads to a closed-form solution of the dipole orientation. Experiments with simulation, phantom, and finger-lifting data clearly demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and accuracy of the proposed method.

The block-matching method plays an important role in displacement field estimation due to its simplicity, achievement of long-range motion, and robustness to noise. In this paper, a single-layer feedback neural network model is proposed that enhances block matching, estimates the displacement field, and simultaneously performs image segmentation from consecutive images. In this paper, image segmentation is defined as partitioning each image into a set of moving objects and the background. For any two consecutive images, a neural network is created that learns the connection relationship of the pixels in an object from the displacement field and stores the relationship in the network. A modified block matching is used to compute a more accurate displacement field by utilizing the segmentation information embedded in the neural network. The displacement vector at the edge of an object or occluding boundary is hard to estimate, but the proposed model performs satisfactorily because it learns and uses the connection information. Furthermore, a flood-fill algorithm is used to compute the dense displacement field more efficiently and correctly than the exhaustive search does. The most important aspect of this paper is that image segmentation is performed simultaneously with the displacement-field estimation by the neural-network model. The novel idea of the work is to embed the segmentation information (connection relations) in the neural network and to perform the displacement-field estimation and image segmentation simultaneously. Two methods for retrieving segmentation information from the neural network with any two consecutive images are also presented.

Background Based on data from the population-based Qidong Cancer Registry, we report a survival analysis for female breast cancer patients diagnosed during 1972–2011 in order to assess the long-term trends for the prognosis of this cancer. Methods The last follow-up for survival status of the 3,398 registered female breast cancer cases was April, 2012. Cumulative observed survival (OS) and relative survival (RS) rates were calculated using Hakulinen’s method performed by the SURV3.01 Software developed at the Finnish Cancer Registry. Results The one-, three-, five-, ten-, fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-, and forty- year OS rates were 83.61%, 67.53%, 58.75%, 48.56%, 42.57%, 38.30%, 29.19%, 19.35%; and the RS rates were 84.76%, 70.45%, 63.12%, 56.81%, 55.26%, 56.36%, 62.59%, 84.00%, respectively. Five-year RS rates of age groups 15–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, and 75+ were 60.17%, 68.27%, 67.79%, 56.03%, 55.50%, and 57.28%; 10-year RS rates were 54.16%, 59.59%, 61.34%, 47.78%, 51.30%, and 59.28%, respectively. There were statistical differences among the age groups (RS: χ2 = 152.15, P = 0.000). Remarkable improvement could be seen for the 5-year RS rates from 52.08% in 1972 to 69.26% in 2003–2007, and the 10-year RS rates from 43.16% in 1972 to 60.85% in 1998–2002, respectively. Conclusions Survival outcomes from Qidong registered cases with breast cancer have shown gradual progress during the past 40 years. The disparities between survival rates of this area and developed countries are getting narrower, but there is still great need for improving survival in Qidong.