Search

Internal flesh breakdown (IFB), a serious physiological disorder of mango fruit, causes significant economic losses in Southwest China. We investigated the extent of IFB in 100 mango orchards and how changes in the mineral nutrients of fruit flesh, leaves and soil affect IFB. We found that 76% of the mango orchards showed IFB symptoms, and the average IFB incidence was 10%. Fruit flesh with IFB showed higher average contents of N, P, K and Mg, lower average Ca content and higher average ratios of N/Ca, K/Ca and Mg/Ca. The leaves from orchards with IFB symptoms exhibited a remarkable increase in the average N and Mg contents. No significant difference was observed in the soil nutrient concentrations between orchards with and without IFB fruit. IFB incidence was significantly positively correlated with the N/Ca, K/Ca and Mg/Ca ratios in the fruit flesh. However, when considering individual orchards with IFB symptoms, fruit flesh that exhibited breakdown symptoms had Ca content higher, lower than or equal to that of the healthy fruit flesh. There was a strong correlation between fruit flesh and leaf in the same mineral elements, but neither of them showed a significant correlation with soil. Considering the mango trees were cultivated on steep slopes, and fertilizer was applied at a fixed position, we hypothesized that long-term fertilization in the partial root zone led to the excess of N, K and Mg in soil, which reduced the total flesh Ca content or resulted in the abnormal cellular distribution of Ca in the flesh, and ultimately triggered IFB development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is the main method to detect human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) expression levels. However, IHC is invasive and cannot reflect HER2 expression status in real time. The aim of this study was to construct and verify three types of radiomics models based on 18F-fuorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) imaging and to evaluate the predictive ability of these radiomics models for the expression status of HER2 in patients with gastric cancer (GC). Patients and Methods: A total of 118 patients with GC were enrolled in this study. 18F-FDG PET/CT imaging was performed prior to surgery. The LIFEx software package was applied to extract PET and CT radiomics features. The minimum absolute contraction and selection operator (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator [LASSO]) algorithm was used to select the best radiomics features. Three machine learning methods, logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF) models, were constructed and verified. The Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) was applied to address data imbalance. Results: In the training and test sets, the area under the curve (AUC) values of the LR, SVM, and RF models were 0.809, 0.761, 0.861 and 0.628, 0.993, 0.717, respectively, and the Brier scores were 0.118, 0.214, and 0.143, respectively. Among the three models, the LR and RF models exhibited extremely good prediction performance. The AUC values of the three models significantly improved after SMOTE balanced the data. Conclusions:18F-FDG PET/CT-based radiomics models, especially LR and RF models, demonstrate good performance in predicting HER2 expression status in patients with GC and can be used to preselect patients who may benefit from HER2-targeted therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Pearl River Origin area, Qujing District of Yunnan Province, has one of the highest female lung cancer mortality rates in China. Smoking was excluded as a cause of the lung cancer excess because almost all women were non-smokers. Crystalline silica embedded in the soot emissions from coal combustion was found to be associated with the lung cancer risk in a geographical correlation study. Lung cancer rates tend to be higher in places where the Late Permian C1 coal is produced. Therefore, we have hypothesized the two processes: C1 coal combustion --> nanoquartz in ambient air --> lung cancer excess in non-smoking women., Methods/design: We propose to conduct a retrospective cohort study to test the hypothesis above. We will search historical records and compile an inventory of the coal mines in operation during 1930-2009. To estimate the study subjects' retrospective exposure, we will reconstruct the historical exposure scenario by burning the coal samples, collected from operating or deserted coal mines by coal geologists, in a traditional firepit of an old house. Indoor air particulate samples will be collected for nanoquartz and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) analyses. Bulk quartz content will be quantified by X-ray diffraction analysis. Size distribution of quartz will be examined by electron microscopes and by centrifugation techniques. Lifetime cumulative exposure to nanoquartz will be estimated for each subject. Using the epidemiology data, we will examine whether the use of C1 coal and the cumulative exposure to nanoquartz are associated with an elevated risk of lung cancer., Discussion: The high incidence rate of lung cancer in Xuan Wei, one of the counties in the current study area, was once attributed to high indoor air concentrations of PAHs. The research results have been cited for qualitative and quantitative cancer risk assessment of PAHs by the World Health Organization and other agencies. If nanoquartz is found to be the main underlying cause of the lung cancer epidemic in the study area, cancer potency estimates for PAHs by the international agencies based on the lung cancer data in this study setting should then be updated.