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Purpose: To describe the real‐world treatment patterns of systemic therapies for biliary tract cancer (BTC) and to examine the frequency and management of biliary infection in Japan. Methods: Patients diagnosed with BTC and prescribed systemic therapy between January 2011 and September 2020 were retrieved from the Japanese Medical Data Vision database. The look‐back period was set to 5 years. Patient characteristics, treatment patterns, and biliary infection‐induced treatment interruption were analyzed. Results: The full analysis set comprised 22 742 patients with a mean age of 71.0 years and 61.6% were male. The most common BTC type was extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (44.6%). The three most common first‐line regimens were S‐1 monotherapy (33.0%), gemcitabine+cisplatin (32.5%), and gemcitabine monotherapy (18.7%) over the entire observation period (January 2011–September 2021). Patients who received monotherapies tended to be older. Biliary infection‐induced treatment interruption occurred in 29.5% of patients, with a median time to onset of 64.0 (interquartile range 29.0–145.0) days. The median duration of intravenous antibiotics was 12.0 (interquartile range 4.0–92.0) days. Conclusions: These results demonstrated potential challenges of BTC in Japanese clinical practice particularly use of multiple regimens, commonly monotherapies, which are not recommended as first‐line treatment, and the management of biliary infections during systemic therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a perceptual system for natural communication between a partner robot and a human. The prediction is very important to reduce the computational cost and to extract the perceptual information for the natural communication with a human in the future. First, we propose a prediction-based perceptual control system based on spiking neurons. The proposed method is composed of four layers, namely: 1) input layer; 2) clustering layer; 3) prediction layer; and 4) perceptual module selection layer. Next, we propose an unsupervised learning method to perform the clustering of human behavior patterns. Furthermore, the robot selects perceptual modules used in the next perception according to the predicted perceptual mode. Furthermore, we show several experimental results of the communication between a partner robot and a human based on our proposed method. Index Terms--Cooperative systems, Hebbian learning, intelligent robots, neural networks, prediction methods, unsupervised learning, visual system.

Purpose: To describe the real-world treatment patterns of systemic therapies for biliary tract cancer (BTC) and to examine the frequency and management of biliary infection in Japan., Methods: Patients diagnosed with BTC and prescribed systemic therapy between January 2011 and September 2020 were retrieved from the Japanese Medical Data Vision database. The look-back period was set to 5 years. Patient characteristics, treatment patterns, and biliary infection-induced treatment interruption were analyzed., Results: The full analysis set comprised 22 742 patients with a mean age of 71.0 years and 61.6% were male. The most common BTC type was extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (44.6%). The three most common first-line regimens were S-1 monotherapy (33.0%), gemcitabine+cisplatin (32.5%), and gemcitabine monotherapy (18.7%) over the entire observation period (January 2011-September 2021). Patients who received monotherapies tended to be older. Biliary infection-induced treatment interruption occurred in 29.5% of patients, with a median time to onset of 64.0 (interquartile range 29.0-145.0) days. The median duration of intravenous antibiotics was 12.0 (interquartile range 4.0-92.0) days., Conclusions: These results demonstrated potential challenges of BTC in Japanese clinical practice particularly use of multiple regimens, commonly monotherapies, which are not recommended as first-line treatment, and the management of biliary infections during systemic therapy., (© 2024 The Authors. Journal of Hepato‐Biliary‐Pancreatic Sciences published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Japanese Society of Hepato‐Biliary‐Pancreatic Surgery.)