Prognostic nomogram for recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma after liver transplantation for decision making on postoperative adjuvant therapy.

It is well-documented that early recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma following liver transplantation can markedly impact patient survival. Accurately identifying patients at risk for early recurrence, followed by timely interventions, could greatly improve the long-term efficacy of liver transplantation. The Milan criteria, the clinical gold standard for selecting patients with a low risk of post-transplant recurrence, fails to exclude high-risk patients with biologically aggressive hepatocellular carcinoma.

Self-supervised suppression of MRI cardiac device artifacts based on multi-instance contrastive learning and anisotropic spatiotemporal transformer.

Cardiovascular implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) induce severe off-resonance artifacts in balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) cine MRI, limiting diagnostic utility for a growing patient population. While supervised and unpaired learning methods have shown promise for artifact suppression, their reliance on paired ground truth or artifact-free domains renders them clinically impractical for CIED imaging. To address this, we propose a self-supervised framework that integrates Noise2Noise, physics-driven multi-instance contrastive learning, and an anisotropic spatiotemporal transformer to eliminate the need for clean data.

Traditional Chinese Medicine for Anti-Arrhythmias: Mechanisms via Potassium Channels.

Cardiac arrhythmia is a common life-threatening cardiovascular disorder. Potassium channels play a crucial role in cardiac electrophysiology, and their dysfunction is closely associated with the occurrence and development of arrhythmia. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a long-standing history of treating various diseases, including arrhythmia and offers a rich source of compounds for anti-arrhythmic drugs.

AX-024 Inhibits Antigen-Specific T-Cell Response and Improves Intracerebral Hemorrhage Outcomes in Mice.

Background: Stroke-induced opposite T-cell responses in the peri-lesion area and periphery worsen stroke outcomes by aggravating brain injury or increasing infectious complications, respectively. Despite their well-known role in T lymphocyte activation, the impact of TCRs (T-cell receptors) on stroke remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the causal link between TCRs and the opposite T-cell responses observed in intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH).

A novel c.1468 G > A GRN mutation causes frontotemporal dementia in a Chinese Han family.

Background/purpose: GRN mutations act as causative factors in patients with FTD clinical phenotype or FTD pathology and exhibit high clinical heterogeneity. The discovery of these mutations and the analysis of their associations with resembling Alzheimer's disease should be critical to understand the pathogenesis of FTD.

Methods: Clinical analysis, neuroimaging, target region capture and high-throughput sequencing were performed in a family of 3 generations.

Proteome-Wide Association Study for Finding Druggable Targets in Progression and Onset of Parkinson's Disease.

Objective: To identify and validate causal protein targets that may serve as potential therapeutic interventions for both the onset and progression of Parkinson's disease (PD) through integrative proteomic and genetic analyses.

Method: We utilized large-scale plasma and brain protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) datasets from the deCODE Health study and the Religious Orders Study/Rush Memory and Aging Project (ROS/MAP), respectively. Proteome-wide association studies (PWAS) were conducted using the OTTERS framework for plasma proteins and the FUSION tool for brain proteins, examining associations with PD onset and three progression phenotypes: composite, motor, and cognitive.

Improve myocardial strain estimation based on deformable groupwise registration with a locally low-rank dissimilarity metric.

Background: Current mainstream cardiovascular magnetic resonance-feature tracking (CMR-FT) methods, including optical flow and pairwise registration, often suffer from the drift effect caused by accumulative tracking errors. Here, we developed a CMR-FT method based on deformable groupwise registration with a locally low-rank (LLR) dissimilarity metric to improve myocardial tracking and strain estimation accuracy.

Methods: The proposed method, Groupwise-LLR, performs feature tracking by iteratively updating the entire displacement field across all cardiac phases to minimize the sum of the patchwise signal ranks of the deformed movie.

Robust Fast Inter-Bin Image Registration for Undersampled Coronary MRI Based on a Learned Motion Prior.

Objective: To propose a 3D nonrigid registration method that accurately estimates the 3D displacement field from artifact-corrupted Coronary Magnetic Resonance Angiography (CMRA) images.

Methods: We developed a novel registration framework for registration of artifact-corrupted images based on a 3D U-Net initializer and a deep unrolling network. By leveraging a supervised learning framework with training labels estimated from fully-sampled images, the unrolling network learns a task-specific motion prior which reduces motion estimation biases caused by undersampling artifacts in the source images.

The predictive value of -glutamyl transferase to serum albumin ratio in hepatocellular carcinoma patients after liver transplantation.

Background: Elevated preoperative γ-glutamyl transferase (GGT) levels or reduced serum albumin levels have been established as negative prognostic factors for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and various other tumors. Nonetheless, the prognostic significance of the GGT to serum albumin ratio (GAR) in liver transplantation (LT) therapy for HCC is still not well-defined.

Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on the clinical data of 141 HCC patients who underwent LT at Shulan (Hangzhou) Hospital from June 2017 to November 2020.

Presenilin2 D439A Mutation Induces Dysfunction of Mitochondrial Fusion/Fission Dynamics and Abnormal Regulation of GTPase Activity.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an age-related progressive neurodegenerative disease, and approximately 10% of AD cases are early-onset familial AD (EOFAD), which is mainly linked to point mutations in genes encoding presenilins (PS1 and PS2). Mutations in PS2 are extremely rare and have not received enough attention. Recently, studies have found that Rho GTPase activity is closely related to the pathogenesis of AD.

C-kit controls blood-brain barrier permeability by regulating caveolae-mediated transcytosis after chronic cerebral hypoperfusion.

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction plays a pivotal role in the pathology of chronic cerebral hypoperfusion (CCH)-related neurodegenerative diseases. Continuous endothelial cells (EC) that line the blood vessels of the brain are important components of the BBB to strictly control the flow of substances and maintain the homeostatic environment of the brain. However, the molecular mechanisms from the perspective of EC-induced BBB dysfunction after CCH are largely unknown.

A Chinese SCA36 pedigree analysis of expansion region based on long-read sequencing.

Spinocerebellar ataxias 36 (SCA36) is the neurodegenerative disease caused by the GGCCTG Hexanucleotide repeat expansions in , which is too long to sequence using short-read sequencing. Single molecule real time (SMRT) sequencing can sequence across disease-causing repeat expansion. We report the first long-read sequencing data across the expansion region in SCA36.

Phenome-wide analysis identifies parent-of-origin effects on the human methylome associated with changes in the rate of aging.

Variation in the rate at which humans age may be rooted in early life events acting through genomic regions that are influenced by such events and subsequently are related to health phenotypes in later life. The parent-of-origin-effect (POE)-regulated methylome includes regions either enriched for genetically controlled imprinting effects (the typical type of POE) or atypical POE introduced by environmental effects associated with parents. This part of the methylome is heavily influenced by early life events, making it a potential route connecting early environmental exposures, the epigenome and the rate of aging.

VCAM1 Drives Vascular Inflammation Leading to Continuous Cortical Neuronal Loss Following Chronic Cerebral Hypoperfusion.

Background: Chronic cerebral hypoperfusion (CCH) is associated with neuronal loss and blood-brain barrier (BBB) impairment in vascular dementia (VaD). However, the relationship and the molecular mechanisms between BBB dysfunction and neuronal loss remain elusive.

Objective: We explored the reasons for neuron loss following CCH.

Novel PSEN1 (P284S) Mutation Causes Alzheimer's Disease with Cerebellar Amyloid β-Protein Deposition.

Background/objective: AD-associated PSEN1 mutations exhibit high clinical heterogeneity. The discovery of these mutations and the analysis of their associations with cases such as EOAD should be critical to understanding AD's pathogenesis.

Methods: We performed clinical analysis, neuroimaging, target region capture and high-throughput sequencing, and Sanger sequencing in a family of 3 generations.

Both the Complexity of Tight Junctions and Endothelial Transcytosis Are Increased During BBB Postnatal Development in Rats.

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) comprises a single layer of endothelial cells and maintains a safe and homeostatic environment for proper neuronal function and synaptic transmission. BBB is not a discrete physical barrier, but a complex, dynamic, and adaptable interface. BBB continues to mature under the influence of the neural environment within a short period of time after birth.

De novo Mutation Enables NOTCH3ECD Aggregation and Mitochondrial Dysfunction via Interactions with BAX and BCL-2.

Background: Cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL) caused by NOTCH3 mutations is the most common monogenic hereditary pattern of cerebral small vessel disease. The aggregation of the mutant NOTCH3 may play a cytotoxic role in CADASIL. However, the main mechanism of this process remains unclear.

Reduction in pericyte coverage leads to blood-brain barrier dysfunction via endothelial transcytosis following chronic cerebral hypoperfusion.

Background: Chronic cerebral hypoperfusion (CCH) is the leading cause of cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD). CCH is strongly associated with blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction and white matter lesions (WMLs) in CSVD. However, the effects of CCH on BBB integrity and components and the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of BBB dysfunction remain elusive.

Synthesis, structure and physical properties of the new layered oxyselenides BiLnOCuSe (Ln = rare earth).

We have synthesized a new series of layered oxyselenides BiLnOCuSe (Ln=Nd, Sm, Eu, Dy, Er, Yb). Their crystal structures and physical properties were studied through X-ray diffraction, electric transport measurements, bulk magnetization and first-principle calculation. All these compounds have a tetragonal structure with space group I4/mmm.