Automated lymph node (LN) recognition and segmentation from cross-sectional medical images is an important step for the automated diagnostic assessment of patients with cancer. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/elacridar-gf120918.html Yet, it is still a difficult task owing to the low contrast of LNs and surrounding soft tissues as well as due to the variation in nodal size and shape. In this paper, we present a novel LN segmentation method based on a newly designed neural network for positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) images. This work communicates two problems involved in LN segmentation task. Firstly, an efficient loss function named cosine-sine (CS) is proposed for the voxel class imbalance problem in the convolution network training process. Second, a multi-stage and multi-scale Atrous (Dilated) spatial pyramid pooling sub-module, named MS-ASPP, is introduced to the encoder-decoder architecture (SegNet), which aims to make use of multi-scale information to improve the performance of LN segmentation. The new architecture is named DiSegNet (Dilated SegNet). Four-fold cross-validation is performed on 63 PET/CT data sets. In each experiment, 10 data sets are selected randomly for testing and the other 53 for training. The results show that we reach an average 77 % Dice similarity coefficient score with CS loss function by trained DiSegNet, compared to a baseline method SegNet by cross-entropy (CE) with 71 % Dice similarity coefficient. The performance of the proposed DiSegNet with CS loss function suggests its potential clinical value for disease quantification.The performance of the proposed DiSegNet with CS loss function suggests its potential clinical value for disease quantification. While recent studies have introduced the composite measure of a textbook outcome (TO) for measuring postoperative outcomes, the incidence of a TO has not been characterized among patients undergoing cytoreductive surgery (CRS) for peritoneal surface malignancies (PSM). All patients who underwent CRS±hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) between 1999 and 2017 from 12 institutions were included. A TO was defined as the absence of any of the following criteria completeness of cytoreduction >1, reoperation within 90-days, readmission within 90-days, mortality within 90-days, any grade ≥2 complication, hospital stay >75th percentile, and non-home discharge. Among 1904 patients who underwent CRS, only 30.9% achieved a TO while 69.1% failed to achieve a TO most commonly because of postoperative complications. On multivariable analysis, factors associated with achieving a TO were age <65 years (OR 1.5), albumin ≥3.5g/dl (OR 5.7), receipt of HIPEC (OR 4.5), PCI ≤14 (OR 2.2), intravenous fluid volume ≤10,000ml (OR 2.1), blood loss ≤1000ml (OR 4.2) and operative time <7h (OR 1.9); while receipt of neoadjuvant therapy (OR 0.7) and liver resection (OR 0.4) were associated with not achieving a TO (all p<0.05). TO was associated with improved overall survival (median 159 months vs 56 months, p<0.01) even after controlling for confounders on Cox regression (hazard ratio 2.5, p<0.01). Among patients undergoing CRS±HIPEC for PSM, failure to achieve a TO is common and independently associated with worse overall survival.Among patients undergoing CRS ± HIPEC for PSM, failure to achieve a TO is common and independently associated with worse overall survival.Major type of internal can coating used for food and beverages is made from epoxy resins, which contain among their components bisphenol A (BPA) or bisphenol A diglycidyl ether (BADGE). These components can be released and contaminate the food or beverage. There is no specific European legislation for coatings, but there is legislation on specific substances setting migration limits. Many investigations have paid attention to BPA due to its classification as endocrine disruptor, however, few studies are available concerning to other bisphenol analogues that have been used in the manufacture of these resins. To evaluate the presence of this family of compounds, ten cans of beverages were taken as study samples. Firstly, the type of coating was verified using an attenuated total reflectance-FTIR spectrometer to check the type of coating presents in most of the samples examined. A screening method was also performed to investigate potential volatiles from polymeric can coatings of beverages using Purge and Trap w intake of bisphenols from beverages.The compositional and stereochemical heterogeneity of copolymers are key molecular metrics, and their knowledge is of pivotal importance for evidence based material development. Yet, while it is state of the art to determine these parameters for many petroleum based polymers, little insight exists in that regard for bio-based materials. Towards this end, size exclusion chromatography (SEC) was hyphenated with nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) in an offline manner and a blend of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and poly(butylene succinate-co-adipate) (PBSA) investigated. Thus, the microstructural heterogeneity could be shown with regard to tacticity of the PLA and regioregularity of the PBSA component. The results show, that the highest molar mass fraction differs in stereochemical composition from the others. It may be assumed that this is the result of misinsertions with regard to stereochemistry occurring during the catalytic polymerization of the lactide. While the content of both constituent polymers along the molar mass axis could be well studied using a univariate analysis of the infrared (IR) spectra, this method failed to profile the adipate and succinate content individually. For this purpose, SEC was coupled to IR spectroscopy in online mode and the spectra were evaluated by a multivariate protocol. Thus, the content of each monomer along the molar mass distribution could be mapped with high chromatographic resolution.An effective sample pretreatment method followed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) was first developed for simultaneous determination of five antiviral drug residues including ribavirin, moroxydine, amantadine, rimantadine and memantine in honey. To adsorb analytes with different binding properties and overcome the interference of sugars and uridine as endogenous ribavirin structural analogs in honey, the target drugs were extracted with 1% formic acid and then purified by a phenylboronic acid (PBA) solid phase extraction cartridge using two-step fraction capture prior to LC-MS/MS analysis. This method was validated by analyzing honey samples from nine floral origins including miscellaneous flowers, citrus, vitex, rape, acacia, sunflower, linden, buckwheat and jujube spiking at multiple levels, and the recoveries ranged from 82.46% to 116.34%, with relative standard deviations (RSDs) less than 14.58%. The limits of detection (LODs) and limits of quantitation (LOQs) of moroxydine, ribavirin, amantadine, rimantadine, and memantine were 0.