Three Birds with one stone: A single AIEgen for dual-organelle imaging, cell viability evaluation and photodynamic cancer cell ablation

Fully understanding the relationship among various organelles and cell viability is great important to clarify the mechanism of cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, the development of a single fluorescent probe...

Subcutaneous Vulvar Flap Viability Evaluation With Near-Infrared Probe and Indocyanine Green for Vulvar Cancer Reconstructive Surgery: A Feasible Technique

Introduction: Vulvar cancer is a rare condition affecting older women and accounts for 3–5% of all gynecological cancers. Primary surgical treatment involves the removal of a large amount of tissue for which reconstructive surgery is often necessary with a high rate of postoperative complications. Despite several techniques for the evaluation of vulvar flap viability have been proposed, many methods cannot be performed during surgery and require expensive devices often missing in a gynecological clinic. This study aims to verify the feasibility and the safety of the vulvar flap viability evaluation through a near-infrared endoscopic probe and Indocyanine green (ICG) tracer in a small group of patients and to evaluate long-term vulvar flap outcomes.Methods: Patients with primary vulvar cancer who required surgical treatment and subsequent vulvar flap reconstructive surgery were prospectively included in the study. A 25 mg ICG vial diluted in 20 ml of saline solution was intravenously infused before closing the skin edges of the flaps. All patients were given 0.2 mg/kg body weight of intravenous ICG. After 10–15 min, a near-infrared endoscopic probe was used to evaluate the vulvar flap viability.Results: Of the 18 patients who underwent radical vulvectomy for vulvar cancer during the study period, 15 were included in the analysis. All packaged surgical flaps showed tracer uptake on the surgical margin. No intro-operative complications were recorded neither surgery-related nor to dye infusion. No surgical infection, dehiscence, or necrosis was recorded.Conclusions: Vulvar flap viability assessment using Indocyanine green and a laparoscopic infrared probe is a feasible method. All cases included in the analysis showed a dye uptake on the surgical edge of the flap. Further, prospective studies are needed to confirm the method in clinical practice and to evaluate its superiority over simple subjective clinical evaluation.

Improving Stability and Accuracy of Cell Viability Evaluation by Fusion of Impedance Spectroscopy Information

The increasing attention to precision medicine is widely paid in order to greatly improve the cure rate of cancer. Improving the stability and accuracy of cell viability evaluation is the key of precision medicine, for excess dosage of anti-cancer drugs not only kills the cancer cells, but also does harm to normal cells. Electrochemical impedance sensing (EIS) method is widely accepted as a label-free, non-invasive approach for real-time, online monitoring of cell viability. Due to the large effects of many influencing factors, the existing EIS methods that utilized single-frequency impedances show poor stability and low accuracy of cell viability evaluation. In this paper, we proposed a multi-physical information fusion method based on least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) for improving the stability and accuracy of cell viability evaluation. The results show that the mean relative error of single-frequency method is about 0.08, while that of fusion method is about 0.04. It means that the prediction results of fusion method are more accurate than that of the single-frequency method. Moreover, the maximum relative error of single-frequency method is up to 0.5 due to the influencing of cell micromotion, while that of fusion method is below 0.07, showing that the fusion method is more stable than single-frequency method.

Viability of polyamide 12 intramedullary rods coated with hydroxyapatite in experimentally induced fractures in young roosters (white Plymouth rock)

The present study aimed the viability evaluation of solid intramedullary rods made with polyamide 12 and coated with hydroxyapatite in experimentally osteotomized humerus of young roosters (white Plymouth rock). Sixteen animals of 45 days old each were used. After general anesthesia, they underwent to complete transverse osteotomy of the right humerus diaphysis to implant the already described rods which filled the entire length of the medullary cavity and were fixed by two cortical stainless steel screws in each bone fragment. The surgical technique was well succeeded without any trans-operative intercurrence. Through clinical and radiographic examination, it was observed that soon after the anesthesia recovery, six rods (37,5%) broke next to the fracture focus and the same was noticed with the others (62,5%) on seventh day post-surgery. Based on the obtained results, it can be hypothesized that polyamide 12 rods resistance could have been affected by all the thermal stages necessary to its incorporation with hydroxyapatite. Furthermore, the roosters’ age may also have contributed to adverse outcomes. However, future researches will be necessary to confirm those hypotheses.