Blood Flow and Shear Stress Allow Monitoring of Progression and Prognosis of Tumor Diseases

Shear Stress Induces a Time-Dependent Inflammatory Response in Human Monocyte-Derived Macrophages

Macrophages are innate immune cells that are known for their extreme plasticity, enabling diverse phenotypes that lie on a continuum. In a simplified model, they switch between pro-inflammatory (M1) and anti-inflammatory (M2) phenotypes depending on surrounding microenvironmental cues, which have been implicated in disease outcomes. Although considerable research has been focused on macrophage response to biochemical cues and mechanical signals, there is a scarcity of knowledge surrounding their behavior in response to shear stress. In this study, we applied varying magnitudes of shear stress on human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) using a cone-and-plate viscometer and evaluated changes in morphology, gene expression, protein expression, and cytokine secretion over time. MDMs exposed to shear stress exhibited a rounder morphology compared to statically-cultured controls. RT-qPCR results showed significant upregulation of TNF-α, and analysis of cytokine release revealed increased secretion of IL-8, IL-18, fractalkine, and other chemokines. The upregulation of pro-inflammatory factors was evident with both increasing magnitudes of shear and time. Taken together, these results indicate that prolonged shear exposure induced a pro-inflammatory phenotype in human MDMs. These findings have implications for medical technology development, such as in situ vascular graft design wherein macrophages are exposed to shear and have been shown to affect graft resorption, and in delineating disease pathophysiology, for example to further illuminate the role of macrophages in atherosclerosis where shear is directly related to disease outcome.

Mesh neural networks for SE(3)-equivariant hemodynamics estimation on the artery wall

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a valuable asset for patient-specific cardiovascular-disease diagnosis and prognosis, but its high computational demands hamper its adoption in practice. Machine-learning methods that estimate blood flow in individual patients could accelerate or replace CFD simulation to overcome these limitations. In this work, we consider the estimation of vector-valued quantities on the wall of three-dimensional geometric artery models. We employ group-equivariant graph convolution in an end-to-end SE(3)-equivariant neural network that operates directly on triangular surface meshes and makes efficient use of training data. We run experiments on a large dataset of synthetic coronary arteries and find that our method estimates directional wall shear stress (WSS) with an approximation error of 7.6% and normalised mean absolute error (NMAE) of 0.4% while up to two orders of magnitude faster than CFD. Furthermore, we show that our method is powerful enough to accurately predict transient, vector-valued WSS over the cardiac cycle while conditioned on a range of different inflow boundary conditions. These results demonstrate the potential of our proposed method as a plugin replacement for CFD in the personalised prediction of hemodynamic vector and scalar fields.

Ovarian Causes of Pseudomyxoma Peritonei (PMP)-A Literature Review

BACKGROUND

Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP) is a rare, progressive, slowly growing, inadequately understood neoplasm with a 5-year progression-free survival rate of as low as 48%. It is characterized by varying degrees of malignancy and the production of mucinous and gelatinous structures. Typically, the development of pseudomyxoma peritonei is associated with the rupture of appendiceal mucinous tumors and other gastrointestinal or ovarian mucinous tumors. The goal of our literature review was to identify various aspects that characterize the ovarian causes of pseudomyxoma peritonei.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The authors performed an extensive literature search between 1 February 2024 and 2 March 2024 on the following databases: Pubmed, Scopus, Oxford Journals, and Reaxys, and the findings were summarized into seven main clinical and paraclinical situations.

RESULTS

According to our research, the main instances in which pseudomyxoma peritonei can be triggered by an ovarian cause are the following: (1) mucinous cystadenoma; (2) mucinous ovarian cancer; (3) colon cancer with ovarian metastasis; (4) malignant transformation of an ovarian primary mature cystic teratoma; (5) appendiceal mucocele with peritoneal dissemination mimicking an ovarian tumor with peritoneal carcinomatosis; (6) mucinous borderline tumor developing inside an ovarian teratoma; and (7) the association between a mucinous bilateral ovarian cancer and a colonic tumor.

CONCLUSIONS

In our study, we aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the ovarian causes of pseudomyxoma peritonei, including its epidemiology, imagery characteristics, symptoms, current treatment, and promising future therapies, in the hopes of finding feasible solutions, as a lack of understanding of this mucus-secreting malignant disease increases the risk of delayed diagnosis or uncontrolled deterioration.

Correlations between contrast-enhanced ultrasound and microvessel density in non-small cell lung cancer: A prospective study

Background

Immunohistochemical microvessel density (MVD) is an early indicator of angiogenesis and it could be used to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We sought to identify the ability of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) in evaluating MVD of subpleural NSCLC.

Methods

We prospectively collected CEUS data of NSCLC confirmed by ultrasound-guided transthoracic needle biopsy from October 2019 to February 2021, The MVD of NSCLC counted by CD34-positive vessels of immunohistochemical staining. Microflow enhancement (MFE) of CEUS was divided into "dead wood", "cotton", and "vascular" patterns. Pathology subgroup and MVD between different MFE patterns were analyzed, respectively. The arrival time, time to peak, peak intensity (PI), and area under curve (AUC) derivefrom time-intensity curve of CEUS with MVD in NSCLC and its pathological subgroups (adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma) were subjected to correlation analysis.

Results

A total of 87 patients were included in this study, consisting of 53 cases of adenocarcinoma and 34 cases of squamous cell carcinoma with a mean MVD of 27.8 ± 12.2 mm^-1. There was a significant statistical difference in MFE patterns between two pathological subgroups (p < 0.05). Besides, the MVD of "cotton" and "vascular" patterns were significantly higher than that of "dead wood" pattern (both of p < 0.05), whereas there was no significant difference in MVD between "cotton" pattern and "vascular" pattern. PI and AUC of CEUS were positively correlated with the MVD of NSCLC (r = 0.497, p < 0.001, and r = 0.367, p < 0.001, respectively). Besides, PI and AUC of CEUS were positively correlated with the MVD of squamous cell carcinoma (r = 0.802, and r = 0.663, respectively; both of p < 0.001). Only the PI was positively correlated with the MVD of lung adenocarcinoma (r = 0.288, p = 0.037).

Conclusions

MFE patterns and quantitative parameters of CEUS had good correlation with MVD of NSCLC, especially in squamous cell carcinoma.