Mass screening with abdominal ultrasonography (AUS) has been suggested as a tool to control adult hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in individuals, but its efficacy in reducing HCC mortality has never been demonstrated. This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of reducing HCC mortality by mass AUS screening for HCC based on a program designed and implemented in the Changhua Community-based Integrated Screening (CHCIS) program with an efficient invitation scheme guided by the risk score. We invited 11,114 (27.0%) of 41,219 eligible Taiwanese subjects between 45 and 69 years of age who resided in an HCC high-incidence area to attend a risk score-guided mass AUS screening between 2008 and 2010. The efficacy of reducing HCC mortality was estimated. Of the 8,962 AUS screening attendees (with an 80.6% attendance rate), a total of 16 confirmed HCC cases were identified through community-based ultrasonography screening. Among the 16 screen-detected HCC cases, only two died from HCC, indicating a favorable survival. The cumulative mortality due to HCC (per 100,000) was considerably lower in the invited AUS group (17.26) compared with the uninvited AUS group (42.87) and the historical control group (47.51), yielding age- and gender-adjusted relative mortality rates of 0.69 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.56-0.84) and 0.63 (95% CI: 0.52-0.77), respectively. Conclusion: The residents invited to community-based AUS screening for HCC, compared with those who were not invited, showed a reduction in HCC mortality by ∼31% among subjects aged 45-69 years who had not been included in the nationwide vaccination program against hepatitis B virus infection. (Hepatology 2014;59:1840–1849)

We report a direct determination of the specular scattering probability of acoustic phonons at a crystal boundary by observing the escape of incident coherent phonons from the coherent state during reflection. In the sub-THz frequency range where the phonon wavelength is much longer than the lattice constant, the acoustic phonon-interface interaction is found to agree well with the macroscopic theory on wave scattering from rough surfaces. This examination thus quantitatively verifies the dominant role of atomic-scale corrugations in the Kapitza anomaly observed at 1-10 K and further opens a new path to nondestructively estimate subnanoscale roughness of buried interfaces.

We report ultra-broadband ultrasonic spectroscopy with an impedance-matched piezoelectric nanolayer, which enables optical generation and detection of a 730-fs acoustic pulse (the width of ten lattice constants). The bandwidth improvement facilitates THz laser ultrasonics to bridge the spectral gap between inelastic light and x-ray scatterings (0.1-1 THz) in the studies of lattice dynamics. As a demonstration, this method is applied to measure sound attenuation α in a vitreous SiO2 thin film. Our results extend the existing low-frequency data obtained by ultrasonic-based and light scattering methods and also show a α∝ f2 behavior for frequencies f up to 650 GHz.

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We found the hydration levels on the capsid surface of viruses can affect the bandwidth of microwave resonant absorption (MRA) induced by the confined acoustic vibrations (CAV). By decreasing the pH value of solution down to 5.2 or inactivating the capsid proteins, we enhanced the surface hydrophilicity and increased the magnitude of surface potentials. Both of these surface manipulations raised the surface affinity to water molecules and narrowed the bandwidths of CAV-induced MRA. Our results validate the viscoelastic transition of hydration shells.

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By using femtosecond laser-ultrasonic, we demonstrate an approach to study the surface plasmon field optically excited in the interface between metal and a semiconductor thin film. By femtosecond impulsive excitation on gallium–nitride (GaN), different optical probe signals were observed when the impulse-excited nanoacoustic pulse propagated through the metal film and metal nanoslits. By analyzing the shape and temporal response of thus induced acousto-optical signals, our femtosecond laser-ultrasonic study not only reveals the plasmonic field distribution optically excited in the metal/substrate interface but also confirms that the penetration depth of surface plasmon field into the substrate agrees well with a simulation result.