Appropriately selected patients who undergo TORS alone for oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma experience acceptable short- and long-term QOL outcomes.

Single-molecule surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) offers new opportunities for exploring the complex chemical and biological processes that cannot be easily probed using ensemble techniques. However, the ability to place the single molecule of interest reliably within a hot spot, to enable its analysis at the single-molecule level, remains challenging. Here we describe a novel strategy for locating and securing a single target analyte in a SERS hot spot at a plasmonic nanojunction. The "smart" hot spot was generated by employing a thiol-functionalized cucurbit[6]uril (CB[6]) as a molecular spacer linking a silver nanoparticle to a metal substrate. This approach also permits one to study molecules chemically reluctant to enter the hot spot, by conjugating them to a moiety, such as spermine, that has a high affinity for CB[6]. The hot spot can accommodate at most a few, and often only a single, analyte molecule. Bianalyte experiments revealed that one can reproducibly treat the SERS substrate such that 96% of the hot spots contain a single analyte molecule. Furthermore, by utilizing a series of molecules each consisting of spermine bound to perylene bisimide, a bright SERS molecule, with polymethylene linkers of varying lengths, the SERS intensity as a function of distance from the center of the hot spot could be measured. The SERS enhancement was found to decrease as 1 over the square of the distance from the center of the hot spot, and the single-molecule SERS cross sections were found to increase with AgNP diameter.

A facile synthesis of highly stable, water-dispersible metal-nanoparticle-decorated polymer nanocapsules (M@CB-PNs: M = Pd, Au, and Pt) was achieved by a simple two-step process employing a polymer nanocapsule (CB-PN) made of cucurbit [6]uril (CB[6]) and metal salts. The CB-PN serves as a versatile platform where various metal nanoparticles with a controlled size can be introduced on the surface and stabilized to prepare new water-dispersible nanostructures useful for many applications. The Pd nanoparticles on CB-PN exhibit high stability and dispersibility in water as well as excellent catalytic activity and recyclability in carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen bond-forming reactions in aqueous medium suggesting potential applications as a green catalyst.Metal nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted great attention because their unique properties such as high surface to volume ratio, quantum confinement, and surface plasmon effect can contribute to diverse applications in catalysis, nanoelectronics, molecular imaging, biosensors, and nanomedicine. [1] Many of these intriguing properties strongly depend on the size [2] and surface area [3] of the NPs. In addition, support materials (or stabilizers) [4] such as polymers, [5] dendrimers, [6] silica, [7] and metal oxides, [8] which are required for some applications (e.g. heterogeneous catalysis), also affect the properties of NPs. Although NPs on solid supports have been successfully employed in catalysis, most systems suffer from shortcomings such as passivation of the NP surface, [9] lack of long-term stability, [10] low dispersibility, [11] deactivation or constant leaching, [12] and low recyclability which limit their capacity and applications. [13] For example, NPs supported on mesoporous/modified silica are unstable, which leads to a rapid decay of the catalytic activity under the reaction conditions. [12] Furthermore, the catalytic activity and stability of NPs in environmentally benign media such as water has important environmental, economical, and safety implications, which are crucial in green chemistry. [14] However, to date, catalysis using NPs on solid supports has seldom been explored in water. [15] Cucurbit[n]uril (CB[n]: n = 5-8, 10) exhibits remarkable recognition abilities with high affinity and selectivity towards organic and inorganic species [16] and stabilizes NPs by forming a passive layer or acting as a protecting agent. [17] We recently reported hollow polymer nanocapsules (CB-PNs) with a thin shell composed of covalently linked cucurbit[6]uril (CB[6]) units, [18] which can be readily synthesized from commercially available allyloxyCB[6] and dithiol (3,6-dioxa-1,8-octanedithiol) in a one-pot reaction. Unique features of CB-PNs include facile tailoring of their surface to prepare new functional materials for various applications such as targeted drug delivery, diagnosis, and imaging. [18c,d] Moreover, CB-PNs synthesized in the presence of excess dithiol have "disulfide loops" protruding from the surface, [18a,b, 19] which can be used as an i...

oor olfactory function has been directly implicated in malnutrition, 1 decreased safety, 2 and overall worse quality of life. 3 It is responsible for more than 200 000 physician visits per year, representing a significant public health burden. 4,5 Emerging evidence suggests that olfactory dysfunction is significantly associated with increased all-cause mortality among older adults. 4,[6][7][8][9][10][11] Most notably, a recent study by Liu et al 12 examining community-dwelling older adults aged 71 to 82 years showed clear evidence that poor olfaction alone explains higher long-term mortality, particularly in individuals with excellent to good health at baseline. Liu et al 12 found the elevated risk of mortality of patients with poor olfaction was only partially explained by neurodegenerative dis-ease, cardiovascular disease, and weight loss. Olfaction is emerging as an early indicator of brain aging that can be objectively measured with a relatively simple smell test in the clinical setting.Choi et al 13 previously used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to demonstrate that objectively measured olfactory dysfunction is associated with cognitive impairment independently of demographics and cardiovascular factors. Herein we further investigate the associations of olfactory dysfunction (measured by both objective smell test and self-report) with all-cause 5-year mortality in US adults 40 years or older, independently of cardiovascular factors, cognition, and depression. IMPORTANCE A study of olfactory dysfunction and mortality in a large national cohort will aid in better understanding their association when accounting for multiple relevant factors and possible underlying mechanisms. OBJECTIVE To investigate the association of olfactory dysfunction with all-cause 5-year mortality in US adults.

High-risk histologic subtype (melanoma, sinonasal undifferentiated carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, neuroendocrine cancer, sarcoma, and squamous cell carcinoma), grade, and orbital and skull base involvement negatively affect survival and/or DFI for patients with local recurrence of SNM. Improved stratification of patients can be used to guide decision making for patients with recurrent SNM and to avoid inappropriate surgery.

The semantic segmentation of a brain tumor is of paramount importance for its treatment and prevention. Recently, researches have proposed various neural network-based architectures to improve the performance of segmentation of brain tumor sub-regions. Brain tumor segmentation, being a challenging area of research, requires improvement in its performance. This paper proposes a 2D image segmentation method, BU-Net, to contribute to brain tumor segmentation research. Residual extended skip (RES) and wide context (WC) are used along with the customized loss function in the baseline U-Net architecture. The modifications contribute by finding more diverse features, by increasing the valid receptive field. The contextual information is extracted with the aggregating features to get better segmentation performance. The proposed BU-Net was evaluated on the high-grade glioma (HGG) datasets of the BraTS2017 Challenge—the test datasets of the BraTS 2017 and 2018 Challenge datasets. Three major labels to segmented were tumor core (TC), whole tumor (WT), and enhancing core (EC). To compare the performance quantitatively, the dice score was utilized. The proposed BU-Net outperformed the existing state-of-the-art techniques. The high performing BU-Net can have a great contribution to researchers from the field of bioinformatics and medicine.

Despite the remarkable progress made in the self-assembly of nano- and microscale architectures with well-defined sizes and shapes, a self-organization-based synthesis of hollow toroids has, so far, proved to be elusive. Here, we report the synthesis of polymer microrings made from rectangular, flat and rigid-core monomers with anisotropically predisposed alkene groups, which are crosslinked with each other by dithiol linkers using thiol-ene photopolymerization. The resulting hollow toroidal structures are shape-persistent and mechanically robust in solution. In addition, their size can be tuned by controlling the initial monomer concentrations, an observation that is supported by a theoretical analysis. These hollow microrings can encapsulate guest molecules in the intratoroidal nanospace, and their peripheries can act as templates for circular arrays of metal nanoparticles.

Background The purpose of this study was to describe how the up-front transoral robotic surgery (TORS) approach could be used to individually tailor adjuvant therapy based on surgical pathology. Methods Between January 2009 and December 2013, 76 patients received TORS for oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC). Clinical predictors of adjuvant therapy were analyzed and comparisons were made between recommended treatment guidelines for up-front surgery versus definitive nonsurgical approaches. Results Advanced N classification, human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive tumor, extracapsular spread (ECS; 26 of 76), perineural invasion (PNI; 14 of 76), and positive margins (7 of 76) were significant predictors of adjuvant chemoradiotherapy (CRT) (p < .05). Up-front TORS deintensified adjuvant therapy; 76% of stage I/II and 46% of stage III/IV patients avoided CRT. Conversely, pathologic staging resulted in 33% of patients who would have received radiotherapy (RT) alone based on clinical staging, to be intensified to receive adjuvant CRT. Conclusion The TORS approach deintensifies adjuvant therapy and provides valuable pathologic information to intensify treatment in select patients. TORS may be less effective in deintensification of adjuvant therapy in patients with clinically advanced N classification disease.