Objectives. This study evaluated the benefits of performing prophylactic central neck dissection (CND) with total thyroidectomy (TT) in management of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) patients who were clinically node-negative at presentation. Methods. A total of 257 patients with stage T1 or T2 PTC and without preoperative evidence of lymph node involvement (N0) were enrolled in this prospective study. The patients were randomly assigned to two groups: (1) a total thyroidectomy (TT) group (n = 104) or (2) a TT plus CND group (n = 153). The two groups were compared for their perioperative data, complication rates, disease recurrence rates, and clinical outcomes. Results. The two groups of patients were similar in age, sex ratio, follow-up duration, and tumor size (P = 0.227, 0.359, 0.214, and 0.878, resp.). The two groups showed similar rates of disease recurrence (3.9% in the TT group versus 3.3% in the TT plus CND group); however, complications occurred more frequently in the TT plus CND group; especially transient hypocalcemia (P = 0.043). Conclusions. Patients treated with TT plus CND had a higher rate of complications with similar recurrence rate. We believe that CND may not be routinely recommended when treating patients with PTC.

The US-CNB is safe, effective, and has a high diagnostic yield for cervical lymphadenopathy. The US-CNB may also be useful for diagnosing lymphoma and Kikuchi's disease.

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The RA approach seems to be beneficial for reducing operation time and hospital stay, and for stabilization of the learning curve. Postoperative bleeding should be considered during the period of early experience for the RA approach.

Background and objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the protective effects of quercetin on cisplatin-induced hair cell damage in transgenic zebrafish embryos. Materials and methods: Five days postfertilization zebrafish embryos were exposed to 1 mM cisplatin and quercetin at 10, 50, 100, or 200 μM for 4 h. Hair cells within neuromasts of the supraorbital, otic, and occipital lateral lines were analyzed by fluorescent microscopy ( n = 10). Survival of hair cells was calculated as the average number of hair cells in the control group that were not exposed to cisplatin. Ultrastructural changes were evaluated using scanning electron microscopy. Results: Hair cell damage in neuromasts was decreased by co-treatment of quercetin and cisplatin (quercetin 100 μM: 8.6 ± 1.1 cells; 1 mM cisplatin only: 5.0 ± 0.5 cells; n = 10, p < 0.05); apoptosis of hair cells examined by special stain was also decreased by quercetin. The ultrastructure of hair cells within neuromasts was preserved in zebrafish by the combination of quercetin (100 μM) and cisplatin (1 mM). Conclusion: In conclusion, quercetin showed protective effects against cisplatin-induced toxicity in a zebrafish model. The results of this study suggest the possibility of a protective role of quercetin against cisplatin-induced apoptotic cell death in zebrafish.

These results indicate that NOX1 and NOX4 may play an important role in reactive oxygen species production, contributing to the oxidative stress in allergic rhinitis and nasal polyp tissues.

Objectives. Prognosticating idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSNHL) is an important challenge. In our study, a dataset was split into training and test sets and cross-validation was implemented on the training set, thereby determining the hyperparameters for machine learning models with high test accuracy and low bias. The effectiveness of the following five machine learning models for predicting the hearing prognosis in patients with ISSNHL after 1 month of treatment was assessed: adaptive boosting, K-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron, random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM).Methods. The medical records of 523 patients with ISSNHL admitted to Korea University Ansan Hospital between January 2010 and October 2017 were retrospectively reviewed. In this study, we analyzed data from 227 patients (recovery, 106; no recovery, 121) after excluding those with missing data. To determine risk factors, statistical hypothesis tests (e.g., the two-sample t-test for continuous variables and the chi-square test for categorical variables) were conducted to compare patients who did or did not recover. Variables were selected using an RF model depending on two criteria (mean decreases in the Gini index and accuracy).Results. The SVM model using selected predictors achieved both the highest accuracy (75.36%) and the highest F-score (0.74) on the test set. The RF model with selected variables demonstrated the second-highest accuracy (73.91%) and F-score (0.74). The RF model with the original variables showed the same accuracy (73.91%) as that of the RF model with selected variables, but a lower F-score (0.73). All the tested models, except RF, demonstrated better performance after variable selection based on RF.Conclusion. The SVM model with selected predictors was the best-performing of the tested prediction models. The RF model with selected predictors was the second-best model. Therefore, machine learning models can be used to predict hearing recovery in patients with ISSNHL.

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