Thermal treatments for tissue ablation rely upon the heating of cells past a threshold beyond which the cells are considered destroyed, denatured, or killed. In this article, a novel three-state model for cell death is proposed where there exists a vulnerable state positioned between the alive and dead states used in a number of existing cell death models. Proposed rate coefficients include temperature dependence and the model is fitted to experimental data of heated co-cultures of hepatocytes and lung fibroblasts with very small RMS error. The experimental data utilized include further reductions in cell viabilities over 24 and 48 h post-heating and these data are used to extend the three-state model to account for slow cell death. For the two cell lines employed in the experimental data, the three parameters for fast cell death appear to be linearly increasing with % content of lung fibroblast, while the sparse nature of the data did not indicate any co-culture make-up dependence for the parameters for slow cell death. A critical post-heating cell viability threshold is proposed beyond which cells progress to death; and these results are of practical importance with potential for more accurate prediction of cell death.
Liver cirrhosis is a common disease causing great public-health concern because of the frequent complications requiring hospital care. Acute liver failure is also prone to several complications but is rare. One of the main complications for both acute and chronic liver diseases is infection, which regularly causes decompensation of cirrhosis, possibly leading to organ failure and death. This review focuses on innate immune function in cirrhosis, acute-on-chronic liver failure and acute liver failure. The known defects of Kupffer cells, neutrophils and monocytes are discussed, together with the pathophysiological importance of gut permeability, portal hypertension and intrinsic cellular defects, and the role of endotoxin, albumin, lipoproteins and toll-like receptors. Based on these different pathomechanisms, the available information on therapeutic strategies is presented. Antibiotic and probiotic treatment, nutritional support, artificial liver support, and experimental strategies such as inhibition of toll-like receptors and use of albumin and colony-stimulating factors are highlighted.
In this paper, a novel segmentation method for liver vasculature is presented, intended for numerical simulation of radio frequency ablation (RFA). The developed method is a semiautomatic hybrid based on multi-scale vessel enhancement combined with ridge-oriented region growing and skeleton-based postprocessing. In addition, an interactive tool for segmentation refinement was developed. Four instances of threephase contrast enhanced computed tomography (CT) images of porcine liver were used in the evaluation. The results showed improved accuracy over common approaches and illustrated the method's suitability for simulation purposes.
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