Purpose The purpose of this essay is to improve computer‐aided diagnosis of lung diseases by the removal of bone structures imagery such as ribs and clavicles, which may shadow a clinical view of lesions. This paper aims to develop an algorithm to suppress the imaging of bone structures within clinical x‐ray images, leaving a residual portrayal of lung tissue; such that these images can be used to better serve applications, such as lung nodule detection or pathology based on the radiological reading of chest x rays. Methods We propose a conditional Adversarial Generative Network (cGAN) (Mirza and Osindero, Conditional generative adversarial nets, 2014.) model, consisting of a generator and a discriminator, for the task of bone shadow suppression. The proposed model utilizes convolutional operations to expand the size of the receptive field of the generator without losing contextual information while downsampling the image. It is trained by enforcing both the pixel‐wise intensity similarity and the semantic‐level visual similarity between the generated x‐ray images and the ground truth, via optimizing an L‐1 loss of the pixel intensity values on the generator side and a feature matching loss on the discriminator side, respectively. Results The framework we propose is trained and tested on an open‐access chest radiograph dataset for benchmark. Results show that our model is capable of generating bone‐suppressed images of outstanding quality with a limited number of training samples (N = 272). Conclusions Our approach outperforms current state‐of‐the‐art bone suppression methods using x‐ray images. Instead of simply downsampling images at different scales, our proposed method mitigates the loss of contextual information by utilizing dilated convolutions, which gains a noticeable quality improvement for the outputs. On the other hand, our experiment shows that enforcing the semantic similarity between the generated and the ground truth images assists the adversarial training process and achieves better perceptual quality.

BackgroundThe health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with localized prostate cancer (LPCa) after treatment mainly surgery and radiotherapy (RT) has received increasing attention. The aim of this study is to compare the HRQoL of LPCa after surgery and RT.MethodsWeb of Science, Embase, PubMed and Cochrane databases were searched after January 2000 to observe the HRQoL scores after surgery and RT at different treatment time points.ResultsA total of 28 studies were included in this study, and the results showed that LPCa received surgery had better bowel scores than RT at ≤3 (weighted mean differences [WMD] = 4.18; p = 0.03), 3–6 (WMD = 4.16; p < 0.001), 6–12 (WMD = 2.99; p = 0.004), 24–60 (WMD = 1.87; p = 0.06), and ≥60 (WMD = 4.54; p = 0.02) months. However, LPCa received RT had higher urinary scores at ≤3 (WMD = −7.39; p = 0.02), 3–6 (WMD = −6.03; p = 0.02), 6–12 (WMD = −4.90; p < 0.001), 24–60 (WMD = −3.96; p < 0.001), ≥60 (WMD = −2.95; p < 0.001) months and had better sexual scores at ≤3 (WMD = −13.58; p = 0.09), 3–6 (WMD = −12.32; p = 0.06), 6–12 (WMD = −12.03; p = 0.002), 24–60 (WMD = −11.29; p < 0.001), and ≥60 (WMD = −3.10; p = 0.46) months than surgery. The scores difference between surgery and RT decreased over time.ConclusionOverall, for LPCa, surgery was associated with better HRQoL in the bowel domain, whereas RT was associated with better HRQoL in the urinary and sexual domains, with the difference between surgery and RT narrowing over time.

Atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor (AT/RT) of the central nervous system is a highly malignant tumor that mainly occurs in children under the age of 3 and has only been rarely described in adults. The fact that AT/RT patients have such a terrible prognosis is even more regrettable. Herein, we reported two special cases of AT/RT, both of which were under 3 years. Symptoms at presentation included increased intracranial pressure and cerebellar symptoms such as headache, altered gait, and ataxia. As for the tumor location, one was infratentorial in the posterior fossa, and the other was the right lateral ventricle. Preoperative magnetic resonance imaging scans showed calcification and heterogeneous contrast enhancement in the lesions. The mass was excised surgically for the progression of symptoms. Postoperative pathologies of the tumors, combined with immunohistochemistry, revealed AT/RT. AT/RTs are often misdiagnosed as other types of brain tumors due to the lack of specific radiological features and other key characteristics. To improve awareness of AT/RT on the differential diagnosis of intracranial lesions among clinicians, we present this report and briefly summarize previous cases.

It is widely thought that statins have huge therapeutic potential against prostate cancer (PCA). This study aimed to investigate the effect of statin exposure on PCA incidence and prognosis. PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and Cochrane databases were searched for observational studies on the association between statin exposure and PCA from inception until July 2022. The primary endpoints were the incidence of PCA and the survival rate. A total of 21 studies were included in this meta-analysis. The pooled estimates showed that exposure to hydrophilic statins was not associated with the incidence of PCA (odds ratio [OR] = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.88-1.01, P = 0.075), while the incidence of PCA was significantly decreased in populations exposed to lipophilic statins compared with the nonexposed group (OR = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.90-0.98, P = 0.001), mainly in Western countries (OR = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.91-0.98, P = 0.006). Subgroup analysis showed that simvastatin (OR = 0.83, 95% CI = 0.71-0.97, P = 0.016) effectively reduced the incidence of PCA. The prognosis of PCA in patients exposed to both hydrophilic (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.49-0.66, P < 0.001) and lipophilic (HR = 0.65, 95% CI = 0.58-0.73, P < 0.001) statins were better than in the nonexposed group, and this improvement was more significant in the East than in Western countries. This study demonstrates that statins can reduce the incidence of PCA and improve prognosis, and are affected by population region and statin properties (hydrophilic and lipophilic).