Background. We hypothesized that texture analysis (TA) from the preoperative MRI can predict early disease progression (ePD), defined as the percentage of patients who relapsed or showed distant metastasis within three months from the radical surgery, in patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC, stage II and III, AJCC) undergoing neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (C-RT). Methods. This retrospective monoinstitutional cohort study included 49 consecutive patients in total with a newly diagnosed rectal cancer. All the patients underwent baseline abdominal MRI and CT scan of the chest and abdomen to exclude distant metastasis before C-RT. Texture parameters were extracted from MRI performed before C-RT (T1, DWI, and ADC sequences) using LifeX Software, a dedicated software for extracting texture parameters from radiological imaging. We divided the cohort in a training set of 34 patients and a validation set of 15 patients, and we tested the data sets for homogeneity, considering the clinical variables. Then we performed univariate and multivariate analysis, and a ROC curve was also generated. Results. Thirteen patients (26.5%) showed an ePD, three of whom with lung metastases and ten with liver relapse. The model was validated based on the prediction accuracy calculated in a previously unseen set of 15 patients. The prediction accuracy of the generated model was 82% (AUC=0.853) in the training and 80% (AUC=0.833) in the validation cohort. The only significant features at multivariate analysis was DWI GLCM Correlation (OR: 0.239, p<0.001). Conclusion. Our results suggest that TA could be useful to identify patients that may develop early progression.

Background: Recent advances in ultrasonography (US) have produced new innovative techniques for the non-invasive assessment of testicular masses. The aim of this study was to investigate the diagnostic performance of multiparametric US, including gray-scale, Color-power Doppler and real-time elastography (RTE) analysis, in the characterization of testicular lesions.Methods: Fifty-four patients (median 42.2 years; range, 10-64 years) with testicular lesions detected with gray-scale US and power Doppler US were evaluated with RTE. The tissue elasticity was assessed in all lesions. Hard lesions were suspected of being malignant while testicular lesions with normal or decreased tissue stiffness (soft lesions) were considered benign. Intraoperative findings were the standard of reference.Sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive value, positive predictive value, and diagnostic accuracy were calculated for each US method and in combination.Results: Forty-six of the 54 lesions (85.2%) were testicular malignant tumors. Thirty-five out of 46 (76%) were ≥2 cm [seminomas (n=18), mixed seminomatous and/or nonseminomatous tumors (n=9), embryonal carcinomas (n=2), immature teratomas (n=3) and Leydig cell tumors (n=3)] while the remaining 11 tumors were <2 cm [seminomas (n=5), mixed germinal cells tumors (n=2), immature teratomas (n=2) and Leydig cell tumors (n=2)]. Eight out of 54 lesions (14.8%) were benign lesions (orchitis n=2, dermoid cyst n=1, adrenal rest n=1, papillary cystadenoma n=1, sclero-hyaline nodule n=1, focal fibrosis n=1 and post-traumatic focal fibrosis n=1). RTE showed the presence of hard pattern in 40 out of 46 (87%) malignant tumors and in 2 out of 8 (25%) of benign lesions. The combination of gray-scale US, Color-power Doppler and RTE aided a sensitivity of 100%, a specificity of 83%, a negative predictive value of 100%, a positive predictive value of 91% and accuracy of 90%.Conclusions: RTE demonstrated to increase the diagnostic accuracy of conventional US in the characterization of testicular lesions providing additional information on tissue stiffness. The multiparametric US evaluation has proven to increase the diagnostic performance in the characterization of testicular lesions.

Several studies suggest that the 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) predicts left ventricular hypertrophy more accurately than conventional blood pressure measurement (CBPM) with mercury sphygmomanometer. We estimated the left ventricular mass by M-mode echocardiography in 58 patients on regular haemodialysis treatment during the midweek haemodialysis (HD) interval. ABPM was recorded during the 24 hours preceding the dialysis session and the average of values were compared with the average of the 13 pre HD CBPM recorded by nurses during the month preceding the echocardiography study. The two types of BP measurements correlated significantly with each other, (systolic BP r = 0.62; p < 0.001 and diastolic BP r = 0.74; p < 0.001). The correlation of left ventricular mass with pre-HD systolic BP was stronger (r = 0.54; p < 0.001) than with 24h-systolic BP (r = 0.33; p < 0.01). The overall accuracy of prediction was also similar (68% for pre HD-CBPM; 67% for 24h-ABPM). Measurements of diastolic BP did not correlate significantly with LVM. Our data suggest that 24h-ABPM does not offer any advantage over pre HD-CBPM in predicting left ventricular hypertrophy in HD patients.

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