Preperitoneal drainage for 23 h after laparoscopic TEP hernioplasty for inguinal hernia can effectively decrease seroma formation in the early postoperative period, and potentially improving postoperative pain. The benefit is short-term and no significant difference was demonstrated after 1-month post operations. This tradition technique applied to novel operative repair of inguinal hernia is safe and feasible with no significant morbidity demonstrated. Preperitoneal drainage after TEP can be considered as an option to improve patient satisfactions and recovery in selected patient group for maximal benefit, especially for those with prolonged operation which may associate with higher chance of seroma formation.

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Brain tumor is the most common malignant tumor of the head and neck in China, postoperative radiotherapy is one of the main methods to improve the survival rate of patients. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has the advantage of its soft tissue contrast, for the sake of getting the tumor boundary accurately, it is necessary to combine CT/MR image fusing in gross tumor volume (GTV) delineation. In order to avoid the uncertainty caused by multimodal images registration and reduce unnecessary radiation dose, replacing CT with MRI has become one of the research hotspots in the field of radiotherapy. The aim of this study was to use unregistered MRI and CT images from brain tumor patients to generate pseudo-CT images based on a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) framework. Materials/Methods: T1, T2-weighted MRI and CT-simulation images of the whole brain were collected from 31 brain tumor patients. In this work, we have used a CycleGAN framework to generate pseudo-CT images from MRI, this model is capable of image-to-image translation using unpaired MRI and CT images in an unsupervised learning method. Due to the influence of head frame in CT-simulation images and the different scanning range, imaging resolution and contrast of each patient, preprocessing of MRI and CT images, such as clipping, background removal, resampling and normalization, was required firstly. Secondly, in order to compensate for the insufficient to separate all major tissue types by the single MR sequence, each patient's T1/T2-weighted MR image pair was served as the input of the CycleGAN framework after registering and fusing. Finally, a simple cross-validation study, randomly selecting 70% samples as the training set and the remaining images as the testing set, was performed to compare the quality of synthetic CT and real CT image. Results: The CycleGAN method produced the overall average MAE below 0.24 § 0.02 and the 0.79 § 0.03 SSIM value for the testing set images, the heterogeneity between the synthetic CT image and the actual CT image was acceptable. Conclusion:We successfully realized the image-to-image translation using unregistered MRI and CT images based on the CycleGAN framework. The evaluation of pseudo-CT image showed the feasibility and accuracy of this method, which can effectively reduce the error caused by multi-mode image registration in gross tumor volume (GTV) delineation for brain tumor patients.

were 80.8% and 86.8% (P Z 0.188). The DMFS rates were 88.7% and 98.1% (P Z 0.029). The number of cycles of ACT (1 cycle vs. ! 2 cycles) did not affect the prognosis of patients with LACSCC. The tumor marker carbohydrate antigen 125 (CA125) was found to be related with survival time. CA125 > 35 U/mL may be one of the indicators for ACT to improve survival. Conclusion: This study showed that ACT after CCRT is beneficial for DMFS in Chinese patients with LACSCC. In practice, the number of ACT cycles should be carefully considered as appropriate. CA125 may be a relevant factor influencing prognosis, and its value is inversely proportional to survival time. In LACSCC patients with CA125 > 35 U/mL, ACT after CCRT may be more important in improving prognosis compared with CCRT alone.