Background. The benefits of preoperative chemotherapy and radiation for esophageal carcinoma are under investigation. A pilot study was undertaken to determine if pathologic assessment of tumor regression correlated with disease free survival. Methods. Ninety‐three resected specimens from patients treated with cis‐dichloro‐diamino cisplatin and irradiation before surgery were examined on semiserial sections. Patients selected for surgery were all Status 1 according to the World Health Organization (WHO) classification. Histologic typing was based on the WHO classification. Tumor regression grade (TRG) was quantitated in five grades: TRG 1 (complete regression) showed absence of residual cancer and fibrosis extending through the different layers of the esophageal wall; TRG 2 was characterized by the presence of rare residual cancer cells scattered through the fibrosis; TRG 3 was characterized by an increase in the number of residual cancer cells, but fibrosis still predominated; TRG 4 showed residual cancer outgrowing fibrosis; and TRG 5 was characterized by absence of regressive changes. Survival curves were estimated according to the Kaplan‐Meier method. A quantification of the relationship between treatment failure and confounding variables (age, tumor location, tumor size, esophageal wall involvement by residual cancer and/or regressive changes, histology, treatment, adequacy of surgery, pathologic lymph node status, and tumor regression grade) was done using Cox's proportional hazards model. Results. Forty‐two percent of specimens were TGR 1–2; 20%, TGR 3; and 33%, TGR 4–5. Univariate analysis found that tumor size, pathologic lymph node status, tumor regression grade, and esophageal wall involvement were highly correlated with disease free survival (P > 0.05). After multivariate analysis, only tumor regression (i.e., TRG 1–3 versus TRG 4–5) remained a significant (P > 0.001) predictor of disease free survival. Conclusions. This study highlights the importance of tumor regression in the survival of patients with esophageal carcinoma treated with preoperative chemoradiotherapy. These findings suggest that tumor regression grade should be considered when evaluating therapeutic results. Cancer 1994; 73:2680–6.

Abstract-Surgical workflow recognition has numerous potential medical applications, such as the automatic indexing of surgical video databases and the optimization of real-time operating room scheduling, among others. As a result, phase recognition has been studied in the context of several kinds of surgeries, such as cataract, neurological, and laparoscopic surgeries. In the literature, two types of features are typically used to perform this task: visual features and tool usage signals. However, the visual features used are mostly handcrafted. Furthermore, the tool usage signals are usually collected via a manual annotation process or by using additional equipment. In this paper, we propose a novel method for phase recognition that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn features from cholecystectomy videos and that relies uniquely on visual information. In previous studies, it has been shown that the tool usage signals can provide valuable information in performing the phase recognition task. Thus, we present a novel CNN architecture, called EndoNet, that is designed to carry out the phase recognition and tool presence detection tasks in a multi-task manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing to use a CNN for multiple recognition tasks on laparoscopic videos. Extensive experimental comparisons to other methods show that EndoNet yields state-of-the-art results for both tasks.

This study shows that bypassing a short segment of proximal intestine directly ameliorates type 2 diabetes, independently of effects on food intake, body weight, malabsorption, or nutrient delivery to the hindgut. These findings suggest that a proximal intestinal bypass could be considered for diabetes treatment and that potentially undiscovered factors from the proximal bowel might contribute to the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes.

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Results of our study support the hypothesis that the bypass of duodenum and jejunum can directly control type 2 diabetes and not secondarily to weight loss or treatment of obesity. These findings suggest a potential role of the proximal gut in the pathogenesis the disease and put forward the possibility of alternative therapeutic approaches for the management of type 2 diabetes.