BackgroundThis study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of drug eluting beads transarterial chemoembolization (DEB-TACE) treatment by CalliSpheres® in Chinese patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as well as the predicting factors for response.Methods99 patients with HCC were consecutively enrolled in this study. All participants were treated by CalliSpheres® DEB-TACE. Clinical response was evaluated according to modified Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (mRECIST) criteria. Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE) was used to assess the adverse events and liver dysfunction during and after the operation.ResultsPost treatment, 16 patients (16.2%) achieved CR and 59 (59.6%) achieved PR, the ORR was 75.8%. Subgroup analysis showed that patients with higher BCLC stage were of worse CR and ORR rates, and the CR as well as ORR between patients with cTACE history and patients without cTACE history were similar. Univariate logistic regression analysis displayed that number of nodules > 3, higher BCLC stage and previous cTACE might be correlated with worse ORR but with no statistical significance. As to liver function, CTCAE grades of laboratory indexes for liver function were increased at 1 week compared to baseline and recovered to the baseline grades at 1–3 months post operation. Besides, most of the common adverse events were light and moderate in our study.ConclusionsIn conclusion, DEB-TACE by CalliSpheres® was efficient and well tolerated in Chinese HCC patients, and BCLC stage, number of nodules and cTACE history were possibly correlated with treatment response.

ObjectiveTo explore the diagnostic value of digital subtraction angiography (DSA) and the effectiveness of endovascular treatment for a post-pancreaticoduodenectomy hemorrhage (PPH).ResultsDuring the DSA examination, positive results were found in 29 patients, yielding a positive rate of 69.0%. The manifestations of the DSA examination included contrast medium extravasation, pseudoaneurysm, and artery walls coarse. All 29 patients with positive results underwent endovascular treatment, including transartery embolization (TAE) in 28 patients and covered stents placement in one patient. The technical success and clinical success rates were 100% and 72.4%, respectively. Re-bleeding occurred in 8 of the 29 patients after the first treatment (27.6%). The mortality of PPH was 17.2% (5 of 29). Two of the five PPH patients died following severe infections, and three died from multiple organ failure.Materials and MethodsA DSA examination was conducted using clinical and imaging data of 42 patients, and endovascular treatment for delayed PPH was retrospectively analyzed.ConclusionsDSA examination is a minimally invasive and rapid method for the diagnosis of delayed PPH. For patients with positive DSA results, endovascular treatment can be performed rapidly, safely, and effectively. Therefore, the DSA examination and endovascular treatment could be considered a preferred treatment approach for delayed PPH.

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In international trade, it is common practice for multinational companies to use financial market instruments, such as financial derivatives and foreign currency debt, to hedge exchange rate risks. Making accurate predictions and decisions on the direction and magnitude of exchange rate movements is a more direct way to reduce exchange rate risks. However, the traditional time series model has many limitations in forecasting exchange rate, which is nonlinear and nonstationary. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid model of complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMDAN) based multilayer long short-term memory (MLSTM) networks. It overcomes the shortcomings of the classic methods. CEEMDAN not only solves the mode mixing problem of empirical mode decomposition (EMD), but also solves the residue noise problem which is included in the reconstructed data of ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) with less computation cost. MLSTM can learning more complex dependences from exchange rate data than the classic model of time series. A lot of experiments have been conducted to measure the performance of the proposed approach among the exchange rates of British pound, the Australian dollar, and the US dollar. In order to get an objective evaluation, we compared the proposed method with several standard approaches or other hybrid models. The experimental results show that the CEEMDAN-based MLSTM (CEEMDAN–MLSTM) goes on better than some state-of-the-art models in terms of several evaluations.

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