St Bartholomew's Hospital, commonly known as Barts, is a teaching hospital located in the City of London. It was founded in 1123 and is currently run by Barts Health NHS Trust.
Introduction Our aim was to evaluate the diagnostic and safety performance of shape-sensing robotic-assisted bronchoscopy (ssRAB) with cone beam CT (CBCT) for the biopsy of pulmonary nodules. Additional analysis was performed to assess outcomes for small nodules and those close to the fissure, pleura or mediastinum.Methods This single arm, multicentre prospective study enrolled 200 subjects with suspicious pulmonary nodules. Each subject underwent a ssRAB procedure with CBCT and was subsequently followed up. The primary outcome was tool-in-lesion (TIL) confirmed with CBCT. Further endpoints included diagnostic outcomes and rate of adverse events.Results Of 200 subjects recruited, 198 subjects had a successful biopsy (whereby lesion was reached and sample was taken) and 97% completed the required follow-up. The median size of the nodules was 13 mm; 26.8% (60/224) have a positive bronchus sign and 181 (80.8%) were located in the outer two-thirds of the lung. TIL was obtained in 99.0% (198/200). The strict diagnostic yield was 85% (170/200) with diagnostic accuracy of 92.0% (184/200) and sensitivity for malignancy of 95.5% (147/154). Diagnostic accuracy for nodules under 20 mm size, within 5 mm from a critical structure (eg, heart, aorta or main pulmonary artery) or from the pleura was 88.2% (172/195), 100% (11/11) and 93.3% (56/60), respectively. There were four (2%) serious procedure-related adverse events, with one patient (0.5%) suffering a pneumothorax.Conclusion ssRAB with CBCT can effectively reach and biopsy small pulmonary nodules, including perifissural, peripleural and paramediastinal lesions with a strong safety profile.Trial registration number NCT05867953.
Accurate reconstruction of cardiac anatomy from sparse clinical images remains a major challenge in patient-specific modeling. While neural implicit functions have previously been applied to this task, their application to mapping anatomical consistency across subjects has been limited. In this work, we introduce Neural Implicit Heart Coordinates (NIHCs), a standardized implicit coordinate system, based on universal ventricular coordinates, that provides a common anatomical reference frame for the human heart. Our method predicts NIHCs directly from a limited number of 2D segmentations (sparse acquisition) and subsequently decodes them into dense 3D segmentations and high-resolution meshes at arbitrary output resolution. Trained on a large dataset of 5000 cardiac meshes, the model achieves high reconstruction accuracy on clinical contours, with mean Euclidean surface errors of 2.51 ± 0.33 mm in a diseased cohort (n=4549) and 2.31 ± 0.36 mm in a healthy cohort (n=5576). The NIHC representation enables anatomically coherent reconstruction even under severe slice sparsity and segmentation noise, faithfully recovering complex structures such as the valve planes. Compared with traditional pipelines, inference time is reduced from over 60 s to 5-15 s. These results demonstrate that NIHCs constitute a robust and efficient anatomical representation for patient-specific 3D cardiac reconstruction from minimal input data. The code is available at https://github.com/marsof97/NIHC.
OBJECTIVE:Advanced adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is treated with mitotane alone or combined with cytotoxic chemotherapy, yet outcomes remain poor and prognostic models in this setting are lacking. This study aimed to evaluate the prognostic value of clinical parameters in a large cohort of patients with advanced ACC undergoing systemic therapy. METHODS:Multicenter, international cohort study investigating 418 patients with advanced ACC (61.5% = women, median age = 52 years) from 11 centers. Patients received mitotane monotherapy (n = 161), etoposide + doxorubicin + cisplatin ± mitotane (n = 178), or second-line regimens (gemcitabine + capecitabine ± mitotane or temozolomide + mitotane, n = 79). Variables included age, cortisol excess, performance status (ECOG-PS), tumor burden, and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) at start of therapy. Outcomes were overall survival (OS), time to progression (TTP), and best objective response. RESULTS:Tumor burden, cortisol excess, ECOG-PS, and NLR ≥5 independently predicted shorter OS (hazard ratio [HR] 1.55-2.68). We developed an integrated ENSAT Risk Score for Advanced ACC combining these variables: tumor burden (0-2), cortisol excess (0/1), ECOG-PS (0-2), and NLR (0/1). A score >2 (poor-risk) was significantly associated with worse OS and TTP across all treatment groups (HRs for OS: 3.05-3.96; TTP: 2.53-3.08). It also predicted poorer response to mitotane (P < .01) and second-line therapies (P = .04). CONCLUSIONS:The ENSAT Risk Score for Advanced ACC is a practical, prognostic tool for patients with advanced ACC receiving systemic therapy. Based on accessible clinical and biochemical markers, it can support treatment decisions and facilitate informed discussions in routine care.
BACKGROUND:Ethnic inequalities exist in the management of patients with cancer with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Given their under-representation in trials, ethnic minority patients are often studied using large registries, but the quality of ethnicity coding in these datasets remains unclear. METHODS:Agreement of ethnicity coding and outcomes for patients with cancer with ACS (2000-2018) was examined across four national datasets: National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), Myocardial Ischaemia National Audit Project (MINAP), British Cardiovascular Intervention Society database (BCIS) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). Three linkages were performed: NCRAS-MINAP, NCRAS-MINAP-BCIS, NCRAS-MINAP-HES, with four groups based on ethnicity agreement: Concordant, Discordant, Missing (1 and ≥2 datasets). Multivariable logistic regression and Cox's Proportional Hazards models assessed 1-year and long-term (≤5 years) cardiac and cancer-related death for each agreement group. RESULTS:Among three linkages, just over half of the ethnicities were concordant (range: 52.4%-53.8%). Discordance was relatively low (range 1.2%-5.5%) while missingness ranged between 28.6% and 43.4% in 1 dataset and 1.6%-12.6% in ≥2 datasets. Ethnicity correlation between individual datasets was poor, lowest between NCRAS and BCIS (r=0.318). We observed higher 1-year and long-term cardiac and cancer deaths in several of the Missing (1 and ≥2 datasets) groups across the three linkages, compared with the Concordant group. CONCLUSION:Across four national datasets for patients with cancer with ACS, nearly half of patients had missing ethnicity in at least one dataset, which was associated with higher cardiac or cancer mortality. Inconsistency in ethnicity coding represents a missed opportunity to examine health inequalities in this high-risk and understudied population.
