Recipient selection for liver transplantation in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is based primarily on criteria affecting the chance of long-term success. Here, the relationship between pretransplant bridging therapy and long-term survival was investigated in a subgroup analysis of the SiLVER Study.

Response to bridging, as defined by comparison of imaging at the time of listing and post-transplant pathology report, was categorized into controlled versus progressive disease (more than 20 per cent tumour growth or development of new lesions).

Of 525 patients with HCC who had liver transplantation, 350 recipients underwent pretransplant bridging therapy. Tumour progression despite bridging was an independent risk factor affecting overall survival (hazard ratio 1.80; P = 0.005). For patients within the Milan criteria (MC) at listing, mean overall survival was longer for those with controlled versus progressive disease (6.8 versus 5.8 years; P < 0.001). Importantly, patients with HCCs outside the MC that the best outcomes after liver transplantation. Downstaging into the limits of the MC did not improve the probability of survival.Prognostic factors determining the long-term success of liver transplantation in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma are still under discussion. A subgroup analysis of the SiLVER trial showed that disease control under bridging therapy is strongly associated with improved prognosis in terms of overall survival. However, in tumours exceeding the limits of the Milan criteria, downstaging did not restore the probability of survival compared with that of patients within the Milan criteria.

The incidence of incisional hernia is up to 20 per cent after abdominal surgery. The management of patients with incisional hernia can be complex with an array of techniques and meshes available. Ensuring consistency in reporting outcomes across studies on incisional hernia is important and will enable appropriate interpretation, comparison and data synthesis across a range of clinical and operative treatment strategies.

Literature searches were performed in MEDLINE and EMBASE (from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2019) and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. All studies documenting clinical and patient-reported outcomes for incisional hernia were included.

In total, 1340 studies were screened, of which 92 were included, reporting outcomes on 12 292 patients undergoing incisional hernia repair. KU-57788 Eight broad-based outcome domains were identified, including patient and clinical demographics, hernia-related symptoms, hernia morphology, recurrent incisional hernia, operative variables, postoperative variables, follow-up and patient-reported outcomes. Clinical outcomes such as hernia recurrence rates were reported in 80 studies (87 per cent). A total of nine different definitions for detecting hernia recurrence were identified. Patient-reported outcomes were reported in 31 studies (34 per cent), with 18 different assessment measures used.

This review demonstrates the significant heterogeneity in outcome reporting in incisional hernia studies, with significant variation in outcome assessment and definitions. This is coupled with significant under-reporting of patient-reported outcomes.

This review demonstrates the significant heterogeneity in outcome reporting in incisional hernia studies, with significant variation in outcome assessment and definitions. This is coupled with significant under-reporting of patient-reported outcomes.

Despite women constituting over half of new doctors, gender disparity remains an issue. Surgery has shown particularly slow progress towards gender parity. This study aimed to quantify gender representation within editorial boards of the highest ranking international general surgery journals.

Surgical journals were collated using two indices SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Non-general surgery journals were excluded. Journals were contacted, requesting gender editorial team demographics. Editorial board data were collected via journal websites on 28 November 2019.

The top 25 general surgery journals according to SJR and JIF ranking methods were determined, identifying 28 unique journals. Editorial board data were publicly available for 27 of these 28 surgical journals, and were examined. Women accounted for 20.2 per cent (568 of 2816) of total editorial board positions. Women constituted 11 per cent (4 of 36) of editor-in-chief positions, 32 per cent (29 of 92) of deputy editors, and 19.1 per cent (369 of 1935) of general editorial board positions.

The findings demonstrate gender disparity within editorial boards of the most prominent general surgery journals.

The findings demonstrate gender disparity within editorial boards of the most prominent general surgery journals.

Identifying the proteins that interact with drugs can reduce the cost and time of drug development. Existing computerized methods focus on integrating drug-related and protein-related data from multiple sources to predict candidate drug-target interactions (DTIs). However, multi-scale neighboring node sequences and various kinds of drug and protein similarities are neither fully explored nor considered in decision making.

We propose a drug-target interaction prediction method, DTIP, to encode and integrate multi-scale neighbouring topologies, multiple kinds of similarities, associations, interactions related to drugs and proteins. We firstly construct a three-layer heterogeneous network to represent interactions and associations across drug, protein, and disease nodes. Then a learning framework based on fully-connected autoencoder is proposed to learn the nodes’ low-dimensional feature representations within the heterogeneous network. Secondly, multi-scale neighbouring sequences of drug and protein nodes Comparison with other state-of-the-art methods and case studies of five drugs further validated DTIP’s ability in discovering the potential candidate drug-related proteins.Venn diagrams are widely used tools for graphical depiction of the unions, intersections and distinctions among multiple datasets, and a large number of programs have been developed to generate Venn diagrams for applications in various research areas. However, a comprehensive review comparing these tools has not been previously performed. In this review, we collect Venn diagram generators (i.e. tools for visualizing the relationships of input lists within a Venn diagram) and Venn diagram application tools (i.e. tools for analyzing the relationships between biological data and visualizing them in a Venn diagram) to compare their functional capacity as follows ability to generate high-quality diagrams; maximum datasets handled by each program; input data formats; output diagram styles and image output formats. We also evaluate the picture beautification parameters of the Venn diagram generators in terms of the graphical layout and briefly describe the functional characteristics of the most popular Venn diagram application tools.