Background and aim: To evaluate the impact of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube on nutritional status, treatment-related toxicity, and treatment tolerance in patients with locally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) who underwent chemoradiotherapy. Patients and methods: We enrolled 133 consecutive non-metastatic NPC (III/IV stage) patients, who were treated with prophylactic PEG feeding before the initiation of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) between June 1, 2010 and June 30, 2014. Meanwhile, another 133 non-PEG patients, who were matched for age, gender, and tumor, node, metastases stage, were selected as historical control cohort. Weight and nutritional status changes from pre-radiotherapy to the end of radiotherapy were evaluated, and treatment tolerance and related acute toxicities were analyzed as well. Results: We found that significantly more patients (91.73%) in the PEG group could finish two cycles of CCRT, when compared with those in the non-PEG group (57.89%) (P<0.001). We also indicated that more patients (50.38%) in the non-PEG group experienced weight loss of ≥5%, while the phenomenon was only found in 36.09% patients in the PEG group (P=0.019). In addition, the percentage of patients who lost ≥10% of their weight was similar in these two groups. Changes in albumin and prealbumin levels during radiotherapy in the non-PEG group were higher than those obtained for the PEG group with significant differences (P-values of 0.023 and <0.001, respectively). Furthermore, patients in the PEG group had significantly lower incidence of grade III acute mucositis than those in the non-PEG group (22.56% vs 36.84%, P=0.011). Tube-related complications occurred only in 14 (10.53%) patients in the PEG group, including incision infection of various degrees. Conclusion: PEG and intensive nutrition support may help to minimize body weight loss, maintain nutritional status, and offer better treatment tolerance for patients with locally advanced NPC who underwent CCRT.

Unidimensional measurement may be superior to assess primary tumor response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy for nasopharyngeal carcinoma

The spatial resolution (250–1000 m) of the FY-3D MERSI is too coarse for agricultural monitoring at the farmland scale (20–30 m). To achieve the winter wheat yield (WWY) at the farmland scale, based on FY-3D, a method framework is developed in this work. The enhanced deep convolutional spatiotemporal fusion network (EDCSTFN) was used to perform a spatiotemporal fusion on the 10 day interval FY-3D and Sentinel-2 vegetation indices (VIs), which were compared with the enhanced spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (ESTARFM). In addition, a BP neural network was built to calculate the farmland-scale WWY based on the fused VIs, and the Aqua MODIS gross primary productivity product was used as ancillary data for WWY estimation. The results reveal that both the EDCSTFN and ESTARFM achieve satisfactory precision in the fusion of the Sentinel-2 and FY-3D VIs; however, when the period of spatiotemporal data fusion is relatively long, the EDCSTFN can achieve greater precision than ESTARFM. Finally, the WWY estimation results based on the fused VIs show remarkable correlations with the WWY data at the county scale and provide abundant spatial distribution details about the WWY, displaying great potential for accurate farmland-scale WWY estimations based on reconstructed fine-spatial-temporal-resolution FY-3D data.

Drought events exacerbated by global climate change occur frequently in China. Currently, high-spatiotemporal-resolution gridded meteorological drought index datasets are generally available for single time scales (e.g., 30, 60, 90, and 150 days) and do not fully account for seasonal differences in the impact of drought on vegetation, thus limiting their accuracy when monitoring drought in different regions of China. To compensate for the limitations of existing drought index datasets, a Chinese regional daily meteorological drought comprehensive index (MCI) dataset covering 1951–2022 with a spatial resolution of 0.1 degrees was developed, and standardized precipitation index (SPI) and standardized precipitation evaporation index (SPEI) datasets at 30- and 90-day scales were constructed based on ERA5-Land datasets. Compared with the existing SPI and SPEI datasets, the generated dataset exhibits a high degree of consistency with those in eastern part of China (R² > 0.5; the average biases were close to 0 and significantly smaller than RMSEs of the fitting). Additionally, the MCI dataset can more accurately reflect the changes in shallow soil moisture in the eastern part of China in a timely manner (R² > 0.7 for the 0–7 cm depth), thus providing notable empirical support for research on drought development in different ecosystems.