Eye samples Eye samples from donors were obtained through the Lions Gift of Sight (Saint Paul Minnesota, USA), operating under the regulations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Eye Bank Association of America. Consent from the donor was obtained and the next of kin received no charge or monetary gain from the donation Continue reading →

Animals Fifty 6-week-old male SpragueDawley (SD) rats were obtained from the Experimental Animal Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd., affiliated with Southern Medical University (license number: SCXK 2011-0015). The rats were housed in an SPF-grade barrier environment at an ambient temperature of 2125 with 5060% humidity and maintained on a 12-h light/12-h dark cycle in the Laboratory Animal Center of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine (Guangzhou, China) Continue reading →

Introduction Breast carcinoma (BC), a common heterogeneous tumor that threatens womens physical and mental health all over the world, is influenced by age, obesity, smoking, alcohol consumption, family history, and use of oral contraceptives.13 Worldwide, there are approximately 2.1 million females diagnosed as BC each year and 630,000 associated deaths.4 Early diagnosis of BC, of no doubt, is conducive to improving survival outcomes and the probability of successful treatment in such patients.5 Moreover, early monitoring is of great value in understanding BC progression and predicting the treatment response, allowing for effective and timely adjustment of treatment.57 Thus, exploring the early diagnosis of BC is beneficial to reduce mortality in BC patients and improve the chance of survival. Molybdenum target X-ray is an imaging technique that uses molybdenum target X-ray machine to take pictures of the patients breast in oblique and axial planes, which can obtain information about the shape, margin, density, calcification and axillary lymph nodes (LNs) of the patients breast mass.8 This examination technique has the advantages of non-invasiveness and high resolution, with important guiding value in early diagnosis and prognosis evaluation of BC.9 But it also has some shortcomings such as poor penetrability and difficulty in distinguishing deep and high lesions, which limits its diagnostic accuracy (ACC) in breast lesions and pathological properties.10,11 High-frequency color Doppler flow imaging (CDFI) is another imaging inspection system that collects information such as the location, size, relationship with surrounding tissues and blood flow of the lesions by examining the lesions in different planes of the breast, which can effectively determine the nature of the lesions and distinguish the benign and malignant breast tumors.12,13 This technique can also be applied to assess the response of tumor xenografts in nude mice to early antiangiogenic therapy.14 Its drawbacks lie in the difficulty in distinguishing small lesions with unclear echoes and microcalcifications (MCs), as well as the difficulty in screening for ductal carcinoma in situ.15 Molybdenum target X-ray has good diagnostic ability for early lesion morphology and microcalcification foci of BC, which can just make up for the shortcomings of CDFI.16 Therefore, we believe that the combination of the two may have a synergistic effect on the early diagnosis of BC. Continue reading →