Breast Cancer Research & Therapies

Biography:

XIAO-XIA YIN received the Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from The University of Adelaide, Australia. She was a Visiting Scholar with the University of Reading, Reading, U.K., under the supervision of S. Hadjiloucas, and with the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., under the supervision of L. F. Gladden. She involved in tumor detection via DCE-MRI with The University of Melbourne, Australia, under the supervision of Prof. Kotagiri. She has an existing collaboration with Prof. M.-Y. Su with the Center for Functional Onco Imaging, University of California at Irvine, USA, and with Prof. T. Kron with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Australia. She is currently a professor in University of Guangzhou, China and her major is in high-dimensional medical image analysis. Her research interests include multiresolution analysis, segmentation, image reconstruction and classifification, and their applications to high-dimensional medical imaging. She received the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, in 2009.

Abstract:

We present Focal Boundary Dice, a new segmentation evaluation measure focused on boundary quality and class imbalance. We perform an extensive analysis across different error types and object sizes of imaged tumors from MRI scan and show that Focal Boundary Dice is significantly more sensitive than the standard Focal and Dice measures to boundary errors for imaged tumors from MRI scans and does not over-penalize errors on division of the boundary, including smaller imaged objects. The new quality measure displays several desirable characteristics, like higher accuracy in the selection of hard samples, prediction/ground truth pairs, and balanced responsiveness across scales, which makes it more suitable for segmentation evaluation than other classification focused measures such as combined IoU and BCE loss, Boundary BCE loss and Shape-aware Loss.

Biography:

Sarah completed her Ph.D in 2021 from Universiti Putra Malaysia. She works as a data analyst. She has published several scientific articles in high impact ISI-indexed journals. Currently, she is a reviewer in some scientific journals. Her area of expertise is engulfed around community health issues such as breast cancer, cancer screening behaviors, knowledge, awareness, health beliefs, vaccine hesitancy, educational programs, health research methodology, systematic review and meta-analysis.

Abstract:

Breast cancer (BC) is the most frequently diagnosed cancer among women worldwide. The role of teachers in educating students plays a vital role in the promotion of healthy behavior such as breast cancer screening (BCS). This study aims to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an educational program on BCS. The highlighted outcomes include BCS knowledge and practice.  A randomized controlled trial was conducted among 180 Arabic women in Malaysia. The intervention group were offered an educational program on BCS prior the intervention. The data were collected at baseline and three-months post intervention using valid and reliable Arabic questionnaires. Data analysis was performed using the SPSS software 22.0. Chi-square test and the independent sample t-test with a confidence interval of 95% and P-value less than 0.05 were conducted to assess the differences between the groups. Results demonstrated there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups regarding the respondents' characteristics and the outcome variables at baseline. Following the intervention, however, the groups demonstrated significant higher changes in breast self-examination (BSE) and in clinical breast examination (CBE) for the intervention group than the control group. Breast self-examination performing was reported by 81.1% of the respondents in the intervention group compared with only 25.6 % in the control group (P<0.01). More than one-third of respondents in the intervention group reported having practiced CBE (36.7%) compared with only 21.1% in the control group with a significant difference between the two groups (P=0.021). However, there was no significant difference between the two groups on mammography (MMG) performance (P=0.756). For the knowledge of BC, there was a significant difference between the two groups (P<0.01). The intervention group displays a significant increase in the knowledge of BC after the intervention 27.55(SD=3.03) than the control group 17.60(SD=5.01). These results show the effectiveness of educational program in improving knowledge and practice of BCS.

Biography:

Jiawei (Stacey) Li obtained her MD in Clinical Medicine in 2016 and a Master’s Degree in 2018 from Jilin University, one of the key universities in China under the Chinese Government’s Building World-class University schemes of the “Project 985” and "Project 211". She is now a PhD candidate at the AUT under the supervision of A/Prof Dong-Xu Liu. Her research project is to delineate the mechanism of the SHON breast cancer biomarker using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique.

Abstract:

Endocrine therapies currently remain the most effective form of treatment for ER-positive (ER+) breast cancer. However, not all patients will benefit from these treatments. Up to 50% the patients with ER+ tumours are resistant to the therapies either from onset of therapy or soon after therapy, with devastating consequences. SHON, a novel secreted hominoid-specific oncogene, promotes cell proliferation and tumour growth and has also been shown to be a promising biomarker that can accurately predict the response of patients to endocrine treatment in breast cancer. SHON is an estrogen-regulated gene, and the expression of SHON is strongly associated with ER expression in breast cancer. However, the molecular mechanism about how SHON drives breast cancer progression and metastasis and mediates endocrine resistance in breast cancer is still not clear. In this project, we utilized the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology to investigate the mechanism of action. Two ER+ breast cancer cell lines MCF-7 and T47D, and two ER- breast cancer cell lines MDA-MB-231 and BT549, were used to generate SHON-knockout (+/-, -/-) cells. For comparison, SHON-overexpressing stable cells were also created from these cell lines. The status of SHON gene in single-cell clones was confirmed by both genomic PCR and DNA sequencing. SHON-overexpressing cell clones were confirmed by RT-PCR at the RNA level and Western Blotting at the protein level. We have obtained monoallelic SHON+/- knockout single-cell clones and SHON-overexpressing MCF-7 cell clones. We are still screening for biallelic SHON-/- knockout cell clones. Once all the cell lines are established, a variety of in vivo and in vitro functional assays to delineate the signaling cascades in these cells in the presence and absence of SHON gene. This will improve our understanding of the role of SHON in breast cancer cells.

Biography:

Dr. Chengcai Yao is the director and academic leader of the Department of Breast Surgery at the Sixth Affiliated Hospital of South China University of Technology, PRC. He is also a member of the breast disease branch of the Guangdong Medical Association, the breast surgery branch of the Guangdong Medical Association and the breast cancer branch of the Guangdong Anticancer Association. He is also a youthful and middle-aged editorial member of the "Chinese Journal of Breast Diseases (electronic edition)" and the "Chinese Journal of General Surgery". He is primarily engaged in basic and clinical breast cancer research, with a particular focus on minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery for early-stage breast cancer and mechanisms of drug resistance to chemotherapy.​

Abstract:

The quest for beauty is never-ending for women with breast cancer, so to ensure a successful treatment of the tumour, traceless surgical incisions are a consideration for surgeons. Endoscopic or robotic minimally invasive surgery may be the perfect solution to this problem, but currently endoscopic surgery is rarely performed in breast surgery for a variety of reasons, such as lack of natural space in the breast, immature technology, and excessive length of operation.
The objective of this study was to investigate the efficacy of transthoracic lateral single-hole non-liposuction endoscopy in nipple sparing mastectomy (NSM) with immediate prosthesis breast reconstruction (IPBR). Methodology：The clinicopathologic data of 42 patients with EBC who underwent endoscopic NSM and IPBR in the Department of Breast Surgery of our hospital from February 2020 to July 2022 were collected, and the success rate of surgery, operation time, intraoperative conditions, postoperative complications, aesthetic effect of breast reconstruction and short-term oncology safety were analyzed.
Finding: All the 42 patients successfully completed the operation, with a success rate of 100%. 12 patients were completed operation with (210.17±9.87) minutes in the first year after the original procedure began, and 30 patients with (155.36±2.42) minutes after the first year, and there was a difference between the two groups. There were also differences in intraoperative blood loss  and postoperative drainage volume between the two groups, but no difference in extubation time. The postoperative complications and the aesthetic effect of breast reconstruction  were not different. The 42 patients were average follow-up of 18.8 months. None of the patients had a recurrence or distant metastasis.
Conclusions:Transthoracic lateral single-hole non-liposuction endoscopy technique for IBPR of EBC: (1) high success rate of surgery, fewer postoperative complications, good aesthetic effect and high safety of oncology; (2) Skillful practice can shorten the operation time, improve intraoperative conditions and improve surgical efficiency.

Biography:

Dr Jean Paul Milambo, Department of Global Health, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Abstract:

Background: Obesity, and mediators of inflammation have been identified as the most important risk and predictive factors in postmenopausal breast cancer survivors (BCS) using aromatase inhibitors (AIs). Data is lacking on the effects of AIs on clinical, biomedical and genetic markers among postmenopausal BC women in the African settings. Therefore, this study was conducted to assess the effects of hs-CRP and BMI, as inflammatory risk markers and prognostic predictors in postmenopausal BCS subjected to AIs after a 24 month follow up.

Methods: A Quasi-experimental study was conducted; including 126 female BC patients with stages ranging from 0-III initially subjected to AIs and subsequently followed up for 24 months. Follow up visits were carried out at the commencement of the study, month 4, month 12 and month 24. A clinical and biomedical assessment was conducted at baseline of study to predict hs-CRP, BMI at month 12 and 24 using multiple imputation model.  Random effects model was used to monitor the changes over the time.

Results: Random linear effects model revealed stronger statistically association between BMI and homocysteine (p=0.021, 95%CI: 0.0083 to 0.1029).  Weight and total body fat were strongly associated after 24 months follow up. In addition, hs-CRP was associated with BMI (p=0.0001), and hs-CRP was associated with other biomedical markers such such as calcium (p=0.021, 95% CI: 0.01 to 0.10), phosphate (p=0.039, 95%CI: 0.01 to 0.10), and ferritin (p=0.002, 95%CI: 0.02 to 0.08). AIs did not affect BMI and hs-CRP after 24 weeks of the study period.

Conclusion: There was statistically significant mean change between the baseline measurement of TBF and homocysteine after 24 follow up among postmenopausal BCS subjected on AIs. There was statistically significant association between hypertension, BMI, TBF, weight, hs-CRP, homocysteine, ferritin and calcium between baseline and after 24 months follow up. These identified markers could serve as predictors of AIs-associated among breast cancer survivors to be incorporated in point of care testing.