Publications database

Haematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) with HLA-mismatched unrelated donors (MMUD) offers access to curative therapy for patients lacking well-matched donors. Accumulating evidence suggests that functional matching among allele-mismatched pairs can significantly influence patient outcomes. [...]

In 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified adrenal cortical carcinoma (ACC) into four subtypes: conventional, oncocytic, myxoid, and sarcomatoid. The differences in prognosis among these subtypes remain unclear. [...]

Excessive retraction force during a minimally invasive surgery could cause tissue damage, affecting the surgical outcome. The integration of surgical force feedback relies on incorporating force sensors into the instruments, predominantly for robot-assisted surgery. [...]

Manual coding of pathology reports with International Classification of Diseases for Oncology (ICD-O)-3 codes is time-consuming, error-prone, and resource-intensive for health care institutions. To evaluate the performance of multiple state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in extracting ICD-O-3 topography and morphology codes from real-world pathology reports and assess their potential for clinical implementation, this study compares the performance of state-of-the-art open-source models in multiple evaluation setups.We analyzed 21,364 pathology reports from 10,823 patients documented between 2013 and 2025 at a large German hospital. [...]

Social inequalities in cancer constitute a major public health challenge. A lower socioeconomic position (SEP) is consistently associated with higher exposure to cancer risk factors, lower participation in screening, more advanced stage at diagnosis, poorer survival, and adverse survivorship outcomes. [...]

Medulloblastoma (MB), the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor, lacks prognostic tools integrating clinical, molecular, and treatment-related characteristics for individualized management.We developed machine learning models using multicenter data from 729 Chinese patients (2001-2023), of whom 509 were assigned to the training set and 220 to the testing set, and further validated the models on 201 patients from international MB consortia. To accommodate patients and researchers with varying datatypes, four application scenarios were established, including clinical-molecular-radiotherapy (CMR), clinical-molecular (CM), clinical-radiotherapy (CR), and clinical-only (CO).We construct four model scenarios and assess their predictive performance in the testing set: an XGBoost-based CMR model (incorporating 11 features, including molecular subgroup, radiotherapy dose, and key gene expression) with a C-index of 0.612; an XGBoost-based CM (C-index = 0.609); a GBM-based CR (C-index = 0.637); and a GBM-based CO (C-index = 0.635). [...]

Patient expectations and satisfaction are critical outcomes in cranial and spinal neurosurgery, yet discrepancies between anticipated and actual results can hinder postoperative adjustment. This prospective longitudinal study investigated how coping strategies and preoperative patient education influence satisfaction with surgical outcomes. [...]

Carbon-ion radiotherapy offers highly precise targeting of tumors while sparing healthy tissue compared to X-ray therapy. However, this precision comes at the cost of an increased sensitivity of the treatment to range uncertainties, which can arise from anatomical changes of the patient. [...]

Experimental designs in dose response experiments often use simple setups where the dose levels are increased by a fixed factor on the log scale. More efficient or even formally optimal experimental designs exist for this context, but these are often unpopular among applied scientists as they usually depend on the true value of some of the parameters and also frequently propose using only a small number of distinct dose levels. [...]

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-associated primary central nervous system lymphoproliferative diseases (EBV+PCNSL) are aggressive conditions with poor prognoses. We previously reported durable responses in patients with PCNSL who were treated with the antivirals ganciclovir and azidothymidine, plus rituximab and dexamethasone (GARD). [...]