Oral submucous fibrosis (OSF) is characterized by abnormal collagen deposition. It is a precancerous disorder and transforms into a malignant tumor in 1.5–15% of all cases. Symptoms include submucous fibrosis, ulceration, xerostomia, a burning sensation, and restricted mouth opening. All of these greatly interfere with patient quality of life. The present review introduces OSF from a molecular perspective and summarizes what is known about its underlying mechanisms, diagnostic biomarkers, and therapeutic interventions. In addition to the aggressive treatment of OSF, its prevention is also important. Future research should, therefore, focus on improving the oral health literacy of the patients susceptible to OSF.

https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/20/12/2940/pdf

Oral Submucous Fibrosis: A Review on Etiopathogenesis, Diagnosis, and Therapy

Automated oral cancer identification using histopathological images: a hybrid feature extraction paradigm.

OBJECTIVE: To study the therapeutic effects and mechanism of saikosaponin-d (SSd) in mice with bleomycin (BLM)-induced pulmonary fibrosis. METHODS: According to the random number table, 180 mice were randomly divided into 5 groups. Four groups were pulmonary fibrosis models. Fibrosis model mice were established by intratracheal injection of bleomycin (5 mgxkg(-1)). They were BLM, DXM, SSd and SSd + DXM groups (n = 40 each). At 1 hour post-modeling, DXM, SSd and SSd + DXM groups were injected ip with dexamethasone (DXM, 5 mgxkg(-1)xd(-1), 0.1 ml), SSd (1.8 mgxkg(-1)xd(-1), 0.18 ml), DXM + SSd (0.28 ml) respectively qd until Day 28. BLM group was similarly dosed with normal saline. In addition, a normal control group (NC group, n = 20) treated likewise. The mice were anesthetized and sacrificed at Days 3, 7, 14, 28 for harvests of serum and lung tissue samples. The conventional histopathological changes of lung tissue were observed. Except for NC group, modeling groups of mice were used to observe the natural survival rate. Such indices as superoxide dismutase (SOD) and malonaldehyde (MDA) were examined both in lung tissue and serum samples. And hydroxyproline (HYP) was tested only in lung tissue. RESULTS: SSd could markedly increase the survival rate (80.0% in SSd and SSd + DXM groups vs 50.0% in BLM group, P < 0.05) and reduce alveolitis and fibrosis in mice. In comparison with BLM group, the levels of HYP of three treatment groups (DXM, SSd and SSd + DXM) in lung tissue was significantly lower (P < 0.05) at Days 14 and 28. The levels of MDA both in serum and lung tissue were significantly lower at Days 3, 7 and 14 (P < 0.05). The serum level of SOD was significantly higher at Days 3, 7 and 14 while the level of SOD in lung tissue was significantly higher at Days 3 and 7 (P < 0.05, P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: SSd has marked therapeutic effects upon bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis in mice. And the mechanism may be associated with its anti-lipid peroxidation effect.

[Therapeutic effects and mechanism of saikosaponin-d in mice with bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis].

Advanced ovarian cancer

Automated classification of cells in sub-epithelial connective tissue of oral sub-mucous fibrosis-An SVM based approach

Aim: To describe a novel neural network based oral precancer (oral submucous fibrosis; OSF) stage detection method.

Method: The wavelet coefficients of transmission electron microscopy images of collagen fibres from normal oral submucosa and OSF tissues were used to choose the feature vector which, in turn, was used to train the artificial neural network.

Results: The trained network was able to classify normal and oral precancer stages (less advanced and advanced) after obtaining the image as an input.

Conclusions: The results obtained from this proposed technique were promising and suggest that with further optimisation this method could be used to detect and stage OSF, and could be adapted for other conditions.

https://jcp.bmj.com/content/jclinpath/58/9/932.full.pdf

K Mukkerjee

Papers

A novel wavelet neural network based pathological stage detection technique for an oral precancerous condition