Interoception, the capacity to sense, perceive, and metacognitively appraise viscerosensory and homeostatic signals, is a growing focus in psychology and psychiatry. Adaptive psychophysical tasks now ...

When we think about risk in early childhood, certain images come easily to mind: a child climbing too high, running too fast, balancing on an unstable surface, or attempting something that might end in a scraped knee.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection can lead to hepatocellular carcinoma, and HBV integration into the host genome is regularly observed in the liver of chronic HBV carriers and is speculated to trigger carcinogenesis. To detect HBV integration, PCR-based methods are sensitive but may not be effective depending on the HBV integration site. High-throughput sequencing reveals not only HBV integration but also the site. However, it is still expensive for clinical applications. In situ hybridization is efficient and allows detection of DNA and RNA in single cells and has been applied to study HBV infection and dynamics. The technique, however, has not been applied to detect HBV integration. The task is challenging because of the small copy number of integrated HBV genomes, which results in a small signal-to-noise ratio. Here, we developed a fluorescence in situ hybridization approach for examining HBV integration in each liver cell. The obtained images of cells were analyzed using a deep learning model. Using several hepatoma cell lines with and without integrated HBV DNA, we showed that our trained neural network achieved an over 90% accuracy for majority of positive and negative control cells. This is the first proof-of-concept study showing that fluorescence imaging and deep learning are useful in detecting HBV integration at the single-cell level.

Alcohol consumption is a major risk factor for cancer, particularly of the head and neck. Acetaldehyde, the main ethanol metabolite, is linked to oral carcinogenesis, but the mechanisms are not well understood. While some mutational signatures such as single-base substitution signature SBS16, doublet-base substitution signature DBS4, and indel signature ID11 have been linked to alcohol use, they are not limited to alcohol-related cancers. We examined the genome-wide in vivo mutation landscapes of rats chronically exposed to ethanol or acetaldehyde, focusing on head-and-neck tumors (involving the cheek and the Zymbal gland) and tumors of the forestomach and liver. Mutational signature analysis revealed early-onset, exposure-associated formation of signature SBS17 in ~ 38% of head-and-neck tumors, suggesting inflammation and oxidative damage may mediate carcinogenesis in these sites. We observed relative enrichment of driver-like mutations in Tp53, Mtor and Hras in exposed tumors, where all Tp53-mutated tumors were SBS17-positive, recapitulating a similar scenario from human gastro-esophageal adenocarcinomas. Next, the doublet-base, indel, copy number and structural variant changes were sporadic and not following exposure-specific patterns. No signatures previously associated with alcohol consumption in humans were observed in the exposed animals. Thus, in this animal cancer model, alcohol-related carcinogenesis across multiple organs is unlikely to be driven mainly by direct mutagenicity of ethanol or acetaldehyde. Rather, the results support a role for non-mutational processes in mediating their carcinogenic effects. Further investigation is warranted to clarify the relationship between mutational signature SBS17 and TP53 loss-of-function mutations as potential biomarkers of alcohol-related carcinogenesis in animals and humans. Graphical Abstract Ethanol or acetaldehyde exposure in rats induces limited genome-wide mutations in head-and-neck, forestomach, and liver tissues. SBS17 appears early in 38% head-and-neck tumors following exposure, implicating inflammation and oxidative damage. Tp53, Mtor, and Hras mutations are enriched upon exposure, with all Tp53-mutant tumors SBS17-positive, paralleling human cancer observations. Exposure-linked carcinogenesis is unlikely driven by direct mutagenicity of ethanol/acetaldehyde.

Background Video-based assessment and surgical data science can advance surgical training, research, and quality improvement. However, widespread use of surgical videos is limited by heterogeneous recording formats and privacy concerns associated with sharing potentially sensitive data. The work presents the development, implementation, evaluation, and public release of Endoshare, a surgeon-friendly application that merges, standardizes, and de-identifies endoscopic videos. Methods Development followed the first four phases of the software development life cycle (analysis, design, implementation, testing), using iterative user-centered evaluations to guide system refinement. In the initial analysis phase, an internal survey of clinicians and computer scientists, using 10 usability heuristics, identified early requirements. These findings guided design and implementation toward a cross-platform, privacy-by-design architecture. In the final testing phase, an external clinician survey combined the same heuristics with Technology Acceptance Model constructs to evaluate usability and adoption, complemented by a performance assessment across different hardware and configurations. Statistical evaluation used standard descriptive and inferential methods. Results In the analysis phase, four clinicians and four computer scientists tested a prototype, reporting high usability (4.68 ± 0.40/5 and 4.03 ± 0.51/5). The lowest score (4.00 ± 0.93/5) concerned the clarity of labels, indicating a need to make functions easier to recognize. The application’s user experience was refined to ensure minimal effort for case selection, video merging, automated out-of-body detection and removal, and filename pseudonymization. In the testing phase, 10 surgeons reported high perceived usefulness (5.07 ± 1.75/7), ease of use (5.15 ± 1.71/7), heuristic usability (4.38 ± 0.48/5), and recommended the system (9.20 ± 0.79/10). Benchmarking showed that processing time increased proportionally with video duration and was consistently lower in fast mode (≈ 79% faster). Conclusion Endoshare is a publicly available surgeon-friendly solution to manage, standardize, and de-identify surgical videos. Endoshare could facilitate the use and sharing of valuable surgical video data for surgical training, research, and quality improvement. Compliance certification and broader interoperability validation are needed to establish it as a reliable tool.

This blog marks World Sexual Health Day 2026 by bringing together a selection of Springer Nature research highlights and topical collections showcasing the importance of sexual health in public health settings and SDG3: Good Health and Well-being.