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Elevation of Liver Elastic Value Following Radiofrequency Ablation Reflected Neutrophils Mediated Abscopal Effect in Liver Cancer

By: Ke Lin · Jiayao Huang · Nan Zhang · Bin Qiao · Daopeng Yang · Jianping Guo · Xiaoyan Xie · Manxia Lin · Bowen Zhuang

25 March 2026 at 18:00

JHEP Rep. 2026 Mar 23:101824. doi: 10.1016/j.jhepr.2026.101824. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality globally. Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a widely used treatment for HCC, but its efficacy is often limited by tumor relapse. Neutrophils, serve as a double-edged sword in tumor immunology, have recently been implicated in anti-tumor immunity post-RFA. Shear wave elastography (SWE) is a non-invasive examination for liver tissue, and associated with immune response. This study investigates the correlation between dynamic change of SWE values and neutrophils response following RFA, and explores potential adjuvant strategies for RFA.

METHODS: We conducted a comprehensive analysis using both clinical data from patients undergoing RFA (n=102) and experimental studies in mouse models (n=4-6 per group). Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and multi-omics analyses including multiplex immunofluorescence staining and flow cytometric analysis were performed to identify neutrophil subsets. To assess the therapeutic potential of neutrophils-activating therapy for enhancing anti-tumor immunity post-RFA, we tested CD40 agonist in combination with RFA in preclinical models.

RESULTS: We noticed that rising liver SWE values following RFA were significantly associated with reduce relapse (n=102, p<0.001), and demonstrated that this phenomenon was linked to the inflammatory environment induced by the infiltration of neutrophils (2.5-fold increase, p<0.001). scRNA-seq analysis identified neutrophil subsets characterized by high expression of interferon-stimulated genes, which exhibited potent anti-tumor activity via nitric oxide. Importantly, treatment with CD40 agonist significantly augmented this immune response, leading to reduced tumor growth in mice (149.6±38.12 mm³ vs 23.92±4.43 mm³, p=0.008).

CONCLUSIONS: We linked clinical features to neutrophil-mediated immunity post-RFA. Neutrophil-activating therapy like CD40 agonists may prevent HCC relapse after RFA.

PMID:41881314 | DOI:10.1016/j.jhepr.2026.101824

Quantum-Inspired Fine-Tuning for Few-Shot AIGC Detection via Phase-Structured Reparameterization

cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

By: Kaiyang Xing · Han Fang · Zhaoyun Chen · Zhonghui Li · Yang Yang · Weiming Zhang · Guoping Guo

4 March 2026 at 13:00

arXiv:2603.02281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent studies show that quantum neural networks (QNNs) generalize well in few-shot regimes. To extend this advantage to large-scale tasks, we propose Q-LoRA, a quantum-enhanced fine-tuning scheme that integrates lightweight QNNs into the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) adapter. Applied to AI-generated content (AIGC) detection, Q-LoRA consistently outperforms standard LoRA under few-shot settings. We analyze the source of this improvement and identify two possible structural inductive biases from QNNs: (i) phase-aware representations, which encode richer information across orthogonal amplitude-phase components, and (ii) norm-constrained transformations, which stabilize optimization via inherent orthogonality. However, Q-LoRA incurs non-trivial overhead due to quantum simulation. Motivated by our analysis, we further introduce H-LoRA, a fully classical variant that applies the Hilbert transform within the LoRA adapter to retain similar phase structure and constraints. Experiments on few-shot AIGC detection show that both Q-LoRA and H-LoRA outperform standard LoRA by over 5% accuracy, with H-LoRA achieving comparable accuracy at significantly lower cost in this task.