godfather of surgery

Chapter 1077 Turning point
After Professor Chang's rabies virus was completely cleared, he was transferred from the ICU to the general ward for rehabilitation treatment.

Now, except for bilateral lower limb dystonia, he has no other sequelae, and the treatment is very successful. Yang Ping did not have time to summarize the treatment of rabies, so he handed over the summary of this new method to the infectious department and ICU of the First Affiliated Hospital of Nandu Hospital, which can be regarded as a small gift to his father-in-law.

The infectious disease department and ICU of the First Affiliated Hospital of Nandu Hospital can definitely set up research projects based on this new method and then conduct further research. At present, this method has only successful cases, but no matter what the success rate of multiple samples will be in the future, it has achieved a breakthrough from zero.

Soon after being discharged from the hospital, Sisi returned to Sanbo Hospital for K virus treatment. Now she needs treatment every four weeks, that is, one treatment every three weeks, and each treatment requires one week of hospitalization. For Sisi, she has become accustomed to switching between the hospital and school, and compared with the past, this switching now seems easy and regular, and each treatment can give her more hope.

A standard process has been formed for the treatment of K virus, and this time it was carried out completely according to the standard process: injection of K virus treatment, and then drawing blood samples immediately after the injection, 6 hours later, 12 hours later, 24 hours later, 48 hours later, 72 hours later... for virus concentration testing, and local puncture of the tumor twice on the third and seventh days to obtain tumor biopsy tissue for cytological examination.

Everyone is no longer as nervous and worried about the experiment as before. After many mutations, the K virus has a minimal impact on the human body. Apart from three to five days of low fever, there will be no other more serious adverse reactions. Apart from drinking plenty of water and monitoring body temperature, no medical intervention is required.

More than twelve hours after the blood was drawn, Yang Ping still hadn't received a call from Professor Zhang Zhiwei. In normal experiments, he would receive the first data report from Professor Zhang about three hours after the blood was drawn. Why didn't he get a response this time? Yang Ping checked his phone and found that he had no outstanding bills and the network was normal.

There may be some difficulties in the experiment, such as bugs in the image recognition software. As a newly launched software, it needs to be constantly upgraded and improved. It is not surprising that some bugs sometimes appear. Yang Ping continues to wait patiently for the data.

While waiting, he continued to think about what to do next, and analyzed the many directions of development of cancer treatment in the world as a whole, trying to find some valuable new clues.

Professor Zhang Zhiwei called, and his tone was anxious: "Professor Yang, is there something wrong with the specimen this time? How come there is no tumor cell infected by the K virus?"

"None?" Yang Ping wanted to confirm again.

For a rigorous researcher, you must never rashly deny any doubts. For any abnormality that occurs, you must first treat it as existing and then think about it seriously.

A gastroenterologist at a domestic university missed the Nobel Prize when he was studying for his doctorate because he rashly denied the abnormalities in the experiment. During his doctorate, he studied the pathogenesis of gastric cancer. Once, he found a kind of bacteria he had never seen before in the patient's gastric juice. He told his supervisor about this situation. The supervisor smiled and said, "You are silly. The human digestive system is an open pipe structure. We need to take in food and water from the outside every day. There are a lot of bacteria in food and water, so isn't it normal to have bacteria in the stomach? The intestines are also the bacterial reservoir of the human body, and countless kinds of bacteria gather there." After hearing this, the doctor lowered his head in shame, thinking that his supervisor was right. He was so naive that he thought he had discovered some important new information. It turned out to be this. Later, an Australian doctor also found this kind of bacteria in the stomach. He did not easily deny this abnormality, but kept studying it, extracted the bacteria for various analyses, and finally found that this bacteria was Helicobacter pylori, which is closely related to gastric cancer. Because of this achievement, this doctor and another colleague who studied together later won the Nobel Prize.

This phenomenon is very strange. Everything was fine some time ago, and the experiments were more successful than the last. Why did this suddenly happen this time?

"I initially thought there was a problem with the image recognition software, but all of our researchers looked at a lot of images manually, and the results were the same: not a single tumor cell was infected, let alone had apoptosis initiated by the K virus." Professor Zhang Zhiwei became more and more excited as he spoke.

Yang Ping immediately said, "We need to do two aspects of analysis. First, we believe that this is the fact, and second, this may be a mistake. We cannot only do a one-sided analysis, otherwise it is easy to ignore the real problem. I will come over immediately to analyze the anomaly with you."

If this was true, it meant that the experiment had a completely new and unexpected problem. Yang Ping immediately rushed to the virus laboratory of Nandu Medical University. He wanted to see for himself what was going on. How could this happen? It was too unexpected. He had to carefully and rigorously analyze what had happened.

When they arrived at Nandu Medical University, Professor Zhang and the researchers in the laboratory were discussing the unexpected situation of the experiment. When they saw Yang Ping coming in, everyone stopped discussing.

Yang Ping sat down: "Everyone continue the discussion. I am also here to participate in the discussion and analyze the reasons behind it with everyone."

Professor Zhang Zhiwei said, "Professor Yang, why don't you take a look at some electron microscope images of cells yourself, and then we can discuss it."

This was good, at least Yang Ping personally verified whether this problem existed. He then took some samples and personally looked at the pictures for an hour, and really did not find a single infected cell.

Based on the experience of the previous experiment, the distribution of this infection is very uniform, and there is no biased concentration. Therefore, a manual image review for an hour will not reveal a single infected image, and there will certainly not be any in the future.

But Yang Ping was still worried. What if there was some biased concentration of infection? All the pictures in the first part had zero infection rate, while the infection was concentrated in the pictures in the back. Just like catching fish, the fish are not necessarily evenly distributed in the river. If the fisherman happens to be in a fishless area, he will certainly not catch any fish, but it cannot be said that there are no fish in the river. This possibility is very small, but it is not impossible. This creates a false impression that all specimens are not infected.

Science is rigorous, and when thinking about problems, one must try to be as foolproof as possible. Any loopholes may interfere with one's thinking and cause the entire experiment to fail.

"What should we do?" Professor Zhang Zhiwei felt the seriousness of the situation. If this was the case, the experiment might fail, because the infection rate was relatively low at the time, but if the infection rate could be maintained, multiple treatments could achieve excellent results. Now that the infection rate suddenly appeared to be zero, there would be no treatment effect anyway.

"We first rule out whether the image recognition software has a fault. We randomly shuffle the order of all the images and run them through the image recognition software again. We retrieve all the electron microscope images from previous experiments and run them through the image recognition software again. When testing, we ask the software developers to participate in the analysis so that we can detect whether there is a problem with the software. If there is no problem with the software, we randomly select a portion of the shuffled images and perform manual image recognition to extend the time for manual image recognition. Thank you for your hard work today."

After some thought, Yang Ping proposed his own solution. The experiment had already been carried out, and he must not miss important things due to any negligence. Professor Zhang Zhiwei immediately arranged the work. In order to shorten the experiment time, Yang Ping transferred all the laboratory staff of Sanbo Hospital to help read the pictures. They all have the literacy of reading pictures. Manual reading is very slow. If you read pictures one by one, the number of people reading more pictures and the number of samples will be larger, and the reliability of the conclusions will be much greater.

All the computers in the laboratory were used, and everyone took turns to read the pictures carefully and meticulously. When the machines failed to function or were untrustworthy, manpower was the only and last resort.

The most reliable person is human, and the least reliable person is also human. This statement also applies to machines.

The computers formed a big circle, and Yang Ping and Professor Zhang Zhiwei sat in the middle of the circle. Yang Ping closed his eyes and thought about what other loopholes this experiment had that he had not thought of. Professor Zhang Zhiwei did not speak either. When the experiment encountered such a sudden change, if this change was a fact and not caused by a machine error, it meant that the previous efforts might be in vain, which made Professor Zhang Zhiwei feel very uncomfortable.

Manual image recognition is very harmful to eyesight. In order to see more pictures, everyone even temporarily buys a few bags of eye drops. But there is no other way. If the number of samples is too small, it cannot explain the problem, so everyone should try to see more pictures.

At about ten o'clock in the evening, Yang Ping looked at the time and said, "Everyone stop working and have a good rest tonight. We will continue tomorrow. The follow-up puncture and blood samples will be delivered tomorrow. We will add another experimenter tomorrow so that the data will be more reliable."

Originally, Zhao Yufan and Sisi's experimental times were staggered, but now they must be done together so that their experimental data can be compared to prevent any deviations.

Yang Ping didn't want everyone to stay up late. This work is important, but it is definitely not urgent. There is no need to sacrifice health to shorten these ten hours. Staying up late not only harms health, but also causes mistakes in this delicate work. When people are exhausted, their attention will definitely decrease, and it is easy to miss some details of the picture.

The next day, this work continued until the evening. A total of 12000 images were manually reviewed, and 27 of them were considered to be infected by the virus. However, after review by Professors Yang Ping and Zhang Zhiwei, it was determined that these 27 images were misdiagnosed, and the tumor cells in these images were not infected by the virus.

The result of manual image recognition was that none of the 12000 images showed that any tumor cells were infected.

So is there any problem with the image recognition software? After testing the software with the original image, it was found that there was no problem with the software at all. So the abnormal data that appeared in this experiment is a fact.

Combining manual and software image review, it was found that not a single tumor cell was infected in this experiment, which means that either the infection rate was zero or the infection rate was extremely low, resulting in no positive samples being collected. Why did this happen?

Why is this happening?

Yang Ping called all members of the experimental team together for a meeting to discuss.

"The K virus we used is the same as in previous experiments. There are several possibilities for this situation: First, the K virus was killed by the human immune system before reaching the target; second, the K virus lost the ability to infect tumor cells," Professor Zhang Zhiwei analyzed.

Lu Xiaolu agreed with this view. After some thought, he said, "No matter which of these two situations it is, either the K virus has mutated and its ability to fight the immune system or infect tumor cells has been reduced or lost; or the human body has acquired some ability to deal with it through several experiments, such as enhanced immune killing ability against it, or tumor cells have undergone some changes that can reject this virus. After all, the K virus is a genetically modified virus, and its stability may not be very good."

Yang Ping nodded. Everyone’s analysis was correct. It was the same problem in the end. Now it was a matter of how to find out what the situation was and how to solve it.

"Regarding the questions just raised, we need to come up with a detailed plan to analyze and solve the problems, such as: virus structure analysis to see if it has mutated? Antibody testing in the subjects' bodies to see if specific antibodies against the virus have been produced? Structural analysis of tumor cells to see if tumor cells have some kind of escape or protection mechanism against it?" said Yang Ping.

A lot of meticulous work needs to be done around these issues, so scientific research is a hard job. When you think you are about to succeed, it is actually an illusion, and in the end you find that the entire experiment is wrong. When you think there is light at the end of the tunnel, you are actually in a dead end.

If a highly effective antibody has already appeared in the subject's body, these antibodies will recognize the K virus and then surround the virus, blocking it outside the human cells. The virus cannot invade the cells and cannot reproduce, and will slowly decompose. This is the human immune system's usual method of dealing with viruses.

In order to figure out the antibody problem, we can only draw blood from Sisi to check for K virus antibodies. In order to detect the antibodies, we must develop a set of antibody detection methods and corresponding reagents.

This requires research cooperation with Ruixing Company. Ruixing Company now has a branch company specializing in the production of diagnostic reagents and other products, and a group of research and technical personnel specializing in the development of diagnostic products. In order to make the development of diagnostic reagents smoother, Yang Ping asked the laboratory department of Sanbo Hospital to participate, combining pathogen research, diagnostic reagent research and diagnostic clinical research.

This is just one aspect of the research. There is also structural analysis of tumor cells, structural analysis of K virus, etc. The subsequent work is very troublesome and it cannot be carried out without extremely high enthusiasm.

Yang Ping couldn't tell where the turning point of this experiment would lead the experiment.