Intrahepatic Cholangiocarcinoma: Clinical Aspects, Pathology and Treatment

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is the second most common primary tumor of the liver. To further define its clinicopathology and surgical management, we reviewed our experience. Clinical presentations of 32 patients with ICC was similar to that with hepatocellular carcinoma. Jaundice occurred in only 27 percent. ICC was unresectable due to advanced disease stage in 81 percent. Six patients had curative resections with two 5 year disease free survivors. Underlying liver disease was associated with ICC in 34 percent of patients

An experimental evaluation of the incidence of fitness-function/search-algorithm combinations on the classification performance of myoelectric control systems with iPCA tuning

BACKGROUND: The information of electromyographic signals can be used by Myoelectric Control Systems (MCSs) to actuate prostheses. These devices allow the performing of movements that cannot be carried out by persons with amputated limbs. The state of the art in the development of MCSs is based on the use of individual principal component analysis (iPCA) as a stage of pre-processing of the classifiers. The iPCA pre-processing implies an optimization stage which has not yet been deeply explored. METHODS: The present study considers two factors in the iPCA stage: namely A (the fitness function), and B (the search algorithm). The A factor comprises two levels, namely A(1) (the classification error) and A(2) (the correlation factor). Otherwise, the B factor has four levels, specifically B(1) (the Sequential Forward Selection, SFS), B(2) (the Sequential Floating Forward Selection, SFFS), B(3) (Artificial Bee Colony, ABC), and B(4) (Particle Swarm Optimization, PSO). This work evaluates the incidence of each one of the eight possible combinations between A and B factors over the classification error of the MCS. RESULTS: A two factor ANOVA was performed on the computed classification errors and determined that: (1) the interactive effects over the classification error are not significative (F(0.01,3,72) = 4.0659 > f( AB ) = 0.09), (2) the levels of factor A have significative effects on the classification error (F(0.02,1,72) = 5.0162 < f( A ) = 6.56), and (3) the levels of factor B over the classification error are not significative (F(0.01,3,72) = 4.0659 > f( B ) = 0.08). CONCLUSIONS: Considering the classification performance we found a superiority of using the factor A(2) in combination with any of the levels of factor B. With respect to the time performance the analysis suggests that the PSO algorithm is at least 14 percent better than its best competitor. The latter behavior has been observed for a particular configuration set of parameters in the search algorithms. Future works will investigate the effect of these parameters in the classification performance, such as length of the reduced size vector, number of particles and bees used during optimal search, the cognitive parameters in the PSO algorithm as well as the limit of cycles to improve a solution in the ABC algorithm

Compression of Surface Electromyographic Signals Using Two-Dimensional Techniques

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Resection of the liver for colorectal carcinoma metastases - A multi-institutional study of long-term survivors

In this review of a collected series of patients undergoing hepatic resection for colorectal metastases, 100 patients were found to have survived greater than five years from the time of resection. Of these 100 long-term survivors, 71 remain disease-free through the last follow-up, 19 recurred prior to five years, and ten recurred after five years. Patient characteristics that may have contributed to survival were examined. Procedures performed included five trisegmentectomies, 32 lobectomies, 16 left lateral segmentectomies, and 45 wedge resections. The margin of resection was recorded in 27 patients, one of whom had a positive margin, nine of whom had a less than or equal to 1-cm margin, and 17 of whom had a greater than 1-cm margin. Eighty-one patients had a solitary metastasis to the liver, 11 patients had two metastases, one patient had three metastases, and four patients had four metastases. Thirty patients had Stage C primary carcinoma, 40 had Stage B primary carcinoma, and one had Stage A primarycarcinoma. The disease-free interval from the time of colon resection to the time of liver resection was less than one year in 65 patients, and greater than one year in 34 patients. Three patients had bilobar metastases. Four of the patients had extrahepatic disease resected simultaneously with the liver resection. Though several contraindications to hepatic resection have been proposed in the past, five-year survival has been found in patients with extrahepatic disease resected simultaneously, patients with bilobar metastases, patients with multiple metastases, and patients with positive margins. Five-year disease-free survivors are also present in each of these subsets. It is concluded that five-year survival is possible in the presence of reported contraindications to resection, and therefore that the decision to resect the liver must be individualized. © 1988 American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons

Semi-automatic algorithm for construction of the left ventricular area variation curve over a complete cardiac cycle

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Two-dimensional echocardiography (2D-echo) allows the evaluation of cardiac structures and their movements. A wide range of clinical diagnoses are based on the performance of the left ventricle. The evaluation of myocardial function is typically performed by manual segmentation of the ventricular cavity in a series of dynamic images. This process is laborious and operator dependent. The automatic segmentation of the left ventricle in 4-chamber long-axis images during diastole is troublesome, because of the opening of the mitral valve.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This work presents a method for segmentation of the left ventricle in dynamic 2D-echo 4-chamber long-axis images over the complete cardiac cycle. The proposed algorithm is based on classic image processing techniques, including time-averaging and wavelet-based denoising, edge enhancement filtering, morphological operations, homotopy modification, and watershed segmentation. The proposed method is semi-automatic, requiring a single user intervention for identification of the position of the mitral valve in the first temporal frame of the video sequence. Image segmentation is performed on a set of dynamic 2D-echo images collected from an examination covering two consecutive cardiac cycles.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The proposed method is demonstrated and evaluated on twelve healthy volunteers. The results are quantitatively evaluated using four different metrics, in a comparison with contours manually segmented by a specialist, and with four alternative methods from the literature. The method's intra- and inter-operator variabilities are also evaluated.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The proposed method allows the automatic construction of the area variation curve of the left ventricle corresponding to a complete cardiac cycle. This may potentially be used for the identification of several clinical parameters, including the area variation fraction. This parameter could potentially be used for evaluating the global systolic function of the left ventricle.</p

De que contexto se fala? Análise de livros didáticos de Química para o ensino médio

Esta comunicação apresenta a análise de livros didáticos de Química para o ensino médio, indicados no PNLD 2012 (Brasil, 2011), em relação a contextualização dos conteúdos químicos, como resultado de atividade desenvolvida com bolsistas do Programa Institucional de Bolsa de Iniciação a Docência do curso de Licenciatura em Química da Universidade Federal da Bahia (PIBID/UFBA), contando com a participação dos estudantes matriculados na disciplina Ensino de Química no Contexto, no semestre 2011.2. Foram consideradas três categorias de análise, baseadas em Silva (2007) e os resultados apontaram que dos livros analisados, três apresentam a contextualização como exemplificação e/ou informação do cotidiano, um apresenta contextualização relacionada ao movimento CTS e um outro aproxima-se também desse tipo de contextualização, embora tenha como foco a construção do conhecimento