Cowden syndrome - Diagnostic skin signs

Cowden syndrome is a rare autosomal dominant familial cancer syndrome with a high risk of breast cancer. The most important clinical features include carcinomas of the breast and thyroid, and hamartomatous polyps of the gastrointestinal tract. There are characteristic mucocutaneous features which allow early recognition of the disease and are generally present before internal malignancies develop. We report on a woman in whom the diagnosis of Cowden syndrome was first made after she had been treated for both breast cancer and melanoma. Copyright (C) 2001 S. KargerAG, Basel

An empirical, graphical, and analytical study of the relationship between vegetation indices

The development of formulae for the reduction of multispectral scanner measurements to a single value (vegetation index) for predicting and assessing vegetative characteristics is addressed. The origin, motivation, and derivation of some four dozen vegetation indices are summarized. Empirical, graphical, and analytical techniques are used to investigate the relationships among the various indices. It is concluded that many vegetative indices are very similar, some being simple algebraic transforms of others

Imputing historical statistics, soils information, and other land-use data to crop area

In foreign crop condition monitoring, satellite acquired imagery is routinely used. To facilitate interpretation of this imagery, it is advantageous to have estimates of the crop types and their extent for small area units, i.e., grid cells on a map represent, at 60 deg latitude, an area nominally 25 by 25 nautical miles in size. The feasibility of imputing historical crop statistics, soils information, and other ancillary data to crop area for a province in Argentina is studied

Identification of human papillomavirus DNA in cutaneous lesions of Cowden syndrome

Background: Cowden syndrome (CS) or multiple hamartoma syndrome is a cancer-associated genodermatosis inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern. One of the diagnostic criteria is facial papules which are felt to be trichilemmomas, benign hair follicle tumors, which some consider to be induced by human papillomavirus (HPV). Objective: To search for HPV in skin tumors, especially trichilemmomas, from patients with CS. Methods: Skin lesions from patients with CS were classified histologically. Each tumor was then analyzed for HPV DNA by polymerase chain reaction with different primer sets; positive amplicons were typed by direct sequencing. Results: Twenty-nine biopsies from 7 patients with CS were investigated. Only 2 of 29 tumors clinically suspected of being trichilemmomas were confirmed histologically. In addition, 3 sclerotic fibromas, also typical of CS, were found, as well as 1 sebaceous hyperplasia. The other 23 lesions showed histological features of HPV-induced tumors in various stages of development. HPV DNA was found in 19 of 29 cutaneous lesions. Tumors without any histological signs of HPV induction were negative for HPV DNA. Two tumors which were histologically classified as common warts contained HPV types 27 and 28. All the 17 other HPV types belong to the group of epidermodysplasia-verruciformis-associated types. Conclusions: The majority of cutaneous lesions in CS contain HPV DNA. They may have a variety of histological patterns. Trichilemmomas are not clinically distinctive and can be difficult to identify in CS patients. Copyright (C) 2003 S. Karger AG, Basel

A virtual world of paleontology

Computer-aided visualization and analysis of fossils has revolutionized the study of extinct organisms. Novel techniques allow fossils to be characterized in three dimensions and in unprecedented detail. This has enabled paleontologists to gain important insights into their anatomy, development, and preservation. New protocols allow more objective reconstructions of fossil organisms, including soft tissues, from incomplete remains. The resulting digital reconstructions can be used in functional analyses, rigorously testing long-standing hypotheses regarding the paleobiology of extinct organisms. These approaches are transforming our understanding of long-studied fossil groups, and of the narratives of organismal and ecological evolution that have been built upon them

Temperature suppression of STM-induced desorption of hydrogen on Si(100) surfaces

The temperature dependence of hydrogen (H) desorption from Si(100) H-terminated surfaces by a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is reported for negative sample bias. It is found that the STM induced H desorption rate ($R$) decreases several orders of magnitude when the substrate temperature is increased from 300 K to 610 K. This is most noticeable at a bias voltage of -7 V where $R$ decreases by a factor of ~200 for a temperature change of 80 K, whilst it only decreases by a factor of ~3 at -5 V upon the same temperature change. The experimental data can be explained by desorption due to vibrational heating by inelastic scattering via a hole resonance. This theory predicts a weak suppression of desorption with increasing temperature due to a decreasing vibrational lifetime, and a strong bias dependent suppression due to a temperature dependent lifetime of the hole resonance.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX, epsf files. Accepted for surface science letter

Course and Outcome of Bacteremia Due to Staphylococcus Aureus: Evaluation of Different Clinical Case Definitions

In a retrospective survey of patients hospitalized in the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, the course and outcome of 281 cases of true bacteremia due to Staphylococcus aureus over a 7-year period were analyzed. The main purpose was to evaluate different case definitions. In 78% of cases the source of bacteremia was obvious; vascular access sites (27%) and wounds (10%) were the most common sources. Metastasizing foci were more common in cases of primary vs. secondary bacteremia (P <.001). The incidence of endocarditis was higher in cases in which no portal of entry was defined (P <.03). The overall mortality rate was high at 34% partly because of inappropriate initial antibiotic therapy. With the introduction of an infectious disease service at the hospital, the fraction of misjudged results of blood culture diminished 2.5-fold. Among the differently defined cases, the mortality rate was significantly higher for cases of complicated vs. uncomplicated bacteremia (P <.01), for cases of primary vs. secondary bacteremia (P = .05), and for patients with endocarditis or other secondary foci (P <.001). Since only one methicillin-resistant strain was isolated, multiresistant staphylococci were not a problem in the hospital. Different case definitions allowed the detection of patients at increased risk for complications and death. In the treatment of sepsis with no evident focus, initial antimicrobial therapy should include the use of agents with antistaphylococcal activity

FAIR Practices in Europe

Institutions driving fundamental research at the cutting edge such as for example from the Max Planck Society (MPS) took steps to optimize data management and stewardship to be able to address new scientific questions. In this paper we selected three institutes from the MPS from the areas of humanities, environmental sciences and natural sciences as examples to indicate the efforts to integrate large amounts of data from collaborators worldwide to create a data space that is ready to be exploited to get new insights based on data intensive science methods. For this integration the typical challenges of fragmentation, bad quality and also social differences had to be overcome. In all three cases, well-managed repositories that are driven by the scientific needs and harmonization principles that have been agreed upon in the community were the core pillars. It is not surprising that these principles are very much aligned with what have now become the FAIR principles. The FAIR principles confirm the correctness of earlier decisions and their clear formulation identified the gaps which the projects need to address

A toolbox for the retrodeformation and muscle reconstruction of fossil specimens in Blender

Accurate muscle reconstructions can offer new information on the anatomy of fossil organisms and are also important for biomechanical analysis (multibody dynamics and finite-element analysis (FEA)). For the sake of simplicity, muscles are often modelled as point-to-point strands or frustra (cut-off cones) in biomechanical models. However, there are cases in which it is useful to model the muscle morphology in three dimensions, to better examine the effects of muscle shape and size. This is especially important for fossil analyses, where muscle force is estimated from the reconstructed muscle morphology (rather than based on data collected in vivo). The two main aims of this paper are as follows. First, we created a new interactive tool in the free open access software Blender to enable interactive three-dimensional modelling of muscles. This approach can be applied to both palaeontological and human biomechanics research to generate muscle force magnitudes and lines of action for FEA. Second, we provide a guide on how to use existing Blender tools to reconstruct distorted or incomplete specimens. This guide is aimed at palaeontologists but can also be used by anatomists working with damaged specimens or to test functional implication of hypothetical morphologies

Effect of filter type on the statistics of energy transfer between resolved and subfilter scales from a-priori analysis of direct numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence

The effects of different filtering strategies on the statistical properties of the resolved-to-sub-filter scale (SFS) energy transfer are analyzed in forced homogeneous and isotropic turbulence. We carry out a priori analyses of statistical characteristics of SFS energy transfer by filtering data obtained from direct numerical simulations (DNS) with up to $2048^3$ grid points as a function of the filter cutoff scale. In order to quantify the dependence of extreme events and anomalous scaling on the filter, we compare a sharp Fourier Galerkin projector, a Gaussian filter and a novel class of Galerkin projectors with non-sharp spectral filter profiles. Of interest is the importance of Galilean invariance and we confirm that local SFS energy transfer displays intermittency scaling in both skewness and flatness as a function of the cutoff scale. Furthermore, we quantify the robustness of scaling as a function of the filtering type