Assessment of Corneal Epithelial Thickness in Asymmetric Keratoconic Eyes and Normal Eyes Using Fourier Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

Purpose. To compare the characteristics of asymmetric keratoconic eyes and normal eyes by Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) corneal mapping. Methods. Retrospective corneal and epithelial thickness OCT data for 74 patients were compared in three groups of eyes: keratoconic (n=22) and normal fellow eyes (n=22) in patients with asymmetric keratoconus and normal eyes (n=104) in healthy subjects. Areas under the curve (AUC) of receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves for each variable were compared across groups to indicate their discrimination capacity. Results. Three variables were found to differ significantly between fellow eyes and normal eyes (all < 0.05 ): minimum corneal thickness, thinnest corneal point, and central corneal thickness. These variables combined showed a high discrimination power to differentiate fellow eyes from normal eyes indicated by an AUC of 0.840 (95% CI: 0.762–0.918). Conclusions. Our findings indicate that topographically normal fellow eyes in patients with very asymmetric keratoconus differ from the eyes of healthy individuals in terms of their corneal epithelial and pachymetry maps. This type of information could be useful for an early diagnosis of keratoconus in topographically normal eyesS

Flexible geoadditive survival analysis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Peru

Knowledge of prognostic factors is an important task for the clinical management of Non Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL). In this work, we study the variables affecting survival of NHL in Peru by means of geoadditive Cox-type structured hazard regression models while accounting for potential spatial correlations in the survival times. We identified eight covariates with significant effect for overall survival. Some of them are widely known such as age, performance status, clinical stage and lactic dehydrogenase, but we also identified hemoglobin, leukocytes and lymphocytes as covariates with a significant effect on the overall survival of patients with NHL. Besides, the effect of continuous covariates is clearly nonlinear and hence impossible to detect with the classical Cox method. Although the spatial component does not show a significant effect, the results show a trend of low risk in certain areas

Flexible geoadditive survival analysis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Peru

Knowledge of prognostic factors is an important task for the clinical management of Non Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL). In this work, we study the variables affecting survival of NHL in Peru by means of geoadditive Cox-type structured hazard regression models while accounting for potential spatial correlations in the survival times. We identified eight covariates with significant effect for overall survival. Some of them are widely known such as age, performance status, clinical stage and lactic dehydrogenase, but we also identified hemoglobin, leukocytes and lymphocytes as covariates with a significant effect on the overall survival of patients with NHL. Besides, the effect of continuous covariates is clearly nonlinear and hence impossible to detect with the classical Cox method. Although the spatial component does not show a significant effect, the results show a trend of low risk in certain areas