3,113 research outputs found
Does shear wave ultrasound independently predict axillary lymph node metastasis in women with invasive breast cancer?
Shear wave elastography (SWE) shows promise as an adjunct to greyscale ultrasound examination in assessing breast masses. In breast cancer, higher lesion stiffness on SWE has been shown to be associated with features of poor prognosis. The purpose of this study was to assess whether lesion stiffness at SWE is an independent predictor of lymph node involvement. Patients with invasive breast cancer treated by primary surgery, who had undergone SWE examination were eligible. Data were retrospectively analysed from 396 consecutive patients. The mean stiffness values were obtained using the Aixplorer(®) ultrasound machine from SuperSonic Imagine Ltd. Measurements were taken from a region of interest positioned over the stiffest part of the abnormality. The average of the mean stiffness value obtained from each of two orthogonal image planes was used for analysis. Associations between lymph node involvement and mean lesion stiffness, invasive cancer size, histologic grade, tumour type, ER expression, HER-2 status and vascular invasion were assessed using univariate and multivariate logistic regression. At univariate analysis, invasive size, histologic grade, HER-2 status, vascular invasion, tumour type and mean stiffness were significantly associated with nodal involvement. Nodal involvement rates ranged from 7 % for tumours with mean stiffness <50 kPa to 41 % for tumours with a mean stiffness of >150 kPa. At multivariate analysis, invasive size, tumour type, vascular invasion, and mean stiffness maintained independent significance. Mean stiffness at SWE is an independent predictor of lymph node metastasis and thus can confer prognostic information additional to that provided by conventional preoperative tumour assessment and staging
WIMP-nucleus scattering in chiral effective theory
We discuss long-distance QCD corrections to the WIMP-nucleon(s) interactions
in the framework of chiral effective theory. For scalar-mediated WIMP-quark
interactions, we calculate all the next-to-leading-order corrections to the
WIMP-nucleus elastic cross-section, including two-nucleon amplitudes and
recoil-energy dependent shifts to the single-nucleon scalar form factors. As a
consequence, the scalar-mediated WIMP-nucleus cross-section cannot be
parameterized in terms of just two quantities, namely the neutron and proton
scalar form factors at zero momentum transfer, but additional parameters
appear, depending on the short-distance WIMP-quark interaction. Moreover,
multiplicative factorization of the cross-section into particle, nuclear and
astro-particle parts is violated. In practice, while the new effects are of the
natural size expected by chiral power counting, they become very important in
those regions of parameter space where the leading order WIMP-nucleus amplitude
is suppressed, including the so-called "isospin-violating dark matter" regime.
In these regions of parameter space we find order-of-magnitude corrections to
the total scattering rates and qualitative changes to the shape of recoil
spectra.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl
Comparing etoricoxib and celecoxib for preemptive analgesia for acute postoperative pain in patients undergoing arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction: a randomized controlled trial
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The efficacy of selective cox-2 inhibitors in postoperative pain reduction were usually compared with conventional non-selective conventional NSAIDs or other types of medicine. Previous studies also used selective cox-2 inhibitors as single postoperative dose, in continued mode, or in combination with other modalities. The purpose of this study was to compare analgesic efficacy of single preoperative administration of etoricoxib versus celecoxib for post-operative pain relief after arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>One hundred and two patients diagnosed as anterior cruciate ligament injury were randomized into 3 groups using opaque envelope. Both patients and surgeon were blinded to the allocation. All of the patients were operated by one orthopaedic surgeon under regional anesthesia. Each group was given either etoricoxib 120 mg., celecoxib 400 mg., or placebo 1 hour prior to operative incision. Post-operative pain intensity, time to first dose of analgesic requirement and numbers of analgesic used for pain control and adverse events were recorded periodically to 48 hours after surgery. We analyzed the data according to intention to treat principle.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Among 102 patients, 35 were in etoricoxib, 35 in celecoxib and 32 in placebo group. The mean age of the patients was 30 years and most of the injury came from sports injury. There were no significant differences in all demographic characteristics among groups. The etoricoxib group had significantly less pain intensity than the other two groups at recovery room and up to 8 hours period but no significance difference in all other evaluation point, while celecoxib showed no significantly difference from placebo at any time points. The time to first dose of analgesic medication, amount of analgesic used, patient's satisfaction with pain control and incidence of adverse events were also no significantly difference among three groups.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Etoricoxib is more effective than celecoxib and placebo for using as preemptive analgesia for acute postoperative pain control in patients underwent arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.</p> <p>Trial registration number</p> <p>NCT01017380</p
A population of luminous accreting black holes with hidden mergers
Major galaxy mergers are thought to play an important part in fuelling the
growth of supermassive black holes. However, observational support for this
hypothesis is mixed, with some studies showing a correlation between merging
galaxies and luminous quasars and others showing no such association. Recent
observations have shown that a black hole is likely to become heavily obscured
behind merger-driven gas and dust, even in the early stages of the merger, when
the galaxies are well separated (5 to 40 kiloparsecs). Merger simulations
further suggest that such obscuration and black-hole accretion peaks in the
final merger stage, when the two galactic nuclei are closely separated (less
than 3 kiloparsecs). Resolving this final stage requires a combination of
high-spatial-resolution infrared imaging and high-sensitivity hard-X-ray
observations to detect highly obscured sources. However, large numbers of
obscured luminous accreting supermassive black holes have been recently
detected nearby (distances below 250 megaparsecs) in X-ray observations. Here
we report high-resolution infrared observations of hard-X-ray-selected black
holes and the discovery of obscured nuclear mergers, the parent populations of
supermassive-black-hole mergers. We find that obscured luminous black holes
(bolometric luminosity higher than 2x10^44 ergs per second) show a significant
(P<0.001) excess of late-stage nuclear mergers (17.6 per cent) compared to a
sample of inactive galaxies with matching stellar masses and star formation
rates (1.1 per cent), in agreement with theoretical predictions. Using
hydrodynamic simulations, we confirm that the excess of nuclear mergers is
indeed strongest for gas-rich major-merger hosts of obscured luminous black
holes in this final stage.Comment: To appear in the 8 November 2018 issue of Nature. This is the
authors' version of the wor
Determining Interacting Objects in Human-Centric Activities via Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Reasoning
Abstract. Understanding the activities taking place in a video is a chal-lenging problem in Artificial Intelligence. Complex video sequences con-tain many activities and involve a multitude of interacting objects. De-termining which objects are relevant to a particular activity is the first step in understanding the activity. Indeed many objects in the scene are irrelevant to the main activity taking place. In this work, we consider human-centric activities and look to identify which objects in the scene are involved in the activity. We take an activity-agnostic approach and rank every moving object in the scene with how likely it is to be involved in the activity. We use a comprehensive spatio-temporal representation that captures the joint movement between humans and each object. We then use supervised machine learning techniques to recognize relevant objects based on these features. Our approach is tested on the challeng-ing Mind’s Eye dataset.
Novel application and validation of in vivo micro‐CT to study bone modelling in 3D
Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149362/1/ocr12265.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149362/2/ocr12265_am.pd
Effective Dark Matter Model: Relic density, CDMS II, Fermi LAT and LHC
The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search recently announced the observation of two
signal events with a 77% confidence level. Although statistically inconclusive,
it is nevertheless suggestive. In this work we present a model-independent
analysis on the implication of a positive signal in dark matter scattering off
nuclei. Assuming the interaction between (scalar, fermion or vector) dark
matter and the standard model induced by unknown new physics at the scale
, we examine various dimension-6 tree-level induced operators and
constrain them using the current experimental data, e.g. the WMAP data of the
relic abundance, CDMS II direct detection of the spin-independent scattering,
and indirect detection data (Fermi LAT cosmic gamma-ray), etc. Finally, the LHC
reach is also explored
The geography of recent genetic ancestry across Europe
The recent genealogical history of human populations is a complex mosaic
formed by individual migration, large-scale population movements, and other
demographic events. Population genomics datasets can provide a window into this
recent history, as rare traces of recent shared genetic ancestry are detectable
due to long segments of shared genomic material. We make use of genomic data
for 2,257 Europeans (the POPRES dataset) to conduct one of the first surveys of
recent genealogical ancestry over the past three thousand years at a
continental scale. We detected 1.9 million shared genomic segments, and used
the lengths of these to infer the distribution of shared ancestors across time
and geography. We find that a pair of modern Europeans living in neighboring
populations share around 10-50 genetic common ancestors from the last 1500
years, and upwards of 500 genetic ancestors from the previous 1000 years. These
numbers drop off exponentially with geographic distance, but since genetic
ancestry is rare, individuals from opposite ends of Europe are still expected
to share millions of common genealogical ancestors over the last 1000 years.
There is substantial regional variation in the number of shared genetic
ancestors: especially high numbers of common ancestors between many eastern
populations likely date to the Slavic and/or Hunnic expansions, while much
lower levels of common ancestry in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas may
indicate weaker demographic effects of Germanic expansions into these areas
and/or more stably structured populations. Recent shared ancestry in modern
Europeans is ubiquitous, and clearly shows the impact of both small-scale
migration and large historical events. Population genomic datasets have
considerable power to uncover recent demographic history, and will allow a much
fuller picture of the close genealogical kinship of individuals across the
world.Comment: Full size figures available from
http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/~plralph/research.html; or html version at
http://ralphlab.usc.edu/ibd/ibd-paper/ibd-writeup.xhtm
Adjusting a cancer mortality-prediction model for disease status-related eligibility criteria
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Volunteering participants in disease studies tend to be healthier than the general population partially due to specific enrollment criteria. Using modeling to accurately predict outcomes of cohort studies enrolling volunteers requires adjusting for the bias introduced in this way. Here we propose a new method to account for the effect of a specific form of healthy volunteer bias resulting from imposing disease status-related eligibility criteria, on disease-specific mortality, by explicitly modeling the length of the time interval between the moment when the subject becomes ineligible for the study, and the outcome.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using survival time data from 1190 newly diagnosed lung cancer patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center, we model the time from clinical lung cancer diagnosis to death using an exponential distribution to approximate the length of this interval for a study where lung cancer death serves as the outcome. Incorporating this interval into our previously developed lung cancer risk model, we adjust for the effect of disease status-related eligibility criteria in predicting the number of lung cancer deaths in the control arm of CARET. The effect of the adjustment using the MD Anderson-derived approximation is compared to that based on SEER data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using the adjustment developed in conjunction with our existing lung cancer model, we are able to accurately predict the number of lung cancer deaths observed in the control arm of CARET.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The resulting adjustment was accurate in predicting the lower rates of disease observed in the early years while still maintaining reasonable prediction ability in the later years of the trial. This method could be used to adjust for, or predict the duration and relative effect of any possible biases related to disease-specific eligibility criteria in modeling studies of volunteer-based cohorts.</p
An A4 flavor model for quarks and leptons in warped geometry
We propose a spontaneous A4 flavor symmetry breaking scheme implemented in a
warped extra dimensional setup to explain the observed pattern of quark and
lepton masses and mixings. The main advantages of this choice are the
explanation of fermion mass hierarchies by wave function overlaps, the
emergence of tribimaximal neutrino mixing and zero quark mixing at the leading
order and the absence of tree-level gauge mediated flavor violations. Quark
mixing is induced by the presence of bulk flavons, which allow for cross-brane
interactions and a cross-talk between the quark and neutrino sectors, realizing
the spontaneous symmetry breaking pattern A4 --> nothing first proposed in
[X.G.\,He, Y.Y.\,Keum, R.R.\,Volkas, JHEP{0604}, 039 (2006)]. We show that the
observed quark mixing pattern can be explained in a rather economical way,
including the CP violating phase, with leading order cross-interactions, while
the observed difference between the smallest CKM entries V_{ub} and V_{td} must
arise from higher order corrections. We briefly discuss bounds on the
Kaluza-Klein scale implied by flavor changing neutral current processes in our
model and show that the residual little CP problem is milder than in flavor
anarchic models.Comment: 34 pages, 2 figures; version published in JHE
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