Impact of loss-to-follow-up on cancer survival estimates for small populations: a simulation study using Hospital-Based Cancer Registries in Japan

Objectives: The accuracy of the ascertainment of vital status impacts the validity of cancer survival. This study assesses the potential impact of loss-to-follow-up on survival in Japan, both nationally and in the samples seen at individual hospitals. Design: Simulation study Setting and participants: Data of patients diagnosed in 2007, provided by the Hospital-Based Cancer Registries of 177 hospitals throughout Japan. Primary and secondary outcome measures: We performed simulations for each cancer site, for sample sizes of 100, 1000 and 8000 patients, and for loss-to-follow-up ranging from 1% to 5%. We estimated the average bias and the variation in bias in survival due to loss-to-follow-up. Results: The expected bias was not associated with the sample size (with 5% loss-to-follow-up, about 2.1% for the cohort including all cancers), but a smaller sample size led to more variable bias. Sample sizes of around 100 patients, as may be seen at individual hospitals, had very variable bias: with 5% loss-to-follow-up for all cancers, 25% of samples had a bias of 3.06%. Conclusion: Survival should be interpreted with caution when loss-to-follow-up is a concern, especially for poor-prognosis cancers and for small-area estimates

Bell monogamy relations in arbitrary qubit networks

Characterizing trade-offs between simultaneous violations of multiple Bell inequalities in a large network of qubits is computationally demanding. We propose a graph-theoretic approach to efficiently produce Bell monogamy relations in arbitrary arrangements of qubits. All the relations obtained for bipartite Bell inequalities are tight and leverage only a single Bell monogamy relation. This feature is unique to bipartite Bell inequalities, as we show that there is no finite set of such elementary monogamy relations for multipartite inequalities. Nevertheless, many tight monogamy relations for multipartite inequalities can be obtained with our method as shown in explicit examples

MCMT-GAN: Multi-Task Coherent Modality Transferable GAN for 3D Brain Image Synthesis

© 1992-2012 IEEE. The ability to synthesize multi-modality data is highly desirable for many computer-aided medical applications, e.g. clinical diagnosis and neuroscience research, since rich imaging cohorts offer diverse and complementary information unraveling human tissues. However, collecting acquisitions can be limited by adversary factors such as patient discomfort, expensive cost and scanner unavailability. In this paper, we propose a multi-task coherent modality transferable GAN (MCMT-GAN) to address this issue for brain MRI synthesis in an unsupervised manner. Through combining the bidirectional adversarial loss, cycle-consistency loss, domain adapted loss and manifold regularization in a volumetric space, MCMT-GAN is robust for multi-modality brain image synthesis with visually high fidelity. In addition, we complement discriminators collaboratively working with segmentors which ensure the usefulness of our results to segmentation task. Experiments evaluated on various cross-modality synthesis show that our method produces visually impressive results with substitutability for clinical post-processing and also exceeds the state-of-the-art methods

Mutation pattern analysis reveals polygenic mini-drivers associated with relapse after surgery in lung adenocarcinoma

The genomic lesions found in malignant tumours exhibit a striking degree of heterogeneity. Many tumours lack a known driver mutation, and their genetic basis is unclear. By mapping the somatic mutations identified in primary lung adenocarcinomas onto an independent coexpression network derived from normal tissue, we identify a critical gene network enriched for metastasis-associated genes. While individual genes within this module were rarely mutated, a significant accumulation of mutations within this geneset was predictive of relapse in lung cancer patients that have undergone surgery. Since it is the density of mutations within this module that is informative, rather than the status of any individual gene, these data are in keeping with a ‘mini-driver’ model of tumorigenesis in which multiple mutations, each with a weak effect, combine to form a polygenic driver with sufficient power to significantly alter cell behaviour and ultimately patient outcome. These polygenic mini-drivers therefore provide a means by which heterogeneous mutation patterns can generate the consistent hallmark changes in phenotype observed across tumours

Twine Game

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This group project asks students to create a choose-your-own-adventure game that engages “gender politics, identity, and narrative in the writing classroom” using Twine. Students propose an original game addressing a gender studies issue, perform research, then develop the game. The purpose of the assignment is to create a narrative that reveals the complex, potential dangers of gender-related issues in a navigable text where players can make choices and reach different outcomes. This assignment can also be adapted to a range of gender studies topics including trans narratives, which are exemplified in the work of Merritt Kopas, who curated such a selection in TransWomen and the New Hypertext, and genre narratives, as anna anthropy has demonstrated with her queer horror and science fiction twine games http://www.auntiepixelante.com/games/