Erratum: Clinical and biological significance of de novo CD5+ diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in Western countries

CD5 is a pan-T-cell surface marker and is rarely expressed in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Large-scale studies of de novo CD5+ DLBCL are lacking in Western countries. In this study by the DLBCL Rituximab-CHOP Consortium, CD5 was expressed in 5.5% of 879 DLBCL patients from Western countries. CD5+ DLBCL was associated with higher frequencies of >1 ECOG performance status, bone marrow involvement, central nervous system relapse, activated B-cell–like subtype, Bcl-2 overexpression, and STAT3 and NF-κB activation, whereas rarely expressed single-stranded DNA-binding protein 2 (SSBP2), CD30 or had MYC mutations. With standard R-CHOP chemotherapy, CD5+ DLBCL patients had significantly worse overall survival (median, 25.3 months vs. not reached, P< .0001) and progression-free survival (median, 21.3 vs. 85.8 months, P< .0001) than CD5− DLBCL patients, which was independent of Bcl-2, STAT3, NF-κB and the International Prognostic Index. Interestingly, SSBP2 expression abolished the prognostic significance of CD5 expression, suggesting a tumor-suppressor role of SSBP2 for CD5 signaling. Gene-expression profiling demonstrated that B-cell receptor signaling dysfunction and microenvironment alterations are the important mechanisms underlying the clinical impact of CD5 expression. This study shows the distinctive clinical and biological features of CD5+ DLBCL patients in Western countries and underscores important pathways with therapeutic implications

Ideologies of religion and diversity in Australian public schools

In many multicultural democracies, education has a Christian history. However, teaching religion has ideological variation. Progressives teach about many religions, while conservatives favor (often exclusive) instruction into one tradition. Australian secular education controversially prioritizes faith-forming instruction (mostly Christian). In this exploratory study (N = 123) the author examines pedagogical preference and attitudes toward religious diversity

An Automated and Robust Tumours Detection and Segmentation Framework for Whole-Body PET-CT Studies

A dual-modality positron emission tomography – computed tomography (PET-CT) is one of widely used medical imaging system. It combines functional (from PET) with anatomical (from CT) information, in a co-aligned space, provides advantages on diagnosing with several types of cancers. The most unique benefit of PET is to noninvasively visualise metabolic information such as glucose metabolism, through administrating radioactive tracer into the human body and quantitatively assess treatment response by analysing tumours metabolism. PET response criterion in solid tumour (PERCIST) is a widely accepted approach of assessing metabolic response of malignant tumours. It suggests placing volume of interest (VOI) reference on the liver structure (or the descending aorta structure if the liver is diseased, e.g. liver cancer) of the PET image to measure average of pixel variations. VOI references are then used to derive a PERCIST-based thresholding value, where the structures’ metabolism comprising of higher than the threshold will be considered as tumours. However, the delineation of VOI reference on the low resolution and poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) PET image is a difficult, time consuming and subjective task; in particular, for the small descending aorta structure. In addition, the global threshold does not provide accurate delineation of the tumour structure on PET. In this study, we propose a fully automatic tumours detection and segmentation framework for whole-body PET-CT studies based on PERCIST. We used multi-atlas based approach to segment PERCIST recommended VOI reference and to detect tumours. Then we used cellular automata with anisotropic diffusion filter (CA-ADF) based algorithm for accurate tumour segmentation on PET. In our evaluation, both clinical and simulation results presented that our proposed framework was able to detect and segment all the tumours with high accuracy, which demonstrated the reliability and robustnes