Role of monocyte and lymphocyte counts in prognosis of cervical cancer

Background: Inflammation seems to play a very crucial role in the growth and progression of many cancers. It has been reported that a peripheral blood count has been used as a cost-effective and simple parameter of systemic inflammation in critically ill patients. The aim of this study is to investigate whether components of WBC counts can predict the prognosis of patients with cervical cancer.Methods: Medical records of 549 cervical cancer patients diagnosed between 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2008 were retrospectively analyzed. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis and Cox proportional hazards model were applied to evaluate the effect of white blood cell (WBC) counts on overall survival.Results: The 5-year overall survival of the cohort was found to be 67.7%. On the basis of univariate analysis elevated monocyte count (≥0.515 109/L) and lower lymphocyte count (≤2.075 109/L) were associated with poor overall survival (OS) (p=0.016 and 0.002 respectively). Multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis showed that higher monocyte and lower lymphocyte levels were a significant independent predictors for worse OS (HR = 1.555, 95% CI = 1.125-2.149; P=0.008) and (HR = 1.712, 95% CI = 1.232-2.379; P= 0.001) respectively. The advanced overall stage and treatment were also found to be independent indicators for poor OS.Conclusions: Pretreatment monocyte and lymphocyte count is an independent predictor of prognosis in cervical cancer patients. Thus it may be a cost effective marker to predict the outcome of cervical cancer patients

ABSTRACT VoxBoox: A System for Automatic Generation of Interactive Talking Books

The VoxBoox system makes digital books accessible to visually impaired individuals via audio and voice. It automatically translates a book published in HTML to VoiceXML, and then further enhances this VoiceXML rendering of the book to enable listener-controlled dynamic aural navigation. The VoxBoox system has the following salient features: (i) it leverages existing infrastructure since the book that is to be made accessible need only be published digitally using HTML on the visual Web, (ii) it is based on accepted Web standards of HTML and VoiceXML and thus books can be made accessible inexpensively, and (iii) it is user-centered in that the listener (the user) has complete control over (aural) navigation of the book. In this paper, we present details of the technologies that make the VoxBoox system possible, as well as the details of the system itself. A prototype of the VoxBoox system is operational

Pretreatment serum albumin: a prognostic indicator of survival inoral cancer

Background: Malnutrition has been recognized as a poor prognostic indicator for cancer. In recent years, the role of serum albumin as a predictor of survival in cancer has received considerable attention. Therefore, the present study was carried out to investigate whether the pretreatment serum albumin can predict the prognosis of patients with oral cancer.Methods: Medical records of 433 pathologically proven oral cancer patients diagnosed and treated from 01st January 2006 to 31st December 2008 were retrospectively analyzed. We used Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis to establish most appropriate cut-off for serum albumin, Kaplan-Meier method for survival analysis and the Cox proportional hazard models to investigate the prognosticators.Results: The overall 5 year’s survival of the cohort was found to be 54.4%.  On univariate analysis, serum albumin of ≤4.34 g/dl was associated with poor overall survival (OS) (p=0.029). Multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis revealed that lower serum albumin (<4.35g/dl) was a significant independent predictors for worse OS (HR=1.350, 95% CI = 1.013 - 1.817; P< 0.038). Lymph nodal involvement was also found to be independent indicator for poor OS. Furthermore, serum albumin was found to be positively correlated with both body weight (r=0.142, p=0.003) and heamoglobin (r=0.304, p=0.000).Conclusion: Pretreatment serum albumin levels are of useful prognostic significance in oral cancer patients. Thus, this easily accessible variable may not only serve as a potent marker to predict the outcomes, but more importantly as an indicator for initiating aggressive nutrition intervention in oral cancer patients

DeepVir, Graphical Deep Matrix Factorization for In Silico Antiviral Repositioning. Application to COVID19.

International audienceThis study formulates antiviral repositioning as a matrix completion problem wherein the antiviral drugs are along the rows and the viruses are along the columns. The input matrix is partially filled, with ones in positions where the antiviral drug has been known to be effective against a virus. The curated metadata for antivirals (chemical structure and pathways) and viruses (genomic structure and symptoms) are encoded into our matrix completion framework as graph Laplacian regularization. We then frame the resulting multiple graph regularized matrix completion (GRMC) problem as deep matrix factorization. This is solved by using a novel optimization method called HyPALM (Hybrid Proximal Alternating Linearized Minimization). Results of our curated RNA drug–virus association data set show that the proposed approach excels over state-of-the-art GRMC techniques. When applied to in silico prediction of antivirals for COVID-19, our approach returns antivirals that are either used for treating patients or are under trials for the same

Cancer screening: Should cancer screening be essential component of primary health care in developing countries?

Background: Cancer is a fatal disease and is on the rise across the globe. In India, breast, cervix and the oral cavity are the leading cancer sites, but, unfortunately, in-spite of availability of screening tools, there is no organized cancer screening program in India. The main objective of this study was to review the performance of various cancer screening modalities in a resource poor setting. Methods: MEDLINE and web of science electronic database was searched from January 1990 to December 2013, using keywords such as "breast cancer, cervical cancer, oral cancer and their corresponding mesh terms were also used in combination with Boolean operators OR, AND." Two authors independently selected studies published in English and conducted in India. A total of 16 studies was found relevant and eligible for the review. The data on sensitivity and specificity of various screening tool was extracted and analyzed. Results: Most of the reported screening trails in India are on cervical cancer and few on breast and oral cancer screening. The pooled estimates of sensitivity and specificity of cervical cancer screening test such as visual inspection with acetic acid, magnified visual inspection with acetic acid, visual inspection with Lugol′s iodine, cytology (Papanicolaou smear) and human papillomavirus deoxyribonucleic acid was found to be 68.76% and 84.02%, 63.27% and 85.43%, 81.86% and 87.03%, 63.25% and 93.17% and 75.04% and 91.66%, respectively. Sensitivity and specificity of clinical breast examination was found to be 94.30% and 94.30%, respectively. Oral cancer screening through visual inspection by trained health care worker was found to have 87.90% sensitivity and 92.05% specificity. Conclusions: Our study highlights the availability and success of visual screening tools in early detection and mortality reduction of major neoplasia in resource-poor health care settings and recommends implementation of oral and cervical cancer screening as part of assured primary health care package in developing countries