Stereotactically guided breast biopsy: a review

The aims of this review are to compare and contrast the available stereotactic equipment, and to describe the variety of needle types used and their affect on pathological results and subsequent patient management. Initial stereotactic devices were “added-on” to analogue mammography units and have been replaced by prone or ducubitus equipment using digital image acquisition. Biopsies use either 14-G core biopsy (CB) needles or vacuum-assisted biopsies (VAB). Vacuum-assisted biopsy systems consistently out-perform 14-G CB with reduced need for diagnostic or multi-treatment surgery. The false-negative rate is 8% for 14-G CB compared with 0.7% for VAB. There is a risk of underestimating the disease present for lesions of uncertain malignant potential (Cat B3) and suspicious of malignancy (Cat B4) results with 25% of patients with a B3 biopsy found to have cancer at subsequent surgery and 66% of those with a B4 biopsy. A CB diagnosis of in situ malignancy is upgraded to invasive disease at surgery in 15-36% of patients undergoing CB and of the order of 10% with VAB. A high degree of diagnostic accuracy and hence safe patient care can only be achieved by meticulous attention to technique and multi-disciplinary cooperation

Vegan diets : practical advice for athletes and exercisers.

With the growth of social media as a platform to share information, veganism is becoming more visible, and could be becoming more accepted in sports and in the health and fitness industry. However, to date, there appears to be a lack of literature that discusses how to manage vegan diets for athletic purposes. This article attempted to review literature in order to provide recommendations for how to construct a vegan diet for athletes and exercisers. While little data could be found in the sports nutrition literature specifically, it was revealed elsewhere that veganism creates challenges that need to be accounted for when designing a nutritious diet. This included the sufficiency of energy and protein; the adequacy of vitamin B12, iron, zinc, calcium, iodine and vitamin D; and the lack of the long-chain n-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA in most plant-based sources. However, via the strategic management of food and appropriate supplementation, it is the contention of this article that a nutritive vegan diet can be designed to achieve the dietary needs of most athletes satisfactorily. Further, it was suggested here that creatine and β-alanine supplementation might be of particular use to vegan athletes, owing to vegetarian diets promoting lower muscle creatine and lower muscle carnosine levels in consumers. Empirical research is needed to examine the effects of vegan diets in athletic populations however, especially if this movement grows in popularity, to ensure that the health and performance of athletic vegans is optimised in accordance with developments in sports nutrition knowledge

PREFER: SPACE-BASED INFORMATION SUPPORT FOR PREVENTION AND RECOVERY OF FOREST FIRES

The PREFER FP7 project aims at responding to major fire prevention needs in Southern Europe. All reports on the state of Europe’s forests indicate that the broad Mediterranean area is systematically affected by uncontrolled forest fires with large impact on ecosystems, soil erosion, slope instability, desertification trends, and local economies as a whole, with a negative mid-to-long-term prospect because of Climate Change. In this scenario, the need to improve the information and the intelligence support to forest fire prevention is widely recognized to be relevant. Fire prevention is still the most cost-effective strategy when compared to fire fighting and extinguishing that are costly, local, and triggered only in response to already ongoing crises. The PREFER project intends to contribute to responding to such a pragmatic need of Southern Europe’s forests by: 1) providing timely multi-scale and multi-payload information products based on exploitation of all available spaceborne sensors within the project time frame (the next 3 years); 2) offering a portfolio of EO products focused both on Pre-crisis and Post-crisis forest fire emergency cycle in the EU Mediterranean area; 3) preparing the exploitation of new spaceborne sensors available by 2020 (e.g.: Sentinels) and 4) contributing to the definition of User requirements for the new EO missions. The project capitalizes on the experience gained in the last decade by the Partners, in the frame of European and national applied research programs focusing on the management of forest fire hazards with spaceborne observation means. It will set up a regional service, able to process and distribute the information to end users, developed and maintained by a regional cluster of core users, industries and research institutes. Through the exploitation of the synoptic character of spaceborne EO data, the regional service is intended to stimulate further the coordination between countries on forest fires prevention in the EU Mediterranean region. The paper is devoted to illustrate the project products and the first results of the R&D activity

A first look at open charm production in Indium-Indium collisions at SPS energies

NA60 is an experiment at the CERN-SPS devoted to the study of dimuon production in heavy-ion and proton-nucleus collisions. The main topics under study are low mass vector meson production, J/psi production and suppression, and the sources of the dimuon continuum in the mass range 1.2 - 2.7 GeV/c(2). In 2003, NA60 collected similar to 230 million dimuon events from Indium-Indium collisions. We present preliminary results of the analysis of this data sample in view of measuring the open charm contribution to the dimuon spectrum. Although we are still working on the final background subtraction procedure, we can already demonstrate that the detector performance is good enough to allow the separation of prompt dimuons from muon pairs originating in distant D (D) over bar decays