Breast Ultrasound Following a Positive Clinical Breast Examination: Does It Have a Role in Low- and Middle-Income Countries?

Purpose: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide, with an estimated 1.7 million new cases occurring in 2012. The majority of cases and deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where population-based mammography screening is not available and countries must rely on clinical breast examination (CBE). Since ultrasound has the potential to reduce unnecessary biopsies by triaging women with palpable or focal breast findings at CBE, we searched for evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of ultrasound in detecting potential breast cancer following positive CBE findings. Methods: We reviewed the literature from 2000 to 2014 for evidence on the performance of breast ultrasound, in the absence of mammography, used to evaluate women after a positive CBE. From the studies meeting our inclusion/exclusion criteria for our analysis, we extracted data on the study design, location, ultrasound transducer parameters, patient age, method for determining positive and negative cases, and number of malignancies detected/total number of women studied. Results: We found 15 studies matching our inclusion/exclusion criteria, 9 from high-income countries and 6 from LMICs. Despite considerable variability in study design and patient populations, breast ultrasound consistently showed high sensitivity (median = 94 percent) and specificity (median = 80 percent) for detecting breast cancer and identifying normal and benign findings not requiring a biopsy. Clear patterns related to transducer frequency or income level were not discernible given the variations in patient populations and final diagnostic determinations. Conclusion: Our systematic review suggests that breast ultrasound following a positive CBE may be a powerful diagnostic test to determine those who do or do not need biopsy. We encourage further research in breast ultrasound use after a positive CBE in LMICs to assess the accuracy of ultrasound in these settings and the feasibility of widespread implementation

Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place is a database and research project designed to trace books-in-motion. It brings together acts of careful individual research with large-scale quantification and mapping: using inscriptions, owner’s marks, and catalogues of copies of early Jewish printed books. The project is a cooperative endeavor of four project directors, both faculty and librarian, from different institutions each representing different fields of Jewish Studies. With the technical expertise of partners at a university-based center for teaching and learning, a mix of paid and volunteer student, post-doctoral, and library based researchers, the project directors have created a database that is transforming the way research on the history of the book is done. The chapter will address collaboration in three aspects: between project directors; between the project and its contributors (individual and institutional, public and private); and between contributors and users. The chapter argues for a new model of iterative projects that relies in part on networked collaboration rather than only on operations in concert by a small, bounded group

Footprints: A New Approach to (Jewish) Book History

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era) and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. Footprints undertakes two concurrent and more open-ended aims: (1) the on-going assemblage of a dataset about post-print mobility based on evidence other than the printed text (e.g. marginalia, catalog records, archival letters, other printed texts); and (2) the creation and iterative refining of a scholarly instrument to analyze the dataset through computational methods and modes of representation

Footprints: A New Approach to (Jewish) Book HIstory

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era) and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. Footprints undertakes two concurrent and more open-ended aims: (1) the on-going assemblage of a dataset about post-print mobility based on evidence other than the printed text (e.g. marginalia, catalog records, archival letters, other printed texts); and (2) the creation and iterative refining of a scholarly instrument to analyze the dataset through computational methods and modes of representation

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me this Far: Future Avenues of Feminist Scholarship

Scholars employing a feminist hermeneutic have advanced the fields of Jewish Studies and Early Christianity while pioneering the new field of Late Antiquity. This session hopes to foster a conversation about the various ways that the feminist lens has been applied to Jewish and Christian texts of Late Antiquity while keeping an eye to what future avenues lie still unexplored. What questions have not been answered? What challenges remain for female scholars in these fields? How can our scholarship speak to Feminist political causes today and in the future? It is our hope that this panel can provide graduate students and young scholars with an opportunity to engage established scholars from a variety of backgrounds to engage these pressing concerns