Characterisation of DOG-1 expression in salivary gland tumours and comparison with myoepithelial markers

DOG1 is an established diagnostic marker for gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST), but has been reported in salivary gland tumours (SGT) as an acinar and intercalated duct marker. However, its specificity and distribution is not well established. The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic utility of DOG-1 expression in SGT in addition to comparing it with myoepithelial markers. Normal salivary tissue and SGT (n = 184) were examined for expression of DOG1 and a range of myoepithelial markers. SGT included: acinic cell carcinoma (ACC, n = 15), secretory carcinoma (SC, n = 9), pleomorphic adenoma (PA, n = 49), carcinoma ex-PA (Ca ex-PA, n = 11), adenoid cystic carcinoma (AdCC, n = 20), polymorphous adenocarcinoma (PAC, n = 6), myoepithelioma (n = 6), myoepithelial carcinoma (MC, n = 2), basal cell adenoma (BCA, n = 14), canalicular adenoma (CA, n = 19), mucoepidermoid carcinoma (MEC, n = 11), oncocytoma (n = 2), adenocarcinoma NOS (AdNOS, n = 4), basal cell adenocarcinoma (BCAC, n = 2), salivary duct carcinoma (SDC, n = 3) and papillary cystadenocarcinoma (PCAC, n = 1). Normal acini and ACC (14/15) showed strong luminal DOG1 staining; SC were largely negative with only focal expression in 3/9 cases. Luminal staining was seen in PA (14/49), PAC (4/6), Ca ex-PA (4/11) and AdCC (6/20). 8/11 MEC showed luminal and/or mucous cell staining. No staining was seen in myoepithelioma, MC, CA, adNOS and BCAC. BCA showed strong staining of myoepithelial cells in some cases (5/14). Variable myoepithelial DOG1 staining was seen in PA, Ca ex PA, BCA, SDC and PCAC which was not as consistent as myoepithelial markers such as calponin, p63 and αSMA. Absence of DOG1 can differentiate ACC from SC, but staining is variable in PA, PLGA and Ca ex-PA. Myoepithelial staining in some tumours but not in normal gland suggests a wider distribution in SGT than originally envisaged

Encouraging Reusable Network Hardware Design

Abstract — The NetFPGA platform is designed to enable students and researchers to build networking systems that run at line-rate, and to create re-usable designs to share with others. Our goal is to eventually create a thriving developer-community, where developers around the world contribute reusable modules and designs for the benefit of the community as a whole. To this end, we have created a repository of “User Contributed Designs” at NetFPGA.org. But creating an “open-source hardware” platform is quite different from software oriented open-source projects. Designing hardware is much more time consuming– and more error prone–than designing software, and so demands a process that is more focussed on verifying that a module really works as advertised, else others will be reluctant to use it. We have designed a novel process for contributing new designs. Each contributed design is specified entirely by a set of tests it passes. A developer includes a list of tests that their design will pass, along with an executable set of tests that the user can check against. Through this process, we hope to establish the right expectations for someone who reuses a design, and to encourage sound design practices with solid, repeatable and integrated testing. In this paper we describe the philosophy behind our process, in the hope that others may learn from it, as well as describe the details of how someone contributes a new design to the NetFPGA repository. I

Netfpga - an open platform for gigabit-rate network switching and routing

The NetFPGA platform enables students and researchers to build high-performance networking systems in hardware. A new version of the NetFPGA platform has been developed and is available for use by the academic community. The NetFPGA 2.1 platform now has interfaces that can be parameterized, therefore enabling development of modular hardware designs with varied word sizes. It also includes more logic and faster memory than the previous platform. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic is used to implement the core data processing functions while software running on embedded cores within the FPGA and/or programs running on an attached host computer implement only control functions. Reference designs and component libraries have been developed for the CS344 course at Stanford University. Open-source Verilog code is available for download from the project website.

Incorporating the voice of the customer into mass-market software product management

Mass-market software products, such as cloud or mobile services, target distributed and heterogeneous users with changing and evolving requirements. They impose several challenges on the software development process in terms of requirements elicitation and prioritization. Classical requirements engineering methods that rely on close interactions with users are difficult to apply for these mass-market scenarios. Therefore, new methods are required to assist product managers in designing their products while integrating the "voice of the customer". In this paper, we argue for using market research techniques in software product management to add user preference measurements, identify market segments and analyze users' willingness-to-pay. Following method engineering guidelines, we develop a method component1 that refines conjoint analysis (CA) for the use in software product management. We present the meta-model and procedure and demonstrate it in a study on secure cloud storage services. Our research extends existing studies that have applied CA by generalizing its application in the form of a method component that provides guidance for future studies