Management and Outcome of 64 Patients with Pancreatic Serous Cystic Neoplasms

Background: The optimal management approach to pancreatic serous cystic neoplasms (SCNs) is still evolving. Methods: Consecutive patients with SCN managed at the Liverpool Pancreas Cancer Centre between 2000 and 2013 were retrospectively reviewed. Results: There were 64 patients consisting of 39 women (60.9%) and 25 men (39.1%). Forty-seven patients (73.4%) had surgical removal and 17 (26.6%) were observed. The possibility of a non-SCN malignancy was the predominant indication for resection in 27 (57.4%) patients. Postoperative morbidity occurred in 26 (55.3%) patients with 2 (4.3%) deaths. An increased risk of resection was associated with patient's age (p = 0.011), diagnosis before 2009 (p < 0.001), pain (p = 0.043), possibility of cancer (p = 0.009) and a solid SCN component on imaging (p = 0.002). Independent factors associated with resection were a diagnosis before 2009 (p = 0.005) and a solid SCN component (p < 0.001). Independent factors associated with shorter time to surgical resection were persistent pain (p = 0.003) and a solid SCN component (p = 0.007). Conclusion: There was a reduction in the proportion of resections with the application of an observe-only policy for asymptomatic patients with more definite features of SCN. Improved criteria are still required in the remainder of patients with uncertain features of SCN in deciding for intervention or surveillance

PANasta Trial; Cattell Warren versus Blumgart techniques of panreatico-jejunostomy following pancreato-duodenectomy: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

PANasta operative manual. (PDF 520 kb

Ontology-based semantic indexing for MPEG-7 and TV-anytime audiovisual content

Summarization: In this paper, we describe a framework that we have developed for the support of ontology-based semantic indexing and retrieval of audiovisual content following the MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime standard specifications for metadata descriptions. Our work aims to provide a methodology to enhance the retrieval effectiveness of audiovisual content, while maintaining compatibility with the international multimedia standards. In our framework, domain-specific ontologies guide the definition of both the application-specific metadata and the instance-description metadata that describe the contents of audiovisual programs and/or their segments. The ontologies are also used in order to provide compatible descriptions in both audiovisual content standards (MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime) for the same content. This approach allows indexing compatibility and interoperability of TV-Anytime and digital library applications. We describe the design and implementation of a system supporting this framework. The components of the system include a segmentation tool for segmenting audiovisual information, which also provides ontology-based semantic indexing capabilities, and an appropriate API for semantic query support. An application testbed for the domain of soccer games has been developed on top of this system. An ontology for soccer games has been defined and used for indexing and retrieval of soccer games that have been stored in the system database. The methodology we developed opens up a wide opportunity for the creation of MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime services offering structured domain-specific ontologies that can be integrated to these standards for enhancing audiovisual content retrieval performance.Presented on: Multimedia Tools and Application