Diabetic Mastopathy: A Case Report and Literature Review

Diabetic mastopathy is a rare fibroinflammatory breast disease characterized by lymphocytic lobulitis, ductitis, and perivasculitis with stromal fibrosis. This lesion often presents as a discretely palpable uni- or bilateral mass in long-standing type I diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. We report a case of insulin-dependent diabetic mastopathy, which presented clinically as an indeterminate breast lump suspicious for malignancy. The patient is a 36-year-old woman who had type 1 insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Mammography and ultrasonography raised a suspicion of malignancy, and an excisional biopsy was performed. A previous biopsy had shown no evidence of malignancy. Histopathological examination now showed dense keloid-like stromal fibrosis with epithelioid-like and spindly myofibroblasts and a characteristic lymphocytic infiltration around blood vessels in and around lobules and ducts, features consistent with diabetic mastopathy. The literature is briefly reviewed

Chaste: an open source C++ library for computational physiology and biology

Chaste - Cancer, Heart And Soft Tissue Environment - is an open source C++ library for the computational simulation of mathematical models developed for physiology and biology. Code development has been driven by two initial applications: cardiac electrophysiology and cancer development. A large number of cardiac electrophysiology studies have been enabled and performed, including high performance computational investigations of defibrillation on realistic human cardiac geometries. New models for the initiation and growth of tumours have been developed. In particular, cell-based simulations have provided novel insight into the role of stem cells in the colorectal crypt. Chaste is constantly evolving and is now being applied to a far wider range of problems. The code provides modules for handling common scientific computing components, such as meshes and solvers for ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs). Re-use of these components avoids the need for researchers to "re-invent the wheel" with each new project, accelerating the rate of progress in new applications. Chaste is developed using industrially-derived techniques, in particular test-driven development, to ensure code quality, re-use and reliability. In this article we provide examples that illustrate the types of problems Chaste can be used to solve, which can be run on a desktop computer. We highlight some scientific studies that have used or are using Chaste, and the insights they have provided. The source code, both for specific releases and the development version, is available to download under an open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence at http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/chaste, together with details of a mailing list and links to documentation and tutorials

Alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma of the neck in a two-months-old baby: diagnostic challenges

Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common soft tissue malignancy in children and adolescents. The rarity of its occurrence in infant poses a great difficulty in terms of diagnosis and management. Here, we report an aggressive case of alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma in an infant who presented with neck swelling and neurological complications. The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) revealed a soft tissue swelling of the neck with intraspinal extension and spinal cord compression, raising the possibility of a neurogenic or malignant nerve sheath tumour. Histopathological examination revealed a primitive, small round cell tumour with no rhabdoid differentiation. The clinical presentation, neurological symptoms, tumor location and the histopathologic features were highly suggestive of neuroblastoma. However, the tumour cells were positive for desmin with focal and weak nuclear positivity for myogenin and MyoD1; immunoexpressions which were in favour of rhabdomyosarcoma. Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) confirmed the presence of a translocation t(2;13)(q35;q14), supporting the diagnosis of alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma. Despite chemotherapy, patient succumbed to death after two months due to septic shock. Rhabdomyosarcoma is highly aggressive mesenchymal neoplasm which may present with diagnostic difficulty. This case highlights the importance of molecular studies in making an accurate diagnosis so that appropriate chemotherapy may be instituted

Chaste: a test-driven approach to software development for biological modelling

Chaste (‘Cancer, heart and soft-tissue environment’) is a software library and a set of test suites for computational simulations in the domain of biology. Current functionality has arisen from modelling in the fields of cancer, cardiac physiology and soft-tissue mechanics. It is released under the LGPL 2.1 licence.\ud \ud Chaste has been developed using agile programming methods. The project began in 2005 when it was reasoned that the modelling of a variety of physiological phenomena required both a generic mathematical modelling framework, and a generic computational/simulation framework. The Chaste project evolved from the Integrative Biology (IB) e-Science Project, an inter-institutional project aimed at developing a suitable IT infrastructure to support physiome-level computational modelling, with a primary focus on cardiac and cancer modelling

An integrative computational model for intestinal tissue renewal

Objectives\ud \ud The luminal surface of the gut is lined with a monolayer of epithelial cells that acts as a nutrient absorptive engine and protective barrier. To maintain its integrity and functionality, the epithelium is renewed every few days. Theoretical models are powerful tools that can be used to test hypotheses concerning the regulation of this renewal process, to investigate how its dysfunction can lead to loss of homeostasis and neoplasia, and to identify potential therapeutic interventions. Here we propose a new multiscale model for crypt dynamics that links phenomena occurring at the subcellular, cellular and tissue levels of organisation.\ud \ud Methods\ud \ud At the subcellular level, deterministic models characterise molecular networks, such as cell-cycle control and Wnt signalling. The output of these models determines the behaviour of each epithelial cell in response to intra-, inter- and extracellular cues. The modular nature of the model enables us to easily modify individual assumptions and analyse their effects on the system as a whole.\ud \ud Results\ud \ud We perform virtual microdissection and labelling-index experiments, evaluate the impact of various model extensions, obtain new insight into clonal expansion in the crypt, and compare our predictions with recent mitochondrial DNA mutation data. \ud \ud Conclusions\ud \ud We demonstrate that relaxing the assumption that stem-cell positions are fixed enables clonal expansion and niche succession to occur. We also predict that the presence of extracellular factors near the base of the crypt alone suffices to explain the observed spatial variation in nuclear beta-catenin levels along the crypt axis

MRI-guided adaptive radiotherapy for prostate cancer: When do we need to account for intra-fraction motion?

A shift of the daily plan can mitigate target position changes that occur between daily MR acquisition and treatment for MR-linac radiotherapy, but increases the session time. We demonstrated that our workflow strategy and decision-making process, to determine whether a subsequent shift is necessary, is appropriate

Evidence-informed health policy: are we beginning to get there at last

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Dielectric and conductivity relaxation in mixtures of glycerol with LiCl

We report a thorough dielectric characterization of the alpha relaxation of glass forming glycerol with varying additions of LiCl. Nine salt concentrations from 0.1 - 20 mol% are investigated in a frequency range of 20 Hz - 3 GHz and analyzed in the dielectric loss and modulus representation. Information on the dc conductivity, the dielectric relaxation time (from the loss) and the conductivity relaxation time (from the modulus) is provided. Overall, with increasing ion concentration, a transition from reorientationally to translationally dominated behavior is observed and the translational ion dynamics and the dipolar reorientational dynamics become successively coupled. This gives rise to the prospect that by adding ions to dipolar glass formers, dielectric spectroscopy may directly couple to the translational degrees of freedom determining the glass transition, even in frequency regimes where usually strong decoupling is observed.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure