Family Rhopaliidae Looss, 1899

Members of the family Rhopaliidae Looss, 1899 include digenetic trematodes that are parasites of marsupials in the Nearctic and Neotropical regions. These forms are characterized by having two anteriorly directed proboscides armed with spines and situated bilaterally relative to the oral sucker. The family was first established by Looss (1899) as the Rhopaliadae. Braun (1901b) incorrectly spelled the subfamily name as Rhopaliadinae. These trematodes were further studied and redescribed by Fuhrmann (1928) and Bresslau (1932), while Pratt (1902) appears to have been the first to consider the group to be related to the schinostomes. Viana (1924) emended the spelling of the family name to Rhopaliidae, which Skrjabin (1948c) considered a synonym of the Rhopaliadae. The spelling Rhopaliasidae was used by Yamaguti (1958). Travassos et al. (1969) established the subfamily Rhopaliasinae, and Yamaguti (1971) synonymized the Rhopaliasidae with the Rhopaliidae. The name Rhopalias was established by Stiles & Hassall (1898) to replace Rhopalophorus Diesing, 1850, which was pre-occupied by Ropalophorus Westwood, 1840 (Hymenoptera), with Distomum coronation Rudolphi, 1819 as the type-species. Rhopalophorus is synonymous with Rhopalias Stiles & Hassall, 1898. Lutz (1895) used the name Rhopalocephalus, without citing a taxon authority, in conjunction with the species names R. coronatus (Rudolphi, 1819) and R. horridus (Diesing, 1850). Stiles & Hassall (1898) did not mention Rhopalocephalus and, presumably, were unaware of it. It does not appear to have been used by other authors. Although Rhopalocephala is the older name, Rhopalias is well established in the literature and we intend to petition the ICZN to declare Rhopalocepbalus a nomen oblitum. The primary distinguishing morphological character of Rhopalias is the possession of a pair of proboscides, armed with chitinous spines, which can be invaginated into a muscular pouch. The pouches open to the exterior on each side of the oral sucker. They are about 0.3 mm long, with protrusor and retractor muscle fibres. The number and arrangement of spines on the proboscides are diagnostic at species level. Among the species, the proboscides range from fairly short \u3c0.26 mm) with 7-8 spines, in R. baculiler Braun, 1900, medium in length \u3c0.32 mm) with many spines, in R. horridus (Diesing, 1850), or medium with ten spines in a dorsal and a ventral group of five spines each, in R. macracantbus Chandler, 1932 or, finally, very long \u3c1.3mm) with ten spines each in R. coronatus (Rudolphi, 1819)

Galectin-3 expression in thyroid tumors

Aim. To evaluate the expression of Galectin-3 in benign and malignant thyroid nodules and to assess its diagnostic value.Methods. Immunohistochemical analysis of Galectin-3 expression was performed on 64 surgically removed thyroid nodules, including 38 carcinomas (13 papillary, 2 tall cell variants, 4 lymph node metastases from papillary carcinoma,6 follicular variants of papillary carcinoma (FVPTC), 4 anaplastic, 5 follicular and 4 Hürthle cell carcinomas), as well as 26 benign lesions (10 follicular adenomas, 5 Hürthle cell adenomas, 11 nodular goiters with surrounding normal thyroid tissue).Results. We found strong and diffuse Galectin-3 expression in all malignant lesions except for one case of FVPTC and one follicular carcinoma. Normal thyrocytes and the majority of the benign lesions were negative for Galectin-3. This molecular marker was expressed in the cytoplasm as well as in the nuclei of follicular cells. Statistical analysis determined sensitivity 94.7%, specificity 69.2%, PPV 81.8%, NPV 90% and accuracy 83% of Galectin-3.Conclusion. Our findings suggest that immunohistochemical expression of Galectin-3 might contribute to differential diagnosis between malignant and benign thyroid nodules, including those with follicular architecture

Fine needle aspiration biopsy of thyroid nodules: Cytohistological Correlation

OBJECTIVE: Fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) currently is the main procedure for distinguishing benign from malignant thyroid nodules. The aim of our study was to assess the accuracy of FNABs in our hospital by comparing the cytological and histological diagnosis.METHODS: We performed a prospective study including 321 patients with thyroid nodules admitted to "St. Marina" Hospital from January 2004 to December 2006. Clinical and US data, TSH, FT3, FT4, anti-TPO, cytological and histological findings were evaluated.RESULTS: FNABs were performed in all 321 cases, 290 of them were women and 31 men; mean age 52,9 years. Cytological evaluation considered 67,3% of FNABs as benign, 15,6% as suspicious, 4,7% as malignant and 12,4% as inadequate sample. 88 of the patients underwent thyroid surgery. The comparison between cytological and histological findings showed that 99,1% of cytologically benign nodules were histologically confirmed, as well as 100% of the malignant lesions. 89,5% of the cases classified as suspicious on FNAB turned out to be benign on histology and 10,5% were malignant. The discrepant cases were 2 false-negative results, which had a cytological diagnosis of nodular hyperplasia and turned out to be a medullary carcinoma. Our results showed a sensitivity of 88,2% and a specifity of 100%.CONCLUSION: Thyroid FNAB is an accurate and cost-effective preoperative tool for selection of patients who would benefit from surgery.Scripta Scientifica Medica 2008;40(1):39-4

A Linear Complementarity Numerical Approach to the Non-Convex Problem of Structures Environmentally Damaged and Strengthened by Cable-Bracings

A computational treatment is presented for the mathematically rigorous analysis of civil engineering structures, which have been environmentally damaged and subsequently strengthened by cable-elements. The problem is treated as an inequality one, where the governing conditions are equalities as well as inequalities. The cable behavior is considered as nonconvex and nonmonotone one and is described by generalized subdifferential relations including loosening, elastoplastic - fracturing and other effects. Using piece-wise linearization for the cable behavior, a linear complementarity problem, with a reduced number of unknowns, is solved by optimization algorithms. Finally, an example from Civil and Environmental Engineering praxis is presented

bgGLUE: A Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

We present bgGLUE (Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation), a benchmark for evaluating language models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Bulgarian. Our benchmark includes NLU tasks targeting a variety of NLP problems (e.g., natural language inference, fact-checking, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.) and machine learning tasks (sequence labeling, document-level classification, and regression). We run the first systematic evaluation of pre-trained language models for Bulgarian, comparing and contrasting results across the nine tasks in the benchmark. The evaluation results show strong performance on sequence labeling tasks, but there is a lot of room for improvement for tasks that require more complex reasoning. We make bgGLUE publicly available together with the fine-tuning and the evaluation code, as well as a public leaderboard at https://bgglue.github.io/, and we hope that it will enable further advancements in developing NLU models for Bulgarian.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023 (Main Conference

Cervix carcinoma and incidental finding of medullary thyroid carcinoma by 18F-FDG PET/CT — clinical case

Thyroid nodules are encountered in clinical practice during the diagnostic procedures or patients’ follow-up due to other diseases quite far from the thyroid gland with prevalence 4–50% in general population, depending on age, diagnostic method and race. The prevalence of thyroid nodules increases with age and their clarification should be done for their adequate treatment. An 18F-FDG PET/CT was done with a PET/CT scanner (Philips Gemini TF), consisting of dedicated lutetium orthosilicate full ring PET scanner and 16 slice CT. The PET/CT scan of the whole-body revealed on the CT portion a hypodense nodular lesion in the left lobe of the thyroid gland with increased uptake of 18F-FDG on the PET with SUVmax 10.3 and demonstrated a complete response to the induction therapy of the main oncological disease of the patient — squamous cell carcinoma. This clinical case demonstrates that whole-body 18F-FDG-PET/CT has an increasingly important role in the early evaluation of thyroid cancer as a second independent malignant localization. Focal thyroid lesion with high risk of thyroid malignancy was incidentally found on 18F-FDG PET/CT

Correlation between serum TSH and malignancy potential of thyroid nodules

Цел: Последни проучвания показват, че по-високите нива на тиреостимулиращ хормон (ТSH) се свързват с повишена честота на малигненост сред пациентите с нодозна гуша. Серумните концентрации на TSH обаче се повлияват от различни състояния. Целта на проучването бе да се корелира нивото на TSH при пациенти с тиреоидни възли с цитологичните и хистологичните резултати.Материали и методи: 1483 последователни пациенти (1339 жени и 144 мъже) с възлеста струма бяха оценени с тънкоиглена аспирационна биопсия (ТАБ) под УЗ контрол с цитологичен резултат, класифициран като недиагностичен, бенигнен, фоликуларна лезия, суспектен или малигнен. Серумните нива на TSH са изследвани по хемилуминисцентна имуноензимна методика. 390 от пациентите са оперирани и окончателното хистологично изследване потвърди 83 карцинома.Резултати: Чувствителността и специфичността на ТАБ в предсказването на малигненост бяха съотв. 90,32% и 81,11%. Средното ниво на серумно TSH при цитологично доброкачествените възли бе 1,7032,569 mU/l, при фоликуларните лезии 2,3934,119 mU/l, при суспектните нодули 2,3262,317 mU/l и при цитологично малигнените възли 3,0452,781 mU/l. Макар и в референтни граници ТSH нивата при малигнените цитологии са значимо по-високи в сравнение с бенигнените случаи (p<0,0001). Тази връзка бе потвърдена и сред оперираните пациенти, при които средното предоперативно ТSH е сигнификантно по-високо при хистологично злокачествените в сравнение с доброкачествените възли (TSH 3,387 vs. 1,613 mU/l; p<0,0001). С цел да избегнем фактори, влияещи на ТSH нивата, изключихме всички пациенти с тиреоидна автономия, тиреоидит на Хашимото (положителни антитела, УЗ вид, лимфоцитна инфилтрация в хисологичния препарат), както и тези, приемащи левотироксин или тиреостатици. Сред оставащите пациенти средното ТSH остана значимо по-ниско при доброкачествените в сравнение със злокачествените случаи (1,370 vs. 2,805 mU/l; p<0,0001).Изводи: Резултатите ни предполагат директна връзка между серумния ТSH и риска за малигненост при тиреоидните нодули както в цитологични, така и в хистологични серии след изключване на влиянието на различни щитовидни заболявания и медикаменти.Objectives:Recent studies have reported that higher levels of TSH are associated with an increased incidence of thyroid malignancy in patients with nodular thyroid disease. However, different conditions may affect TSH concentration. The aim of our study was to correlate serum TSH levels in patients with thyroid nodules with cytological and histological results.Materialsandmethods:1483 consecutive patients (1339 women and 144 men) with nodular thyroid disease were evaluated by ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) with cytological results classified as nondiagnostic, benign, follicular lesion, suspicious or malignant. Serum levels of TSHwere measured at presentation by chemiluminescent immunoassay. 390 of the patients were operated and final histology proved 83 carcinomas.Results:The overall sensitivity and specificity of FNAB in predicting malignancy were 90,32% and 81,11%, respectively. Mean TSH in cytologically benign nodules was 1,7032,569 mU/l, in follicular lesions 2,3934,119 mU/l, in suspicious nodules 2,3262,317 mU/l and in malignant on cytology nodules 3,0452,781 mU/l. Although in the reference range TSH levels in malignant cytologies were significantly higher that those in benign cases (p<0,0001). This relationship was confirmed among operated cases where mean preoperative TSH was significantly higher in histologically malignant than benign nodules (TSH 3,387 vs. 1,613 mU/l; p<0,0001). In order to eliminate the factors influencing TSH concentration, we excluded all patients with thyroid autonomy, Hashimoto`s thyroiditis (positive antibodies, US appearance, lymphocytic infiltration on histology) and those on levothyroxin or thyrostatic treatment. Among the rest of the patients, mean TSH value remained significantly lower in benign than malignant cases (1,370 vs. 2,805 mU/l; p<0,0001).Conclusion:Our results suggest a direct relationship between serum TSH and risk of malignancy in thyroid nodules both in cytological and histological series after excluding the influence of different thyroid diseases and medication

Graphene coating of Nafion(R)^{(R)} membranes for enhanced fuel cell performance

Electrochemically exfoliated graphene (e-G) thin films on Nafion$^{(R)}$ membranes exhibit a selective barrier effect against undesirable fuel crossover. The approach combines the high proton conductivity of state-of-the-art Nafion$^{(R)}$ and the ability of e-G layers to effectively block the transport of methanol and hydrogen. Nafion$^{(R)}$ membranes are coated with aqueous dispersions of e-G on the anode side, making use of a facile and scalable spray process. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) confirm the formation of a dense percolated graphene flake network which acts as diffusion barrier. The maximum power density in direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) operation with e-G coated Nafion$^{(R)}$ N115 is 3.9 times higher than the Nafion$^{(R)}$ N115 reference (39 vs. 10 mW cm$^{-2}$ @ 0.3 V) at 5M methanol feed concentration. This suggests the application of e-G coated Nafion$^{(R)}$ membranes for portable DMFCs, where the use of highly concentrated methanol is desirable