Cyclin A and cyclin D1 as significant prognostic markers in colorectal cancer patients

BACKGROUND: Colorectal cancer is a common cancer all over the world. Aberrations in the cell cycle checkpoints have been shown to be of prognostic significance in colorectal cancer. METHODS: The expression of cyclin D1, cyclin A, histone H3 and Ki-67 was examined in 60 colorectal cancer cases for co-regulation and impact on overall survival using immunohistochemistry, southern blot and in situ hybridization techniques. Immunoreactivity was evaluated semi quantitatively by determining the staining index of the studied proteins. RESULTS: There was a significant correlation between cyclin D1 gene amplification and protein overexpression (concordance = 63.6%) and between Ki-67 and the other studied proteins. The staining index for Ki-67, cyclin A and D1 was higher in large, poorly differentiated tumors. The staining index of cyclin D1 was significantly higher in cases with deeply invasive tumors and nodal metastasis. Overexpression of cyclin A and D1 and amplification of cyclin D1 were associated with reduced overall survival. Multivariate analysis shows that cyclin D1 and A are two independent prognostic factors in colorectal cancer patients. CONCLUSIONS: Loss of cell cycle checkpoints control is common in colorectal cancer. Cyclin A and D1 are superior independent indicators of poor prognosis in colorectal cancer patients. Therefore, they may help in predicting the clinical outcome of those patients on an individual basis and could be considered important therapeutic targets

People who don't have a past, don't have a future.'

Original art created in partial fulfillment of the course requirements for ARTV 200 Foundations of Design and Color in Spring 2011 at The American University in Cairo.The University on the Square: Documenting Egypt's 21st Century Revolution project was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Emerging from the sand

Original art created in partial fulfillment of the course requirements for ARTV 200 Foundations of Design and Color in Spring 2011 at The American University in Cairo.The University on the Square: Documenting Egypt's 21st Century Revolution project was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

NDPA: A generalized efficient parallel in-place N-Dimensional Permutation Algorithm

N-dimensional transpose/permutation is a very important operation in many large-scale data intensive and scientific applications. These applications include but not limited to oil industry i.e. seismic data processing, nuclear medicine, media production, digital signal processing and business intelligence. This paper proposes an efficient in-place N-dimensional permutation algorithm. The algorithm is based on a novel 3D transpose algorithm that was published recently. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D and 7D data sets as a proof of concept. This is the first contribution which is breaking the dimensions’ limitation of the base algorithm. The suggested algorithm exploits the idea of mixing both logical and physical permutations together. In the logical permutation, the address map is transposed for each data unit access. In the physical permutation, actual data elements are swapped. Both permutation levels exploit the fast on-chip memory bandwidth by transferring large amount of data and allowing for fine-grain SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) operations. Thus, the performance is improved as evident from the experimental results section. The algorithm is implemented on NVidia GeForce GTS 250 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) containing 128 cores. The rapid increase in GPUs performance coupled with the recent and continuous improvements in its programmability proved that GPUs are the right choice for computationally demanding tasks. The use of GPUs is the second contribution which reflects how strongly they fit for high performance tasks. The third contribution is improving the proposed algorithm performance to its peak as discussed in the results section