Congenital granular cell tumour - a case report

Congenital granular cell tumour (epulis) is a rare benign tumour occurring in gingiva of neonates, of unknown histogenesis, predominantly occurring in girls. It can cause feeding and respiratory difficulty. We describe a case of a newborn male baby born with swelling in the gingiva of anterior segment of upper jaw. The lesion was excised, with baby doing well at follow up.

Accuracy of automated urine dipstick test as a screening tool for proteinuria in hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background: Progressive proteinuria implies worsening of the condition in hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and hence its quantification guides clinician in making decision and planning treatment. The gold standard is 24 hour urine protein estimation. Urine sediment cytology, also known as ‘liquid renal biopsy’ identifies and analyses the extent of renal damage.Methods: Objectives of the study were to compare the efficacy of urine dipstick test to 24 hour urine protein estimation in detecting proteinuria in pre-eclampsic patients and to describe the findings in urine sediment examination in assessing proteinuria in above patients. Urine dipstick test and sediment cytology were performed on the urinary samples of 242 pregnant women with high BP recordings (BP>140/90 mm Hg) which were collected and tested in Department of Pathology, Government Medical College, Kottayam during the study period of 18 months. This was compared with 24 hour urine protein values (gold standard).Results: About 154 patients (63.63%) had significant proteinuria of more than 300mg/24hr. Dipstick method showed 78.57% sensitivity and 81.82% specificity for prediction of significant proteinuria. Positive predictive value and negative predictive value of urine dipstick test were 88.32% and 68.57% respectively. Urine sediment examination revealed the presence of casts only in 11.98% of study population. Conclusions: Diagnostic accuracy of automated urine dipstick test in assessing proteinuria was 79.75%. For grade 1 proteinuria, diagnostic accuracy was 79.81%, for Grade 2 it increased to 93.14% and for grade 3 & 4, accuracy was 98.68%. Urine sediment examination didn’t correlate with proteinuria and hence the extent of renal damage in pre-eclampsia

A study of the diagnostic effectiveness of repeated fine needle aspiration in thyroid and breast lesions

Background: Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is a relatively safe diagnostic tool with high sensitivity and specificity. Due to lesion inherent properties and lack of proper technique, adequate cellularity is not yielded in some instances, resulting in an inconclusive report. In such instances we have to go for repeat FNA to make a proper diagnosis. Repeat aspirations impose unnecessary workload on the lab and are distressful to the patients. The issue of repeat aspiration is largely unaddressed. Objectives were to identify the proportion of repeated fine needle aspirations in breast and thyroid lesions turning out to be diagnostic and to identify and describe the common factors leading to repeat fine needle aspiration.Methods: 190 cases of repeated FNA including both thyroid and breast lesions are included in the study. FNA done after an initial aspiration with inconclusive smear is considered as repeated FNA. History, clinical examination findings, findings in imaging studies, nature of aspirate obtained for each patient advised repeat FNA, are recorded. Proportion of repeat FNAs turning out to be diagnostic and the documented reasons for repeat were taken as the outcome measure.Results: 78% of repeat FNA in thyroid lesions and 50% of the repeat FNA in breast lesions were diagnostic. Inadequate cellularity, haemorrhagic aspirate and cystic change are the most common factors leading to repeat FNA.Conclusions: Since thyroid and breast are the most common sites where FNA is done and 64% of the total lesions are diagnostic, repeat FNA in all other sites are likely to yield a similar diagnostic outcome. Hence, repeat FNA is advisable in lesions which had initial non diagnostic result

Ossifying fibroma in an adolescent boy and his mother: a case report

Cemento-ossifying fibroma is a rare benign neoplasm occurring in the tooth bearing areas of mandible and maxilla. Here we report a case of an adolescent boy who presented with swelling in the right side of mandible. It was excised surgically and histopathological diagnosis of cement-ossifying fibroma was made. His mother also had history of cemento-ossifying fibroma 10 years back. This case is being reported for its rare incidence and familial occurrence

Calretinin expression in molecular subtypes of invasive carcinoma breast

Background: Breast cancer is a leading cause of cancer death  in women worldwide. Breast carcinoma is currently managed by assessing clinicopathological features. Elucidation of molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis of breast carcinoma  may lead to the development of new targeted therapies, particularly in triple negative cancers. Literature shows a few studies on the expression of calretinin  in breast carcinoma particularly in basal like type and its prognostic significance.  In this study, authors are trying  to assess the expression of  a new marker calretinin in different molecular subtypes of invasive carcinoma breast.Methods: This study was done in  107 cases of invasive carcinoma breast specimens received in  Department of Pathology, Government Medical college, Kottayam from December  2017 to May 2019.Results: Among the molecular subtypes, Basal like tumours showed 68.4% of cases with high level and 31.6% of cases with low level calretinin expression which is comparable with the study by Farrag et al. All the other molecular subgroups showed predominantly low level of calretinin expression.Conclusions: Different molecular subtypes of invasive carcinoma breast showed varied calretinin expression. High level calretinin expression was significantly associated with grade 3 (p value = 0.002), ER negativity (p = 0.004), PR negativity (p = 0.018)  and Basal like molecular subtype (p : <0.001). This suggests that calretinin might play a role in pathogenesis of basal like breast carcinomas

Audience-Centric Natural Language Generation via Style Infusion

Adopting contextually appropriate, audience-tailored linguistic styles is critical to the success of user-centric language generation systems (e.g., chatbots, computer-aided writing, dialog systems). While existing approaches demonstrate textual style transfer with large volumes of parallel or non-parallel data, we argue that grounding style on audience-independent external factors is innately limiting for two reasons. First, it is difficult to collect large volumes of audience-specific stylistic data. Second, some stylistic objectives (e.g., persuasiveness, memorability, empathy) are hard to define without audience feedback. In this paper, we propose the novel task of style infusion - infusing the stylistic preferences of audiences in pretrained language generation models. Since humans are better at pairwise comparisons than direct scoring - i.e., is Sample-A more persuasive/polite/empathic than Sample-B - we leverage limited pairwise human judgments to bootstrap a style analysis model and augment our seed set of judgments. We then infuse the learned textual style in a GPT-2 based text generator while balancing fluency and style adoption. With quantitative and qualitative assessments, we show that our infusion approach can generate compelling stylized examples with generic text prompts. The code and data are accessible at https://github.com/CrowdDynamicsLab/StyleInfusion.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, Accepted in Findings of EMNLP 202

Comparative analysis of the genomic regions flanking Xa21 locus in indica and japonica ssp. of rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Abstract Comparative analysis of a 100 kb region flanking of major bacterial blight resistance gene Xa21 (3.57 kb) was performed in the two subspecies of rice Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica cv. Nipponbare and Oryza sativa L. ssp. indica cv. 93-11 to understand the evolution and divergence of Xa21 locus. A total of 12 genes in japonica and 14 genes in indica were predicted and annotated in this region. Functional annotation revealed the presence of 4 genes and 8 genes in japonica and indica, respectively, which could be putatively associated with disease resistance in the 100 kb region of Xa21 locus. The study also revealed that 50% of japonica genes and 42.8% of indica genes in the genomic region of interest were transposable elements protein coding genes. Analysis of each predicted gene in this region revealed more or less similar GC content in both the subspecies. A total of 109 SSRs have been identified in the region of interest in both indica and japonica. The numbers of repeated motifs were observed to decrease with the increased number of nucleotides. Interestingly, most of the leucine rich repeat (LRR) gene products were predicted to be localized in the plasma membrane and the transposable element related protein coding genes were localized in the nucleus. Phylogenetic tree analysis revealed that the majority of predicted genes with similar functions of both the subspecies were grouped together

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' resources: focus on curated databases

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB's resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB's most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB's Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article