Intramuscular myxoid lipoma in the proximal forearm presenting as an olecranon mass with superficial radial nerve palsy: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Extremity lipomas may occur in any location, including the proximal forearm. We describe a case of a patient with an intramuscular lipoma presenting as an unusual posterior elbow mass.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We discuss the case of a 57-year-old Caucasian man who presented with a tender, posterior elbow mass initially diagnosed as chronic olecranon bursitis. A minor sensory disturbance in the distribution of the superficial radial nerve was initially thought to be unrelated, but was likely caused by mass effect from the lipoma. No pre-operative advanced imaging was obtained because the diagnosis was felt to have already been made. At the time of surgery, a fatty mass originating in the volar forearm muscles was found to have breached the dorsal forearm fascia and displaced the olecranon bursa. Tissue diagnosis was made by histopathology as a myxoid lipoma with no aggressive features. Post-operative recovery was uneventful.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We present a case of an unusual elbow mass presenting with symptoms consistent with chronic olecranon bursitis, a relatively common condition. The only unexplained pre-operative finding was the non-specific finding of a transient superficial radial nerve deficit. We remind clinicians to be cautious when diagnosing soft tissue masses in the extremities when unexplained physical findings are present.</p

A Flexible Proximity Sensor Fully Fabricated by Inkjet Printing

A flexible proximity sensor fully fabricated by inkjet printing is proposed in this paper. The flexible proximity sensor is composed of a ZnO layer sandwiched in between a flexible aluminum sheet and a web-shaped top electrode layer. The flexible aluminum sheet serves as the bottom electrode. The material of the top electrode layer is nano silver. Both the ZnO and top electrode layers are deposited by inkjet printing. The fully inkjet printing process possesses the advantages of direct patterning and low-cost. It does not require photolithography and etching processes since the pattern is directly printed on the flexible aluminum sheet. The prototype demonstrates that the presented flexible sensor is sensitive to the human body. It may be applied to proximity sensing or thermal eradiation sensing

AMiBA Wideband Analog Correlator

A wideband analog correlator has been constructed for the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy. Lag correlators using analog multipliers provide large bandwidth and moderate frequency resolution. Broadband IF distribution, backend signal processing and control are described. Operating conditions for optimum sensitivity and linearity are discussed. From observations, a large effective bandwidth of around 10 GHz has been shown to provide sufficient sensitivity for detecting cosmic microwave background variations.Comment: 28 pages, 23 figures, ApJ in press

The Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy

The Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy (AMiBA) is the first interferometer dedicated to studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation at 3mm wavelength. The choice of 3mm was made to minimize the contributions from foreground synchrotron radiation and Galactic dust emission. The initial configuration of seven 0.6m telescopes mounted on a 6-m hexapod platform was dedicated in October 2006 on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Scientific operations began with the detection of a number of clusters of galaxies via the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. We compare our data with Subaru weak lensing data in order to study the structure of dark matter. We also compare our data with X-ray data in order to derive the Hubble constant.Comment: accepted for publication in ApJ (13 pages, 7 figures); a version with high resolution figures available at http://www.asiaa.sinica.edu.tw/~keiichi/upfiles/AMiBA7/pho_highreso.pd

The Taiwan Birth Panel Study: a prospective cohort study for environmentally- related child health

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Taiwan Birth Panel Study (TBPS) is a prospective follow-up study to investigate the development of child health and disease in relation to in-utero and/or early childhood environmental exposures. The rationale behind the establishment of such a cohort includes the magnitude of potential environmental exposures, the timing of exposure window, fatal and children's susceptibility to toxicants, early exposure delayed effects, and low-level or unknown neurodevelopmental toxicants.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A total of 486 mother-infant paired was enrolled from April 2004 to January 2005 in this study. Maternal blood before delivery, placenta and umbilical cord blood at birth, and mothers' urine after delivery were collected. The follow-up was scheduled at birth, 4, 6 months, and 1, 2, 3 and 5 years. The children's blood, urine, hair, and saliva were collected at 2 years of age and children's urine was collected at 5 years of age as well. The study has been approved by the ethical committee of National Taiwan University Hospital. All the subjects signed the inform consent on entering the study and each of the follow up.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Through this prospective birth cohort, the main health outcomes were focused on child growth, neurodevelopment, behaviour problem and atopic diseases. We investigated the main prenatal and postnatal factors including smoking, heavy metals, perfluorinated chemicals, and non-persistent pesticides under the consideration of interaction of the environment and genes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This cohort study bridges knowledge gaps and answers unsolved issues in the low-level, prenatal or postnatal, and multiple exposures, genetic effect modification, and the initiation and progression of "environmentally-related childhood diseases."</p

Automatic Morphological Subtyping Reveals New Roles of Caspases in Mitochondrial Dynamics

Morphological dynamics of mitochondria is associated with key cellular processes related to aging and neuronal degenerative diseases, but the lack of standard quantification of mitochondrial morphology impedes systematic investigation. This paper presents an automated system for the quantification and classification of mitochondrial morphology. We discovered six morphological subtypes of mitochondria for objective quantification of mitochondrial morphology. These six subtypes are small globules, swollen globules, straight tubules, twisted tubules, branched tubules and loops. The subtyping was derived by applying consensus clustering to a huge collection of more than 200 thousand mitochondrial images extracted from 1422 micrographs of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells treated with different drugs, and was validated by evidence of functional similarity reported in the literature. Quantitative statistics of subtype compositions in cells is useful for correlating drug response and mitochondrial dynamics. Combining the quantitative results with our biochemical studies about the effects of squamocin on CHO cells reveals new roles of Caspases in the regulatory mechanisms of mitochondrial dynamics. This system is not only of value to the mitochondrial field, but also applicable to the investigation of other subcellular organelle morphology

Integration of CNS survival and differentiation by HIF2α

Hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) 1α and HIF2α and the inhibitor of apoptosis survivin represent prominent markers of many human cancers. They are also widely expressed in various embryonic tissues, including the central nervous system; however, little is known about their functions in embryos. Here, we show that zebrafish HIF2α protects neural progenitor cells and neural differentiation processes by upregulating the survivin orthologues birc5a and birc5b during embryogenesis. Morpholino-mediated knockdown of hif2α reduced the transcription of birc5a and birc5b, induced p53-independent apoptosis and abrogated neural cell differentiation. Depletion of birc5a and birc5b recaptured the neural development defects that were observed in the hif2α morphants. The phenotypes induced by HIF2α depletion were largely rescued by ectopic birc5a and birc5b mRNAs, indicating that Birc5a and Birc5b act downstream of HIF2α. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assay revealed that HIF2α binds to birc5a and birc5b promoters directly to modulate their transcriptions. Knockdown of hif2α, birc5a or birc5b reduced the expression of the cdk inhibitors p27/cdkn1b and p57/cdkn1c and increased ccnd1/cyclin D1 transcription in the surviving neural progenitor cells. The reduction in elavl3/HuC expression and enhanced pcna, nestin, ascl1b and sox3 expression indicate that the surviving neural progenitor cells in hif2α morphants maintain a high proliferation rate without terminally differentiating. We propose that a subset of developmental defects attributed to HIF2α depletion is due in part to the loss of survivin activity

The 5p15.33 Locus Is Associated with Risk of Lung Adenocarcinoma in Never-Smoking Females in Asia

Genome-wide association studies of lung cancer reported in populations of European background have identified three regions on chromosomes 5p15.33, 6p21.33, and 15q25 that have achieved genome-wide significance with p-values of 10−7 or lower. These studies have been performed primarily in cigarette smokers, raising the possibility that the observed associations could be related to tobacco use, lung carcinogenesis, or both. Since most women in Asia do not smoke, we conducted a genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma in never-smoking females (584 cases, 585 controls) among Han Chinese in Taiwan and found that the most significant association was for rs2736100 on chromosome 5p15.33 (p = 1.30×10−11). This finding was independently replicated in seven studies from East Asia totaling 1,164 lung adenocarcinomas and 1,736 controls (p = 5.38×10−11). A pooled analysis achieved genome-wide significance for rs2736100. This SNP marker localizes to the CLPTM1L-TERT locus on chromosome 5p15.33 (p = 2.60×10−20, allelic risk = 1.54, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 1.41–1.68). Risks for heterozygote and homozygote carriers of the minor allele were 1.62 (95% CI; 1.40–1.87), and 2.35 (95% CI: 1.95–2.83), respectively. In summary, our results show that genetic variation in the CLPTM1L-TERT locus of chromosome 5p15.33 is directly associated with the risk of lung cancer, most notably adenocarcinoma

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research