A study on histopathological examination of colorectal carcinoma with special reference to expression of CK20 in colorectal adenocarcinoma at a tertiary care centre

Background: Colorectal carcinoma is the third most common cancer worldwide, over 1.8 million new cases are estimated in the year 2018. In terms of mortality, colorectal carcinoma ranks second with estimated 881,000 deaths in 2018. Histopathological study plays a central role for diagnosis and definitive treatment of colorectal carcinoma. In present time, immunohistochemical markers with adjunct to morphology helps in diagnosis and also in prognosis and treatment. Therefore, in colorectal carcinoma, along with morphology, many such immunohistochemical markers are being studied.Methods: This study was carried out in the Department of Pathology at a tertiary care health centre in the southern part of Assam for a period of 1 year from June 2018 to May 2019. 52 cases of colorectal carcinoma diagnosed by histopathological study were included in the study. All patients were analysed for age, gender, type of growth and location of growth. Immunohistochemical staining of cytokeratin (CK) 20 was done and expression was studied and correlated with age, location of tumour, grade and tumour stage.Results: Out of total 52 patients, 33 were male and 19 were female. Average age of presentation was 48.46±15.51 years. On gross examination rectal tumours were the most common and maximum tumours had polypoidal type of growth. On immunohistochemical study CK20 expression was detected in 82.7% out of 52 cases of colorectal adenocarcinoma and negative in 17.3% cases.Conclusions: The correlation between CK20 expression and grading and tumour stages of colorectal adenocarcinoma was statistically significant. Further, large scale population-based studies with more number of cases and follow-up of these cases need to be done for better assessment of this immunohistochemical marker in colorectal adenocarcinoma that can be used for assessment of prognosis.

Analysis of current methods of flexural design for high strength concrete beams

Considerable amount of research was carried out into the properties and structural performance of high strength concrete for more than few decades. Whilst this research has produced relevant and useful results, there are several properties of high strength concrete like compressive and tensile strengths, stiffness, durability etc. that need to be evaluated and investigated to determine an accurate representation for the determination of different structural properties of beams made of high strength concrete. For this purpose, an investigation into the behaviour of beams made of higher concrete strengths has been carried out and conclusions drawn for the design of high strength concrete beams in flexure. Experimental data from previous research was considered for the study to establish some understanding of flexural behavior of HSC beams. A number of spreadsheets in Excel were developed using available data and various graphs were plotted to determine the accuracy of the code provisions for calculating the ultimate moment capacity of beams. A study on flexural ductility of beams has been carried out using a computer program FRMPHI which generates moment-curvature curves for the beams. Ductility has been studied using ductility factors. The influence of ductility on the value of the depth of neutral axis has been analysed and discussed. A chapter on the short-term deflection of simply supported high strength concrete beams under instantaneous deflections is presented. This chapter includes analysis of the available formula to calculate deflection to determine if these can be adopted for high strength concrete. Extensive ongoing research on the shear strength of beams by several researchers since many years has lead to the generation of a large body of knowledge. Although each author has analysed the data comparing them with existing relationships, the whole body of information has not been analysed to establish a statistical significance. In this study, regression analysis on experimental data collected from published research is carried a relationship between the different parameters affecting the shear strength of beams. The level of significance of the association between parameters influencing shear strength is also discussed

Investigating the benefits of molecular profiling of advanced non-small cell lung cancer tumors to guide treatments.

In this study we utilized data on patient responses to guided treatments, and we evaluated their benefit for a non-small cell lung cancer cohort. The recommended therapies used were predicted using tumor molecular profiles that involved a range of biomarkers but primarily used immunohistochemistry markers. A dataset describing 91 lung non-small cell lung cancer patients was retrospectively split into two. The first group's drugs were consistent with a treatment plan whereby all drugs received agreed with their tumor's molecular profile. The second group each received one or more drug that was expected to lack benefit. We found that there was no significant difference in overall survival or mortality between the two groups. Patients whose treatments were predicted to be of benefit survived for an average of 402 days, compared to 382 days for those that did not (P = 0.7934). In the matched treatment group, 48% of patients were deceased by the time monitoring had finished compared to 53% in the unmatched group (P = 0.6094). The immunohistochemistry biomarker for the ERCC1 receptor was found to be a marker that could be used to predict future survival; ERCC1 loss was found to be predictive of poor survival

An audit on hospital management of bronchial asthma

Medical audit is a new concept in developing countries like Pakistan. We carried out this retrospective study on bronchial asthma. The purpose was to see if care given to patient with asthma meets the accepted international standard or not. During this audit several deficiencies were found. Documentation in notes about signs indicating severity of asthma was very poor. Peak flow recording in the notes was also very deficient. There was no documentation in notes whether inhalers technique of the patients has been checked or not. This audit shows that care given to asthma patients is far from satisfactory and we clearly need to improve in order to reach the accepted international standards

Diffuse optical spectroscopic imaging reveals distinct early breast tumor hemodynamic responses to metronomic and maximum tolerated dose regimens.

BACKGROUND:Breast cancer patients with early-stage disease are increasingly administered neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) to downstage their tumors prior to surgery. In this setting, approximately 31% of patients fail to respond to therapy. This demonstrates the need for techniques capable of providing personalized feedback about treatment response at the earliest stages of therapy to identify patients likely to benefit from changing treatment. Diffuse optical spectroscopic imaging (DOSI) has emerged as a promising functional imaging technique for NAC monitoring. DOSI uses non-ionizing near-infrared light to provide non-invasive measures of absolute concentrations of tissue chromophores such as oxyhemoglobin. In 2011, we reported a new DOSI prognostic marker, oxyhemoglobin flare: a transient increase in oxyhemoglobin capable of discriminating NAC responders within the first day of treatment. In this follow-up study, DOSI was used to confirm the presence of the flare as well as to investigate whether DOSI markers of NAC response are regimen dependent. METHODS:This dual-center study examined 54 breast tumors receiving NAC measured with DOSI before therapy and the first week following chemotherapy administration. Patients were treated with either a standard of care maximum tolerated dose (MTD) regimen or an investigational metronomic (MET) regimen. Changes in tumor chromophores were tracked throughout the first week and compared to pathologic response and treatment regimen at specific days utilizing generalized estimating equations (GEE). RESULTS:Within patients receiving MTD therapy, the oxyhemoglobin flare was confirmed as a prognostic DOSI marker for response appearing as soon as day 1 with post hoc GEE analysis demonstrating a difference of 48.77% between responders and non-responders (p < 0.0001). Flare was not observed in patients receiving MET therapy. Within all responding patients, the specific treatment was a significant predictor of day 1 changes in oxyhemoglobin, showing a difference of 39.45% (p = 0.0010) between patients receiving MTD and MET regimens. CONCLUSIONS:DOSI optical biomarkers are differentially sensitive to MTD and MET regimens at early timepoints suggesting the specific treatment regimen should be considered in future DOSI studies. Additionally, DOSI may help to identify regimen-specific responses in a more personalized manner, potentially providing critical feedback necessary to implement adaptive changes to the treatment strategy

Electroencephalographic correlates of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Unremitting fatigue and unrefreshing sleep, hallmark traits of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), are also pathognomonic of sleep disorders. Yet, no reproducible perturbations of sleep architecture, multiple sleep latency times or Epworth Sleepiness Scores are found to be associated consistently with CFS. This led us to hypothesize that sleep homeostasis, rather than sleep architecture, may be perturbed in CFS. To probe this hypothesis, we measured and compared EEG frequencies associated with restorative sleep between persons with CFS and matched controls, both derived from a population-based sample.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We evaluated overnight polysomnography (PSG) in 35 CFS and 40 control subjects. PSG records were manually scored and epochs containing artifact removed. Fast Fourier Transformation was utilized to deconstruct individual EEG signals into primary frequency bands of alpha, delta, theta, sigma, and beta frequency domains. The spectral power of each frequency domain for each sleep state was compared between persons with CFS and matched controls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In persons with CFS, delta power was diminished during slow wave sleep, but elevated during both stage 1 and REM. Alpha power was reduced during stage 2, slow wave, and REM sleep. Those with CFS also had significantly lower theta, sigma, and beta spectral power during stage 2, Slow Wave Sleep, and REM.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Employing quantitative EEG analysis we demonstrate reduced spectral power of cortical delta activity during SWS. We also establish reduced spectral power of cortical alpha activity, with the greatest reduction occurring during REM sleep. Reductions in theta, beta, and sigma spectral power were also apparent.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Unremitting fatigue and unrefreshing sleep, the waking manifestations of CFS, may be the consequence of impaired sleep homeostasis rather than a primary sleep disorder.</p

Social network analytics and visualization: Dynamic topic-based influence analysis in evolving micro-blogs

Influence Analysis is one of the well-known areas of Social Network Analysis. However, discovering influencers from micro-blog networks based on topics has gained recent popularity due to its specificity. Besides, these data networks are massive, continuous and evolving. Therefore, to address the above challenges we propose a dynamic framework for topic modelling and identifying influencers in the same process. It incorporates dynamic sampling, community detection and network statistics over graph data stream from a social media activity management application. Further, we compare the graph measures against each other empirically and observe that there is no evidence of correlation between the sets of users having large number of friends and the users whose posts achieve high acceptance (i.e., highly liked, commented and shared posts). Therefore, we propose a novel approach that incorporates a user's reachability and also acceptability by other users. Consequently, we improve on graph metrics by including a dynamic acceptance score (integrating content quality with network structure) for ranking influencers in micro-blogs. Additionally, we analysed the topic clusters' structure and quality with empirical experiments and visualization.Fundaçao para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Grant/Award Number: UIDB/50014/202

Dynamic topic modeling using social network analytics

First Online: 03 September 2021Topic modeling or inference has been one of the well-known problems in the area of text mining. It deals with the automatic categorisation of words or documents into similarity groups also known as topics. In most of the social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, hashtags are used to define the content of posts. Therefore, modelling of hashtags helps in categorising posts as well as analysing user preferences. In this work, we tried to address this problem involving hashtags that stream in real-time. Our approach encompasses graph of hashtags, dynamic sampling and modularity based community detection over the data from a popular social media engagement application. Further, we analysed the topic clusters’ structure and quality using empirical experiments. The results unveil latent semantic relations between hashtags and also show frequent hashtags in a cluster. Moreover, in this approach, the words in different languages are treated synonymously. Besides, we also observed top trending topics and correlated clusters