Computed tomography of renal oncocytomas

A retrospective analysis of 5 renal oncocytomas studied with CT was performed. Oncocytomas appeared as rounded hypodense solid masses with sharp margination from the normal renal parenchyma. They showed uniform homogeneous enhancement on CT scans performed after drip infusion of urographic contrast. One oncocytoma studied with dynamic CT scanning demonstrated a stellate (spoke-wheel) pattern of enhancement. No evidence of involvement of adjacent renal parenchyma, perinephric fat, renal veins or regional lymph nodes was present at CT and the findings were confirmed at surgery. Although the differential diagnosis between renal oncocytoma and hypernephroma may not be possible, preoperative awareness of a potentially benign lesion may guide the surgeon to attempt renal preserving surgery instead of the customary nephrectomy.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25589/1/0000133.pd

Linguistics And Second Language Teaching: An Assessment

No Abstract available

Tools and criteria for ensuring estuarine stock enhancement programs maximise benefits and minimise impacts

New South Wales (NSW) is the first jurisdiction in Australia to approve and implement an ongoing marine stock enhancement program. As part of the development and consent process an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was prepared, and a management strategy developed to govern the activity in estuaries and control for risks outlined in the EIS. Initially, the EIS developed and used novel tools and criteria to determine which of 158 NSW estuaries were most appropriate to achieve the program’s goals for the seven recreationally-targeted species (4 fish, 2 crab and 1 prawn species). Estuaries within three release regions were selected and ranked using a multi-criteria analysis of 20 factors considered important to the success of stock enhancement. Estimation of the trophic impact of released species and estimates of the productivity of the selected estuaries were used to determine release rates at various sizes for the target species. Criteria were established to: (1) ensure best practice broodstock management and genetic quality of released recruits; (2) minimise disease risk through stock enhancement; and, (3) maximise social and economic benefits from stock enhancement. These tools and criteria fed into the risk assessment in the EIS and guided further controls outlined in the management arrangements for the program. In this paper, we outline this novel approach to development and assessment of stock enhancement activities. We discuss the potential application of this framework to marine stock enhancement activities in other jurisdictions.13 page(s

Applying computer vision to digitised natural history collections for climate change research: Temperature‐size responses in British butterflies

Abstract Natural history collections are invaluable resources for understanding biotic response to global change. Museums around the world are currently imaging specimens, capturing specimen data and making them freely available online. In parallel to the digitisation effort, there have been great advancements in computer vision: the computer trained automated recognition/detection, and measurement of features in digital images. Applying computer vision to digitised natural history collections has the potential to greatly accelerate the use of these collections for biotic response to global change research. In this paper, we apply computer vision to a very large, digitised collection to test hypotheses in an established area of biotic response to climate change research: temperature‐size responses. We develop a computer vision pipeline (Mothra) and apply it to the NHM collection of British butterflies (>180,000 imaged specimens). Mothra automatically detects the specimen and other objects in the image, sets the scale, measures wing features (e.g. forewing length), determines the orientation of the specimen (pinned ventrally or dorsally) and identifies the sex. We pair these measurements and specimen collection data with temperature records for 17,726 specimens across a subset of 24 species to test how adult size varies with temperature during the immature stages of species. We also assess patterns of sexual size dimorphism across species and families for 32 species trained for automated sex ID. Mothra accurately measures the forewing lengths of butterfly specimens compared to manual measurements and accurately determines the sex of specimens, with females as the larger sex in most species. An increase in adult body size with warmer monthly temperatures during the late larval stages is the most common temperature‐size response. These results confirm suspected patterns and support hypotheses based on recent studies using a smaller dataset of manually measured specimens. We show that computer vision can be a powerful tool to efficiently and accurately extract phenotypic data from a very large collection of digital natural history collections. In the future, computer vision will become widely applied to digital collections to advance ecological and evolutionary research and to accelerate their use to investigate biotic response to global change