Pulmonary Artery Leiomyosarcoma Diagnosed without Delay

A 63-year-old female presented with abnormal lung shadows but had, apart from this, few symptoms. Computed tomography (CT) revealed multiple nodules and blockage of the pulmonary artery. She was immediately diagnosed with pulmonary artery sarcoma based on a careful differential diagnosis and underwent surgery. Her tumor was pathologically diagnosed as leiomyosarcoma (i.e. intimal sarcoma). Pulmonary artery sarcoma can be easily confounded with thromboembolism in a clinical setting and some cases are diagnosed post mortem only. In our case, clinical prediction scores (Wells score, Geneva score, and revised Geneva score) for the pulmonary embolism showed low probability. Moreover, chest CT showed uncommon findings for pulmonary thromboembolism, as the nodules were too big for thrombi. Because surgical resection can provide the only hope of long-term survival in cases of pulmonary artery sarcoma, clinicians should consider this possibility in the differential diagnosis of pulmonary embolism. Clinical prediction scores and CT findings might help to reach the correct diagnosis of pulmonary artery sarcoma

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: acute exacerbation and lung cancer associated with pulmonary fibrosis

Abstract: The 5-year survival rate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is 30-50%, and the major causes of death are respiratory failure, cardiac failure, lung cancer, infection, and pulmonary thromboembolism. Clinical conditions of acute exacerbation of IPF, which was first reported from Japan and is also now being recognized in Europe and the US, include deterioration of dyspnea, exacerbation in image findings, a decrease in the partial pressure of oxygen in arterial blood, and elevation in the levels of KL-6 and SP-D, in a short period of time. Its clinical characteristics are those of the ARDS and its pathological findings are those of diffuse alveolar damage (DAD). Infection, an inappropriate tapering of the dose of steroids, certain medications, invasive tests, and surgical operations are among the inducing factors. Combination therapy by steroid pulse and cyclosporin-A has been attracting attention. The complication of lung cancer in IPF, which is frequently observed in patients aged 70 or older, is one of the prognostic factors, and the knowledge of IPF is indispensable to treat this. Expression and mutations of various genes during the repairing process of damaged DNA is presumed to be involved in the development of this lung cancer. Special attention is required for the treatment because surgery, administration of anti-cancer drugs, and radiation can possibly induce the acute exacerbation

A VLSI Design of a Tomlinson-Harashima Precoder for MU-MIMO Systems Using Arrayed Pipelined Processing

This paper presents a VLSI design of a Tomlinson-Harashima (TH) precoder for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. The TH precoder consists of LQ decomposition (LQD), interference cancellation (IC), and weight coefficient multiplication (WCM) units. The LQ decomposition unit is based on an application specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) architecture with floating-point arithmetic for high accuracy operations. In the IC and WCM units with fixed-point arithmetic, the proposed architecture uses an arrayed pipeline structure to shorten a circuit critical path delay. The implementation result shows that the proposed architecture reduces circuit area and power consumption by 11% and 15%, respectively

Proteome Analysis of Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid in Lung Fibrosis Associated with Systemic Sclerosis

Background: Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is the major cause of mortality in collagen vascular diseases. However, its pathogenesis still needs to be elucidated. Methods: To evaluate the alteration of certain proteins in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) and clarify the causative role in the processes of ILD in systemic sclerosis (SSc), we compared a BALF protein profile between 5 patients with systemic sclerosis with pulmonary fibrosis (SSc-fib+) and 4 patients with systemic sclerosis without pulmonary fibrosis (SSc-fib-) using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE), and matrix assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). Results: We analyzed spots over the range of 10.1 kDa to 207.4 kDa. SSc-fib+ patients showed increased 3 proteins compared to SSc-fib- including α2-macroglobulin, α1-antitrypsin, and pulmonary surfactant protein A and decreased 2 proteins including α2 heat shock protein (HSP) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) compared to SSc-fib- patients. Conclusions: In conclusion, we identified several interesting proteins that might have roles in ILD of SSc patients. Further studies are warranted to clarify the role of these proteins in the processes of pulmonary fibrosis in SSc