Routine ultrasound screening of congenital anomalies: An overview of the European experience

Results from ultrasound in low-risk pregnant women are significant when routine screening is performed on a large population because the anomalies are rare. Professionals expect from routine ultrasound objective information that cannot usually be obtained by clinical procedures. Parents seek reassurance about the absence of fetal congenital anomalies and overall fetal health. Therefore, Europeans view routine ultrasound as a part of obstetrical care, capable of filling important gaps by delivering much key information for improving obstetrical practice. Fetal anomalies screening (FAS) requires higher education and qualifications than obstetrical ultrasound. The health insurance systems support ultrasound screening and allow its spread in most European countries; approximately 98% of pregnant women are examined by ultrasound and, frequently, two to three times (usually once per trimester). Detection rate of congenital anomalies is about 28% in geographical areas (private practice and hospitals), 60 to 80% in Ob/Gyn's ultrasound labs. Routine ultrasound screening policy has not proved to result in an immoderate use of ultrasound; on the contrary, chaotic use of routine ultrasound can lead to an unproductive and excessive number of scans. New trends in FAS, such as the early detection of fetal defects and chromosomal anomalies, bring more arguments for routine screening. Effectiveness should increase by enhancing education and training and the systematic referral for FAS to accredited laboratories.SCOPUS: ar.kFLWINinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedUltrasound screening for fetal anomalies: Is it worth it? Screening revisited after the eurofetus dat

Large scale bioinformatics data mining with parallel genetic programming on graphics processing units

Abstract A suitable single instruction multiple data GP interpreter can achieve high (Giga GPop/second) performance on a SIMD GPU graphics card by simultaneously running multiple diverse members of the genetic programming population. SPMD dataflow parallelisation is achieved because the single interpreter treats the different GP programs as data. On a single 128 node parallel nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, the interpreter can out run a compiled approach, where data parallelisation comes only by running a single program at a time across multiple inputs. The RapidMind GPGPU Linux C++ system has been demonstrated by predicting ten year+ outcome of breast cancer from a dataset containing a million inputs. NCBI GEO GSE3494 contains hundreds of Affymetrix HG-U133A and HG-U133B GeneChip biopsies. Multiple GP runs each with a population of five million programs winnow useful variables from the chaff at more than 500 million GPops per second. Sources available via FTP.