Mediastinal syndrome from plasmablastic lymphoma in human immunodeficiency virus and human herpes virus 8 negative patient with polycythemia vera: a case report

Background: Plasmoblastic lymphoma is a rare and aggressive subtype of diffuse large B cell lymphoma, which occurs usually in the jaw of immunocompromised subjects. Case presentation: We describe the occurrence of plasmoblastic lymphoma in the mediastinum and chest wall skin of an human immunodeficiency virus-negative 63-year-old Caucasian man who had had polycytemia vera 7 years before. At admission, the patient showed a superior vena cava syndrome, with persistent dyspnoea, cough, and distension of the jugular veins. Imaging findings showed a 9.7 × 8 × 5.7 cm mediastinal mass. A chest wall neoformation biopsy and ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration biopsy of the mediastinal mass allowed diagnosis of plasmoblastic lymphoma and establishment of an immediate chemotherapeutic regimen, with rapid remission of compression symptoms. Conclusions: Plasmoblastic lymphoma is a very uncommon, difficult to diagnose, and aggressive disease. The presented case represents the first rare mediastinal plasmoblastic lymphoma in a human immunodeficiency virus-/human herpesvirus-8-negative patient. Pathologists should be aware that this tumor does appear in sites other than the oral cavity. Fine-needle aspiration biopsy is a low-cost, repeatable, easy-to-perform technique, with a high diagnostic accuracy and with very low complication and mortality rates. Fine-needle aspiration biopsy could represent the right alternative to surgery in those patients affected by plasmoblastic lymphoma, being rapid and minimally invasive. It allowed establishment of prompt medical treatment with subsequent considerable reduction of the neoplastic tissue and resolution of the mediastinal syndrome

A M3G Talking Head for Smartphones

Often customer information services or virtual support guides make use of friendly interface to facilitate human-machine interaction. Indeed, virtual guided tours or helpdesks use a talking anthropomorphic head to communicate with the user. In this paper, we present a talking head for Smartphones, PDAs and, in general, all the mobile devices ableto support J2ME and MIDP protocol. The objective of this article is to illustrate how to make such an interface as portable as possible by maximizing the limited computational resources of these devices

A Java 3D Talking Head for a Chatbot

Facial animation is referred to all those systems per- forming the speech synchronization with an animated face model. This kind of systems are called ”Talking Head” or ”Talking Face”. In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. It requires an in- put query and an answer is generated in form of text. The answer is transduced into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are synchronized with the sound produced by a speech synthesis module. Our ”Talk- ing Head” explores the naturalness of the facial animation and provides a real-time interactive interface to the user. The WEB infrastructure has been realized using the Client- Server model delegating the Chatbot, the Natural Language Processing and the Digital Signal Processing services to the server, while the client is involved in animation, syn- chronization; in this way, the server can handle multiple requests from clients

PREVALENCE OF METABOLIC SYNDROME IN PATIENTS WITH ACUTE CORONARY SYNDROME

PREVALENCE OF METABOLIC SYNDROME IN PATIENTS WITH ACUTE CORONARY SYNDROM

Uniportal bilateral video-assisted sequential thoracoscopic extended thymectomy

Standard video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery has been reported as a minimally invasive approach alternative to sternotomy for management of myasthenia gravis (MG) associated with thymoma or thymic hyperplasia. Uniportal video-thoracoscopy is an evolution of standard multi-portal video-thoracoscopy for management of several thoracic diseases but its role for resecting mediastinal tumor remains under-evaluated. Herein, we describe our experience with bilateral uniportal thoracoscopic sequential extended thymectomy with case and video illustrations