Advanced head and neck cancer: Long-term results of chemo-radiotherapy, complications and induction of second malignancies

Background: Chemo-radiotherapy is superior to radiotherapy alone in the treatment of advanced, inoperable head and neck cancer. The long-term treatment results, the induction of second malignant tumors, and other long-term toxicities are not well defined. Patients and Methods: 100 consecutive patients with advanced head and neck cancer who were treated at our center were studied. Treatment results, survival, the occurrence of late complications, and second malignant tumors (SMT) were investigated. 78 patients were treated with a protocol combining cisplatinum, 5-fluorouracil, folinic acid and hyper-fractionated irradiation. 22 patients were treated with other chemo-radiotherapy protocols. The relative risk of developing an SMT was compared with that within the normal population. Results: The cumulative total probability of survival was 51.1% at 2 years and 38.7% at 4 years. The probability of relapse-free survival was 39.9% at 2 years and 36.7% at 4 years. A total of 7 patients developed SMT (4 cases of lung cancer, 2 colon cancers, 1 skin cancer). After 6 years, a cumulative risk of SMT of 8.7% was observed. The relative risk of developing an SMT was significantly increased (4.45-fold in males) compared with a normal population. 13 of 38 evaluable patients (34.2%) had severe late complications like fibrosis of soft tissues, nerve lesions, or were dependent on tracheal cannulas. Conclusions: The treatment results and long-term prognoses in our population of unselected high-risk patients are unsatisfactory, but comparable to those from multicenter studies. About 35% of patients become long-term (> 4 years) survivors. SMT generally occur early, have a poor prognosis and, most likely, are not treatment-related. Approximately 30% of long-term survivors have severe, often incapacitating late effects. The treatment and - if possible - prevention of these late effects is important for the quality of life of patients who survived advanced head and neck cancer

Spontaneous bleeding in a patient with malignant lymphoma: A case of acquired hemophilia

Background: Acquired hemophilia is a rare condition which can be associated with lymphoproliferative disease. Case Report: Eleven yea rs after the diagnosis of immunocytoma had been made, a 72-year-old man developed a high-titer factor VIII inhibitor. At this time, the lymphoma was without significant progress and there was no paraprotein in the serum. Partial thromboplastin time (PTT) was 83 a, factor-VIII clotting activity was <1%, and inhibitor level was 50.4 Bethesda units. The patient presented with spontaneous hematomas in the skin and musculature of the extremities. Following combination chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide, vincristine and prednisolone (COP), there was a prompt disappearance of the inhibitor and normalization of coagulation; however, the patient developed serious infectious complications. When the inhibitor recurred he was treated with low-dose cyclophosphamide and prednisolone. This time there was a more delayed response, but the inhibitor disappeared again completely. Two months after cessation of therapy, there was again relapse. Conclusion: Causal relationship between lymphoma and acquired hemophilia remains speculative. At least in some cases of factor VIII inhibitors associated with malignant disease, immunosuppressive therapy may be sufficient to suppress the inhibitor

HIV-assoziierte Malignome

Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), Non-Hodgkin's lymphma (NHL) and invasive cervical cancer are considered AIDS-defining malignancies. The incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma has recently been increased as a secondary manifestation of AIDS. The pathogenesis is not completely understood. Human herpesvirus 8 could be identified as an infectious cofactor. Therapeutic strategies should be based on prognostic factors and tailored to the patient's individual situation. Local treatments widely used are cryotherapy or radiotherapy. Systemic therapies such as interferon-alpha. or single and multiagent chemotherapy are also well established. Based on their high response rates and favorable toxicity profile, liposome-encapsulated anthracyclines may be considered first-line therapy for advanced AIDS-related KS. HIV-associated NHL may increase in frequency as HIV-infected individuals survive longer with improved antiretroviral therapy. There is no advantage for intensive as compared with standard or less intensive chemotherapeutic regimens of the CHOP type. Complete remissions can be achieved in approximately 50% of the patients, but the recurrence rate is high. The therapeutic strategy should include an optimal supportive care and antiretroviral treatment because chemotherapy significantly increases the risk of opportunistic infection. In urban populations at risk, cervical cancer is a common AIDS-related malignancy in women. Patients with cervical carcinoma usually have a more aggressive and more advanced disease. Various malignant diseases, such as Hodgkin's lymphoma, anal cancer or seminoma in patients with AIDS occur at higher frequency in HIV infection

Enabling Accurate Cross-Layer PHY/MAC/NET Simulation Studies of Vehicular Communication Networks

Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications is required for numerous applications that aim at improving traffic safety and efficiency. In this setting, however, gauging system performance through field trials can be very expensive especially when the number of studied vehicles is high. Therefore, many existing studies have been conducted using either network or physical layer simulators; both approaches are problematic. Network simulators typically abstract physical layer details (coding, modulation, radio channels, receiver algorithms, etc.) while physical layer ones do not consider overall network characteristics (topology, network traffic types, and so on). In particular, network simulators view a transmitted frame as an indivisible unit, which leads to several limitations. First, the impact of the vehicular radio channel is typically not reflected in its appropriate context. Further, interference due to frame collisions is not modeled accurately ( if at all) and, finally, the benefits of advanced signal processing techniques, such as interference cancellation, are difficult to assess. To overcome these shortcomings we have integrated a detailed physical layer simulator into the popular NS-3 network simulator. This approach aims to bridge the gap between the physical and network layer perspectives, allow for more accurate channel and physical layer models, and enable studies on cross-layer optimization. In this paper, we exemplify our approach by integrating an IEEE 802.11a and p physical layer simulator with NS-3. Further, we validate the augmented NS-3 simulator against an actual IEEE 802.11 wireless testbed and illustrate the additional value of this integration

Confidential database-as-a-service approaches: taxonomy and survey

Outsourcing data to external providers has gained momentum with the advent of cloud computing. Encryption allows data confidentiality to be preserved when outsourcing data to untrusted external providers that may be compromised by attackers. However, encryption has to be applied in a way that still allows the external provider to evaluate queries received from the client. Even though confidential database-as-a-service (DaaS) is still an active field of research, various techniques already address this problem, which we call confidentiality preserving indexing approaches (CPIs). CPIs make individual tradeoffs between the functionality provided, i.e., the types of queries that can be evaluated, the level of protection achieved, and performance.In this paper, we present a taxonomy of requirements that CPIs have to satisfy in deployment scenarios including the required functionality and the required level of protection against various attackers. We show that the taxonomy?s underlying principles serve as a methodology to assess CPIs, primarily by linking attacker models to CPI security properties. By use of this methodology, we survey and assess ten previously proposed CPIs. The resulting CPI catalog can help the reader who would like to build DaaS solutions to facilitate DaaS design decisions while the proposed taxonomy and methodology can also be applied to assess upcoming CPI approaches

Systematic image-driven analysis of the spatial Drosophila embryonic expression landscape

We created innovative virtual representation for our large scale Drosophila insitu expression dataset. We aligned an elliptically shaped mesh comprised of small triangular regions to the outline of each embryo. Each triangle defines a unique location in the embryo and comparing corresponding triangles allows easy identification of similar expression patterns.The virtual representation was used to organize the expression landscape at stage 4-6. We identified regions with similar expression in the embryo and clustered genes with similar expression patterns.We created algorithms to mine the dataset for adjacent non-overlapping patterns and anti-correlated patterns. We were able to mine the dataset to identify co-expressed and putative interacting genes.Using co-expression we were able to assign putative functions to unknown genes

MuPix7 - A fast monolithic HV-CMOS pixel chip for Mu3e

The MuPix7 chip is a monolithic HV-CMOS pixel chip, thinned down to 50 \mu m. It provides continuous self-triggered, non-shuttered readout at rates up to 30 Mhits/chip of 3x3 mm^2 active area and a pixel size of 103x80 \mu m^2. The hit efficiency depends on the chosen working point. Settings with a power consumption of 300 mW/cm^2 allow for a hit efficiency >99.5%. A time resolution of 14.2 ns (Gaussian sigma) is achieved. Latest results from 2016 test beam campaigns are shown.Comment: Proceedingsfor the PIXEL2016 conference, submitted to JINST A dangling reference has been removed from this version, no other change

JunB is required for endothelial cell morphogenesis by regulating core-binding factor β

The molecular mechanism triggering the organization of endothelial cells (ECs) in multicellular tubules is mechanistically still poorly understood. We demonstrate that cell-autonomous endothelial functions of the AP-1 subunit JunB are required for proper endothelial morphogenesis both in vivo in mouse embryos with endothelial-specific ablation of JunB and in in vitro angiogenesis models. By cDNA microarray analysis, we identified core-binding factor β (CBFβ), which together with the Runx proteins forms the heterodimeric core-binding transcription complex CBF, as a novel JunB target gene. In line with our findings, expression of the CBF target MMP-13 was impaired in JunB-deficient ECs. Reintroduction of CBFβ into JunB-deficient ECs rescued the tube formation defect and MMP-13 expression, indicating an important role for CBFβ in EC morphogenesis

An Integrated Micro- and Macroarchitectural Analysis of the Drosophila Brain by Computer-Assisted Serial Section Electron Microscopy

A new software package allows for dense electron microscopy reconstructions of neuronal networks in the fruit fly brain, and reveals specific differences in microcircuits between insects and vertebrates

Interactions of Bacillus Mojavensis and Fusarium Verticillioides With a Benzoxazolinone (Boa) and Its Transformation Product, Apo

En:Journal of Chemical Ecology (2007, vol. 33, n. 10, p. 1885-1897)The benzoxazolinones, specifically benzoxazolin-2(3H)-one (BOA), are important transformation products of the benzoxazinones that can serve as allelochemicals providing resistance to maize from pathogenic bacteria, fungi, and insects. However, maize pathogens such as Fusarium verticillioides are capable of detoxifying the benzoxazolinones to 2-aminophenol (AP), which is converted to the less toxic N-(2-hydroxyphenyl) malonamic acid (HPMA) and 2-acetamidophenol (HPAA). As biocontrol strategies that utilize a species of endophytic bacterium, Bacillus mojavensis, are considered efficacious as a control of this Fusarium species, the in vitro transformation and effects of BOA on growth of this bacterium was examined relative to its interaction with strains of F. verticillioides. The results showed that a red pigment was produced and accumulated only on BOA-amended media when wild type and the progeny of genetic crosses of F. verticillioides are cultured in the presence of the bacterium. The pigment was identified as 2-amino-3H-phenoxazin-3-one (APO), which is a stable product. The results indicate that the bacterium interacts with the fungus preventing the usual transformation of AP to the nontoxic HPMA, resulting in the accumulation of higher amounts of APO than when the fungus is cultured alone. APO is highly toxic to F. verticillioides and other organisms. Thus, an enhanced biocontrol is suggested by this in vitro study. =580 $aEn:Journal of Chemical Ecolog