Connexin expression in intestinal type of adenocarcinoma of nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses

AIM: To investigate the immunohistochemical expression of connexins (Cxn) 30, 32, 37, 43 in patients with intestinal type of adenocarcinoma of nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses. METHODS: This was a retrospecitve study which included patients with adenocarcinoma of nose and paranasal sinuses operated at ENT Department of University Hospital Center Sister of Mercy in an 11- year period (from 2007-2018). Immunohistochemical analysis was performed on a single representative block from 17 cases. We used primary antibodies for connexins 30, 32, 37 and 43 (Abcam). The material was routinely processed and analyzed under the light microscope. Each section was analyzed in the whole mount two times. The first time under low power (x40) and the second time under high power magnification (x400). RESULTS: All cases showed negative reaction for Cxn 43, moderately positive reaction for Cxn 32 and extremly strong positive reaction for Cxn 30 and 37. CONCLUSION: The preliminary data of our study showed the absence of the reaction for Cxn 43 and positive reaction of Cxn 30, 32 and 37 in patients with ITAC. These findings are in concordance with the results of studies performed on adenocarcinomas of ovary, prostate, lung and stomach. Further studies are needed to explore the potential prognostic role of cxn expression in these patients

APPLICATION OF TOURISM DESTINATION COMPETITIVENESS MODEL ON RURAL DESTINATIONS

Measuring competitiveness has become one of the key factors for ensuring successful and sustainable tourism development, especially destination's current level of development and its growth and vitality. The main goal of this study was to analyze the applicability of the Ritchie and Crouch competitiveness model in order to assess tourism advantages and disadvantages of Vojvodina Province (Northern Serbia) as a rural tourism destination. Exactly 216 tourism stakeholders on the supply side that have the knowledge and/or experience relevant to this topic were interviewed. The results show that stakeholders believe that Vojvodina is not a competitive rural tourism destination, but some destination's advantages were identified, and they can be used for improving Vojvodina's position on rural tourism market. The research has shown that the key resources and the attractions of rural areas of Vojvodina are rated better than the macro and industry-related factors. In order that Vojvodina stands out in the competitive market, destination marketing is crucial and should be more closely focused on new products and market development. .

Intensity-based elastic registration incorporating anisotropic landmark errors and rotational information

Purpose: Thin-plate splines (TPS) represent an effective tool for estimating the deformation that warps one set of landmarks to another based on the physical equivalent of thin metal sheets. In the original formulation, data used to estimate the deformation field are restricted to landmark locations only and thus does not allow to incorporate information about the rotation of the image around the landmark. It furthermore assumes that landmark positions are known exactly which is not the case in real world applications. These localization inaccuracies are propagated to the entire deformation field as each landmark has a global influence. We propose to use a TPS approximation method that incorporates anisotropic landmark errors and rotational information and integrate it into a hierarchical elastic registration framework (HERA). The improvement of the registration performance has been evaluated. Methods: The proposed TPS approximation scheme integrates anisotropic landmark errors with rotational information of the landmarks. The anisotropic landmark errors are represented by their covariance matrices estimated directly from the image data as a minimal stochastic localization error, i.e. the Cramér-Rao bound. The rotational attribute of each landmark is characterized by an additional angular landmark, thus doubling the number of landmarks in the TPS model. This allows the TPS approximation to better cope up with local deformations. Results: We integrated the proposed TPS approach into the HERA registration framework and applied it to register 161 image pairs from a digital mammogram database. Experiments showed that the mean squared error using the proposed TPS approximation was superior to pure TPS interpolation. On artificially deformed breast images HERA, with the proposed TPS approximation, performed significantly better than the state-of-the-art registration method presented by Rueckert. Conclusion: The TPS approximation approach proposed in this publication allows to incorporate anisotropic landmark errors as well as rotational information. The integration of the method into an intensity-based hierarchical non-rigid registration framework is straightforward and improved the registration quality significantl