Clinical and age peculiarities of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas with primary involvement of lymph nodes

Department of Oncology, Hematology and Radiotherapy, Nicolae Testemitsanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Chisinau, the Republic of MoldovaBackground: Non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas (NHLs) are a heterogenous group of malignant tumors developing from the lymphoid tissue and having a wide range of clinical manifestations and varied evolution and prognosis. Material and methods: We have studied the clinical peculiarities of 228 patients of different age groups with NHLs and a primary involvement of lymph nodes. Results: The frequency of the lymph nodes primary involvement has constituted 37.6%. It has been established that NHLs most frequently had their primary onset in the peripheral lymph nodes (61.8%), less frequently – in the abdominal (23.3%) and mediastinal (14.9%) ones. NHLs most frequently begin their development in the peripheral lymph nodes, first in patients over 60 years old (84.6%), in the abdominal lymph nodes – in children (57.2%), in the mediastinum – in children and people aged between 19 and 39 (48.2%). Conclusions: Children develop only aggressive NHL forms, these forms also predominate in adults. Aggressive NHLs in adults have been most often diagnosed in the patients having the primary tumor focus location in the mediastinal and abdominal lymph nodes. The frequency of indolent NHLs is higher in the cases with the primary involvement of the peripheral lymph nodes, the patients’ age being over 60. Metastases in the bone marrow have most frequently been recorded in NHL patients with the primary involvement of peripheral lymph nodes (53.5%). The involvement of CNS has taken place most frequently in the patients with NHLs, having the onset in the abdominal (34.4%) and mediastinal (30.0%) lymph nodes

Towards real-time multiple surgical tool tracking

Surgical tool tracking is an essential building block for computer-assisted interventions (CAI) and applications like video summarisation, workflow analysis and surgical navigation. Vision-based instrument tracking in laparoscopic surgical data faces significant challenges such as fast instrument motion, multiple simultaneous instruments and re-initialisation due to out-of-view conditions or instrument occlusions. In this paper, we propose a real-time multiple object tracking framework for whole laparoscopic tools, which extends an existing single object tracker. We introduce a geometric object descriptor, which helps with overlapping bounding box disambiguation, fast motion and optimal assignment between existing trajectories and new hypotheses. We achieve 99.51% and 75.64% average accuracy on ex-vivo robotic data and in-vivo laparoscopic sequences respectively from the Endovis’15 Instrument Tracking Dataset. The proposed geometric descriptor increased the performance on laparoscopic data by 32%, significantly reducing identity switches, false negatives and false positives. Overall, the proposed pipeline can successfully recover trajectories over long-sequences and it runs in real-time at approximately 25–29 fps

Scalable Joint Detection and Segmentation of Surgical Instruments with Weak Supervision

Computer vision based models, such as object segmentation, detection and tracking, have the potential to assist surgeons intra-operatively and improve the quality and outcomes of minimally invasive surgery. Different work streams towards instrument detection include segmentation, bounding box localisation and classification. While segmentation models offer much more granular results, bounding box annotations are easier to annotate at scale. To leverage the granularity of segmentation approaches with the scalability of bounding box-based models, a multi-task model for joint bounding box detection and segmentation of surgical instruments is proposed. The model consists of a shared backbone and three independent heads for the tasks of classification, bounding box regression, and segmentation. Using adaptive losses together with simple yet effective weakly-supervised label inference, the proposed model use weak labels to learn to segment surgical instruments with a fraction of the dataset requiring segmentation masks. Results suggest that instrument detection and segmentation tasks share intrinsic challenges and jointly learning from both reduces the burden of annotating masks at scale. Experimental validation shows that the proposed model obtain comparable results to that of single-task state-of-the-art detector and segmentation models, while only requiring a fraction of the dataset to be annotated with masks. Specifically, the proposed model obtained 0.81 weighted average precision (wAP) and 0.73 mean intersection-over-union (IOU) in the Endovis2018 dataset with 1% annotated masks, while performing joint detection and segmentation at more than 20 frames per second

SnappySonic: An Ultrasound Acquisition Replay Simulator

SnappySonic provides an ultrasound acquisition replay simulator designed for public engagement and training. It provides a simple interface to allow users to experience ultrasound acquisition without the need for specialist hardware or acoustically compatible phantoms. The software is implemented in Python, built on top of a set of open source Python modules targeted at surgical innovation. The library has high potential for reuse, most obviously for those who want to simulate ultrasound acquisition, but it could also be used as a user interface for displaying high dimensional images or video data

Emerging business models in local energy markets: A systematic review of peer-to-peer, community self-consumption, and transactive energy models

The emergence of peer-to-peer, collective or community self-consumption, and transactive energy concepts gives rise to new configurations of business models for local energy trading among a variety of actors. Much attention has been paid in the academic literature to the transition of the underlying energy system with its macroeconomic market framework. However, fewer contributions focus on the microeconomic aspects of the broad set of involved actors. Even though specific case studies highlight single business models, a comprehensive analysis of emerging business models for the entire set of actors is missing. Following this research gap, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of 135 peer-reviewed journal articles to examine business models of actors operating in local energy markets. From 221 businesses in the reviewed literature, nine macro-actor categories are identified. For each type of market actor, a business model archetype is determined and characterised using the business model canvas. The key elements of each business model archetype are discussed, and areas are highlighted where further research is needed. Finally, this paper outlines the differences of business models for their presence in the three local energy market models. Focusing on the identified customers and partner relationships, this study highlights the key actors per market model and the character of the interactions between market participants

Прогресс в классификации неходжкинских лимфом

We present the review of literature related to the classification of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, which form the group of morphologically and biologically heterogeneous malignant disorders of lymphoid tissue. The conceptions about these lymphomas have repeatedly undergone changes depending on interpretation of the origin of cells, which constitute the morphological substrate of the tumor. As far as the new data about morphological, immunological and cytogenetic features of lymphoid cells has been accumulated, the classifications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas have been elaborated with respect to histological types and subtypes, which are of clinical significance. The evolution and progress of classification of these tumors are analyzed in this article. The clearly outlined histological types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas were stipulated on the basis of morphological, immunophenotyping, cytogenetic and clinical patterns in the last classification, adopted by World Health Organization in 2001. Those changed the approaches to the examination and differentiated treatment of patients with such pathology.Приведен литературный обзор по классификациям неходжкинских лимфом, представляющих собой группу злокачественных процессов лимфатической ткани неоднородных с точки зрения морфологии и биологии. Концепции об этих лимфомах неоднократно менялись в зависимости от интерпретации происхождения клеток, образующих морфологический субстрат опухоли. По мере накопления новых данных о морфологии лимфоидных клеток, об их иммунологических и цитогенетических особенностях, были разработаны классификации с отражением вариантов и подвариантов неходжкинских лимфом, имеющих клиническую значимость. В этой работе проанализирована эволюция и прогресс классификаций этих опухолей. В самой последней классификации неходжкинских лимфом, принятой ВОЗ в 2001 году, сформулированы хорошо очерченные варианты на основании характеристики морфологии, иммунофенотипирования, цитогенетики и клиники, изменивших подход к исследованию и дифференцированному лечению больных, страдающих этой патологией

Measuring Time with Minimal Clocks

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00303Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It allows for timely reaction to regular or predicted events, reducing the pressure for fast processing of sensory input. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present article, we consider minimal abstract pure clocks in different configurations and investigate their characteristic dynamics. We are especially interested in optimally time-resolving clocks. Among these, we find fundamentally diametral clock characteristics, such as oscillatory behavior for purely local time measurement or decay-based clocks measuring time periods on a scale global to the problem. We include also sets of independent clocks (clock bags), sequential cascades of clocks, and composite clocks with controlled dependence. Clock cascades show a condensation effect, and the composite clock shows various regimes of markedly different dynamics.Peer reviewe