HPV Infection and Vulvar Cancer

Although the strong association between human papilloma virus (HPV) and cervical cancer has been widely demonstrated, it seems that uterine cervix cancer is not the only gynecologic malignancy induced by this pathogenic agent. It has been shown that HPV infection plays a central role in the development of vulvar cancer too, HPV 16 and 18 being the most frequently reported genotypes that might induce this kind of lesions. This aspect presents a particular importation, patients diagnosed with HPV-related vulvar cancer reporting a more favorable trend in regard with the long-term outcome. The current chapter aims to describe the pathogenesis as well as the therapeutic options and the long-term outcomes of patients in which association between HPV and vulvar cancer can be assessed

FINANCIAL DIAGNOSIS OF A COMPANY’S ACTIVITIES

Financial diagnosis consists of a number of instruments and methods which help to evaluate a company’s financial situation and performances. The financial diagnosis identifies the favourable and unfavourable factors which will affect the company’s future activity. The purpose of financial diagnosis is to draw a comparison with similar companies, in order to establish risk, profitability, and value parameters, by estimating the cost of capital (discount rate). The financial diagnosis helps to appreciate the past and present financial situation, and based on them to make projections for the future

Evaluation of overshooting errors in particle methods for diffusion by biased global random walk

The adjustment of grid steps which guarantees that particles methods yield no numerical diffusion inevitably induces overshooting errors in the solution of the parabolic partial differential equations with space variable coefficients. In this paper we give an evaluation of the overshooting errors of the "global random walk" algorithm (GRW), a computational efficient method used in simulations for transport in environmental problems. The evaluation is performed by comparisons between the GRW solutions and those of the "biased global random walk" algorithm (BGRW), a cellular automaton, which is computationally more expensive but is also free of overshooting errors. The reference problem was the diffusive transport in a random velocity field, a model for the transport of the contaminant solutes in groundwater. The evaluation reveals that, for an optimum choice of the parameters, GRW results for time intervals of practical interest lie in ranges of acceptable precision, for both the ensemble averaged observables and for their fluctuations

Global random walk solvers for fully coupled flow and transport in saturated/unsaturated porous media

In this article, we present new random walk methods to solve flow and transport problems in saturated/unsaturated porous media, including coupled flow and transport processes in soils, heterogeneous systems modeled through random hydraulic conductivity and recharge fields, processes at the field and regional scales. The numerical schemes are based on global random walk algorithms (GRW) which approximate the solution by moving large numbers of computational particles on regular lattices according to specific random walk rules. To cope with the nonlinearity and the degeneracy of the Richards equation and of the coupled system, we implemented the GRW algorithms by employing linearization techniques similar to the -scheme developed in finite element/volume approaches. The resulting GRW -schemes converge with the number of iterations and provide numerical solutions that are first-order accurate in time and second-order in space. A remarkable property of the flow and transport GRW solutions is that they are practically free of numerical diffusion. The GRW solvers are validated by comparisons with mixed finite element and finite volume solvers in one- and two-dimensional benchmark problems. They include Richards’ equation fully coupled with the advection-diffusion-reaction equation and capture the transition from unsaturated to saturated flow regimes.publishedVersio