Summary
A 64‐year‐old man with HBV‐related cirrhosis presented with a liver nodule measuring 2.8 cm revealed by a routine ultrasound and concomitant increased alpha‐fetoprotein (AFP) up to 400 UI/l. ...Contrast‐enhanced CT was suggestive of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and the patient underwent laser ablation procedure. Five months later, because of raised AFP up to 1600 UI/l, ultrasonography and abdominal CT were repeated, showing an increased diameter of liver nodule, measuring 3.8 cm. The patient underwent down‐staged trans‐arterial chemoembolization (TACE) and then was entered into the active liver transplant (LT) list. Lamivudine was already started and the patient underwent LT showing HBV‐DNA serum levels <103 log/copies at the time of surgery. Pathological analysis performed on the explanted liver showed, instead of the suspected HCC, hepatic yolk sac tumor with the presence of typical ‘Schiller‐Duval bodies’. The first 12 months of postoperative follow‐up were excellent, with no evidence of tumor recurrence.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
We examined the impact of a lamivudine-containing highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) regimen on 164 hepatitis B virus/HIV co-infected individuals starting their first HAART. ...Lamivudine-treated patients (accounting for 73% of the study population) showed a significantly lower level of alanine aminotransferase over follow-up -81.1 mU/ml mean difference; 95% confidence intervals (95% CI): -30.3; -131.7, P=0.003 and a significantly reduced risk of liver-related morbidity/mortality Relative hazard (RH)=0.07; 95% CI: 0.01-0.38, P=0.002 than those starting a lamivudine sparing-regimen.
We report and comment the experimental results of the PRAISED system, which implements an automatic method for discovering and resolving a wide range of protein name abbreviations from the full-text ...versions of scientific articles. This system has been recently proposed as part of a framework for creating and maintaining a publicly-accessible abbreviation repository. The testing phase was carried out against the widely used Medstract Gold Standard Corpus and a relevant subset of real scientific papers extracted from the PubMed database. As far as the Medstract corpus is concerned, we obtained significantly high results in terms of recall, precision and overall correctness. As for the full-text papers, results inevitably varied, due to the complex and often chaotic nature of the confronted domain; even so, we detected encouraging levels of recall and extremely fast execution times. The major strength of the system lies in addressing the unstructuredness of the scientific publications and being able to save time and effort for extracting protein-related information in an automatic fashion, while at the same time keeping computational overhead to a minimum thanks to its light-weight approach.
We describe a methodology for identifying characterizing terms from a source text or paper and automatically building an ontology around them, with the purpose of semantically categorizing a paper ...corpus where documents sharing similar subjects may be subsequently clustered together by means of ontology alignment. We first employ a Natural Language Processing pipeline to extract relevant terms from the source text, and then use a combination of a pattern-based and machine-learning approach to establish semantic relationships among those terms, with some user's feedback required in-between. This methodology for discovering characterizing knowledge from textual sources finds its inception as an extension of PRAISED, our abbreviation discovery framework, in order to enhance its resolution capabilities. By moving from a paper-by-paper, mainly syntactical process to a corpus-based, semantic approach, it was in fact possible to overcome earlier limits of the system related to abbreviations whose explanation could not be found within the same paper they were cited in. At the same time, though, the methodology we present is not tied to this specific task, but is instead of relevance for a variety of contexts, and might therefore be used to build a stand-alone system for advanced knowledge extraction and semantic categorization.
HBsAg bound to IgM was measured in the serum of HBsAg carriers with acute hepatitis using a radioimmunoassay based on selective absorption of IgM on solid phase coated with antiserum to human IgM. ...HBsAg/IgM was detected in 94 (100%) patients with acute type B hepatitis during the acute phase of infection and persisted after the fourth week only in 13 of them, who developed chronic liver disease. HBsAg/IgM was detected only in 1 patient out of 15 carriers of the HBsAg with superimposed non-B hepatitis. No activity was found in serum of 20 patients with acute HBsAg-negative hepatitis. The nature of the IgM component of the complex is uncertain, however, blocking experiments of the HBsAg/IgM reaction with polymerized human albumin suggest that the IgM component of the complex might represent antibody to the denatured protein. Persistent HBsAg/IgM complex detection in patients with acute type B hepatitis provides a useful tool to predict transition of HBV infection to chronicity. Its absence in patients with acute HBsAg-positive hepatitis is indicative of non-B hepatitis in chronic carriers of the HBsAg.
To evaluate the importance of several risk factors for breast cancer in the Italian female population, a large multicentric case-control study was conducted in 10 breast clinics in Italy. The study ...included 1,556 women affected by breast cancer, histologically and/or cytologically confirmed. Controls were 1,505 women admitted to a hospital in the same town, matched with cases for residence and with the same age distribution of the Italian female population. The risk factors considered in this study were family history of breast cancer, reproductive history, height and weight, use of oral contraceptives, other hormonal therapies and smoking history. The results of this study confirm the significant role of a positive family history of breast cancer (RR = 2.37); the relative risk was even higher when a first-degree relative was affected or the breast cancer was bilateral. The analysis of the reproductive history showed a significant trend of increasing risk with increasing age at first birth and, although less evident, with increasing number of children. Quetelet's index (kg/m-2) was positively correlated with breast cancer risk, mostly in postmenopausal women. Among other studied factors, only late age at menopause confirmed an increased risk for breast cancer, whereas age at menarche, use of oral contraceptives and smoking histories did not show any significant correlation with breast cancer risk. These results are in substantial agreement with other international studies, but represent an interesting contribution to studies about the Italian female population.
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