Gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) are the most common mesenchymal tumors of the gastrointestinal tract. Except for surgical resection, no effective treatment strategies have been established. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) consists of intravenous administration of a photosensitizer, activated by a specific wavelength of light, which produces reactive oxygen species that directly kill tumor cel...

In today’s world, large amounts of information have to be dealt with, regardless of the field involved. Most of this information comes in written format. Computers seem the right choice for making life easier, by processing text automatically, but in many cases at least partial understanding (if not full understanding) is necessary in order to automate a process. Luhn (1958) proposed a method f...

Basically, A is a reason for B, if A speaks in favor of B, or makes B more plausible, or is positively relevant to B. And basically, a doxastic feature is a priori, if all rational doxastic states have that feature. The paper will unfold these notions. And it will argue, partially in a deductive way, for a series of a priori principles about the structure of reasons, starting with a basic empir...

Contrast statistics of the majority of natural images conform to a Weibull distribution. This property of natural images may facilitate efficient and very rapid extraction of a scene's visual gist. Here we investigated whether a neural response model based on the Weibull contrast distribution captures visual information that humans use to rapidly identify natural scenes. In a learning phase, we...

A few years ago at a “Leadership and Diversity Training” for Virginia project directors I was introduced for the first time to the business management maxim “You get what you measure.” 1 For those of you as unenlightened as I was at the time, here’s the gist of this insight. The metrics an organization collects send the strong message that those measures are what are truly important. In fact, t...

In vision, humans use summary statistics (e.g., the average facial expression of a crowd) to efficiently perceive the gist of groups of features. Here, we present direct evidence that ensemble coding is also important for auditory processing. We found that listeners could accurately estimate the mean frequency of a set of logarithmically spaced pure tones presented in a temporal sequence (Exper...

Recent psychological experiments show that the feeling of awe increases people’s generosity. In this paper, we show that a usual utilitybased approach to decision making explains this increase. 1 Formulation of the Problem Recent experiment: a brief summary. A recent experiment [13] showed that the feeling of awe increases people’s generosity. Recent experiment: details. To measure a person’s g...

Gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) account for about 0.2% of all malignancy of gastrointestinal tumors and rarely arise in the rectum. We experienced three patients with large GISTs in the rectum. Case 1 (66-year-old man) underwent abdominoperineal resection (APR) for intrapelvic mass. The tumor was 90 mm and diagnosed to be a Kit-positive GIST. Case 2 (81-year-old woman) underwent right h...

BACKGROUND Single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS), an advanced form of minimally invasive surgery, has recently been used for surgical management of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST). The literature comparing SILS to conventional laparoscopic surgery for treatment of this disease is limited. This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of SILS compared with conventio...