On 28 January 1997, three clinical cases of measles among students attending Simon Fraser University (SFU) were reported to the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. These cases were subsequently confirmed by the presence of measles-specific IgM on acute serology. Because several more clinical and suspect cases had been identified by the following day, a decision was made to offer measle...

AIMS/BACKGROUND A previous study has shown that in age-related macular degeneration a high degree of concordance of disciform scar size occurs in the two eyes of any one patient. In a study of 35 patients with choroidal neovascular membrane who were treated with low dose ionising radiation to the macula of the affected eye, 11 were found to have bilateral disease. METHODS The visual outcome a...

Background: Uveitis refers to diseases characterized by intraocular inflammation of the uveal tract. Anterior uveitis is a common ocular disease characterized by inflammation of the iris and the ciliary body. Objectives: To establish the frequency of HLA-B27- positive uveitis in Asian Indian population, study their clinical profile and compare it with other reports in literature. Methods: We re...

This paper describes the design of the SQUASH system, the SFU Question Answering Summary Handler, developed by members of the Natural Language Lab from the SFU School of Computing Science in order to participate in the 2005 Document Understanding Conference (DUC-2005) summarization task. The system design involves semantic role labelling, semantic subgraph-based sentence selection and automatic...

Exome sequencing indicated that the gene encoding the calpain-5 protease, CAPN5, is the likely cause of retinal degeneration and autoimmune uveitis in human patients with autosomal dominant neovascular inflammatory vitreoretinopathy (ADNIV, OMIM #193235). To explore the mechanism of ADNIV, a human CAPN5 disease allele was expressed in mouse retinas with a lentiviral vector created to express ei...

OBJECTIVE To analyze published evidence about adalimumab use in autoimmune diseases. METHODS Systematic review of MEDLINE database of citations included from January 1990 to December 2008 employing the terms "adalimumab" and the different systemic autoimmune diseases. RESULTS Our search identified 241 potentially relevant citations. 154 were retrieved for detailed evaluation. Finally, 18 we...

Institutional open access (OA) policies can act as a solid foundation on which to build university-wide support for access. This is the first paper reflect entire process of developing, implementing, and reviewing an institutional policy at Canadian post-secondary institution. Simon Fraser University (SFU) one few universities with policy. As leader in access, SFU well positioned share observat...