background: this study intends to determine the diagnostic and prognostic roles of hypermethylation of serum rassf1a and protocadherin-10 promoters in females with breast cancer. methods: this study enrolled 80 breast cancer patients and 80 apparently normal healthy controls. the promoter methylation status of serum rassf1a and pcdh10 genes was investigated using methylation specific pcr. resul...

introduction: the preoperative diagnostic evaluation of the parotid lesion is a valuable aid in planning the operation and the approach to intervention. among different diagnostic tools, fine needle aspiration has a key role. however, the exact efficacy of this technique in our center had not been thoroughly investigated. materials and methods: between january 2000 and june 2007 a subset of 64 ...

in the previous two parts of educational manuscript series in emergency, we explained some screening characteristics of diagnostic tests including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values. in the 3rd  part we aimed to explain positive and negative likelihood ratio (lr) as one of the most reliable performance measures of a diagnostic test. to better underst...