PURPOSE Cancer-related inflammation affects many aspects of malignancy. We confirm the effects of early postoperative systemic inflammation on cancer prognosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS Six hundred consecutive patients underwent surgery for colorectal cancer from 2006 to 2009. Measurements of white blood cells, neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, and platelet counts were performed preoperativel...

Normalization is an essential step with considerable impact on high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data analysis. Although there are numerous methods for read count normalization, it remains a challenge to choose an optimal method due to multiple factors contributing to read count variability that affects the overall sensitivity and specificity. In order to properly determine the most appr...

We report the case of a patient with acute necrotizing colitis due to invasive amebiasis associated with CD4 lymphopenia and impaired neutrophil responses. The course of the disease was characterized by CMV reactivation and severe and recurrent bacterial and fungal infections, which might be related to the decreased CD4 T cell count and the impaired functional capacities of neutrophils, respect...

All patients received the first plasma exchange employing fresh frozen plasma, and CPP was used in the following procedures. PE was performed daily until normalization of the platelet count and serum LDH levels. Two patients (B.S. and P.M.L.) died 8 and 5 days, respectively, after beginning plasma exchange, and the addition of highdose iv immunoglobulins in one case did not produce any effect. ...

Normalization is critically important for the proper interpretation of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) imaging datasets. The effects of the commonly used normalization techniques based on total ion count (TIC) or vector norm normalization are significant, and they are frequently beneficial. In certain cases, however, these normalization algorithms may produce misleading resu...

INTRODUCTION A randomized trial was conducted prospectively to evaluate the efficacy, related complications, and convalescence of emergency percutaneous nephrolithotomy compared to percutaneous nephrostomy for decompression of the collecting system in cases of sepsis associated with large uretero-pelvic junction stone impaction. MATERIALS AND METHODS The inclusion criteria included a WBC coun...

BACKGROUND Drug ontologies could help pharmaceutical researchers overcome information overload and speed the pace of drug discovery, thus benefiting the industry and patients alike. Drug-disease relations, specifically drug-indication relations, are a prime candidate for representation in ontologies. There is a wealth of available drug-indication information, but structuring and integrating it ...

Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) is a rare disorder belonging to thrombotic microangiopathies (TMA) and is caused by functional deficiency of the ADAMTS-13 metalloproteinase. Plasma exchange (PE) remains the treatment of choice in this disease. Here, were describe the case of a patient who apparently recovered from TTP following multiple sessions of PE, but remained thrombocytopenic. C...

Training neural network language models over large vocabularies is computationally costly compared to count-based models such as Kneser-Ney. We present a systematic comparison of neural strategies to represent and train large vocabularies, including softmax, hierarchical softmax, target sampling, noise contrastive estimation and self normalization. We extend self normalization to be a proper es...

Basic haematologic parameters and serum gamma-glutamyl-transferase (GGT) activity were evaluated in a five-year prospective follow-up study of 25 patients with newly diagnosed epilepsy starting treatment with carbamazepine. In addition, we evaluated the effects of replacing carbamazepine by oxcarbazepine on these parameters, erythrocyte folate concentrations and serum vitamin B12 levels in 12 m...