Scandinavian trial of uncomplicated aortic dissection therapy: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Contemporary management of uncomplicated type B aortic dissections (uTBAD) is based on the acuity and various morphological features. Medical therapy is mandatory, while the risks of early thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) are balanced against the potential for rupture, complex surgery, and death. Improved aortic morphology following TEVAR is documented, but evidence for improved overall survival is lacking. The costs and impact on quality of life are also needed. METHODS: The trial is a randomized, open-label, superiority clinical trial with parallel assignment of subjects at 23 clinical sites in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Eligibility includes patients aged ≥ 18 with uTBAD of < 4 weeks duration. Recruited subjects will be randomized to either standard medical therapy (SMT) or SMT + TEVAR, where TEVAR must be performed between 2-12 weeks from the onset of symptoms. DISCUSSION: This trial will evaluate the primary question of whether early TEVAR improves survival at 5 years among uTBAD patients. Moreover, the costs and the impact on quality of life should provide sorely needed data on other factors that play a role in treatment strategy decisions. The common Nordic healthcare model, with inclusion of all aortic centers, provides a favorable setting for carrying out this trial, while the robust healthcare registries ensure data validity. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05215587. Registered on January 31, 2022.

[Olaus Rudbeck as scientist and professor of medicine]. / Olof Rudbeck som vetenskapsman och läkare: Lars Thorénföreläsning 2003. Sammandrag.

Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1702) was one of the pioneers in the study of lymphatic vessels. As a young student at Uppsala University he began dissecting small animals with great diligence and found the lymphatic connection between the intestines and the circulating blood, leading the prepared nutrients via the thoracic duct to the veins. By applying ligatures to the lymphatic vessels he could observe the direction of the flow. His observations confirmed William Harvey's newly advanced theory about the circulation of the blood and were in agreement with the then modern mechanistic view of body functions. Rudbeck demonstrated his findings for Queen Christina in the spring of 1652 and received from her money for a visit to the University of Leiden, Holland in the autumn of 1653. He had just before his departure published his own discoveries, but the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin had reported very similar results slightly before. During his stay in Holland (autumn 1653-summer 1654) where he was admired for his anatomical skillfullness, a priority dispute began between him and one of Bartholin's students, lasting for years. Back in Uppsala Rudbeck began and extensive activity, including the foundations of the botanical garden, the anatomical theatre and other university buildings. He became a professor of medicine in 1660 but soon left his anatomical studies for work in several disciplines and trades. He was a prominent master-builder and garden architect as well as an astronomer, botanist, musician and archaeologist. In the last mentioned capacity he published his ill-famed Atlantica, a gigantic reconstruction of the history of old Sweden from the times of the Flood, through the era of vast conquests including Russia and the Mediterranean region, supposed to have take place in the third and second millenium B.C. Rudbeck mingled philogical methods and mythological explanations with excavations and natural history to reach his phantastic conclusions. At the same time the Atlantica (in three volumes plus one unfinished) is a very personal document, demonstrating i.a. that he had a medical practices, including advanced anatomical surgery, as when helping at the birth of one of his children. The boy was christened "Johannes Caesar" in commemoration of the event, but apparently it was not a regular Caeserian section.

Protein names and how to find them.

A prerequisite for all higher level information extraction tasks is the identification of unknown names in text. Today, when large corpora can consist of billions of words, it is of utmost importance to develop accurate techniques for the automatic detection, extraction and categorization of named entities in these corpora. Although named entity recognition might be regarded a solved problem in some domains, it still poses a significant challenge in others. In this work we focus on one of the more difficult tasks, the identification of protein names in text. This task presents several interesting difficulties because of the named entities variant structural characteristics, their sometimes unclear status as names, the lack of common standards and fixed nomenclatures, and the specifics of the texts in the molecular biology domain in which they appear. We describe how we approached these and other difficulties in the implementation of Yapex, a system for the automatic identification of protein names in text. We also evaluate Yapex under four different notions of correctness and compare its performance to that of another publicly available system for protein name recognition.