Laparoscopic Versus Open Surgery for Colorectal Cancers: Clinical and Pathological Outcomes from a Single Institution in Bahrain.

INTRODUCTION: Colorectal carcinoma is commonly diagnosed and accounts for an important cause of cancerrelated mortality worldwide. Despite that literature has shown the superiority of laparoscopic surgery, with improved short-term clinical benefits and equivalent oncological outcomes compared with open surgery for colorectal cancer, most cases are operated by open approach. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical and pathological outcomes between laparoscopic and open colorectal cancer surgery at our institution. METHODOLOGY: 126 patients who had operations for colorectal cancers were identified. Patients ' clinical data, surgery type and details, postoperative early clinical outcomes and histology reports were retrieved from the database and retrospectively reviewed. Statistical analysis was used to assess the differences between laparoscopy and open approach in terms of clinical and oncological outcomes. RESULTS: Significant advantages were associated with minimally invasive colorectal surgery, with shorter postoperative hospital stay, less incidence of medical complications and improved survival. There were no statistically significant differences between both groups in pathological parameters, namely, number of retrieved lymph nodes and margins. DISCUSSION: In the hands of skilled trained surgeons, laparoscopic surgery for colorectal cancer is oncologically safe as it showed adequate dissection and appropriate number of resected lymph nodes, and is associated with reduction in postoperative morbidity and mortality. Conversion to open surgery is a risk associated with minimally invasive surgery. However, it is reported that conversion and postoperative complications are decreasing with increased surgical experience. CONCLUSION: In accordance with the current worldwide practice, our study indicates that minimally invasive surgery for colorectal cancer has the benefits of laparoscopy in terms of short-term clinical outcomes but show similar pathological outcomes in comparison to open approach. With increased surgical expertise, laparoscopic surgery is becoming the standard approach to treat colorectal cancer in our centre.

Graph-based extractive text summarization method for Hausa text.

Automatic text summarization is one of the most promising solutions to the ever-growing challenges of textual data as it produces a shorter version of the original document with fewer bytes, but the same information as the original document. Despite the advancements in automatic text summarization research, research involving the development of automatic text summarization methods for documents written in Hausa, a Chadic language widely spoken in West Africa by approximately 150,000,000 people as either their first or second language, is still in early stages of development. This study proposes a novel graph-based extractive single-document summarization method for Hausa text by modifying the existing PageRank algorithm using the normalized common bigrams count between adjacent sentences as the initial vertex score. The proposed method is evaluated using a primarily collected Hausa summarization evaluation dataset comprising of 113 Hausa news articles on ROUGE evaluation toolkits. The proposed approach outperformed the standard methods using the same datasets. It outperformed the TextRank method by 2.1%, LexRank by 12.3%, centroid-based method by 19.5%, and BM25 method by 17.4%.