Massive hemoptysis complicating Behçet's syndrome: the importance of early pulmonary angiography and operation.

A 16-year-old patient with Behçet's syndrome had massive hemoptysis due to a ruptured aneurysm of a segmental artery of the left lung. Emergency left lower lobectomy was performed. The patient is well 12 months after operation. There have been no further episodes of hemoptysis.

Severe lymphedema of the arm as a potential cause of shoulder trauma.

The aim of this study was to determine whether lymphedema of the arm is associated with traumatic injury to the shoulder and to assess the role of lymphatic physiotherapy in reducing disabling shoulder pain. The study group consisted of 10 women aged 58-81 years (mean 66.9) with arm lymphedema after surgery for breast cancer. The average interval between the operation and the appearance of lymphedema was 9.8 years. All patients complained of shoulder pain. Five patients had a tear in the supraspinatus muscle diagnosed by ultrasound examination, and 5 had chronic bursitis; the nonaffected arm showed no pathology. The mean volume of the affected arm was 568 ml greater. Treatment consisted of manual lymphatic drainage and intermittent sessions of pneumatic compression with the LymphaPress device. This led to an average decrease in arm volume of 170 ml, with improvement of arm mobility and a drastic reduction in shoulder pain. In conclusion, lymphedema of the arm can cause severe shoulder trauma, pain and disability. Proper physiotherapy can reduce these effects. Patients should be referred for early treatment and follow-up to avoid permanent damage to the shoulder muscles.

[Traumatic common carotid-internal jugular fistula: positive aspect].

A 42-year-old man presented with a penetrating neck injury from a pellet gun. Physical examination showed an open 1 cm wound on the right side of the neck, hematoma of the right sternocleidomastoid muscle, and carotid artery injury. He was hemodynamically stable and there was no neurological deficit. Arteriogram of the neck disclosed a pseudoaneurysm with an arteriovenous fistula between the common carotid artery and internal jugular vein. At surgery, the tears in the carotid artery and jugular vein were sutured and a vacuum drain was introduced. The postoperative course was uneventful, and the patient was discharged 5 days later. Instead of the expected results of a penetrating carotid artery injury, such as blood loss, airway obstruction or neurological deficit, the arteriovenous fistula caused by the pellet actually saved the patient's life. Blood flow from the artery via the pseudoaneurysm to the jugular vein kept the patient in stable condition.

Multiple linear regression for index SNP selection on unphased genotypes.

The search for the association between complex diseases and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) or haplotypes has recently received great attention. Recent successes in high throughput genotyping technologies drastically increase the length of available SNP sequences. This elevates the importance for the use of a small subset of informative SNPs, called index SNPs, accurately representing the rest of the SNPs (i.e., the rest of the SNPs can be highly predicted from the index SNPs). Index SNP selection achieves the compaction of huge unphased genotype data (obtained, e.g., from Affimetrix Map Array) in order to make feasible fine genotype analysis. In this paper we propose a novel index SNP selection on unphased genotypes based on multiple linear regression (MLR) SNP prediction. We measure the quality of our index SNP selection algorithm by comparing actual SNPs with the SNPs computationally predicted from chosen index SNPs. We obtain an extremely good prediction rates and compression. For example, for region ENm010 (123 SNPs), we can use 2% of SNPs for representing all SNPs with 93.5% accuracy. An experimental study on 4 ENCODE regions from HapMap shows that our method uses significantly fewer index SNPs (e.g., up to two times less index SNPs to reach 90% prediction accuracy) than the state-of-the-art method of Halperin et al. for genotypes.

Consolidating software tools for DNA microarray design and manufacturing.

As the human genome project progresses and some microbial and eukaryotic genomes are recognized, a novel technology, DNA microarray (also called gene chip, biochip, gene microarray, and DNA chip) technology, has attracted increasing number of biologists, bioengineers and computer scientists recently. This technology promises to monitor the whole genome at once, so that researchers can study the whole genome on the global level and have a better picture of the expressions among millions of genes simultaneously. Today, it is widely used in many fields - disease diagnosis, gene classification, gene regulatory network, and drug discovery. We present a concatenated software solution for the entire DNA array flow exploring all steps of a consolidated software tool. The proposed software tool has been tested on Herpes B virus as well as simulated data. Our experiments show that the genomic data follow the pattern predicted by simulated data although the number of border conflicts (quality of the DNA array design) is several times smaller than for simulated data. We also report a trade-off between the number of border conflicts and the running time for several proposed algorithmic techniques employed in the physical design of DNA arrays.

Laparoscopy in the prevention of unnecessary appendicectomies: a prospective study.

More than one-third of all appendicectomies are unnecessary. A study was directed towards reducing the misdiagnosis of appendicitis, thus preventing needless operations. Thirty-six women in the fertile age group and with a diagnosis of appendicitis were subjected to laparoscopy before surgery. All women had undergone a gynaecological examination to rule out disease of the female genitalia. As a result of the laparoscopy, surgery was cancelled in one-third of the cases, which were found to have acute gynaecological disease not requiring surgery.

Rejection of a gelatin-impregnated Dacron graft.

Sealing of the synthetic vascular graft is important to solve problems of leakage. The use of a new vascular graft--Dacron impregnated by gelatin--is described. After operation the patient developed a febrile reaction, and in spite of a thorough investigation no septic foci could be identified. It is believed that the fever was immunological in origin.