Publications by authors named "Andrew Sholl"

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer diagnosed in women in the US with almost 280,000 new cases anticipated in 2023. Currently, on-site pathology for location guidance is not available during the collection of breast biopsies or during surgical intervention procedures. This shortcoming contributes to repeat biopsy and re-excision procedures, increasing the cost and patient discomfort during the cancer management process.

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Prostate cancer continues to be the most diagnosed non-skin malignancy in men. While up to one in eight men will be diagnosed in their lifetimes, most diagnoses are not fatal. Better lesion location accuracy combined with emerging localized treatment methods are increasingly being utilized as a treatment option to preserve healthy function in eligible patients.

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Context: Despite the benefits of digital pathology, data storage and management of digital whole slide images introduces new logistical and infrastructure challenges to traditionally analog pathology labs.

Aims: Our goal was to analyze pathologist slide diagnosis patterns to determine the minimum number of pixels required during the diagnosis.

Methods: We developed a method of using pathologist viewing patterns to vary digital image resolution across virtual slides, which we call variable resolution images.

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The presence of mutant BRAF correlates with the risk of recurrence in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) patients. However, not all PTC patients with BRAF are associated with poor prognosis. Thus, understanding the mechanisms by which certain PTC patients with nuclear BRAF become aggressive and develop resistance to a selective BRAF inhibitor, PLX-4032, is urgently needed.

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Current breast tumor margin detection methods are destructive, time-consuming, and result in significant reoperative rates. Dual-modality photoacoustic tomography (PAT) and ultrasound has the potential to enhance breast margin characterization by providing clinically relevant compositional information with high sensitivity and tissue penetration. However, quantitative methods that rigorously compare volumetric PAT and ultrasound images with gold-standard histology are lacking, thus limiting clinical validation and translation.

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Background: Up to 30% of thyroid nodules undergoing fine needle aspiration (FNA) yield an indeterminate result. Recent research efforts have suggested that nuclear morphometry and morphology may enhance the diagnostic accuracy of FNA as an objective adjunct. We applied nuclear morphometric analysis on a diverse cohort of patients to evaluate the association between nuclear morphometry and malignancy.

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Objective: This case report will describe the first adjunct use of directly measuring the concentration of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) in fine-needle aspiration (FNA) washout for diagnosing metastatic non-semi-nomatous germ cell tumor (NSGCT) of the testicle in a patient with cervical lymphadenopathy.

Methods: We present the clinical, laboratory, imaging, and pathologic findings, along with a review of the literature.

Results: A 23-year-old, otherwise healthy man who first presented with left testicular discomfort and swelling was diagnosed with NSGCT after undergoing a left orchiectomy.

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Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly fatal disease recognized as a growing global health crisis worldwide. Currently, no curative treatment is available for early-to-intermediate stage HCC, characterized by large and/or multifocal tumors. If left untreated, HCC rapidly progresses to a lethal stage due to favorable conditions for metastatic spread.

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We present a urologic case report associated with retinoblastoma (RB1) mutation. A 65-year-old man, who has a history of bilateral retinoblastoma treated with primary radiation therapy at approximately 1 year of age. He presented with a 3-month history of gross hematuria and, on initial workup, was found to have synchronous renal and urothelial malignancies.

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The current system for evaluating prostate cancer architecture is the Gleason grading system which divides the morphology of cancer into five distinct architectural patterns, labeled 1 to 5 in increasing levels of cancer aggressiveness, and generates a score by summing the labels of the two most dominant patterns. The Gleason score is currently the most powerful prognostic predictor of patient outcomes; however, it suffers from problems in reproducibility and consistency due to the high intra-observer and inter-observer variability amongst pathologists. In addition, the Gleason system lacks the granularity to address potentially prognostic architectural features beyond Gleason patterns.

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Chemical-based medicine that targets specific oncogenes or proteins often leads to cancer recurrence due to tumor heterogeneity and development of chemoresistance. This challenge can be overcome by mechanochemical disruption of cancer cells via focused ultrasound (FUS) and sensitizing chemical agents such as ethanol. We demonstrate that this disruptive therapy decreases the viability, proliferation rate, tumorigenicity, endothelial adhesion, and migratory ability of prostate cancer cells .

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Background: Fine-needle aspiration (FNA) cytology has been the standard of care in the workup of cervical lymph nodes (LNs) in patients with recurrent papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) and suspicious cervical LNs. Recently, FNA thyroglobulin (TG) washout measurement has been proposed as an adjunct in the management of these patients. We hypothesize that using FNA-TG washout for suspicious cervical LNs would increase the accuracy of diagnosing metastatic disease especially in cystic and highly vascular cervical LN in patients with recurrent PTC.

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Molecular mechanisms underlying the health disparity of prostate cancer (PCa) have not been fully determined. In this study, we applied bioinformatic approach to identify and validate dysregulated genes associated with tumor aggressiveness in African American (AA) compared to Caucasian American (CA) men with PCa. We retrieved and analyzed microarray data from 619 PCa patients, 412 AA and 207 CA, and we validated these genes in tumor tissues and cell lines by Real-Time PCR, Western blot, immunocytochemistry (ICC) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) analyses.

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Background: Approximately half of cutaneous melanoma tissues harbor BRAF mutations, resulting in a constitutive activation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. Nuclear-cytoplasmic transport machinery is dysregulated in neoplastic cells and alters the key regulatory proteins that can lead to tumor progression and drug resistance. The significance of nuclear localization of BRAF has not been fully understood.

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Although overall survival rate for patients with thyroid cancer (TC) is high, there is an alarming 10-year recurrence rate of up to 30% conferring a ~50% survival among these high-risk patients. The BRAF mutation is estimated to be present in over 50% of papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) cases besides being associated with carcinogenesis and poor prognosis. We assessed the status of NF-κB, Ki-67, cyclin D1 and BRAF in TC tissues and TC cell lines using immunohistochemistry and Western blot analysis.

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Partial nephrectomy (PN) is the recommended procedure over radical nephrectomy (RN) for patients with renal masses less than 4 cm in diameter (Stage T1a). Patients with less than 4 cm renal masses can also be treated with PN, but have a higher risk for positive surgical margins (PSM). PSM, when present, are indicative of poor clinical outcomes.

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Background And Study Aims:  The optimal technique for sampling pancreatic lesions with a 22 G Procore needle (pc) is unknown. The aims of this study were to evaluate the 22 Gpc using standard suction technique (SST) and capillary suction technique (CST) and compare diagnostic adequacy of 22 Gpc with the standard 25 G needle.

Patients And Methods:  Sixty consecutive patients referred for EUS-FNA of a solid pancreatic mass were prospectively evaluated.

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Importance: It is crucial for clinicians to know the malignancy prevalence within each indeterminate cytologic category to estimate the performance of the gene expression classifier (GEC).

Objective: To examine the variability in the performance of the GEC.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This retrospective cohort study of patients with Bethesda category III and IV thyroid nodules used single-institution data from January 1, 2013, through February 29, 2016.

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Background: BRAF mutation has been investigated by immunohistochemistry and has shown high sensitivity and specificity. We aim to investigate the accuracy of immunohistochemistry versus molecular testing of BRAF in papillary thyroid cancer using a large number of polymerase chain reaction-positive BRAF papillary thyroid cancer tissues.

Methods: We stained 130 formalin-fixed papillary thyroid cancer specimens using the VE1 antibody: 100 BRAF positive and 30 BRAF negative confirmed by PCR.

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Real-time on-site histopathology review of biopsy tissues at the point-of-procedure has great potential for significant clinical value and improved patient care. For instance, on-site review can aid in rapid screening of diagnostic biopsies to reduce false-negative results, or in quantitative assessment of biospecimen quality to increase the efficacy of downstream laboratory and histopathology analysis. However, the only currently available rapid pathology method, frozen section analysis (FSA), is too time- and labor-intensive for use in screening large quantities of biopsy tissues and is too destructive for maximum tissue conservation in multiple small needle core biopsies.

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Objective: To present a novel imaging technique used for rapid, nondestructive histological assessment of renal neoplasias using a dual-component fluorescence stain and structured illumination microscopy (SIM).

Materials And Methods: After Institutional Review Board approval, 65 total biopsies were obtained from 19 patients undergoing partial or radical nephrectomy. Biopsies were stained with a dual-component fluorescent, and optically sectioned SIM images were obtained from the surface of the intact biopsies.

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Purpose: To identify variations in renal function and histology between Caucasian Americans (CA) and African Americans (AA) undergoing robotic nephron-sparing surgery (NSS).

Methods: A retrospective chart review was performed on patients who underwent NSS. Multivariate analysis identified factors affecting postoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR).

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Background: In the case of a nondiagnostic thyroid fine-needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy result, recent guidelines from the Bethesda system recommend repeat thyroid FNA after 3 months to prevent false-positive results. We aimed to examine our institutional data to determine whether the 3-month period affects the diagnostic yield of repeat biopsies.

Methods: A retrospective review of patient records over a 5-year period at our institution was performed.

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