Publications by authors named "Duncan Gillies"

In order to provide the most effective therapy for cancer, it is important to be able to diagnose whether a patient's cancer will respond to a proposed treatment. Methylation profiling could contain information from which such predictions could be made. Currently, hypothesis testing is used to determine whether possible biomarkers for cancer progression produce statistically significant results.

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Intensive international efforts are underway toward phenotyping the entire mouse genome by modifying all its [Formula: see text] genes one-by-one for comparative studies. A workload of this scale has triggered numerous studies harnessing image informatics for the identification of morphological defects. However, existing work in this line primarily rests on abnormality detection via structural volumetrics between wild-type and gene-modified mice, which generally fails when the pathology involves no severe volume changes, such as ventricular septal defects (VSDs) in the heart.

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We summarise various ways of performing dimensionality reduction on high-dimensional microarray data. Many different feature selection and feature extraction methods exist and they are being widely used. All these methods aim to remove redundant and irrelevant features so that classification of new instances will be more accurate.

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The United States has achieved unprecedented survival rates, as high as 98%, for casualties arriving alive at the combat hospital. Our military medical personnel are rightly proud of this achievement. Commanders and Servicemembers are confident that if wounded and moved to a Role II or III medical facility, their care will be the best in the world.

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Microarray databases are a large source of genetic data, which, upon proper analysis, could enhance our understanding of biology and medicine. Many microarray experiments have been designed to investigate the genetic mechanisms of cancer, and analytical approaches have been applied in order to classify different types of cancer or distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue. However, microarrays are high-dimensional datasets with high levels of noise and this causes problems when using machine learning methods.

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Spin probes based on the 1,1,3,3-tetramethylisoindolin-2-yl structure have been used, in conjunction with electron spin resonance spectroscopy (ESR), to study the physical changes occurring in ice cream during freezing and melting. The ESR measurements allowed the rotational correlation times, tau(B), of the spin probes to be determined. Two probes were used together in a given sample of ice cream, namely, 1,1,3,3-tetramethylisoindolin-2-yl (TMIO), which samples the fat phase, and the sodium salt of 1,1,3,3-tetramethylisoindolin-2-yloxyl-5-sulfonate (NaTMIOS), which samples the aqueous phase.

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Oxidised lipids are reported to interact with proteins causing undesirable changes in nutritional and functional properties including a loss of amino acids, cross-linking and damage to proteins and DNA. ESR spectroscopy with spin trapping was used to study the type of radical species generated in methyl linoleate and the transfer of the radical to protein beta-lactoglobulin. Antioxidants vitamins C and E reduced lipid oxidation and subsequent transfer of the radical to the protein as shown by the shape and size of the radical adduct.

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Hypothesis: Objective assessment of surgical skill has recently been shown to be possible through the use of dexterity-based and video analysis systems. The aim of this study was to synchronize these 2 modalities to produce a comprehensive surgical assessment tool.

Design: The Imperial College Surgical Assessment Device is a dexterity-based motion analysis device that has been developed in the Department of Surgical Oncology and Technology by the Surgical Computing and Imaging Research Group.

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Surgical skills assessment has been paid increased attention over the last few years. Stochastic models such as Hidden Markov Models have recently been adapted to surgery to discriminate levels of expertise. Based on our previous work combining synchronized video and motion analysis we present preliminary results of a HMM laparoscopic task recognizer which aims to model hand manipulations and to identify and recognize simple surgical tasks.

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Surgical dexterity in operating theatres has traditionally been assessed subjectively. Electromagnetic (EM) motion tracking systems such as the Imperial College Surgical Assessment Device (ICSAD) have been shown to produce valid and accurate objective measures of surgical skill. To allow for video integration we have modified the data acquisition and built it within the ROVIMAS analysis software.

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Transcranial Doppler ultrasound (US) can be used to detect emboli in the cerebral circulation. We have implemented and evaluated the first online wavelet-based automatic embolic signal-detection system, based on a fast discrete wavelet transform algorithm using the Daubechies 8th order wavelet. It was evaluated using a group of middle cerebral artery recordings from 10 carotid stenosis patients, and a 1-h compilation tape from patients with particularly small embolic signals, and compared with the most sensitive commercially available software package (FS-1), which is based on a frequency-filtering approach using the Fourier transform.

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Background: In September 2000, a physician in northern California described four patients with persistent, culture-negative boils on the lower extremities. The patients had received pedicures at the same nail salon. We identified and investigated an outbreak of Mycobacterium fortuitum furunculosis among customers of this nail salon.

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