Breast Cancer and Anesthesia.

Breast cancer is a complex heterogeneous disease that is categorized into several histological and genomic subtypes with relevant prognostic and therapeutical implications. Such diversity requires a multidisciplinary approach for a comprehensive treatment that will involve surgeons, radiotherapists and medical oncologists. Breast cancer is classified as either local (or locoregional), which stands for 90-95% of cases, or metastatic, representing 5% of cases.

Procalcitonin and white blood cells, combined predictors of infection in cardiac surgery patients.

Background: Sepsis is strongly associated with an increased risk of postoperative mortality, longer length of hospital stay, and elevated health care costs. Early clinical symptoms overlap with those of systemic inflammatory response syndrome, a response that commonly occurs after cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass. Since a combination of biomarkers has been demonstrated to improve the prediction of postoperative infection, the objective of the present study was to test whether the combination of C-reactive protein (CRP), white blood cells (WBC), and procalcitonin (PCT) is able to predict postoperative infection in a large cohort of cardiac surgery patients.

Neural network implementation for a reversal procedure for water and dry matter estimation on plant leaves using selected LED wavelengths.

An inversion method based on a neural network was used to estimate water and dry matter contents on plant leaves, from transmittance and reflectance measurements, using light emitting diodes (LEDs) at specific wavelengths in NIR and FIR. The preliminary results for the predicted water content by the neural network method showed a RMSE value of 0.0027 g/cm(2) and |σ| value of approximately 3.

Exemestane and chemotherapy as first-line treatment of metastatic breast cancer: results of a phase II study.

Background: Metastatic breast cancer remains largely incurable. Strategies involving the combination of the selective estrogen receptor modulator tamoxifen and chemotherapy have been abandoned in view of unacceptable toxicity because of thromboembolic events. The aim of this study was to investigate the safety and efficacy of the third-generation steroidal aromatase inhibitor exemestane plus chemotherapy.

Biophotonic in situ sensor for plant leaves.

Unlabelled: Knowledge of the water concentration of plants can be helpful in several environmental and agricultural domains. There are many methods for the determination of water content in plant leaves; however, most of them give a relative moisture level or an analytical measure after a previous calibration procedure. Even for other biochemical compounds such as dry matter or chlorophyll, the measurement techniques could be destructive.