Outcomes of local thoracic surgery in patients with stage IV non-small-cell lung cancer: A SEER-based analysis.

Background: The outcomes of thoracic surgery for patients with stage IV non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are controversial and uncertain.

Patients And Methods: The National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results was queried for patients with stage IV NSCLC, including those treated with surgery-participated therapy modalities. Overall survival (OS) was evaluated using a variety of statistical analyses.

An efficient, large-scale, non-lattice-detection algorithm for exhaustive structural auditing of biomedical ontologies.

One of the basic challenges in developing structural methods for systematic audition on the quality of biomedical ontologies is the computational cost usually involved in exhaustive sub-graph analysis. We introduce ANT-LCA, a new algorithm for computing all non-trivial lowest common ancestors (LCA) of each pair of concepts in the hierarchical order induced by an ontology. The computation of LCA is a fundamental step for non-lattice approach for ontology quality assurance.

FEDRR: fast, exhaustive detection of redundant hierarchical relations for quality improvement of large biomedical ontologies.

Background: Redundant hierarchical relations refer to such patterns as two paths from one concept to another, one with length one (direct) and the other with length greater than one (indirect). Each redundant relation represents a possibly unintended defect that needs to be corrected in the ontology quality assurance process. Detecting and eliminating redundant relations would help improve the results of all methods relying on the relevant ontological systems as knowledge source, such as the computation of semantic distance between concepts and for ontology matching and alignment.

NHash: Randomized N-Gram Hashing for Distributed Generation of Validatable Unique Study Identifiers in Multicenter Research.

Background: A unique study identifier serves as a key for linking research data about a study subject without revealing protected health information in the identifier. While sufficient for single-site and limited-scale studies, the use of common unique study identifiers has several drawbacks for large multicenter studies, where thousands of research participants may be recruited from multiple sites. An important property of study identifiers is error tolerance (or validatable), in that inadvertent editing mistakes during their transmission and use will most likely result in invalid study identifiers.

[Comparison of clinicopathological features and prognosis in familial and sporadic gastric cancer].

Objective: To analyze the clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis of familial gastric cancer and to improve the treatment outcome.

Methods: Clinical data of 67 patients with familial gastric cancer and 820 patients with sporadic gastric cancer in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University from 1995 to 2005 were retrospectively analyzed.

Results: Compared to sporadic gastric cancer, the percentage of familial gastric cancer patients less than 45 years old was higher (34.