Evolution of synchronous female bilateral breast cancers and response to treatment.

Synchronous bilateral breast cancer (sBBC) occurs after both breasts have been affected by the same germline genetics and environmental exposures. Little evidence exists regarding immune infiltration and response to treatment in sBBCs. Here we show that the impact of the subtype of breast cancer on levels of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs, n = 277) and on pathologic complete response (pCR) rates (n = 140) differed according to the concordant or discordant subtype of breast cancer of the contralateral tumor: luminal breast tumors with a discordant contralateral tumor had higher TIL levels and higher pCR rates than those with a concordant contralateral tumor.

Microsurgical Management of Vestibular Schwannoma (Acoustic Neuroma): Facial Nerve Outcomes, Radiographic Analysis, Complications, and Long-Term Follow-Up in a Series of 420 Surgeries.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to retrospectively evaluate the clinical and surgical outcomes of a large surgical series of vestibular schwannoma from North America over 20 years.

Methods: After institutional review board approval a retrospective review of the senior author's personal case logs to identify patients who had operations for vestibular schwannoma was performed. The clinical notes, operative record, preoperative and postoperative imagings, and long-term clinical follow-up notes were evaluated.

Radial Long Sheath Angioplasty for Proximal Severe Flow-Limiting Radial Artery Spasm Using the Dotter Technique.

Background: Although studies have continued to demonstrate the advantages of transradial access (TRA) for neurointervention, radial artery spasm (RAS) has remained a frequent cause of TRA failure. Dotter and Judkins initially described a technique to dilate areas of peripheral vascular stenosis by advancing sequentially larger catheters across the lesion over a guidewire. We have presented our institutional experience with the use of a modified Dotter technique with long radial sheaths to dilate areas of proximal flow-limiting RAS.

CloneSig can jointly infer intra-tumor heterogeneity and mutational signature activity in bulk tumor sequencing data.

Systematic DNA sequencing of cancer samples has highlighted the importance of two aspects of cancer genomics: intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) and mutational processes. These two aspects may not always be independent, as different mutational processes could be involved in different stages or regions of the tumor, but existing computational approaches to study them largely ignore this potential dependency. Here, we present CloneSig, a computational method to jointly infer ITH and mutational processes in a tumor from bulk-sequencing data.