Leveraging Saliva for Insights into Head and Neck Cancer.

Head and neck cancer (HNC) represents a heterogeneous group of malignancies with increasing global incidence and notable mortality. Early detection is essential for improving survival rates and minimizing recurrence; however, existing diagnostic methods are often invasive and complex. There is a need for noninvasive and more effective approaches for early detection and real-time monitoring of HNC.

Critical review of the current and future prospects of VEGF-TKIs in the management of squamous cell carcinoma of head and neck.

As the prognosis for squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck remains unsatisfactory when compared to other malignancies, novel therapies targeting specific biomarkers are a critical emerging area of great promise. One particular class of drugs that has been developed to impede tumor angiogenesis is vascular endothelial growth factor-tyrosine kinase inhibitors. As current data is primarily limited to preclinical and phase I/II trials, this review summarizes the current and future prospects of these agents in squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.

Presenting Symptoms and Disease Severity in Multiple Sclerosis Patients.

Introduction: The study aims to determine an association between presenting symptoms in multiple sclerosis and measures of disease severity, including the expanded disability status score (EDSS) and MRI based lesion volumes.

Methods: Data was collected as part of a larger 3 year MS study, from 2014 to 2017, to compare Vitamin A levels and MS progression. All data was collected from a single clinical site.

Conflict of interest in clinical research: direct payment to the investigators for finding human subjects and health information.

The recent death of teenager Jesse Gelsinger in a drug therapy trial has drawn attention to how financial conflicts of interest may compromise patient protection. While research institutions throughout the world have instituted a variety of conflict of interest guidelines, the potential conflicts associated with investigators receiving direct payment from private companies for both the recruitment of patients and the running of clinical trials in pharmaceutical research remains a relatively unexplored area. Clinical researchers undoubtedly deserve to be reasonably compensated for their participation.

Recursive soft morphological filters.

We present properties of recursive soft morphological filters that use previously filtered outputs as their inputs, cascade combinations of these filters, and the idempotent recursive soft morphological filters. The development allows problems in the implementation of cascaded recursive soft morphological filters to be reduced to the equivalent problems of a single recursive standard morphological filter.