The rejection that defies antirejection drugs-chronic vascular rejection (allograft vasculopathy): The role of terminology and linguistic relativity.

While allograft loss due to acute rejection has been dramatically reduced due to the introduction of immunophilins, this therapy has little effect on allografts lost due to chronic vascular rejection. This situation may be due to a misnomer of the pathology. Specifically, its designation as 'chronic rejection' has given the wrong impression that the cause of the disease has been identified.

A method for modeling co-occurrence propensity of clinical codes with application to ICD-10-PCS auto-coding.

Objective: Natural language processing methods for medical auto-coding, or automatic generation of medical billing codes from electronic health records, generally assign each code independently of the others. They may thus assign codes for closely related procedures or diagnoses to the same document, even when they do not tend to occur together in practice, simply because the right choice can be difficult to infer from the clinical narrative.

Methods: We propose a method that injects awareness of the propensities for code co-occurrence into this process.

Genotyping of hepatocellular carcinoma in liver transplant recipients adds predictive power for determining recurrence-free survival.

The goal of this study was to determine whether a panel of tumor suppressor gene markers of allelic loss could serve as a representative indicator of gene damage and thereby provide further discriminative power over current staging systems for recurrence-free prognostication in patients undergoing liver transplantation in the presence of hepatocellular carcinoma. The paraffin blocks from 103 cases of hepatocellular carcinoma were obtained, and cellular targets were selected for tissue microdissection genotyping. Tumor suppressor gene loss was based on loss of heterozygosity situated within or adjacent to specific genes of interest (APC, CDKN2A, DCC, MET, MYC1, OGG1, p34, p53, PTEN).

Microdissection-based allelotyping discriminates de novo tumor from intrahepatic spread in hepatocellular carcinoma.

A total of 103 cases of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) arising in native livers discovered at the time of transplantation underwent allelic loss analysis. HCC mutational allelotyping targeted 10 genomic loci (1p, 3p, 5q, 7q, 8q, 9p, 10q, 17p, 17q, 18q) using 18 polymorphic microsatellite markers situated in proximity to known tumor suppressor genes associated with human carcinogenesis. Gene analysis was performed on microdissected tissue samples removed from 4-microm thick histologic sections at specific topographic sites selected on the basis of representative cellular characteristics.

Effect of liver transplantation on inflammatory bowel disease in patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis.

This report investigates the influence of liver transplantation and concomitant immunosuppression on the course of progression of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and discusses statistical methodology appropriate for such settings. The data on 303 patients who underwent liver transplantation for primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) were analyzed using person-time analysis and Cox regression, with the duration of IBD as the time variable and transplantation as a segmented time-dependent covariate, to take into account both posttransplant and pretransplant history of IBD. The need for colectomy and appearance of colorectal cancer were taken as outcome measures.

The prediction of risk of recurrence and time to recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma after orthotopic liver transplantation: a pilot study.

Orthotopic liver transplantation (OLTx) in the presence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has been complicated by high recurrence rates. The ability to determine the risk and timing of HCC recurrence on an individual basis would greatly aid in the candidate selection process resulting in a more efficient use of donated organs and allow the individualization and better evaluation of adjuvant chemotherapy. The 214 patients who underwent OLTx in the presence of HCC were analyzed.

Multisolutional clustering and quantization algorithm (MCQ).

We have developed a novel clustering and quantization algorithm that allows the user to create multiple one-to-one correspondences between the actual data and its transformed (clustered and quantized) values, based on the user's hypothesis regarding the nature of the classification task. The types of problems for which the algorithm can be beneficial are discussed. We report experiments employing simulated and real data that suggest the proposed algorithm may be useful in neural network analysis of various phenomena in medicine and biology.

Performance of multi-layer feedforward neural networks to predict liver transplantation outcome.

A novel multisolutional clustering and quantization (MCQ) algorithm has been developed that provides a flexible way to preprocess data. It was tested whether it would impact the neural network's performance favorably and whether the employment of the proposed algorithm would enable neural networks to handle missing data. This was assessed by comparing the performance of neural networks using a well-documented data set to predict outcome following liver transplantation.

Comparative in vitro study of nonoxynol-9: effects on human, bull and boar spermatozoa.

Spermicidal activity of different dilutions of nonoxynol-9 (nonyl-phenoxy-polyethoxy-ethanol) on human, bull and boar spermatozoa was studied using the modified Sander-Cramer method. The results obtained showed that differences in spermatozoal resistance among the mentioned species to nonoxynol-9 were statistically very significant (P much less than 0.0005): bull greater than man greater than boar.