Predicting prognosis in lung cancer: use of proliferation marker, Ki67 monoclonal antibody.

An investigation was carried out to assess the prognostic significance of proliferation marker Ki67 in a group of lung cancer patients treated by surgery (limited disease). Tissue was not available for Ki67 immunostaining in inoperable group. The diagnosis is established by bronchial biopsy which does not carry enough tissue for frozen section and counting.

Inhomogeneities in wall stress measured by microergometry in the heart muscle in situ.

Microergometry is a method which we have developed as a tool to measure local mesh-tension within the myocardial weave at any measuring site of both ventricles and the septum on the beating heart in situ. In a mapping procedure on pig and dog hearts, both in control conditions and in the hypertrophied state after aortic banding, local mesh-tension was measured in several areas and in up to eight depths proceeding from the epicardium to the endocardium: Probe-to-fibre coupling is definitely more stable in the canine myocardium than in the porcine heart muscle, probably due to a more effective connective tissue fettering of the canine myocardial weave. The observed longitudinal gradient, with the highest tension in the base, of control dog hearts was levelled out in the hypertrophied hearts.

The heart's fibre alignment assessed by comparing two digitizing systems. Methodological investigation into the inclination angle towards wall thickness.

Myocardial contractile pathways which are not aligned strictly parallel to the heart's epicardial surface, give rise to forces which also act in the ventricular dilating direction. We developed a method which allows us to assess any fibre orientation in the three-dimensional myocardial weave. Decollagenized hearts were prepared by peeling-off fibre strands, following their main fibre orientation down to near the endocardium.

The heart muscle's putative "secondary structure'. Functional implications of a band-like anisotropy.

Opinions are divided as to whether the rope-like secondary structure, which Torrent-Guasp dissected out of the myocardial body by the blunt unwinding technique (BUT) reveals some kind of functional compartmentation of the heart muscle. The myocardial fibres are aligned parallel to the fibre disruption (cleavage) plane, along which the band has been prepared but they are not necessarily aligned parallel to the long axis of the band. Inconsistencies in the myocardial rope model arise from the obligatory zones of transmural inflection, which are obvious in the base and the apex of both ventricles.

A silicone rubber mould of the heart.

The macroscopical structure of the ventricular myocardium has been an unsolved problem since the XVIth century, when Anatomy started as an authentic science. Since then the spatial organization of the myocardial fibres has represented, as Pettigrew says, "an arrangement so unusual and perplexing, that it has long been considered as forming a kind of Gordian knot in Anatomy. Of the complexity of the arrangement I need not speak further than to say that Vesalius, Albinus, Haller and De Blainville, all confessed their-inability to unravel it".