A Poissonian Model of Indel Rate Variation for Phylogenetic Tree Inference.

While indel rate variation has been observed and analyzed in detail, it is not taken into account by current indel-aware phylogenetic reconstruction methods. In this work, we introduce a continuous time stochastic process, the geometric Poisson indel process, that generalizes the Poisson indel process by allowing insertion and deletion rates to vary across sites. We design an efficient algorithm for computing the probability of a given multiple sequence alignment based on our new indel model.

A Retrospective Review of Chemotherapy for Patients with Small Bowel Adenocarcinoma in British Columbia.

Small bowel adenocarcinoma (SBA) is associated with a poor prognosis. It is an uncommon malignancy and therefore difficult to study. Randomized phase III trials are not available to guide best approaches.

Timing of Hip Fracture Surgery and 30-Day Outcomes.

The goal of this study was to determine the proportion of patients admitted with a hip fracture to participating American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP) hospitals who were treated within the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) time-to-hip-fracture-surgery benchmark. The secondary goals were to identify factors associated with missing the benchmark and to determine whether the benchmark was associated with improved 30-day patient outcomes. Patients aged 60 years or older who underwent hip fracture surgery between 2005 and 2013 were identified from the ACS-NSQIP database.

Less toxic chemotherapy improves uptake of all lines of chemotherapy in advanced non-small-cell lung cancer: a 10-year retrospective population-based review.

Background: Over the past decade, well tolerated second-line therapies for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer have been approved including erlotinib and pemetrexed in addition to docetaxel. We hypothesize that the introduction of less toxic chemotherapy has increased treatment of advanced non-small-cell lung cancer resulting in improved survival.

Methods: The BC Cancer Agency provides cancer care to 4.

Asian Versus Non-Asian Outcomes in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: A North American Population-based Analysis.

Objectives: The effect of ethnicity on nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) outcomes is unclear. This retrospective analysis examines survival and the impact of concurrent chemoradiation (chemoRT) among Asian and non-Asian patients.

Methods: Subjects included 380 consecutive patients with NPC treated at a Canadian institution from 2000 to 2009.

A population-based review of the feasibility of platinum-based combination chemotherapy after tyrosine kinase inhibition in EGFR mutation positive non-small cell lung cancer patients with advanced disease.

Introduction: The IPASS trial demonstrated superior progression free survival for Asian, light/never smoking, advanced, pulmonary adenocarcinoma patients treated with first-line gefitinib compared to carboplatin/paclitaxel, of which 59% of those tested were epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation positive. In IPASS 39% of gefitinib treated patients went on to receive platin based polychemotherapy. We hypothesized that in a population-based setting fewer patients receive second-line platin based chemotherapy than those enrolled in a clinical trial.