The use of tissue electrical characteristics for breast cancer detection: a perspective review

Breast cancer is the most frequently occurring malignancy in women. It is characterized by a high mortality rate. For the purpose of detecting this life threatening disease, research efforts are being made worldwide to exploit new technologies, to improve the detection accuracy of current devices and to develop new detection devices, comprehensive diagnostic procedures, and protocols. One such technology that is gaining popular attention over the recent years is the usage of electrical characteristics of the breast tissue to differentiate normal and cancerous tissues. Most of the devices using this technology are currently being used as adjunct diagnostic tools to improve the detection accuracy of established techniques like mammography and ultrasound. Also, early detection of breast cancer can help save many thousands of lives every year and can also reduce unnecessary healthcare expenditure caused by advanced stage treatment options. Hence, more research is also being done to adapt these devices into screening tools for early detection of breast cancer. The main objective of this review is to highlight the features of the currently available commercial devices that use this technology for breast cancer detection. The electrical behavior of normal and cancerous breast tissues is first presented. The various commercial devices that utilize electrical impedance or electropotentials for breast cancer detection are then described. Finally, conclusions and potential areas of research are highlighted.     

Traumatic intralenticular abscess: a case series

PURPOSE: To report the clinical presentation, management and outcome of eyes with traumatic intralenticular abscess. METHODS: In this interventional case series, records of eight patients (eight eyes) with intralenticular abscess developing following trauma were reviewed. All patients underwent extracapsular cataract extraction with intracameral antibiotics with or without pars plana vitrectomy. Main outcome measures studied were resolution of infection and final visual outcome. RESULTS: Lens abscess developed in six eyes following penetrating injury and in two eyes following intraocular penetration of caterpillar hair. Gram positive cocci were cultured from the lens aspirate in five eyes and Staphylococcus epidermidis was the most common organism isolated. Cataract extraction resulted in control of the infection in all eyes and seven eyes (87.5%) had a favourable visual outcome. CONCLUSION: Early lens extraction with intracameral antibiotics in eyes with intralenticular abscess allows control of infection with good visual outcome.     

High predictive ability of glycated hemoglobin on comparison with oxidative stress markers in assessment of chronic vascular complications in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Objective: To validate the diagnostic utility of oxidative stress markers along with glycated hemoglobin (HbA_1c?) in the assessment of chronic vascular complications in type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). Methods: Ischemia modified albumin (IMA), advanced oxidation protein products (AOPP) and malondialdehyde (MDA) were measured in 100 type 2 DM (without complications n?=?50, with complications n?=?50) and healthy controls (n?=?50). Diagnostic potential was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic analysis and their relationships to risk variables were analyzed. Results: MDA, IMA and AOPP were significantly increased in diabetics, both with and without complications. Oxidative stress parameters correlated with fasting blood glucose and HbA_1c (independent predictors). Duration of diabetes was an independent predictor for AOPP and MDA. The association of IMA with diabetes duration was lost on multiple regression analysis. Area under the curve, sensitivity and specificity for MDA were 0.795, 84%, 66%; for AOPP, they were 0.762, 82%, 56%; for IMA, they were 0.611, 60%, 52%; and for HbA_1c, they were 0.848, 90%, 70%, respectively. Conclusion: MDA and AOPP could be considered better than IMA in the evaluation of diabetes progression, but MDA is more useful as a diagnostic indicator to detect vascular complications. HbA_1c measurement is of greater value than the oxidative stress markers in the prediction of vascular complications.     

Ovarian Tumor Characterization and Classification Using Ultrasound—A New Online Paradigm

Among gynecological malignancies, ovarian cancer is the most frequent cause of death. Image mining algorithms have been predominantly used to give the physicians a more objective, fast, and accurate second opinion on the initial diagnosis made from medical images. The objective of this work is to develop an adjunct computer-aided diagnostic technique that uses 3D ultrasound images of the ovary to accurately characterize and classify benign and malignant ovarian tumors. In this algorithm, we first extract features based on the textural changes and higher-order spectra information. The significant features are then selected and used to train and evaluate the decision tree (DT) classifier. The proposed technique was validated using 1,000 benign and 1,000 malignant images, obtained from ten patients with benign and ten with malignant disease, respectively. On evaluating the classifier with tenfold stratified cross validation, the DT classifier presented a high accuracy of 97 %, sensitivity of 94.3 %, and specificity of 99.7 %. This high accuracy was achieved because of the use of the novel combination of the four features which adequately quantify the subtle changes and the nonlinearities in the pixel intensity variations. The rules output by the DT classifier are comprehensible to the end-user and, hence, allow the physicians to more confidently accept the results. The preliminary results show that the features are discriminative enough to yield good accuracy. Moreover, the proposed technique is completely automated, accurate, and can be easily written as a software application for use in any computer.     

Thermography Based Breast Cancer Detection Using Texture Features and Support Vector Machine

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death nowadays in women throughout the world. In developed countries, it is the most common type of cancer in women, and it is the second or third most common malignancy in developing countries. The cancer incidence is gradually increasing and remains a significant public health concern. The limitations of mammography as a screening and diagnostic modality, especially in young women with dense breasts, necessitated the development of novel and more effective strategies with high sensitivity and specificity. Thermal imaging (thermography) is a noninvasive imaging procedure used to record the thermal patterns using Infrared (IR) camera. The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of using thermal imaging as a potential tool for detecting breast cancer. In this work, we have used 50 IR breast images (25 normal and 25 cancerous) collected from Singapore General Hospital, Singapore. Texture features were extracted from co-occurrence matrix and run length matrix. Subsequently, these features were fed to the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for automatic classification of normal and malignant breast conditions. Our proposed system gave an accuracy of 88.10%, sensitivity and specificity of 85.71% and 90.48% respectively.     

Recent Progress in the Development of Advanced Functionalized Electrodes for Oxygen Evolution Reaction: An Overview

Presently, the global energy demand for increasing clean and green energy consumption lies in the development of low-cost, sustainable, economically viable and eco-friendly natured electrochemical conversion process, which is a significant advancement in different morphological types of advanced electrocatalysts to promote their electrocatalytic properties. Herein, we overviewed the recent advancements in oxygen evolution reactions (OERs), including easy electrode fabrication and significant action in water-splitting devices. To date, various synthetic approaches and modern characterization techniques have effectively been anticipated for upgraded OER activity. Moreover, the discussed electrode catalysts have emerged as the most hopeful constituents and received massive appreciation in OER with low overpotential and long-term cyclic stability. This review article broadly confers the recent progress research in OER, the general mechanistic approaches, challenges to enhance the catalytic performances and future directions for the scientific community.     

Reactive Hemophagocytic syndrome

We describe two cases of Reactive Hemophagocytic syndrome (RHS) occurring in rheumatic diseases in childhood. Patient 1, an adolescent girl with systemic onset Juvenile idopathic arthritis (JRA) presented like severe sepsis with shock, hepatic dysfunction and coagulopathy. Patient 2 presented with cardiac tamponade, she was later detected to have systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Her bone marrow aspirate revealed prominent hemophagocytosis. Both cases improved with pulse methylprednisolone therapy.