ABSTRACT
Acute aortic dissection can be an emergency event characterized by the splitting of tunica media of the aortic wall by high pressure arterial blood throught an intimomedial tear: The CT imaging is a currently emerging technique for dianosis and evaluation of aortic dissection and has sensitivity and specificity of nearly 100%. The differentiation between true and false lumens of aortic dissection is important for percutaneous treatment with endovascular grafts or surgical repair: Previous studies described CT criteria to distinguish true from false lumens. The most reliable sings in this study are outer wall calcification, intraluminal thrombus, eccentric flap calcification, a larger area at one-quarter distance, and a larger area at one-half distance.
ABSTRACT
Estrogen receptor (ER) is widely used as an indicator of prognosis and response to endocrine treatment of primary breast cancer. ER phenotypes detected by conventional assays may not reflect their capability on binding specifically to estrogen response elements of target DNA. The reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has been shown to offer the sensitive and specific method for measuring the ER mRNA in breast cancer. The ER-mutant gene which is positively detected in breast tumor by biochemical or immunocytochemical assays may be negatively shown by RT-PCR or vice versa. PCR technique for examining expression of ER mRNA may therefore provide a good screening method for detection of functioning ER that will affect the selection of appropriate treatment and prognosis of breast cancer patients. We have developed RT-PCR assay using b2-microglobulin as internal control for detection and relative-quantitation of ER mRNA in breast cancer tissue. Preliminary results show that the developed assay provides a sensitive and specific method for detection of ER expression in breast tumor. Also, the assay procedure is simple, rapid, non- expensive and required very small amount of breast cancer tissues.