Intracystic papillary breast carcinoma in a male patient: a case report and review of literature.

Intracystic papillary carcinoma of the breast is a rare subtype of breast cancer accounting for approximately 0.5-1% of all breast carcinomas. To the best of our knowledge, the occurrence of this rare subtype of breast cancer in the male is even lower with less than 20 cases reported in the English literature over the past 30 years. We report a case of an elderly Asian male with intracystic papillary breast carcinoma who initially presented with a right sided breast lump for 4 months duration and his subsequent management. In addition, a review of similar cases in the English literature is included.

The prognostic value of fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography metabolic tumor volume in solitary colorectal liver metastasis.

BACKGROUND: Management of colorectal liver metastasis (CRLM) is evolving but surgery remains the most effective treatment in improving survival. Optimal preoperative patient selection is important and semiquantitative F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (PET) parameters may provide valuable prognostic information. METHODS: Sixty-one patients with solitary CRLM as first site of distant dissemination and preoperatively staged with PET were retrospectively studied. Various semiquantitative PET parameters, pathological size of the hepatic lesion and clinical variables were correlated with survival outcome. The data were analyzed with nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis test and univariate Cox regression. Kaplan-Meier estimates of overall survival and disease-free survival (DFS) were log-rank tested. RESULTS: Mean follow-up for the 61 subjects was 48 months. The 1- and 3-year survival rates were 98.7% and 72.2%. The median DFS was 16 months with recurrence in 10 (16.4%) patients following surgery. Univariate analysis found a statistically significant increased risk of death for higher mean PET tumor diameter (hazard ratio [HR] 2.95, P = 0.014), mean metabolic tumor volume (HR 3.0, P = 0.009) and median pathological size of hepatic lesion (HR 2.97, P = 0.022). Maximum standardized uptake value of the liver metastasis and calculated standardized uptake value ratio between tumor and normal liver parenchyma (tumor background ratio) were not predictive of overall survival. None of the PET parameters or clincopathological variables statistically correlated with DFS. CONCLUSION: Semiquantitative PET variables are potentially valuable prognostic biomarkers in CRLM. Volumetric data like metabolic tumor volume enable better estimation of tumor burden and its utility may improve preoperative risk stratification and optimize outcome.

Paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration and dermatomyositis as first manifestations of underlying breast malignancy: a report of two cases and a brief review of the subject.

Paraneoplastic syndromes are rare first manifestations of breast cancer. In this report, we present two cases of a 58-year-old woman and a 69-year-old woman presenting with acute symptoms of paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration (PCD) and dermatomyositis, respectively, as the first sign of breast malignancy. The patient diagnosed with PCD presented initially with ataxia, was serum anti-Yo antibody negative, and subsequently investigated to have poorly differentiated intraductal breast carcinoma. Cerebellar symptoms regressed following breast cancer surgery and chemotherapy, highlighting the better neurological prognosis associated with anti-Yo antibody negative PCD. The rarity of these presentations highlights the necessity to include an occult malignancy in the differential diagnosis when attending to such patients.

Positron emission tomography and colorectal cancer.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major cause of cancer-related morbidity and mortality. Molecular imaging using positron emission tomography (PET) is now an integral part of multidisciplinary cancer care. In this review, we discuss the role of PET in CRC including well established indications in the assessment of recurrent disease and emerging applications such as initial staging, monitoring therapy efficacy and using PET for radiotherapy planning. With rapid advancement in imaging technology, we also discuss the future potential of combining PET and magnetic resonance imaging and the use of novel radiotracers.

Optimal network alignment with graphlet degree vectors.

Important biological information is encoded in the topology of biological networks. Comparative analyses of biological networks are proving to be valuable, as they can lead to transfer of knowledge between species and give deeper insights into biological function, disease, and evolution. We introduce a new method that uses the Hungarian algorithm to produce optimal global alignment between two networks using any cost function. We design a cost function based solely on network topology and use it in our network alignment. Our method can be applied to any two networks, not just biological ones, since it is based only on network topology. We use our new method to align protein-protein interaction networks of two eukaryotic species and demonstrate that our alignment exposes large and topologically complex regions of network similarity. At the same time, our alignment is biologically valid, since many of the aligned protein pairs perform the same biological function. From the alignment, we predict function of yet unannotated proteins, many of which we validate in the literature. Also, we apply our method to find topological similarities between metabolic networks of different species and build phylogenetic trees based on our network alignment score. The phylogenetic trees obtained in this way bear a striking resemblance to the ones obtained by sequence alignments. Our method detects topologically similar regions in large networks that are statistically significant. It does this independent of protein sequence or any other information external to network topology.