Triple Assessment in Diagnosis of Thyroid Nodules and Its Comparison With Histopathology.

BACKGROUND:  Thyroid nodules are more common than previously realised, and the rate of prevalence is hugely impacted by the method of detection and their easy access. No single test is sufficient to access the thyroid nodule at any given time. Hence this necessitates the need for clinicians to use an evidence-based protocol for their assessment and diagnosis. AIMS AND OBJECTIVE:  To determine the likelihood of malignancy in individuals who have thyroid nodules of any size, by a) performing a triple assessment, including a history and physical examination, an ultrasound of the neck and fine needle aspiration and cytology (FNAC) b) predicting the percentage of correlation between findings of malignancy on FNAC and final histopathological diagnosis c) identifying and validate individual risk factors in the clinical examination and ultrasound imaging that point towards a nodule being malignant Methods: Patients presenting with thyroid nodules in a clinically euthyroid state were studied over a time period of 18 months. Seventy-five patients were included in this study. Patients having external cytology and ultrasonography reports were reassessed if they consented to the study. If the pathologists thought the smears were sufficient, slide reviews were accepted. A senior consultant conducted the clinical evaluation. Prior to doing the FNACs, the designated radiologist performed the majority of the ultrasonograms. If the physicians believed it was necessary, ultrasound-guided FNACs were performed. According to Bethesda criteria, the cytology was reported. The outcome of the histopathological analysis was used as the gold standard for diagnosis in this investigation. RESULT: Out of 75 patients included in the study, the older age group (50-70) patients had mostly malignant lesions (92%). In the younger age group (20-39), about 77% had benign lesions. Benign lesions were more common in females than males according to the histopathology study. Seventy-three percent of fixed swellings turned out to be malignant. About 86% of patients who had extrathyroidal extension ended up being found to have malignant lesions but even 41% of patients who didn't have any extrathyroidal extension also turned out to be having malignant lesions. However, the presence of pressure symptoms didn't necessarily translate to being an indicator of malignancy. Ninety-seven percent of patients who had punctate microcalcifications turned out to have malignant lesions. Hypoechogenicity on imaging also is an important marker of malignancy, with about 87% of patients who had hypoechogenicity having malignant lesions proven on histopathology. All the patients who had solid lesions on imaging were proven to have malignant lesions. About 77% of patients who had cystic features ended up having benign lesions. Hence, it is a very significant marker. Intranodular vascularity, taller than wider lesions and positive lymph nodes on imaging were proven to have malignant lesions. FNAC is an important diagnostic tool. It is made out that the reporting of FNAC more or less matched the histopathological diagnosis in almost all categories. CONCLUSION:  There are definite correlations in the role of triple assessment as a standard protocol in the diagnosis of thyroid nodules and guiding its management.

Evaluation and comparison of anti-inflammatory properties of ibuprofen using two drug delivery systems after third molar surgery: using chitosan microspheres as a carrier for local drug delivery in to the third molar socket and through the oral route.

We undertook this study to assess the analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties of ibuprofen when administered through two drug delivery systems after mandibular third molar surgery. The study was conducted on 100 patients who required the surgical removal of impacted mandibular third molars under local anaesthesia. The study subjects were divided into two groups of 50 patients each. Patients in the study group were given ibuprofen-incorporated chitosan-based microspheres, which were packed into the third molar sockets after removal of impacted teeth. Patients in the control group were prescribed with ibuprofen 400mg tablets that were to be administered orally after the removal of impacted mandibular third molars. All patients were assessed for pain, swelling, and trismus on the second, fourth, and seventh postoperative days, and wound healing was assessed on the seventh postoperative day. Patients in the study group had significantly less pain and comparatively better mouth opening on the second, fourth, and seventh postoperative days, which showed clinically and statistically significant results of p<0.05, respectively, while the assessment of swelling for the study group did not show statistically significant results on any of the three postoperative days. Among 50 patients in the study group, two had wound gaping, and among 50 patients in the control group, four presented with wound gaping and three patients developed dry socket. Ibuprofen-incorporated chitosan-based microspheres (study group) had comparatively better analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties with drastic reduction of pain, swelling, trismus, and also had a reliable wound healing property when compared with the orally-administered ibuprofen (control group) after mandibular third molar surgery.

Epithelial Ingrowth Post Phacoemulsification in a Case of Recurrent Pterygium.

PURPOSE: To report an unusual case of epithelial ingrowth after phacoemulsification with posterior chamber intraocular lens implantation in a patient with recurrent pterygium, along with confocal microscopy findings of epithelial ingrowth. METHODS: This is a case report and review of the literature. RESULTS: A healthy 68-year-old woman presented with epithelial ingrowth with a best-corrected visual acuity of 6/60 in the left eye (-4.0 × 85 DC). She underwent pterygium surgery a decade ago, followed by recurrence 7 years later and an uneventful phacoemulsification surgery with posterior chamber intraocular lens implantation in the previous year. Confocal microscopy showed vacuolated cells in the area of epithelial ingrowth, which were similar to conjunctival cells of the pterygium. The postoperative period after cataract surgery was uneventful. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first case report to document epithelial ingrowth after phacoemulsification in a patient with recurrent pterygium and that demonstrates confocal microscopy findings showing conjunctival cells of pterygium as the origin of epithelial ingrowth. We recommend making clear corneal side-port incisions during phacoemulsification away from the site of pterygium in such cases and to check for postoperative wound leaks and tissue incarceration.

Cancer Diagnosis Epigenomics Scientific Workflow Scheduling in the Cloud Computing Environment Using an Improved PSO Algorithm

Objective: Epigenetic modifications involving DNA methylation and histone statud are responsible for the stable maintenance of cellular phenotypes. Abnormalities may be causally involved in cancer development and therefore could have diagnostic potential. The field of epigenomics refers to all epigenetic modifications implicated in control of gene expression, with a focus on better understanding of human biology in both normal and pathological states. Epigenomics scientific workflow is essentially a data processing pipeline to automate the execution of various genome sequencing operations or tasks. Cloud platform is a popular computing platform for deploying large scale epigenomics scientific workflow. Its dynamic environment provides various resources to scientific users on a pay-per-use billing model. Scheduling epigenomics scientific workflow tasks is a complicated problem in cloud platform. We here focused on application of an improved particle swam optimization (IPSO) algorithm for this purpose. Methods: The IPSO algorithm was applied to find suitable resources and allocate epigenomics tasks so that the total cost was minimized for detection of epigenetic abnormalities of potential application for cancer diagnosis. Result: The results showed that IPSO based task to resource mapping reduced total cost by 6.83 percent as compared to the traditional PSO algorithm. Conclusion: The results for various cancer diagnosis tasks showed that IPSO based task to resource mapping can achieve better costs when compared to PSO based mapping for epigenomics scientific application workflow.

Cancer Detection in Microarray Data Using a Modified Cat Swarm Optimization Clustering Approach

Objective: A better understanding of functional genomics can be obtained by extracting patterns hidden in gene expression data. This could have paramount implications for cancer diagnosis, gene treatments and other domains. Clustering may reveal natural structures and identify interesting patterns in underlying data. The main objective of this research was to derive a heuristic approach to detection of highly co-expressed genes related to cancer from gene expression data with minimum Mean Squared Error (MSE). Methods: A modified CSO algorithm using Harmony Search (MCSO-HS) for clustering cancer gene expression data was applied. Experiment results are analyzed using two cancer gene expression benchmark datasets, namely for leukaemia and for breast cancer. Result: The results indicated MCSO-HS to be better than HS and CSO, 13% and 9% with the leukaemia dataset. For breast cancer dataset improvement was by 22% and 17%, respectively, in terms of MSE. Conclusion: The results showed MCSO-HS to outperform HS and CSO with both benchmark datasets. To validate the clustering results, this work was tested with internal and external cluster validation indices. Also this work points to biological validation of clusters with gene ontology in terms of function, process and component.