Imaging Paget's disease of bone--from head to toe.

Paget's disease of the bone is a common, non-inflammatory, metabolic, skeletal disorder of unknown aetiology characterized by an increase in osteoclast-mediated bone resorption and compensatory excessive osteoblast activation. Prevalence increases with age, and a pronounced geographical variation is well documented. The disease is often an incidental finding on a radiological examination requested for an unrelated indication. The osteolytic, mixed osteolytic/osteoblastic, and osteosclerotic phases may occur in the same patient and same bone in a synchronous or metachronous fashion. Radiological features in each phase mirror the histopathological appearances, and are distinctive enough to establish a diagnosis with confidence. Using multi-technique imaging, this review illustrates the most common and the not so common radiological patterns of involvement in Paget's disease of bone observed at our centre during the past 20 years.

Using clusters of computers for large QU-GENE simulation experiments.

The QU-GENE Computing Cluster (QCC) is a hardware and software solution to the automation and speedup of large QU-GENE (QUantitative GENEtics) simulation experiments that are designed to examine the properties of genetic models, particularly those that involve factorial combinations of treatment levels. QCC automates the management of the distribution of components of the simulation experiments among the networked single-processor computers to achieve the speedup.