Incidence, etiology, location, prevention and treatment of positive surgical margins after radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer

PURPOSE: During radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer tumor at the surgical margin is a relatively frequent finding. We summarize the literature on the incidence, etiology, location, prevention and treatment of positive surgical margins after radical prostatectomy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The literature was reviewed for data on positive margins during radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer. RESULTS: Positive surgical margins may result from artifacts induced by tissue processing, incising inadvertently into the prostate or incising into extraprostatic tumor that has extended beyond the limits of resection. Patients with 10 ng./ml. or greater preoperative prostate specific antigen, biopsy Gleason score 7, multiple positive biopsies, or clinical stage T2b, T2c or T3 cancer have a higher risk of positive margins. Preoperative endorectal magnetic resonance imaging may be useful in staging a select group of patients. Neoadjuvant androgen deprivation reduces the incidence of positive margins but does not appear to delay progression or improve survival. The surgical approach, retropubic or perineal, may influence the location and etiology of positive margins. In general, nerve and bladder neck sparing procedures do not compromise tumor removal in appropriately selected patients. Positive margins increase the risk of progression and correlate with decreased cancer specific and overall survival. There is no consensus on the management of positive margins. External beam radiation and androgen deprivation may be administered as adjuvant therapy or at the time of recurrence. CONCLUSIONS: Tumor at the specimen edge is an adverse prognostic factor. With appropriate patient selection and meticulous surgical technique some positive margins can be prevented. Controlled prospective randomized studies of postoperative therapy are needed before definitive recommendations can be made for treating positive margins.     

Active memory chips: A brief survey and case study

Conventional random access memories are capable only of writing data into and reading data from the storage location corresponding to a given address. The availability of VLSI circuits containing hundreds of thousands of switching devices, however, has recently made practical the implementation of active memory chips capable of performing a range of complex operations on their stored data. Such designs are characterized by the extensive intermingling of processing and memory resources within a single chip to achieve the rapid and cost-effective parallel execution of operations relevant to such tasks as image processing, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and database management.This paper presents a brief survey of a number of active memory chips that have been implemented or proposed, along with a more detailed examination of a particular active memory circuit, the NON-VON 3 primary processing subsystem chip.This research was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, under contract N00039-84-C-0165, in part by the New York Center for Advanced Technology in Computers and Information Systems at Columbia University, and in part by an IBM Faculty Development Award.     

Rechargeable sodium batteries—VI. Cycling behavior of VS2, ‘VCl3 + nS’ and NbS2Cl2 cathodes in molten NaAlCl4

The electrochemistry of VS₂ in molten NaAlCl₄ has been investigated in relation to its usefulness as a reversible positive electrode for sodium batteries operating in the moderate temperature range of 160–200°C. VS₂ reacted with NaAlCl₄ during early stages of cell cycling, and became VS₂Cl showing a reversible capacity of 2.8 electrons/vanadium. The electrochemistry of mixtures of VCl₃ and S in molten NaAlCl₄ showed similarities to that of VS₂Cl. The VS_xCl_y cathodes obtained via the two different routes exhibited excellent rechargeability as evidenced by the long-term cycling behavior of cells of the configuration, Na_(l)/β″-Al₂O₃/NaAlCl_4(l), cathode material. When NbS₂Cl₂ was used as the cathode material it underwent a structural change in the first cycle to form what appeared to be NbS₂Cl₂, the Nb analog of VS_xCl_y. The structurally modified niobium sulfur chloride cathode exhibited excellent rechargeability.     

Relationship between mouse liver Δ9 desaturase activity and plasma lipids

This study was undertaken to investigate the total plasma fatty acid composition and the relationship between plasma triacylglycerol (TG) levels and liver Δ9 desaturase activity in mice fed n−3 and/or n−6 fatty acid or hydrogenated coconut oil (HCO) (maximum 25 mg/g) supplemented diets. Generally, plasma TG levels and Δ9 desaturase activity were inversely correlated with the ratio of the sum of long chain n−3 fatty acids to 18∶2n−6 and to the ratio of the sum of long chain n−3 fatty acids to 18∶n−3, but they were positively correlated with the ratio of products and substrates (18∶1/18∶0) of the enzyme in plasma total lipids. The n−3 fatty acid (mainly 20∶5n−3) enriched diet, when compared to the HCO diet at 21 d, caused a significant reduction in plasma TG levels but not in Δ9 desaturase activity. However, a marked reduction in plasma TG content (50–60%) and Δ9 desaturase activity (55–70%) was observed when both 20∶5n−3 and 18∶3n−6 were supplemented in the diet. The plasma TG levels and Δ9 desaturase activity rose again when the animals were fed the HCO diet or chow. The results suggest that low dose supplementation of a mixture of n−3 (mainly 20∶5n−3) and n−6 (18∶3n−6) fatty acids modified both plasma TG content and liver Δ9 desaturase activity, in parallel.     

Assignment Games with Conflicts: Robust Price of Anarchy and Convergence Results via Semi-Smoothness

We study assignment games in which jobs select machines, and in which certain pairs of jobs may conflict, which is to say they may incur an additional cost when they are both assigned to the same machine, beyond that associated with the increase in load. Questions regarding such interactions apply beyond allocating jobs to machines: when people in a social network choose to align themselves with a group or party, they typically do so based upon not only the inherent quality of that group, but also who amongst their friends (or enemies) chooses that group as well. We show how semi-smoothness, a recently introduced generalization of smoothness, is necessary to find tight bounds on the robust price of anarchy, and thus on the quality of correlated and Nash equilibria, for several natural job-assignment games with interacting jobs. For most cases, our bounds on the robust price of anarchy are either exactly 2 or approach 2. We also prove new convergence results implied by semi-smoothness for our games. Finally we consider coalitional deviations, and prove results about the existence and quality of strong equilibrium.     

Entorhinal cortex grid cells can map to hippocampal place cells by competitive learning

'Grid cells' in the dorsocaudal medial entorhinal cortex (dMEC) are activated when a rat is located at any of the vertices of a grid of equilateral triangles covering the environment. dMEC grid cells have different frequencies and phase offsets. However, cells in the dentate gyrus (DG) and hippocampal area CA3 of the rodent typically display place fields, where individual cells are active over only a single portion of the space. In a model of the hippocampus, we have shown that the connectivity from the entorhinal cortex to the dentate granule cells could allow the dentate granule cells to operate as a competitive network to recode their inputs to produce sparse orthogonal representations, and this includes spatial pattern separation. In this paper we show that the same computational hypothesis can account for the mapping of EC grid cells to dentate place cells. We show that the learning in the competitive network is an important part of the way in which the mapping can be achieved. We further show that incorporation of a short term memory trace into the associative learning can help to produce the relatively broad place fields found in the hippocampus.     

Evaluation of the complex hygrothermal behaviors of epoxy–amine systems

In this study, the complex hygrothermal behavior of two epoxy systems used for strengthening applications was studied. In these systems, property loss by plasticization simultaneously occurred with property gain during additional curing. A comparison of the changes in the glass-transition temperature (T_g) and crosslink density with water immersion at different temperatures clearly showed that the two effects of additional curing by a postcuring reaction and plasticization by water absorption were in competition with each other during the exposure. The changes in the conversion with different exposure conditions suggested that water accelerated the postcuring reaction, even at low temperatures; this resulted in a significant difference in the postcuring reaction between unexposed and exposed epoxies. The construction of the plot of T_g versus conversion for the unexposed system and the placement of the T_g for exposed systems onto this master plot provided a method for evaluating the plasticization effect while excluding the influence of additional curing. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012     

Regioselective Alkoxylation of 2,2,4-Trimethyl-1,3-pentanediol

An efficient procedure for the regioselective synthesis of secondary alcohol alkoxylates from 2,2,4-trimethyl-1,3-pentanediol (TMPD) is described. TMPD was reacted with propylene oxide followed by ethylene oxide in the presence of a catalytic amount of alkali metal hydroxide to form secondary alcohol alkoxylates. Instead of a mixture of compounds resulting from the reaction of TMPD and propylene oxide, the primary hydroxyl group of the TMPD reacted to form predominantly 2,2,4-trimethyl-3-hydroxypentylpropoxylate as the major product. On further ethoxylation the less hindered secondary hydroxyl group of the 2,2,4-trimethyl-3-hydroxypentylpropoxylate reacted predominantly. ¹³C NMR indicated that the secondary hydroxyl group (96.2 mol%) of TMPD remained unreacted during alkoxylation.