BACKGROUND To evaluate the pattern of lymph node metastasis (LNM) according to primary tumor location in T1 and T2 stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. METHODS The data of 1916 NSCLC patients with LNM who underwent surgery with systematic nodal resection between November 2008 to December 2014 were included in the study. Analyses of tumor location, pathological T stage, and nodal...

Urothelial carcinoma of the upper urinary tract represents only 5% of all urothelial cancers. The 5-year cancer-specific survival in the United States is roughly 75% with grade and stage being the most powerful predictors of survival. Nephroureterectomy with excision of the ipsilateral ureteral orifice and bladder cuff en bloc remains the gold standard treatment of the upper urinary tract uroth...

Early hilar lung cancer is rare. It is usually curable if properly diagnosed and treated. We recently encountered two cases of early stage squamous cell carcinoma of the left upper division bronchus, which responded well to left upper division sleeve segmentectomy. Case 1 was a 74-year-old man, a heavy smoker, who was referred to our hospital after sputum cytology had resulted in a positive dia...

When controlling dynamic systems such as mobile robots in uncertain environments, there is a trade off between risk and reward. For example, a race car can turn a corner faster by taking a more challenging path. This paper proposes a new approach to planning a control sequence with guaranteed risk bound. Given a stochastic dynamic model, the problem is to find a control sequence that optimizes ...

Pampatheriidae are a group of cingulates native to South American that are known from the middle Miocene to the lower Holocene. Two genera have been recognized between the lower Pleistocene and the lower Holocene: Pampatherium Gervais and Ameghino (Ensenadan, Bonaerian and Lujanian, lower Pleistocene-lower Holocene) and Holmesina Simpson (Blancan, Irvingtonian, upper Pliocene-lower Holocene). T...

There is growing interest in sleep research and increasing demand for screening of circadian rhythms in genetically modified animals. This requires reliable sleep stage scoring programs. Present solutions suffer, however, from the lack of flexible adaptation to experimental conditions and unreliable selection of stage-discriminating variables. EEG was recorded in freely moving C57BL/6 mice and ...

We derive a lower and upper bound on the reliability function of discrete memoryless multiple-access channel (MAC) with noiseless feedback and variable-length codes (VLCs). The bounds are similar to the one for point-to-point channels, increasing linearly with respect to an appropriate distance between the rate pair and the capacity boundary. For the lower bound on the error exponent, we adapt ...

Purpose: We evaluated the pattern of recurrence and the prognostic factors for patients who suffered with upper urinary tract transitional cell carcinoma (TCCa) and were surgically treated. Materials and Methods: Between 1986 and 2003, the medical records on 228 patients who were diagnosed and surgically treated for upper urinary tract TCCa were retrospectively analyzed with regard to the patte...

In two-stage randomization trials subjects are first randomized to an initial treatment, and then if and when a response (or nonresponse) criterium is met, re-randomized to a second-stage treatment. When the primary outcome is a time to event, sample size calculation is challenging because the variances of common estimators depend in a complex manner on the joint distribution of primary time to...

PURPOSE We retrospectively assessed the clinical significance of anti-p53 antibody (S-p53Ab) status in the serum of patients with upper urinary tract tumors. MATERIALS AND METHODS Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to analyze S-p53Abs in 63 upper urinary tract tumors. Its incidence and clinical or pathological background were analyzed in comparison with 80 bladder tumors. RESULTS Th...