Adrenocortical carcinoma is a rare disease with an incidence of approximately 1-2 per million populations per year. The main symptoms are abdominal mass with or without endocrine dysfunction. However, there are difficulties in the diagnosis and treatment of this case due to its unspecific clinical presentation which sometimes require additional diagnostic methods such as immunohistochemistry. T...

Rebecca L. Lewison*, Sloan A. Freeman and Larry B. Crowder Duke University Marine Laboratory, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, 135 Duke Marine Lab Road, Beaufort, NC 28516, USA *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract The depletion of fish stocks from global fisheries has been a long-standing concern. More recently, incidental catch of non-target (termed ...

The photometric and spectroscopic properties of 26 well observed Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) were analyzed with the aim to explore SN Ia diversity. The sample includes (Branch-)normal SNe as well as extreme events like SNe 1991T and 1991bg, while the truly peculiar SN Ia, SN 2000cx (Li et al. 2001) and SN 2002cx (Li et al. 2003) are not included in our sample. A statistical treatment reveals th...

In many surveys, characteristic of interest is sparsely distributed but highly aggregated; in such situations the adaptive cluster sampling is very useful. Examples of such populations can be found in fisheries, mineral investigations (unevenly distributed ore concentrations), animal and plant populations (rare and endangered species), pollution concentrations and hot spot investigations, and e...

IN 1962 LORENTZ described a 41-year-old woman who had an ischemic stroke while taking oral contraceptives. By 1970, 93 cases of ischemic strokes in young women using oral contraceptives had been reported. Establishing that a common exposure, oral contraceptives, causes a rare outcome, stroke, is methodologically challenging. Experimental studies with random allocation of subjects are not possib...

In large but finite populations, weak demographic stochasticity due to random birth and death events can lead to population extinction. The process is analogues to the escaping problem of trapped particles under random forces. Methods widely used in studying such physical systems, for instance, Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) and Fokker-Planck methods, can be applied to solve similar biological...

Resequencing is an emerging tool for identification of rare disease-associated mutations. Rare mutations are difficult to tag with SNP genotyping, as genotyping studies are designed to detect common variants. However, studies have shown that genetic heterogeneity is a probable scenario for common diseases, in which multiple rare mutations together explain a large proportion of the genetic basis...

Our present ability to identify individuals who are at risk for sudden cardiac death (SCD) in the general population is poor. Although SCD risk has a heritable component, our understanding of the genetic basis of SCD is most advanced in rare arrhythmic disorders such as the long-QT and Brugada syndromes, in which mutations in genes encoding cardiac ion channels result in increased susceptibilit...

MOTIVATION Next-generation sequencing technologies sequence viruses with ultra-deep coverage, thus promising to revolutionize our understanding of the underlying diversity of viral populations. While the sequencing coverage is high enough that even rare viral variants are sequenced, the presence of sequencing errors makes it difficult to distinguish between rare variants and sequencing errors. ...