We report a 17-year-old woman with bronchiolitis obliterans-organizing pneumonia (BOOP)-like granulomatosis with polyangiitis developing severe airway obliterations. Pending age, phase and grade of autoimmune treatment, and offering ECMO treatment may be crucial for survival but occasionally preface futility. ECMO-treated patient with BOOP-like GPA has never been described before.

Chasing HIV-1 across the genotype landscape, unequipped to anticipate its maneuvers, the antibody variable-region genes pursue the virus in futility. In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Dingens et al. (2017) exhibit a powerful technology that reveals the escape pathways of HIV-1 and may enable its capture.

Pre-specified interim analyses may be performed to evaluate whether a clinical trial can be halted prematurely for overwhelming efficacy and/or futility. This approach is somewhat more complex when the primary endpoint is a survival analysis. This paper provides an overview of performing the initial calculations and actual interim analyses using SAS ® PROC SEQDESIGN and PROC SEQTEST, EAST ® sof...

Acceptance of the concept of medical futility facilitates a paradigm shift from curative to palliative medicine, accommodating a more humane approach and avoiding unnecessary suffering in the course of the dying process. This should not be looked upon as abandoning the patient but rather as providing the patient and family with an opportunity to come to terms with the dying process. It also doe...

This paper might have been subtitled An algorithmicist looks at no free lunch We use simple adversary arguments to redevelop and explore some of the no free lunch NFL theorems and perhaps extend them a lit tle A second goal is to clarify the relationship of NFL theorems to algorithm theory In particular we claim that NFL puts much weaker restrictions on the claims that an evolutionary algorithm...

This paper might have been subtitled \An algorithmicist looks at no free lunch." We use simple adversary arguments to redevelop and explore some of the no free lunch (NFL) theorems and perhaps extend them a little. A second goal is to clarify the relationship of NFL theorems to algorithm theory. In particular we claim that NFL puts much weaker restrictions on the claims that an evolutionary alg...

Medical futility has been proposed for many years to define the procedure that simply prolongs the suffering of patients but heals nothing [1] . To deal with the decision procedure for treatment, two ideas arise: patients9 autonomy and doctors9 authority. Widely recognized in 1960s, patients9 autonomy respected patients9 willingness over treatment, requiring specific consent for treatment and r...