Chromogranin A (CgA), present in the chromaffin granules of neuroendocrine cells, is a useful biomarker for the diagnosis of patients with gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs). This study was conducted to investigate the potential role of circulating CgA in monitoring clinical response in Chinese patients with advanced GEP-NETs. Eighty patients with advanced GEP-NETs treated ...

This paper introduces the technologies to improve the performance of function mining by Gene Expression Programming (GEP) developed in Sichuan University last year. The main results include: (a) Genetic Modifying Algorithm (Trans-gene). By injection gene segment into genome, it guides the evolutional direction and speeds up knowledge discovery process. (b) Overlapped gene expression. Borrowing ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the breast histomorphometric changes in rats treated with estrogen and/or progestogen for a short period of time. METHODS Forty oophorectomized rats were divided into four groups: GC, vehicle; GE, treated with estradiol benzoate (37.6 mg/animal); GP, treated with medroxyprogesterone acetate (11.2 mg/animal) and GEP, treated with estradiol benzoate (37.6 mg/animal) plus m...

The spreading of infectious diseases with and without immunization of individuals can be modeled by stochastic processes that exhibit a transition between an active phase of epidemic spreading and an absorbing phase, where the disease dies out. In nature, however, the transmitted pathogen may also mutate, weakening the effect of immunization. In order to study the influence of mutations, we int...

Advanced esophageal cancer has been recently treated by multimodal therapy including preoperative chemotherapy or chemoradiotherapy and surgery. A biopsy sample provides a valuable specimen for understanding the biological characteristics of individual esophageal cancer. Pretreatment prediction of the response to chemotherapy or radiotherapy based on biological characteristics using biopsy samp...

PURPOSE Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) are rare group of tumors with a wide spectrum of clinical behavior. However, there are no known clinically relevant biomarkers to predict metastasis. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN To investigate differential gene expression signatures of metastatic vs non-metastatic NETs, we studied cell cycle regulatory genes in 19 metastatic and 22 non-m...

GNAS1 codes for a part of the a-stimulatory subunit (Gsa) of the G protein. Mutation of GNAS1 has been frequently found in myxoid soft tissues, however, in gastrointestinal tumors, little is known about the mutation status of GNAS1. The aim of the study was to analyze the occurrence of GNAS1 mutations indifferent gastrointestinal, gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) and colo...

AIMS Serial invasive endomyocardial biopsies (EMB) remain the gold standard for acute cellular rejection (ACR) diagnosis. However histological grading has several limitations. We aimed to explore the value of myocardial Gene Expression Profiling (GEP) for diagnosing and identifying predictive biomarkers of ACR. METHODS A case-control study nested within a retrospective heart transplant patien...

This paper focuses on TWEANN (Topology and Weight Evolving Artificial Neural Network) methods based on indirect developmental encodings. TWEANNs are Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) which evolve both topology and parameters (weights) of neural networks. Indirect developmental encoding is an approach inspired by multi-cellular organisms’ development from a single cell (zygote) known from Nature. Th...

AIMS AND BACKGROUND Somatostatin receptor scintigraphy (SRS) is the standard method for the detection of somatostatin receptors (SSTRs). It is commonly used in gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (GEP-NET) staging, and represents the criterion of choice for treatment with somatostatin (SST) analogs. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was reported as a reliable method for the detection of SSTRs ...