MOTIVATION A growing body of literature has demonstrated the potential for non-invasive diagnosis of a variety of human genetic diseases using cell-free DNA extracted from maternal plasma samples in early gestation. Such methods are of great significance to the obstetrics community because of their potential use as clinical standard of care. Proof of concept for such approaches has been establi...

background and purpose: disc herniation leading to radiculopathy is one of the important differential diagnosis of low back pain which needs specific medical care. radiculopathies can be initially diagnosed by history taking and physical examination. however role of other diagnostic methods like magnetic resonance imaging (mri) and electromyography (emg) in narrowing differential diagnosis is w...

background and objective: fine needle aspiration cytology (fnac) is well accepted as a useful diagnostic technique in the management of adult patients with head and neck lumps. but, until recently, very few reports have been obtained regarding the role of fnac in nonthyroidal neck masses in children. hence, the objective of our study was to determine the diagnostic value of fine needle aspirati...

introduction: the most common chromosomal abnormalities detected in perinatal period are aneuploidies of chromosome 21, 18, 13, x and y. the aim of this study is to assess referral reasons for invasive diagnostic method using rapid qf-pcr for fetal chromosomal abnormalities in gynecologists’ referrals. methods: a retrospective study of results was performed on data between september 2015 and ju...

background: vaginal sonograghy and serial -hcg are the most common diagnostic methods for ectopic pregnancy but about 50% of cases are initially misdiagnosed. in tubal pregnancy the zygote lies next to the muscular layer, and this invasion causes an increase in creatine phosphokinase (cpk) in blood. objective: assessment of cpk and its isoenzyme cpk-mb as a diagnostic marker for tubal pregnanc...

BACKGROUND This study assessed the degree of diagnostic agreement among community-based general pathologists reading slides of representative breast tissue specimens and tested whether diagnostic variability is associated with type of breast specimen (e.g., core needle or excisional biopsy) or slide quality. METHODS Twenty-six of the 44 eligible pathologists working at community-based patholo...

BACKGROUND & AIMS The diagnostic accuracy of non-invasive liver fibrosis tests that may replace liver biopsy in patients with chronic hepatitis remains controversial. We assessed and compared the accuracy of FibroScan® and that of the main biomarkers used for predicting cirrhosis and significant fibrosis (METAVIR ≥ F2) in patients with chronic viral hepatitis. METHODS A multicenter prospectiv...

Lung cancer is one of the malignancies causing deaths worldwide. The yet to be developed non-invasive diagnostic techniques, are a challenge for early detection of cancer before it progresses to its later stages. The currently available diagnostic methods are expensive or invasive, and are not fit for general screening purposes. Early identification not only helps in detecting primary cancer, b...