BACKGROUND Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) are known to have a dismal prognosis. A number of chemokines play important roles in the progress of BTCs. However, the serum levels of chemokines in BTCs have not yet been explored. METHODS The sera of healthy donors (n = 8) and patients with BTCs who were enrolled in second line sunitinib trials (n = 27) were collected. The concentrations of three kin...

The spatial Markov model (SMM) is an upscaled Lagrangian model that effectively captures anomalous transport across a diverse range of hydrologic systems. The distinct feature of the SMM relative to other random walk models is that successive steps are correlated. To date, with some notable exceptions, the model has primarily been applied to data from high-resolution numerical simulations and c...

Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) are characterized by a bad prognosis and the armamentarium of drugs for their treatment is very poor. Although the inflammatory status of biliary tract represents the first step in the cancerogenesis, the microenvironment also plays a key role in the pathogenesis of BTCs, promoting tumor angiogenesis, invasion and metastasis. Several molecules, such as vascular endo...

Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) are lethal malignancies currently lacking satisfactory methods for early detection and accurate diagnosis. Surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS) is a promising diagnostic tool for this disease. In this pilot study, sera samples from 50 BTCs and 30 cholelithiasis patients as well as 30 healthy subjects from a pop...

Strategies to identify tumors at highest risk for treatment failure are currently under investigation for patients with bladder cancer. We demonstrate that flow cytometric detection of poorly differentiated basal tumor cells (BTCs), as defined by the co-expression of CD90, CD44 and CD49f, directly from patients with early stage tumors (T1-T2 and N0) and patient-derived xenograft (PDX) engraftme...

This study proposes one-dimensional advection–diffusion equation (ADE) with finite differences method (FDM) using implicit spreadsheet simulation (ADEISS). By changing only the values of temporal and spatial weighted parameters with ADEISS implementation, solutions are implicitly obtained for the BTCS, Upwind and Crank–Nicolson schemes. The ADEISS uses iterative spreadsheet solution technique. ...

To close, let's estimate the overall chip count required to add the multicast capability to a point-to-point network with 256 inputs and outputs. We will assume that for the chips that have little internal memory, we are constrained only by pin count, that each chip has 128 pins available for inputs and outputs and that the data paths are one bit wide. For the example con guration then, 32 chip...

The transport of chemicals or heat in fractured reservoirs is strongly affected by the fracture-matrix interfacial area. In a vapor-dominated geothermal reservoir, this area can be estimated by inert gas tracer tests, where gas diffusion between the fracture and matrix causes the tracer breakthrough curve (BTC) to have a long tail determined by the interfacial area. For water-saturated conditio...

Biliary tract carcinomas (BTCs) including cholangiocarcinoma and gallbladder cancer arise from the bile duct epithelia (Figure 1). Prominent risk factors of BTC include cholelithiasis, chronic inflammation, congenital abnormalities of the biliary tree and genetic predisposition (Aljiffry et al., 2009; Onori et al., 2010). The relative low incidence of BTCs appeared to ascent in the past decades...

BACKGROUND We previously reported that the addition of erlotinib to gemcitabine and oxaliplatin (GEMOX) resulted in greater antitumor activity and might be a treatment option for patients with biliary tract cancers (BTCs). Molecular subgroup analysis of treatment outcomes in patients who had specimens available for analysis was undertaken. METHODS Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), KRAS...