Objective To investigate the relationship between Livin and Ki-67 proteins, and the expres-sion and clinical significance of Livin and Ki-67 proteins in cholangiocarcinoma. Methods Fifty-five samples of cholangiocarcinoma tissue were collected in Shengjing Hospital from January 2002 to December 2003. The expres-sion of Livin and Ki-67 proteins in the 55 samples of cholangiocarcinoma tissue and 12 samples of chronic cholan-gitis tissue were detected by immunohistochemical assay. The relationship between the expression of Livin and Ki-67 proteins and the clinicopathological parameters of cholangiocarcinoma was analyzed. The results were analyzed by Spearman rank correlation coefficient, chi-square test and t test. Results The positive expression rate of Livin protein in cholangiocarcinoma was 71% (39/55), which was significantly higher than 0 (0/12)in chronic cholan-girls tissue (χ2=20.361, P<0.01). The expression of Livin protein was influenced by the differentiation of cholangiocarcinoma and the lymph node metastasis (χ2=4.193, 4.245, P <0.05). The positive expression rate of Ki-67 protein was 96% (53/55) in cholangiocarcinoma. The label index of Ki-67 in patients in clinical stage Ⅰ,Ⅱ,Ⅲ,Ⅳ,were 22%±16%, 33%±12%, 43%±15%, and 49%±10%, respectively. There was signifi-cant difference in the label index of Ki-67 between patients in clinical stage Ⅰ and those in clinical stages Ⅱ, Ⅲ,Ⅳ(t=2.307, 2.871, 3.957, P<0.05). The label index of Ki-67 was 43%±13 % in patients with local lymph node metastasis, and 34%±16% in patients without local lymph node metastasis, with statistical difference between the 2 groups (t=2.334, P<0.05). The expression of Livin protein in cholangiocarcinoma was positively correlated with the label index of Ki-67 (r=0.502, P<0.01). Conclusions Livin protein plays an important role in the pathogenesis and development of eholangiocarcinoma, and it also has correlation with the proliferating activity of cholangiocarcinoma cells. Combined detection of the expression of Livin and Ki-67 proteins may be helpful in judging the malignancy of cholangiocarcinoma and determining the prognosis of patients.

Objective To explore the long-term predictive value of serum concentration of N-terminal prosoma brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) in the early acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Methods The 164 patients firstly hospitalized and finally diagnosed as acute myocardial infarction (AMI) were selected, and then the serum concentration of NT-proBNP was determined in less than 12 hours. According to the 75 percentage points of serum concentration of NT-proBNP, the patients were divided into two groups: low concentration group (n = 123) and high concentration group (n = 41 ). The major adverse cardiac events (MACEs) were followed and compared at one month, six months and twelve months between low group and high group. Results At 1-, 6-, 12-month follow-up, the odds ratio (OR) of death event were 4.1, 5.6 and 4.0 in high group respectively, and the nonfatal heart failure occurred in 4, 4 and 7 patients in high group. Multiple factor logistic regression analysis showed that NT-proBNP was an independent risk factor of the MACEs at different periods including short time, middle time and long time in ACS patients (P＜0. 05). Conclusions NT-proBNP is a strong predictor of the long-term MACEs in patients with early ACS.

Early diagnosis and treatment is the key to improve the prognosis and reduce the disability of Wilson′s disease. Conventional magnetic resonance imaging sequences are difficult to detect early brain lesions in Wilson′s disease, especially in preclinical patients. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a recently developed magnetic resonance post-processing technique, which is very sensitive to magnetic metal deposition in the brain. QSM can be used for quantitative analysis of metal deposition in the basal ganglia of Wilson′s disease and is expected to be an imaging technique for early diagnosis and condition assessment of Wilson′s disease.

Since epileptic seizure is unpredictable and paroxysmal, an automatic system for seizure detecting could be of great significance and assistance to patients and medical staff. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for multichannel patient-specific seizure detection applying the earth mover's distance (EMD) in scalp EEG. Firstly, the wavelet decomposition is executed to the original EEGs with five scales, the scale 3, 4 and 5 are selected and transformed into histograms and afterwards the distances between histograms in pairs are computed applying the earth mover's distance as effective features. Then, the EMD features are sent to the classifier based on the Bayesian linear discriminant analysis (BLDA) for classification, and an efficient postprocessing procedure is applied to improve the detection system precision, finally. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the CHB-MIT scalp EEG database with 958 h EEG recordings from 23 epileptic patients is used and a relatively satisfactory detection rate is achieved with the average sensitivity of 95.65% and false detection rate of 0.68/h. The good performance of this algorithm indicates the potential application for seizure monitoring in clinical practice.
Classification ; Discriminant Analysis* ; Electroencephalography* ; Epilepsy* ; Humans ; Medical Staff ; Methods ; Scalp* ; Seizures ; Weights and Measures