Antonio Guevara

Circulating Tumor Cells Identify Early Recurrence in Patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Undergoing Radical Resection

Background Surgery is the treatment of choice for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) stages I-IIIA. However, more than 20% of these patients develop recurrence and die due to their disease. The release of tumor cells into peripheral blood (CTCs) is one of the main causes of recurrence of cancer. The objectives of this study are to identify the prognostic value of the presence and characterization of CTCs in peripheral blood in patients undergoing radical resection for NSCLC. Patients and Methods 56 patients who underwent radical surgery for previously untreated NSCLC were enrolled in this prospective study. Peripheral blood samples for CTC analysis were obtained before and one month after surgery. In addition CTCs were phenotypically characterized by epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression. Results 51.8% of the patients evaluated were positive with the presence of CTCs at baseline. A decrease in the detection rate of CTCs was observed in these patients one month after surgery (32.1%) (p = 0.035). The mean number of CTCs was 3.16 per 10 ml (range 0–84) preoperatively and 0.66 (range 0–3) in postoperative determination. EGFR expression was found in 89.7% of the patients at baseline and in 38.9% patients one month after surgery. The presence of CTCs after surgery was significantly associated with early recurrence (p = 0.018) and a shorter disease free survival (DFS) (p = .008). In multivariate analysis CTC presence after surgery (HR = 5.750, 95% CI: 1.50–21.946, p = 0.010) and N status (HR = 0.296, 95% CI: 0.091–0.961, p = 0.043) were independent prognostic factors for DFS. Conclusion CTCs can be detected and characterized in patients undergoing radical resection for non-small cell lung cancer. Their presence might be used to identify patients with increased risk of early recurrence.

Workflow: a solution for cooperative information system development

Workflow management includes concepts of special interest to the business organization field and for the automation of processes within a company. However, process modeling via workflow specifications and workflow management systems can be applied in any field where a workflow exists. The use of CASE tools provides a great increase in performance in information system development but, on the other hand, these tools do not support group work and make skipped steps possible in a methodology. Applying workflow management systems as a meta‐CASE tool together with the use of cooperative methodologies – that aim to capture user requirements – can help us to solve problems related to shortcomings in monitoring, controls, and audit information system development.

WORKFLOW TECHNOLOGY: AN APPLICATION FOR TOURISM MANAGEMENT

Workflow management is of great value for companies since today they have to confront a highly competitive environment, and are in need of reducing costs and swiftly developing new services and products. These demands cannot be met without reconsidering and optimising the way of doing business, developing policy and modifying information systems and applications. Workflow technology facilitates this constant evolution, providing methodologies and software to support: (i) the modelling of processes as workflow specifications, (ii) reengineering business processes in order to optimise them and (iii) workflow automation to generate an implementation from applications. Tourism related organisations and business, like any other type of enterprise, can benefit from this technology and obtain greater efficiency. This will translate into increased customer satisfaction and better efficiency in the developed processes. In this work we intend to apply workt1ow technology to the management of a hotel by identifying processes, tasks and methods employed in the hotel industry. First we will gain an understanding of the processes involved in hotel management and then model them, from the moment of booking in, to the customer checking out. Thus, our objectives are: (i) to introduce workflow technology and (ii) to apply it to the tourism sector, specifically to a botel.

MC64-ClustalWP2: a highly-parallel hybrid strategy to align multiple sequences in many-core architectures.

We have developed the MC64-ClustalWP2 as a new implementation of the Clustal W algorithm, integrating a novel parallelization strategy and significantly increasing the performance when aligning long sequences in architectures with many cores. It must be stressed that in such a process, the detailed analysis of both the software and hardware features and peculiarities is of paramount importance to reveal key points to exploit and optimize the full potential of parallelism in many-core CPU systems. The new parallelization approach has focused into the most time-consuming stages of this algorithm. In particular, the so-called progressive alignment has drastically improved the performance, due to a fine-grained approach where the forward and backward loops were unrolled and parallelized. Another key approach has been the implementation of the new algorithm in a hybrid-computing system, integrating both an Intel Xeon multi-core CPU and a Tilera Tile64 many-core card. A comparison with other Clustal W implementations reveals the high-performance of the new algorithm and strategy in many-core CPU architectures, in a scenario where the sequences to align are relatively long (more than 10 kb) and, hence, a many-core GPU hardware cannot be used. Thus, the MC64-ClustalWP2 runs multiple alignments more than 18x than the original Clustal W algorithm, and more than 7x than the best x86 parallel implementation to date, being publicly available through a web service. Besides, these developments have been deployed in cost-effective personal computers and should be useful for life-science researchers, including the identification of identities and differences for mutation/polymorphism analyses, biodiversity and evolutionary studies and for the development of molecular markers for paternity testing, germplasm management and protection, to assist breeding, illegal traffic control, fraud prevention and for the protection of the intellectual property (identification/traceability), including the protected designation of origin, among other applications.

Workflow Management Applied to Information Systems in Tourism

Nowadays, Workflow Management offers many advantages to the tourism industry due to the high degree of competition existing in this field and the need to quickly develop new products, offers, and services. This need for flexibility cannot be achieved without improving the processes involved in the information systems. Workflow technology facilitates this constant evolution, providing modeling methodologies and software to support all the processes taking place in a given company. This article studies the application of such technologies to businesses belonging to the tourism sector and focuses on the improvement of information systems to obtain higher customer satisfaction. To achieve this objective, a modeling methodology oriented toward customer satisfaction is presented. This is applied to the set of information systems involved in making a trip by plane and more specifically to aspects such as booking from intermediary companies and the information systems used by airline companies in airports.

Improving Recommender Systems with Simplification Logic to Manage Implications with Grades

Recommender systems are considered powerful tools to suggest items to users according to their interests. The main problem in this process is the big amount of items to be managed. In this work we take advantage of the user context information to prune the original set of items stored in the data set. By providing a smaller set of data to be managed, we will improve the efficiency of the recommender system. We use fuzzy relations and implications with grades to specify the context and Simplification Logic to develop a linear pre-filtering process. Finally, we show the benefits of our approach with an illustrative example on the tourism sector.

Electronic Invoicing for a Hotel Management Computer Network System

The current work is part of a larger research and development project undertaken by the Department of Computer Languages and Science at the University School of Tourism in Malaga University, in collaboration with certain software development companies plus the support of more than fifteen hotels in Malaga and Almeria, Spain.

Association of circulating tumour cells with early relapse and 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography uptake in resected non-small-cell lung cancers

OBJECTIVES More than 20% of lung cancer patients develop a recurrence, even after curative resection. We hypothesized that relapse may arise from the dissemination of circulating tumour cells (CTCs). This study evaluates the significance of CTC detection as regards the recurrence of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in surgically resected patients. Secondly, we investigated the association between CTCs and the uptake of 18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) by the primary tumour on a positron emission tomographic (PET) scan. METHODS In this single-centre prospective study, blood samples for analysis of CTCs were obtained from 102 patients with Stage I-IIIA NSCLC both before (CTC1) and 1 month after (CTC2) radical resection. CTCs were isolated using immunomagnetic techniques. The presence of CTCs was correlated with the maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) measured on preoperative FDG PET/computed tomographic scans. Recurrence free survival (RFS) analysis was performed. RESULTS CTCs were detected in 39.2% of patients before and in 27.5% 1 month after the operation. The presence of CTCs after the operation was significantly correlated with SUVmax on PET scans, pathological stage and surgical approach. Only SUVmax was an independent predictor for the presence of CTC2 on multivariate analysis. Postoperative CTCs were significantly correlated with a shorter RFS ( P  = 0.005). In multivariate analysis, the presence of CTC2 was associated with RFS, independent of disease staging. CONCLUSIONS Detection of CTCs 1 month after radical resection might be a useful marker to predict early recurrence in Stage I-III NSCLC. The SUVmax value of the primary tumour on preoperative PET scans was associated with the presence of CTC 1 month after the operation.

COMIS: Cooperative Methodology for Information Systems

This paper proposes a cooperative methodology for IS development, focusing on the end-users collaboration in the process, providing the training and tools required to obtain the characteristics of the processes in which he/she is involved and actively integrating the user in the IS development team. Each of the steps involved in IS development is coordinated by a Meta-CASE tool based on a Workflow Management System (WfMS).

Cooperative Techniques And Tools To Increase The Quality Of The Software In Tourist Companies

In this article we present methods for the analysis and design of Cooperative Object-oriented Information Systems. These methods enable companies to achieve competitive advantages, as well as increase the quality of software development. In addition, they involve users much more in the development of Tourist Information Systems. In order to accomplish the foregoing, it would be necessary to re-examine business organisational structure as well as the methods used in the development of Information Systems (IS).