Narrow Results

The contents of multi-elements in whole blood from 115 patients with 7 different types of acute leukemia and 38 well matched healthy controls have been determined by means of proton induced X-ray emission (PIXE). The number of available analyzed elements was as many as 11, mainly due to the use of a 100 um thick Cr funny foi1 as an absorber. The contents of elements Cu, Ca, S, P, Si and the ratio of Cu to Zn (Cu/Zn) were higher and those of elements Zn, K, Fe, Al and Rb were lower with high significant differences (P<0. 01) in acute leukemia patients than in norma1 controls. The results indicate that the contents of Cu, Zn, and the ratio Cu/Zn are useful indices of disease activity. The elements of Al and Rb may play important roles in acute leukemia etiology,

Bioinformatics has recently drawn a lot of attention to efficiently analyze biological genomic information with information technology, especially pattern recognition. In this paper, we attempt to explore extensive features and classifiers through a comparative study of the most promising feature selection methods and machine learning classifiers. The gene information from a patient's marrow expressed by DNA microarray, which is either the acute myeloid leukemia or acute lymphoblastic leukemia, is used to predict the cancer class. Pearson's and Spearman's correlation coefficients, Euclidean distance, cosine coefficient, information gain, mutual information and signal to noise ratio have been used for feature selection. Backpropagation neural network, self-organizing map, structure adaptive self-organizing map, support vector machine, inductive decision tree and k-nearest neighbor have been used for classification. Experimental results indicate that backpropagation neural network with Pearson's correlation coefficients produces the best result, 97.1% of recognition rate on the test data.

Making headway by Dario Campana Recent advances in the treatment of childhood leukemia look set to improve the disease's cure rates.

The Second St Jude – Viva Forum in Pediatric Oncology by Associate Professor Allen Yeoh and Dr Sally Blair

A Mother's Journey by Nicola Horlick A True-life Account of a Mother's Sad, Affecting Journey when Her Child was Diagnosed with Leukemia.