Differential diagnosis of bilateral ovarian masses during pregnancy, and their hormonal effect

Rapidly enlarging bilateral ovarian cystic masses can be confused with malignant entities. When this happens during pregnancy, benign transient reactivity can present a similar clinical course. Here we describe a 33-year-old woman with hyperreactio luteinalis or multiple gestational theca lutein cysts whose ovaries drastically changed in size peripartum, with concordant changes in human chorionic gonadotropin, thyroid function, and testosterone levels. Management was conservative and the cystic masses spontaneously remitted postpartum. Present work suggested that evaluating the character of the cysts by magnetic resonance imaging and serial assessments of their size and the patient’s hormonal levels may assist in diagnosis. Conservative management could be successfully applied in a carefully chosen subset of patients to avoid unnecessary invasive procedures.

Analysis of Main Steam Line Break Accident at Hot Shutdown State Using a Coupled Method

This paper describes the analysis of main steam line break at hot shutdown state performed using a new developed method where a 3D core neutronics code, a core thermal-hydraulics code and a plant simulation computer code are fully coupled. Models, main hypothesis applied and calculation results of the main steam line break (MSLB) accident analysis are presented. To cover as many as states points a new parameter named Transient Reactivity Variation (TRV) is introduced, the conservatism of this parameter when doing safety analysis are evaluated also. The study shows that the coupled method using some best estimate parameters can get more margins compared with the traditional analysis method, and the TRV can be used as a key parameter to determine which core configuration is the most penalizing case.

Anti-melanoma monoclonal antibody HMB45 identifies an oncofetal glycoconjugate associated with immature melanosomes.

The anti-melanoma monoclonal antibody HMB45 is widely used in diagnostic pathology owing to its great specificity and sensitivity in identifying pigmented tumors such as malignant melanoma. However, little is known regarding the nature of the antigen(s) recognized by this antibody. In the observations reported here, the HMB45-defined antigen was identified in another pigmented tissue, the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). A series of immunocytochemical studies demonstrated transient reactivity of the prenatal and infantile human RPE with antibody HMB45; adult RPE is non-reactive with the antibody. By immunoelectron microscopy, the antibody was demonstrated to react with immature melanosomes. Pre-treatment of deparaffinized tissue sections with neuraminidase completely eliminated HMB45 immunoreactivity, suggesting that the antigen(s) recognized is a sialated glycoconjugate. Mannosidase or N-acetylglucosaminidase pre-treatment had no effect on immunoreactivity. Thus, HMB45 may identify an oncofetal antigen present in cutaneous melanocytes, RPE, and melanoma cells, and changes in immunoreactivity with maturation or malignant transformation may be a function of post-translational modification.