OCT is a viable tool for in vivo diagnosis of BCCs. FD-OCT and HD-OCT outperformed TD-OCT in diagnostic accuracy and detection of morphological features, but not tumour depth estimation.

Discussion | Patients with HS have malignant lymphomas more frequently than the general population. Rates of NHL, HL, and CTCL in the general population are low. However, patients with HS appear to have 2 to 4 times the overall risk of developing lymphomas.Overall and subgroup associations between HS and lymphoma subtypes have not been evaluated previously in a population. A single-center retrospective series identified 1776 patients with HS in whom frequency of unspecified lymphoma was 1.8%. 5 In a Swedish retrospective analysis including 2119 patients hospitalized for HS, 6 cases of any hematopoietic cancer, which may include lymphomas, were identified. 6 Neither study observed greater risk of malignant lymphoproliferative disease among patients with HS.A limitation of our study was that we could not assess the disease duration or severity in this claims analysis. The uncommonness of the event did not permit us to evaluate systemic treatment or other exposures and the association between HS and lymphoma. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation to systematically evaluate this association in a US population of patients with HS. Size and diversity of our cohort may overcome selection biases and limitations inherent to smaller cohorts recruited with specialty centers.

Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) represent permanent, localized dilations of the abdominal aorta that can be life-threatening if progressing to rupture. Evaluation of risk of rupture depends on understanding the mechanical behavior of patient AAA walls. In this project, a series of patient AAA wall tissue samples have been evaluated through a combined anamnestic, mechanical, and histopathologic approach. Mechanical properties of the samples have been characterized using a novel, strain-controlled, planar biaxial testing protocol emulating the in vivo deformation of the aorta. Histologically, the tissue ultrastructure was highly disrupted. All samples showed pronounced mechanical stiffening with stretch and were notably anisotropic, with greater stiffness in the circumferential than the axial direction. However, there were significant intrapatient variations in wall stiffness and stress. In biaxial tests in which the longitudinal stretch was held constant at 1.1 as the circumferential stretch was extended to 1.1, the maximum average circumferential stress was 330 ± 70 kPa, while the maximum average axial stress was 190 ± 30 kPa. A constitutive model considering the wall as anisotropic with two preferred directions fit the measured data well. No statistically significant differences in tissue mechanical properties were found based on patient gender, age, maximum bulge diameter, height, weight, body mass index, or smoking history. Although a larger patient cohort is merited to confirm these conclusions, the project provides new insight into the relationships between patient natural history, histopathology, and mechanical behavior that may be useful in the development of accurate methods for rupture risk evaluation.