Osteosarcoma is the most common primary malignant bone tumor in Egypt. Ezrin is involved in cell adhesion to the extracellular matrix and in cell-cell interactions facilitating metastasis. HER2/neu is overexpressed in breast cancer and other types of cancer. This study aimed to assess the expression of ezrin and HER2/neu in 57 primary osteosarcoma cases and to correlate their expression with the available clinicopathologic parameters and the overall, metastasis-free and event-free survival. Both ezrin and HER2/neu were not expressed in the normal bone and they were upregulated in 82.5% and 71.9% of osteosarcoma, respectively. Positive ezrin expression was significantly associated with young age (below 25 y) (P=0.01), high grade (P=0.001), and short survival time (P=0.0001). Positive HER2/neu expression was significantly associated with high-grade osteosarcoma (P=0.04). Membranous HER2/neu expression was the only factor that showed significant impact on metastasis-free (P=0.002) and event-free survival (P=0.002). Ezrin was significantly correlated with HER2/neu expression (P=0.02). Advanced stage (P=0.0001), metastasis (P=0.0001), and recurrence (P=0.01) were the factors affecting the overall survival of osteosarcoma patients. Ezrin and HER2/neu are overexpressed and coexpressed in osteosarcoma with adverse prognostic features such as high grade. Membranous pattern of HER2/neu seems to be more important than the cytoplasmic pattern because of its impact on metastasis-free and event-free survival. Therefore, ezrin and HER2/neu could be potential prognostic markers and treatment targets for osteosarcoma.

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In certain situations, there may be an urgent need to disseminate alerts without the support of communication infrastructure. For example, when a disaster like an earthquake strikes, it may cause the loss of cellular coverage, Wi-Fi hotspots, etc. In this and similar application scenarios, last mile connectivity will be needed for prompt delivery of alerts. Nearly everyone nowadays carry a smart device that is equipped with at least three communication options that do not need any infrastructure, namely, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Ad-hoc, and Wi-Fi Direct. Despite their ability to work without infrastructure, all these options need a connection setup phase before starting data dissemination. The setup phase incurs unneeded overhead and delay, which diminish their utility in delivering time-critical data. In this paper, we propose a protocol that uses the service discovery mechanism in Wi-Fi Direct to addresses these shortcomings. The protocol embeds the alert data to be disseminated in a Wi-Fi Direct service discovery frame and stores it locally. Other devices interested in receiving alerts send service discovery requests to get updates. The protocol also takes care of forwarding the received alerts to other devices as well. The evaluations showed that the proposed protocol is capable of transmitting timely alerts.