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Mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor everolimus is a novel agent used in endocrine therapy resistant hormone receptor positive metastatic breast cancer. Its use has been associated with clinically significant improvement in the otherwise dismal outcomes of this subset of patients. Rash is a common adverse effect associated with everolimus. However, Hand-foot syndrome is an uncommon toxicity with the use of this drug. We report a case of Grade 3 hand-foot syndrome following institution of everolimus therapy and describe its successful management.

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable disease for which an early diagnosis is essential to control the disease. The microscopy-based TB screening is the conventional method employed for TB identification in sputum smears. Fluorescence microscopy-based diagnosis provides improved sensitivity and benefits large number of TB burdened communities across the globe. Microscopic images are often corrupted by intensity variations because of inherent imperfections of the image formation process. This may result in false positives which is the potential shortcoming of fluorescence microscopy.Methods & Materials: The fluorescence-stained slides were prepared at South African National Health Laboratory Services, Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The images (N=100) were captured using a camera in monochrome binning mode attached to a 20x objective fluorescence microscope of 0.5 numerical aperture. The camera (AxioCam HR) has a resolution of 4164 x 3120 with a pixel size 6.45 m (h) x 6.45 m (v).The illumination correction methods adopted in this work include surface fitting method, multiple regression method and bidirectional empirical mode decomposition. The results of illumination correction are validated using the image sharpness measures. This includes derivative-based, statistical, histogrambased and transform-based parameters.