AIM:To determine the outcome of esophageal cancer patients referred for palliative care, in Gorgan and Gonbad gastrointestinal clinics, northeast of Iran. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was done on inoperable esophageal cancer cases referred to gastrointestinal clinics in Gorgan and Gonbad city (2005)(2006). Demographic data were collected during the procedure and cases were followed up every one month. Improvement proportion was calculated with 95% confidence interval, to determine the rate of improvement. Survival analysis and KaplanMeier methods were used to estimate the duration of palliative care effectiveness. RESULTS: We recruited 39 cases into the study. Squamous cell carcinoma was the most prevalent (92.3%). The middle third of the esophagus was involved predominantly (51.3%). Dilation was the most preferred method (89.7%) and stenting was done in 4 cases. Decreasing dysphagia score was not related to palliation method or pathology type of carcinoma. Age of the patients was significantly related to the improvement of dysphagia score. Mean survival time was 137.6 d and median was 103 d. CONCLUSION: Results of this study showed a low survival rate after palliative care in esophageal cancer cases despite dysphagia scores' improvement after dilating or stenting.

Time series are one of the most common types of recorded data in various scientific, industrial, and financial domains. Depending on the context, time series analysis are used for a variety of purposes: forecasting, estimation, classification, and trend and event detection. Thanks to the outstanding capabilities of human visual perception, visualization remains one of the most powerful tools for data analysis, particularly for time series. With the increase in data sets' volume and complexity, new visualization techniques are clearly needed to improve data analysis. They aim to facilitate visual analysis in specified situations, tasks, or for unguided exploratory analysis.

Association of silica with diseases like cancers has been determined previously. This study was designed to determine the quantity of silis in flour produced in Golestan Province, and its relation to esophageal cancer (EC). We took flour samples from all flour millings in Golestan Province. Base-melting method in nickel cruise was used at 550℃. The extract was reduced with acids. Different silis concentrations in various regions were compared. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. The median silis concentration was 0.0030 g, the mean silis concentration was 0.008760 ± 0.004265 g in each 100 g flour. The difference of mean silis concentrations in various regions was not significant. No high level of silica was found in the flour of Golestan Province. We could not find any significant difference in various areas between silica contaminations. Studies on the consumed bread and rice in various regions of Golestan Province can be helpful.

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Abstract-Metadata is a structural data defining details such as: content, format, object and structure. Within the past years, the IEEE-LOM standard has greatly captured the metadata world in e-learning tools. However, by the emergence of semantic web, e-learning tools particularly the ones issuing e-learning content have upgraded the metadata operation by adding the semantic structure to the present standards and or completely changing the structure into a semantic one. In fact, this change makes it possible to implement a new set of tools issuing e-learning content for the added value to the applied assets.So, the current essay aims at studying the evolution of utilized metadata in e-learning issuing tools from the standard applied programs to its semantic presentation and putting it into practice in our engine producing e-learning content.Indexed Terms-Semantic metadata, reusability learning objects, learning object metadata, ontology