This multicenter, open-label, non-comparative phase II trial evaluated the safety and efficacy of salvage therapy with lenalidomide, melphalan, prednisone and thalidomide (RMPT) in patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma (MM). Oral lenalidomide (10 mg/day) was administered on days 1-21, and oral melphalan (0.18 mg/kg) and oral prednisone (2 mg/kg) on days 1-4 of each 28-day cycle. Thalidomide was administered at 50 mg/day or 100 mg/day on days 1-28; six cycles were administered in total. Maintenance included lenalidomide 10 mg/day on days 1-21, until unacceptable adverse events or disease progression. Aspirin (100 mg/day) was given as thromboprophylaxis. A total of 44 patients with relapsed/ refractory MM were enrolled and 75% achieved at least a partial response (PR), including 32% very good PR (VGPR) and 2% complete response (CR). The 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) was 51% and the 1-year overall survival (OS) from study entry was 72%. Grade 4 hematologic adverse events included neutropenia (18%), thrombocytopenia (7%) and anemia (2%). Grade 3 non-hematologic adverse events were infections (14%), neurological toxicity (4.5%) and fatigue (7%). No grade 3/4 thromboembolic events or peripheral neuropathy were reported. In conclusion, RMPT is an active salvage therapy with good efficacy and manageable side effects. This study represents the basis for larger phase III randomized trials.

This work presents a language model adaptation method combining the latent semantic analysis framework with the minimum discrimination information estimation criterion. In particular, an unsupervised topic model decomposition is built which allows to infer topic related word distributions from very short adaptation texts. The resulting word distribution is then used to constraint the estimation of a minimum divergence trigram language. With respect to previous work, implementation details are discussed that make such approach effective for a large scale application. Experimental results are provided for a digital library indexing task, i.e. the speech transcription of five historical documentary films. By adapting a trigram language model from very terse content descriptions, i.e. maximum ten words, available for each film, a word error rate relative reduction of 3.2% was achieved.

manifestations with neuronal loss in the frontal lobe, basal ganglia, hippocampus, cerebellum were present. In most of cases the arteriolosclerosis with perivascular rarefaction was present. The reactive astrogliosis with positive astrocytic marker GFAP was seen in all cases but showed variable degrees. The perivascular activation of microglia and the microglial nodules with CD68 positive cells were in the cortex, basal ganglia, hippocampus, brainstem, but less in cerebellum. And perivascular infiltration by CD3 was most pronounced in the brainstem. ConclusionsThus, the morphological changes of the CNS associated with COVID-19 include ischemic infarction with encephalolysis, astrogliosis, microgliosis, perivascular infiltration by CD3 in different regions of the brain.

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Background and aimsIn March 2020, WHO declared Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak to be a pandemic. All countries were given the call to take prompt actions to reduce spread of infection and save lives. The prevalence of the disease rose exponentially worldwide. When it comes to the new SARS COVID 19, the understanding of the disease was poor, especially among the non-medical folk. Social media was flooded with information and several of them were not tested for authenticity. Accurate information is the key to protect oneself, one's family as well as one's society and break the chain in the spread of the misinformation and the disease. MethodsIn June 2020, we conducted a study among the students of an engineering college to assess the knowledge about COVID-19. An online questionnaire with 29 open ended questions was mailed to 700 students and faculty. The questionnaire included demographics, fund of information, risk factors, prophylaxis, protection and mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Results416 subjects ages ranging from 18-53 years participated in the study. 22.8% believed that COVID-19 is caused by bacteria.12.5% believed that it affects the elderly only. 41.1% believed it is airborne. 37.7% considered it unsafe to go to hospitals for medical attention though 80.5% believed that if they have cough or fever, they should get tested. 46.6% believed a vaccine for COVID-19 has already been launched. ConclusionsOur study results showed several lacunae in the levels of knowledge regarding COVID-19 except for the co-morbidities being risk factors for COVID-19.