A healthy 70-year-old male patient, who was a farmer by occupation presented to us with complaints of recurrent right sided nasal block, right sided retro-orbital pain and multiple episodes of epistaxis of three months duration. There was no history of tuberculosis, diabetes mellitus or other immunocompromised states. The diagnostic nasal endoscopy did not reveal any gross abnormality except for a deviated nasal septum to right, minimal mucosal discharge on right nasal cavity and polypoidal mucosa over right middle turbinate. His serum IgE was 305 UI/ml. CT scan of the Nose and Paranasal Sinuses showed a soft tissue density obliterating the right sphenoid sinus and right posterior ethmoid air cells with widened sphenoethmoidal recess [Table/ Fig-1]. Functional Endoscopic Sinus Surgery was done to clear out the disease from sinuses. Intraoperatively fungal debris and mucin with mucosal hypertrophy was found in the right posterior ethmoid sinus and sphenoid sinus which was sent for microbiological examination. There were no complications intraoperatively or postoperatively and the patient was discharged in the third postoperative day. Microbiological examination confirmed the presence of the fungus on Potassium Hydroxide preparation. The fungus grew on Sabouraud's dextrose agar after one week of incubation as white cottony growth with reverse light brown. On Lactophenol cotton blue preparation hyaline, septate hyphae with terminal one celled ovoid smooth walled conidia were present [ Chrysosporium: An Uncommon Fungus in Chronic Rhinosinusitis aBstRaCt Chronic rhinosinusitis is one of the commonest health problem encountered in rhinology. Of these allergic fungal rhinosinusitis forms a significant group of patients. Patients commonly present with typical symptoms of sinusitis and the diagnosis is often made after imaging and/ or intraoperatively. We report a rare case of allergic fungal sinusitis (AFS) caused by Chrysosporium species in a 70-year-old male with no comorbidities. The fungus was isolated from allergic mucin collected from the sinuses. Therapy with intravenous Voriconazole was given leading to good relief for the patient, and no recurrences have occurred till date. Infections caused by Chrysosporium species are very rare, and is very rarely been reported to cause sinusitis in humans. DisCussionChronic rhinosinusitis is a major cause of morbidity in our current era affecting more than 14% of adults and children [1]. Acute rhinosinusitis is usually unimicrobial whereas chronic form will have multiple microorganisms [1]. Chronically infected sinuses are often inhabitant for fungus which is difficult to completely eradicate hence adding complications or morbidities [2]. Incidence of AFS is 5-10% of all cases of chronic rhinosinusitis which requires surgery [3]. It represents an allergic/hypersensitivity disorder and is the commonest form of fungal rhinosinusitis [4]. Members of the dematiaceous family are commonly implicated like alternaria, curvularia, fusarium, rhizopus, drechslera and excerohilum [5].A...

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Gliomas are extremely infiltrative type of brain cancers, the borders of which are difficult to locate. Gliomas largely consist of tumors of astrocytic or oligodendroglial lineage. Usually stereotactic surgery is performed to obtain tumor tissue sample. Complete excision of these tumors with preservation of uninvolved normal areas is important during brain tumor surgeries. The present study was undertaken to explore feasibility of classifying abnormal and normal glioma tissues with Raman spectroscopy (RS). RS is a nondestructive vibrational spectroscopic technique, which provides information about molecular composition, molecular structures and molecular interactions in tissue. Postoperated 33 (20-abnormal and 13-normal) gliomas tissue samples of different grades were collected under clinical supervision. Five micron section from tissue sample was used for confirmatory histopathological diagnosis while the remaining tissue was placed on CaF 2 window and spectra were acquired using a fiberoptic-probe-coupled HE-785 Raman-spectrometer. Spectral acquisition parameters were laser power-80mW, integration-20s and averaged over 3 accumulations. Spectra were pre-processed and subjected to unsupervised Principal-Component Analysis (PCA) to identify trends of classification. Supervised PC-LDA (Principal-Component-Linear-Discriminant Analysis) was used to develop standard-models using spectra of 12 normal and abnormal specimens each. Leave-one-out crossvalidation yielded classification-efficiency of 90% and 80% for normal and abnormal conditions, respectively. Evaluation with an independent-test data-set comprising of 135 spectra of 9 samples provided sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 70%. Findings of this preliminary study may pave way for objective tumor margin assessment during brain surgery.

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