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Objective: The aims of this study were to evaluate the performance of Helicobacter pylori stool antigen test in the diagnosis of H. pylori infection., Method: The study included 63 out patients attending the ULB-Lothier Clinic between January 1 and July 31, 2002. They underwent an upper endoscopy, as well as biopsies for histological examination and for culture of H. pylori. Stool samples of these patients were collected either the day of the endoscopy or within 24 hours and tested for H. pylori antigen (HpSA Test), Results: The mean age of study patients included 29 men and 34 women was 51(+/- :16) years. H. pylori infection was detected in 29 cases (46 %) by culture and histology, and in 31 cases (49.2 %) by detection of the antigen in the feces. In 27 patients, all methods were positive whereas 5 in they provided discrepant results. Compared to the reference methods (culture and histology), the HpSA test had a sensitivity of 96.5% and a specificity of 91.2%. PPV of 90.3% and NPV of 96.8%., Conclusion: The good correlation found between the results of the HpSA test and the methods based on endoscopy supports its use as an alternative to invasive methods of diagnosis of H. pylori infection and therapeutic follow-up.

The evolution of the Laboratory of Pathology at Erasmus Hospital is directly related to the morphological diagnosis integration in the medico-surgical organization of the Hospital. Such integration is based on the creation of links between the Laboratory of Pathology and the clinical departments and necessitates permanent adaptations to new complementary technology. Immunohistochemical methods were gradually included in the surgical morphological diagnosis. Currently, new markers from molecular biology are needed to obtain accurate pathological diagnosis. We observe an increasing hyperspecialization of the morphological classification with complete integration of such biological markers leading to the necessity of carrying out collegial diagnosis. The development of the telepathology technology permits international collegial diagnosis. According to its central position the Laboratory of Pathology plays an important part in the development of the clinical and fundamental research. The research subjects of the Laboratory of Pathology concern diagnostic and prognostic evaluation in colic cancers, sarcomas, brain tumors and HPV related tumors endometriosis.

Fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) is safe, inexpensive, minimally invasive, and highly accurate in the diagnosis of nodular diseases of the thyroid. However, FNAB does not provide a reliable benign versus malignant diagnosis for 100% of the cases analysed. It is possible to increase the accuracy of the cytological diagnosis by means of information contributed by different clinical variables. In the present study we evaluate the diagnostic value of 10 variables in addition to FNAB on a series of 218 specimens for which we obtained histological diagnoses including 37 cancers (17%). The diagnostic information contributed by these variables was analyzed by means of the Decision Tree technique, an artificial intelligence-related method which forms part of the Supervised Learning algorithms. The results show that Decision Trees enable some subpopulations of patients with uncertain FNAB results to be characterized.