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Summary: Background: Bladder cancer is a highly over-represented disease in males. The involvement of sex steroids in bladder carcinogenesis and the utilisation of steroid hormone action as a therapeutic target have been frequently proposed. However, the intratumoural steroid milieu remains unclear. Methods: We used mass spectrometry and transcriptomic profiling to determine the levels of 23 steroid hormones and the expression of steroidogenic enzymes in primary tumours from patients who underwent transurethral resection (n = 24), and tumours and adjacent morphologically benign bladder tissues from treatment-naïve patients, who underwent radical cystectomy (n = 20). The corresponding steroids were determined from the patients’ sera. Findings: Our results show that both bladder tumours and non-tumour tissues are androgen-poor, with DHT being virtually unquantifiable and testosterone at castration levels. Intratumoural enzymes that inactivate potent androgens (e.g., HSD17B2) exhibited similar tumour aggressiveness-linked downregulation, as reported in advanced forms of classical steroid-dependent cancers, whereas there was little change in the corresponding activating enzymes. Finally, our results suggest cancer aggressiveness-linked dissimilarities in steroid profiles; the patients with overall low circulating steroid levels and those with an association between androgen receptor expression and intratumoural testosterone levels in place had fewer recurrences than the rest. Interpretation: By revealing the steroid landscape of bladder cancer, our study not only underscores the androgen-poor nature of the malignancy but also identifies potential alterations in steroid profiles that are linked to disease aggressiveness. Funding: The Cancer Foundation Finland, the Finnish State Research Funding (VTR).

The National Library of Finland has digitized and made available the historical newspapers published in Finland between 1771 and 1910 (Bremer-Laamanen 2014; Kettunen et al. 2014). This collection contains approximately 1.95 million pages in Finnish and Swedish. The Finnish part of the collection consists of about 2.40 billion words. The National Library’s Digital Collections are offered via the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi web service, also known as Digi. An open data package of the whole collection was released in early 2017 (Pääkkönen et al. 2016). Quality of OCRed collections is an important topic in digital humanities, as it affects general usability and searchability of collections. There is no single available method to assess quality of large collections, but different methods can be used to approximate quality. This paper discusses different corpus analysis style methods to approximate overall lexical quality of the Finnish part of the Digi collection. Methods include usage of parallel samples and word error rates, usage of morphological analysers, frequency analysis of words and comparisons to comparable edited lexical data. Our aim in the quality analysis is twofold: firstly to analyse the present state of the lexical data and secondly, to establish a set of assessment methods that build up a compact procedure for quality assessment after e.g. re-OCRing or post-correction of the material. RésuméLa Bibliothèque nationale de Finlande a numérisé et rendu disponible les journaux historiques publiés en Finlande entre 1771 et 1910 (Bremer-Laamanen 2014 ; Kettunen et al. 2014). Cette collection contient environ 1,95 million pages en finnois et suédois. La partie finnoise de la collection compte environ 2,40 milliards de mots. Les Collections numérisées de la Bibliothèque Nationale sont offertes sur le service web digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi, également appelé Digi. Un ensemble de données disponibles de la collection entière est sorti début 2017 (Pääkkönen et al. 2016).La qualité de collections en OCR est un thème important pour les humanités numériques, puisqu’elle concerne l’utilité et la facilité de recherche de collections. Il n’y a pas qu’une seule méthode pour évaluer la qualité de grandes collections, mais des méthodes différentes peuvent être employées pour en estimer la qualité. Cet article discute de méthodes différentes d’analyses de corpus visant à estimer la qualité lexicale totale de la partie finnoise de la collection Digi. Les méthodes comprennent l’usage d’échantillons parallèles et de fréquences d’erreur de mot, l’usage d’analyseurs morphologiques, l’analyse de fréquence de mots et les comparaisons à des données lexicales rédigées comparables. Notre objectif dans l’analyse de qualité est double : premièrement, analyser l’état actuel des données lexicales et, deuxièmement, établir un ensemble de méthodes d’évaluation qui constituent une procédure compacte pour l’évaluation de la qualité après, par exemple, la retransformation en OCR ou après les après corrections du matériel. Mots-clés: qualité d’OCR; estimation de qualité lexicale; collection de journaux finnois du 19e siècle

The National Library of Finland (NLF) has digitized historical newspapers, journals and ephemera published in Finland since the late 1990s. The present collection consists of about 16.51 million pages mainly in Finnish and Swedish. Out of these about 7.64 million pages are freely available on the web site https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/etusivu. The copyright restricted part of the collection can be used at six legal deposit libraries in different parts of Finland. The time period of the open collection is from 1771 to 1929. The last nine years, 1921–1929, were opened in January 2018. This paper presents briefly the ground truth Optical Character Recognition data of about 500 000 words that has been compiled at the NLF for development of an improved OCR process for the Finnish collection. We discuss compilation of the data generally and show results of the new OCR process in comparison to current OCR, using the ground truth data as an evaluation benchmark. We also show with real newspaper data of 30 years and 109 million words that the re-OCRing process is improving the quality of the OCRed data.

Tässä artikkelissa luodaan katsaus Kansalliskirjaston digitoitujen lehtiaineistojen avoimen datan tutkimuskäyttöön. Lehtiaineistoista julkaistiin vuonna 2017 vuodet 1771–1910 kattava datapaketti, ja sen tutkimuskäytöstä on kertynyt tähän mennessä hiukan yli vuoden kokemus. Sivuamme katsauksessa myös aineiston verkkokäyttöä tutkimuksessa. Esittelemme lisäksi myös ohjelmistorajapintoja, joiden kautta aineistoihin pääsee käsiksi.