A validated methodological approach to prove the safety of clinical electromagnetic induction systems in magnetic hyperthermia

The present study focuses on the development of a methodology for evaluating the safety of MNH systems, through the numerical prediction of the induced temperature rise in superficial skin layers due to eddy currents heating under an alternating magnetic field (AMF). The methodology is supported and validated through experimental measurements of the AMF’s distribution, as well as temperature data from the torsos of six patients who participated in a clinical trial study. The simulations involved a computational model of the actual coil, a computational model of the cooling system used for the cooling of the patients during treatment, and a detailed human anatomical model from the Virtual Population family. The numerical predictions exhibit strong agreement with the experimental measurements, and the deviations are below the estimated combined uncertainties, confirming the accuracy of computational modeling. This study highlights the crucial role of simulations for translational medicine and paves the way for personalized treatment planning.peer-reviewe

EffoVPR: Effective Foundation Model Utilization for Visual Place Recognition

The task of Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is to predict the location of a query image from a database of geo-tagged images. Recent studies in VPR have highlighted the significant advantage of employing pre-trained foundation models like DINOv2 for the VPR task. However, these models are often deemed inadequate for VPR without further fine-tuning on task-specific data. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful approach to better exploit the potential of a foundation model for VPR. We first demonstrate that features extracted from self-attention layers can serve as a powerful re-ranker for VPR. Utilizing these features in a zero-shot manner, our method surpasses previous zero-shot methods and achieves competitive results compared to supervised methods across multiple datasets. Subsequently, we demonstrate that a single-stage method leveraging internal ViT layers for pooling can generate global features that achieve state-of-the-art results, even when reduced to a dimensionality as low as 128D. Nevertheless, incorporating our local foundation features for re-ranking, expands this gap. Our approach further demonstrates remarkable robustness and generalization, achieving state-of-the-art results, with a significant gap, in challenging scenarios, involving occlusion, day-night variations, and seasonal changes

The Mg isotope signature of marine Mg-evaporites

Marine Mg-evaporites are a small oceanic sink of magnesium, precipitating only from extremely evaporated brines. The isotopic composition of Mg in seawater, δ26Mgseawater, has recently been shown to be an effective tool for reconstructing the Mg budget of the modern and past oceans. However, estimations of the Mg isotope fractionation between the Mg-evaporites and their precipitating solution are required for full quantification of the isotope effect of the evaporitic sink on δ26Mgseawater, as well as for utilizing ancient evaporitic sequences as an archive for past δ26Mgseawater. Here, we estimate the Mg isotope fractionation between Mg-evaporites and modern marine-derived brine along the course of seawater evaporation, up to degree evaporation of >200. The sequence of Mg-salts included epsomite (MgSO4·7H2O), kainite (KMgClSO4·3H2O), carnallite (KMgCl3·6H2O), kieserite (MgSO4·H2O) and bischofite (MgCl2·6H2O). The following isotope fractionation values, either negative or positive, were calculated from the isotope difference between the salt and its precipitating brine, and from the evolution of δ26Mg in the brine throughout the evaporation: Δcarnallite-brine = +1.1‰, Δepsomite-brine = +0.59‰, Δbischofite-brine = +0.33‰, Δkieserite-brine = −0.2‰ and Δkainite-brine = −1.3‰. Magnesium isotopic compositions determined on minerals from different ages in the geological record corroborate well these results. Due to precipitation of multi-mineral assemblages having isotope fractionation values of opposing signs, the δ26Mg value of the brine changes only slightly (50%). The isotope fractionations are shown to correlate with the number of water molecules coordinated to the Mg2+ and with Mg-O bond length in the mineral lattice. Given these isotope fractionations, it is calculated that a volume of 0.4 · 106–0.8 · 106 Km3 of a mono-mineral assemblage of kainite or carnallite needs to precipitate in order to change seawater δ26Mg by only 0.1‰. This huge volume is by far larger than the volume of these minerals known to date in the global geological record. Therefore, it is concluded that the impact of Mg-evaporites formation on δ26Mgseawater has been insignificant since the Proterozoic. The results of this study suggest that the Mg isotopic composition of Mg-evaporites preserved in the geological record of evaporitic basins may be used to: 1) quantify geochemical processes that fractionate Mg-isotopes within these basins, such as dolomitization; and 2) complete the secular variations curve of the marine δ26Mg record using basins with well-established evaporitic sequences.ISSN:0016-7037ISSN:1872-953

Precise determination of delta Sr-88/86 in natural samples by double-spike MC-ICP-MS and its TIMS verification

delta Sr-88/86 values of standards and a variety of natural samples were measured by MC-ICP-MS using the double-spike (DS) method and compared to results obtained by the standard-sample-bracketing (SSB) method and to DS-TIMS measurements. The external reproducibility of the SRM987 measurements carried out by DS-MC-ICP-MS was 0.021 parts per thousand (1SD), slightly better than previously published DS-TIMS and SSB-MC-ICP-MS results. The value of the IAPSO seawater standard (0.388 +/- 0.018; 2SEM) agrees with the results of the current SSB and DS-TIMS measurements and with previously published values. Using these values a variance-weighted mean for seawater was calculated (0.387 +/- 0.002, 2SEM). Compared to measurements carried out by the SSB method, natural sample measurements by the DS method are more accurate and more precise. An excellent agreement between DS-MC-ICP-MS and DS-TIMS methods was demonstrated for delta Sr-88/86 determination in natural samples over a range of similar to 0.5 parts per thousand. The DS-TIMS delta Sr-88/86 results had a smaller standard error than the DS-MC-ICP-MS measurements but required a much longer acquisition tim

A targeted population carrier screening program for severe and frequent genetic diseases in Israel

A national carrier screening program targeted at communities in which severe genetic diseases are present with a frequency higher than 1/1000 live births, has been in existence in Israel since 2002. Within the communities at risk, carrier screening is voluntary whereas genetic counseling and testing is provided free of charge. During the first 5 years of the program more than 13 000 tests were performed, and at the end of 2007 it was offered in 35 different localities/communities for a total of 36 diseases. Many of the couples identified to be at risk opted for prenatal diagnosis and in two cases an affected pregnancy was terminated. In some cases the couples declined prenatal diagnosis and two of those families gave birth to an affected child. Based on the experience learnt from this targeted screening program it appears that a knowledge-based, voluntary screening program operated within the community is an effective way to provide genetic services and test referrals. The community program directed toward couples in their reproductive period does not seem to have led to stigmatization at either the individual or the community level