Diaphragm as an anatomic surrogate for lung tumor motion

Lung tumor motion due to respiration poses a challenge in the application of modern three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy. Direct tracking of the lung tumor during radiation therapy is very difficult without implanted fiducial markers. Indirect tracking relies on the correlation of the tumor's motion and the surrogate's motion. The present paper presents an analysis of the correlation between the tumor motion and the diaphragm motion in order to evaluate the potential use of diaphragm as a surrogate for tumor motion. We have analyzed the correlation between diaphragm motion and superior-inferior lung tumor motion in 32 fluoroscopic image sequences from 10 lung cancer patients. A simple linear model and a more complex linear model that accounts for phase delays between the two motions have been used. Results show that the diaphragm is a good surrogate for tumor motion prediction for most patients, resulting in an average correlation factor of 0.94 and 0.98 with each model respectively. The model that accounts for delays leads to an average localization prediction error of 0.8mm and an error at the 95% confidence level of 2.1mm. However, for one patient studied, the correlation is much weaker compared to other patients. This indicates that, before using diaphragm for lung tumor prediction, the correlation should be examined on a patient-by-patient basis.Comment: Accepted by Physics in Medicine and Biolog

Status of Muon Collider Research and Development and Future Plans

The status of the research on muon colliders is discussed and plans are outlined for future theoretical and experimental studies. Besides continued work on the parameters of a 3-4 and 0.5 TeV center-of-mass (CoM) energy collider, many studies are now concentrating on a machine near 0.1 TeV (CoM) that could be a factory for the s-channel production of Higgs particles. We discuss the research on the various components in such muon colliders, starting from the proton accelerator needed to generate pions from a heavy-Z target and proceeding through the phase rotation and decay ($\pi \to \mu \nu_{\mu}$) channel, muon cooling, acceleration, storage in a collider ring and the collider detector. We also present theoretical and experimental R & D plans for the next several years that should lead to a better understanding of the design and feasibility issues for all of the components. This report is an update of the progress on the R & D since the Feasibility Study of Muon Colliders presented at the Snowmass'96 Workshop [R. B. Palmer, A. Sessler and A. Tollestrup, Proceedings of the 1996 DPF/DPB Summer Study on High-Energy Physics (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA, 1997)].Comment: 95 pages, 75 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Special Topics, Accelerators and Beam

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Measurement of correlated μ\mu-b‾\overline{b} jet cross sections in pp‾\overline{p} collisions at \Sqrt s = 1.8 TeV

We report on measurements of differential \mu - {\overline b} cross sections, where the muon is from a semi-leptonic b decay and the {\overline b} is identified using precision track reconstruction in jets. The semi-differential correlated cross sections, d\sigma/d\Et^{{\overline b}}, d\sigma/d\pt^{{\overline b}}, and d\sigma/d\delta\phi(\mu - {\overline b}) for \pt^{\mu}>~9~GeV/c, |\eta^{\mu}|~10~GeV, |\eta^{{\overline b}}|<~1.5, are presented and compared to next-to-leading order QCD calculations