39 research outputs found
PCA-based lung motion model
Organ motion induced by respiration may cause clinically significant
targeting errors and greatly degrade the effectiveness of conformal
radiotherapy. It is therefore crucial to be able to model respiratory motion
accurately. A recently proposed lung motion model based on principal component
analysis (PCA) has been shown to be promising on a few patients. However, there
is still a need to understand the underlying reason why it works. In this
paper, we present a much deeper and detailed analysis of the PCA-based lung
motion model. We provide the theoretical justification of the effectiveness of
PCA in modeling lung motion. We also prove that under certain conditions, the
PCA motion model is equivalent to 5D motion model, which is based on physiology
and anatomy of the lung. The modeling power of PCA model was tested on clinical
data and the average 3D error was found to be below 1 mm.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. submitted to International Conference on the use
of Computers in Radiation Therapy 201
Charmless two-body B decays: A global analysis with QCD factorization
In this paper, we perform a global analysis of and decays
with the QCD factorization approach. It is encouraging to observe that the
predictions of QCD factorization are in good agreement with experiment. The
best fit is around . The penguin-to-tree ratio of decays is preferred to be larger than 0.3.
We also show the confidence levels for some interesting channels: , and , . For decays, they are expected to have smaller branching ratios with
more precise measurements.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, version to appear in Phys. Rev.
Contribution of Direct Heating, Thermal Conduction and Perfusion During Radiofrequency and Microwave Ablation
Both radiofrequency (RF) and microwave (MW) ablation devices are clinically used for tumor ablation. Several studies report less dependence on vascular mediated cooling of MW compared to RF ablation. We created computer models of a cooled RF needle electrode, and a dipole MW antenna to determine differences in tissue heat transfer
QCD factorization for B -> PP
In this work, we give a detailed discussion for QCD factorization involved
the complete chirally enhanced power corrections for B decays to two light
pseudoscalar mesons, and present some detailed calculations of radiative
corrections at the order of alpha_s. We point out that the infrared finiteness
of the vertex corrections in the chirally enhanced power corrections requires
twist-3 light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs) of the light pseudoscalar
symmetric. However, even in the symmetric condition, there is also logarithmic
divergence from the endpoints of the twist-3 LCDAs in the hard spectator
scattering. We point out that the decay amplitudes of B --> PP predicted by QCD
factorization are really free of the renormalization scale dependence, at least
at the order of alpha_s. At last, we briefly compare the QCD factorization with
the generalized factorization and PQCD method.Comment: 31 pages, 3 eps figure
Genomic and Epidemiological Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Viruses in Sri Lanka.
Background: In order to understand the molecular epidemiology of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Sri Lanka, since March 2020, we carried out genomic sequencing overlaid on available epidemiological data until April 2021. Methods: Whole genome sequencing was carried out on diagnostic sputum or nasopharyngeal swabs from 373 patients with COVID-19. Molecular clock phylogenetic analysis was undertaken to further explore dominant lineages. Results: The B.1.411 lineage was most prevalent, which was established in Sri Lanka and caused outbreaks throughout the country until March 2021. The estimated time of the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) of this lineage was June 1, 2020 (with 95% lower and upper bounds March 30 to July 27) suggesting cryptic transmission may have occurred, prior to a large epidemic starting in October 2020. Returning travellers were identified with infections caused by lineage B.1.258, as well as the more transmissible B.1.1.7 lineage, which has replaced B.1.411 to fuel the ongoing large outbreak in the country. Conclusions: The large outbreak that started in early October, is due to spread of a single virus lineage, B.1.411 until the end of March 2021, when B.1.1.7 emerged and became the dominant lineage
Phenomenological Analysis of B->PP Decays with QCD Factorization
In this paper, we study nonleptonic charmless B decays to two light
pseudoscalar mesons within the frame of QCD factorization, including the
contributions from the chirally enhanced power corrections and weak
annihilation. Predictions for the CP-averaged branching ratios and CP-violating
asymmetries are given. Within the reasonable range of the parameters, we find
that our predictions for the branching ratios of B -> PP are consistent with
the present experimental data. But because of the logarithmic divergences at
the endpoints in the hard spectator scatterings and weak annihilation, there
are still large uncertainties in these predictions.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures. to appear in PR
Implementation and evaluation of various demons deformable image registration algorithms on GPU
Online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) promises the ability to deliver an
optimal treatment in response to daily patient anatomic variation. A major
technical barrier for the clinical implementation of online ART is the
requirement of rapid image segmentation. Deformable image registration (DIR)
has been used as an automated segmentation method to transfer tumor/organ
contours from the planning image to daily images. However, the current
computational time of DIR is insufficient for online ART. In this work, this
issue is addressed by using computer graphics processing units (GPUs). A
grey-scale based DIR algorithm called demons and five of its variants were
implemented on GPUs using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)
programming environment. The spatial accuracy of these algorithms was evaluated
over five sets of pulmonary 4DCT images with an average size of 256x256x100 and
more than 1,100 expert-determined landmark point pairs each. For all the
testing scenarios presented in this paper, the GPU-based DIR computation
required around 7 to 11 seconds to yield an average 3D error ranging from 1.5
to 1.8 mm. It is interesting to find out that the original passive force demons
algorithms outperform subsequently proposed variants based on the combination
of accuracy, efficiency, and ease of implementation.Comment: Submitted to Physics in Medicine and Biolog
within and beyond the Standard Model
We revisit (with and ) within
the Standard Model (SM). The electro-magnetic contributions are given in
color-singlet model with non-vanishing lepton masses at the leading order of
. Numerically, the branching ratios of
predicted within the SM are so small that such decays are barely possible to be
detected at future BESIII and SuperB experiments, but may be possible to be
observed at the LHC. We investigate in Type-II 2HDM
with large , and in the Randall-Sundrum
model, to see their chance to be observed in future experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. To match the published versio
Genomic and epidemiological analysis of SARS-CoV-2 viruses in Sri Lanka
Background: In order to understand the molecular epidemiology of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Sri Lanka, since March 2020, we carried out genomic sequencing overlaid on available epidemiological data until April 2021.
Methods: Whole genome sequencing was carried out on diagnostic sputum or nasopharyngeal swabs from 373 patients with COVID-19. Molecular clock phylogenetic analysis was undertaken to further explore dominant lineages.
Results: The B.1.411 lineage was most prevalent, which was established in Sri Lanka and caused outbreaks throughout the country until March 2021. The estimated time of the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) of this lineage was June 1, 2020 (with 95% lower and upper bounds March 30 to July 27) suggesting cryptic transmission may have occurred, prior to a large epidemic starting in October 2020. Returning travellers were identified with infections caused by lineage B.1.258, as well as the more transmissible B.1.1.7 lineage, which has replaced B.1.411 to fuel the ongoing large outbreak in the country.
Conclusions: The large outbreak that started in early October, is due to spread of a single virus lineage, B.1.411 until the end of March 2021, when B.1.1.7 emerged and became the dominant lineage