Single fraction radiosurgery using Rapid Arc for treatment of intracranial targets

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Stereotactic-Radio-Surgery (SRS) using Conformal-Arc-Therapy (CAT) is a well established irradiation technique for treatment of intracranial targets. Although small safety margins are required because of very high accuracy of patient positioning and exact online localisation, there are still disadvantages like long treatment time, high number of monitor units (MU) and covering of noncircular targets. This planning study analysed whether Rapid Arc (RA) with stereotactic localisation for single-fraction SRS can solve these problems.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Ten consecutive patients were treated with Linac-based SRS. Eight patients had one or more brain metastases. The other patients presented a symptomatic vestibularis schwannoma and an atypic meningeoma. For all patients, two plans (CAT/RA) were calculated and analysed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Conformity was higher for RA with additional larger low-dose areas. Furthermore, RA reduced the number of MU and the treatment time for all patients. Dose to organs at risk were equal or slightly higher using RA in comparison to CAT.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>RA provides a new alternative for single-fraction SRS irradiation combining advantages of short treatment time with lower number of MU and better conformity in addition to accuracy of stereotactic localisation in selected cases with uncomplicated clinical realization.</p

Search for neutral heavy leptons produced in ZZ decays

Weak isosinglet Neutral Heavy Leptons (νm) have been searched for using data collected by the DELPHI detector corresponding to 3.3 × 106 hadronic Z0 decays at LEP1. Four separate searches have been performed, for short-lived νm production giving monojet or acollinear jet topologies, and for long-lived νm giving detectable secondary vertices or calorimeter clusters. No indication of the existence of these particles has been found, leading to an upper limit for the branching ratio BR(Z0 → νmν̄) of about 1.3 × 10-6 at 95% confidence level for νm masses between 3.5 and 50 GeV/c2. Outside this range the limit weakens rapidly with the νm mass. The results are also interpreted in terms of limits for the single production of excited neutrinos. © Springer-Verlag 1997

Transcriptional activity of the RHOB gene is influenced by regulatory polymorphisms in its promoter region

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic joint disease with genetic as well as environmental factors contributing to its etiology. We recently identified RHOB as a gene overexpressed in osteoarthritis. Interestingly, RHOB harbors numerous polymorphisms in its promoter region and genotyping of OA patients and healthy controls revealed an association of the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs585017 with the disease. We here set out to investigate the influence of RHOB promoter polymorphisms on the transcriptional activity of the gene and we found evidence that the SNPs rs2602160 and rs585017 cooperate in regulating RHOB expression. In addition, a variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) impacts on the RHOB transcriptional activity in a cell type restricted manner. These results mechanistically link our previous finding of an elevated RHOB expression to the disease associated SNP rs585017 and confirm a role for regulatory polymorphisms in osteoarthritis

Electroweak parameters of the z0 resonance and the standard model

Contains fulltext : 124399.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Multi-omics discovery of exome-derived neoantigens in hepatocellular carcinoma

Background: Although mutated HLA ligands are considered ideal cancer-specific immunotherapy targets, evidence for their presentation is lacking in hepatocellular carcinomas (HCCs). Employing a unique multi-omics approach comprising a neoepitope identification pipeline, we assessed exome-derived mutations naturally presented as HLA class I ligands in HCCs.Methods: In-depth multi-omics analyses included whole exome and transcriptome sequencing to define individual patient-specific search spaces of neoepitope candidates. Evidence for the natural presentation of mutated HLA ligands was investigated through an in silico pipeline integrating proteome and HLA ligandome profiling data.Results: The approach was successfully validated in a state-of-the-art dataset from malignant melanoma, and despite multi-omics evidence for somaticmutations, mutated naturally presented HLA ligands remained elusive in HCCs. An analysis of extensive cancer datasets confirmed fundamental differences of tumor mutational burden in HCC and malignantmelanoma, challenging the notion that exome-derived mutations contribute relevantly to the expectable neoepitope pool in malignancies with only few mutations.Conclusions: This study suggests that exome-derived mutated HLA ligands appear to be rarely presented in HCCs, inter alia resulting from a low mutational burden as compared to other malignancies such as malignantmelanoma. Our results therefore demand widening the target scope for personalized immunotherapy beyond this limited range of mutated neoepitopes, particularly for malignancies with similar or lower mutational burden

The reaction e+ e- ---> gamma gamma (gamma) at Z0 energies

The total and differential cross-sections for the reaction e+e- → γγ(γ) are measured at centre of mass energies around 91 GeV using an integrated luminosity of 4.7 pb-1. The aggreement with QED prediction is good. Consequently there is no evidence for non-standard channels which would have the same experimental signature. The lower limits on the QED cuttoff parameters are Λ+ > 113 GeV and Λ- > 95 GeV. An upper limit on the effective coupling between a possible excited electron and the gamma is derived. At 95% confidence level the branching ratios for Z0 decay into π0γ, ηψ and γγγ are below 1.5 × 10-4, 2.8 × 10-4 and 1.4 × 10-4 respectively.0info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe