Continuous photon energy modulation in IMRT of pancreatic cancer

Purpose: To develop a novel IMRT optimization method based on the principle of photon energy synthesis that simultaneously optimizes fluence map and beamlet energy. The method was validated on pancreatic cancers to demonstrate the benefits of the additional degree of freedom of photon energy in IMRT.Methods: Previous work has demonstrated that the effect of a photon beam of known energy can be achieved by the combination of two existing energy photons in the proper ratio. It further implied that any energy photon can be synthesized. Based on this, we propose the concept of continuous beamlet energy modulation in IMRT, or IMRT-BEM. The IMRT-BEM was modeled as the simultaneous optimization of two fluence maps, one for the low energy beam and one for the high energy beam, and it was implemented in an in-house inverse planning system. The IMRT-BEM was applied on 10 pancreatic cancer cases, where the IMRT-BEM plan was compared with single-energy IMRT plans of 6 MV (IMRT-6MV) and 15 MV photons (IMRT-15MV).Results: The IMRT-BEM plan provides a noticeable reduction to the volume irradiated at the high dose level (PTV105%) for PTV, at least 24.7% (6.4 ± 6.8 vs. 31.1 ± 18.7 (p = 0.005) and 43.8 ± 19.8 (p = 0.005) for IMRT-BEM, IMRT-6MV, and IMRT-15MV respectively). For target dose coverage, there were statistically significant improvements between the IMRT-BEM plans and the other two plans in terms of CI and HI. Compared to the IMRT-6MV plan, there were significant reductions in the Dmean of the spinal cord, liver, bowel, duodenum, and stomach. The irradiation volumes of the medium dose (V20Gy, and V40Gy) for the duodenum and bowel were reduced significantly. There were no significant differences between the IMRT-BEM and IMRT-15MV plans except for the Dmean of the spinal cord and the duodenum, the V20Gy, and V40Gy for the duodenum, and the V20Gy of the stomach.Conclusion: IMRT-BEM has certain dosimetric advantages for PTV and improves OAR sparing in pancreatic cancer, and can be effectively used in radiation treatment planning, providing another degree of freedom for planners to improve treatment plan quality

Survey on Dim Small Target Detection in Clutter Background: Wavelet, Inter-Frame and Filter Based Algorithms

AbstractDim small target is an active and important research area in image processing and pattern recognition. Various algorithms have been proposed to detect and track dim small target. This paper reviews some algorithms for dim small target detection, including the wavelet based algorithms, inter-frame difference based algorithms and filter based algorithms. Also, the further development of the technologies has been briefly analyzed

Bis(μ-2-{bis­[(2-oxidobenzyl­idene)amino]­meth­yl}phenolato)bis­[(tetra­hydro­furan)­samarium(III)] tetra­hydro­furan disolvate

In the centrosymmetric binuclear complex of the title solvate, [Sm2(C21H15N2O3)2(C4H8O)2]·2C4H8O, the SmIII is coordin­ated in a distorted monocapped octa­hedral geometry by four O atoms and two N atoms from two tridentate deprotonated 2-{bis­[(2-oxidobenzyl­idene)amino]­meth­yl}phenolate ligands and an O atom of a tetra­hydro­furan (THF) mol­ecule. The Sm⋯Sm distance in the complex is 3.8057 (4) Å. Parts of the coordinating THF mol­ecule are disordered over two sets of sites in a 0.56 (3):0.44 (3) ratio. The complex and solvent mol­ecules are linked into a three-dimensional structure via C—H⋯O hydrogen-bonding inter­actions

A β-glucosidase hyper-production Trichoderma reesei mutant reveals a potential role of cel3D in cellulase production

Abstract Background The conversion of cellulose by cellulase to fermentable sugars for biomass-based products such as cellulosic biofuels, biobased fine chemicals and medicines is an environment-friendly and sustainable process, making wastes profitable and bringing economic benefits. Trichoderma reesei is the well-known major workhorse for cellulase production in industry, but the low β-glucosidase activity in T. reesei cellulase leads to inefficiency in biomass degradation and limits its industrial application. Thus, there are ongoing interests in research to develop methods to overcome this insufficiency. Moreover, although β-glucosidases have been demonstrated to influence cellulase production and participate in the regulation of cellulase production, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Results The T. reesei recombinant strain TRB1 was constructed from T. reesei RUT-C30 by the T-DNA-based mutagenesis. Compared to RUT-C30, TRB1 displays a significant enhancement of extracellular β-glucosidase (BGL1) activity with 17-fold increase, a moderate increase of both the endoglucanase (EG) activity and the exoglucanase (CBH) activity, a minor improvement of the total filter paper activity, and a faster cellulase induction. This superiority of TRB1 over RUT-C30 is independent on carbon sources and improves the saccharification ability of TRB1 cellulase on pretreated corn stover. Furthermore, TRB1 shows better resistance to carbon catabolite repression than RUT-C30. Secretome characterization of TRB1 shows that the amount of CBH, EG and BGL in the supernatant of T. reesei TRB1 was indeed increased along with the enhanced activities of these three enzymes. Surprisingly, qRT-PCR and gene cloning showed that in TRB1 β-glucosidase cel3D was mutated through the random insertion by AMT and was not expressed. Conclusions The T. reesei recombinant strain TRB1 constructed in this study is more desirable for industrial application than the parental strain RUT-C30, showing extracellular β-glucosidase hyper production, high cellulase production within a shorter time and a better resistance to carbon catabolite repression. Disruption of β-glucosidase cel3D in TRB1 was identified, which might contribute to the superiority of TRB1 over RUT-C30 and might play a role in the cellulase production. These results laid a foundation for future investigations to further improve cellulase enzymatic efficiency and reduce cost for T. reesei cellulase production.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134636/1/12934_2016_Article_550.pd

A fixed-point algorithm for blind source separation with nonlinear autocorrelation

AbstractThis paper addresses blind source separation (BSS) problem when source signals have the temporal structure with nonlinear autocorrelation. Using the temporal characteristics of sources, we develop an objective function based on the nonlinear autocorrelation of sources. Maximizing the objective function, we propose a fixed-point source separation algorithm. Furthermore, we give some mathematical properties of the algorithm. Computer simulations for sources with square temporal autocorrelation and the real-world applications in the analysis of the magnetoencephalographic recordings (MEG) illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach. Thus, the presented BSS algorithm, which is based on the nonlinear measure of temporal autocorrelation, provides a novel statistical property to perform BSS

A Two-Level Task Scheduler on Multiple DSP System for OpenCL

This paper addresses the problem that multiple DSP system does not support OpenCL programming. With the compiler, runtime, and the kernel scheduler proposed, an OpenCL application becomes portable not only between multiple CPU and GPU, but also between embedded multiple DSP systems. Firstly, the LLVM compiler was imported for source-to-source translation in which the translated source was supported by CCS. Secondly, two-level schedulers were proposed to support efficient OpenCL kernel execution. The DSP/BIOS is used to schedule system level tasks such as interrupts and drivers; however, the synchronization mechanism resulted in heavy overhead during task switching. So we designed an efficient second level scheduler especially for OpenCL kernel work-item scheduling. The context switch process utilizes the 8 functional units and cross path links which was superior to DSP/BIOS in the aspect of task switching. Finally, dynamic loading and software managed CACHE were redesigned for OpenCL running on multiple DSP system. We evaluated the performance using some common OpenCL kernels from NVIDIA, AMD, NAS, and Parboil benchmarks. Experimental results show that the DSP OpenCL can efficiently exploit the computing resource of multiple cores