Breast cancer: Monitoring response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy using Tc-99m sestamibi scintimammography

Background: Aim of the study was to assess the value of scintimammography using Tc-99m sestamibi in the evaluation of tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Material and Methods: Results were calculated for 9 patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Scintimammography using 740 MBq Tc-99m sestamibi was performed before, during and after chemotherapy, and sestamibi uptake was scored visually and semiquantitatively to evaluate tumor response. Results: In the case of complete response (n = 3) sestamibi uptake decreased 8 days after beginning neoadjuvant chemotherapy and normalized in the following course. Focal uptake decreased more slowly in patients with partial response (n = 3), who showed clear, persisting tracer accumulation after therapy. The patients without response (n = 3) showed a persisting high tumor activity even after chemotherapy was completed. Conclusions: The preliminary data suggest that in contrast to other imaging modalities scintimammography appears to yield early information regarding tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy

What you give is what you get : payment of one randomly selected trial induces risk-aversion and decreases brain responses to monetary feedback

In economic studies, it is standard practice to pay out the reward of only one randomly selected trial (pay-one) instead of the total reward accumulated across trials (pay-all), assuming that both methods are equivalent. We tested this assumption by recording electrophysiological activity to reward feedback from participants engaged in a decision-making task under both a pay-one and a pay-all condition. We show that participants are approximately 12% more risk averse in the pay-one condition than in the pay-all condition. Furthermore, we observed that the electrophysiological response to monetary rewards, the reward positivity, is significantly reduced in the pay-one condition relative to the pay-all condition. The difference of brain responses is associated with the difference in risky behavior across conditions. We concluded that the two payment methods lead to significantly different results and are therefore not equivalent

Hydromorphological analysis and water balance modelling of ombro- and mesotrophic peatlands

The hydromorphological analysis (HMA) is a method to quantify the potentials of mire revitalisation. In this study, the HMA is combined with the new peatland-tool of the water balance model AKWA-M®. This peatland-tool includes as well depth functions of the hydraulic conductivity and drainable porosity for several mire-ecotope-types as specific equations for mire evapotranspiration. The calculations were applied in several peatlands and mires of the German-Czech Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge/Krušné hory). The simulation results show that the chosen depth functions are valuable for the water balance calculation of mire ecotopes with a fully developed akrotelm like ombro- and mesotrophic peatlands. For degenerated peat soil or regenerating mires it is necessary to improve the model and the parameter calibration, especially the depth functions, with additional measured data in different peatlands

A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects

Comparison between 403 nm and 497 nm repumping schemes for strontium magneto-optical traps

The theoretical description of the external degrees of freedom of atoms trapped inside a magneto-optical trap (MOT) often relies on the decoupling of the evolution of the internal and external degrees of freedom. That is possible thanks to much shorter timescales typically associated with the first ones. The electronic structure of alkaline-earth atoms, on the other hand, presents ultra-narrow transitions and metastable states that makes such an approximation invalid in the general case. In this article, we report on a model based on open Bloch equations for the evolution of the number of atoms in a magneto-optical trap. With this model we investigate the loading of the strontium blue magneto-optical trap under different repumping schemes, either directly from a Zeeman slower, or from an atomic reservoir made of atoms in a metastable state trapped in the magnetic quadrupolar field. The fluorescence observed on the strong 461~nm transition is recorded and quantitatively compared with the results from our simulations. The comparison between experimental results and calculations within our model allowed to identify the existence of the decay paths between the upper level of the repumping transition and the dark strontium metastable states, which could not be explained by electric dipole transition rates calculated in the literature. Moreover, our analysis pinpoints the role of the atomic movement in limiting the efficiency of the atomic repumping of the Sr metastable states

Data trustworthiness and user reputation as indicators of VGI quality

ABSTRACTVolunteered geographic information (VGI) has entered a phase where there are both a substantial amount of crowdsourced information available and a big interest in using it by organizations. But the issue of deciding the quality of VGI without resorting to a comparison with authoritative data remains an open challenge. This article first formulates the problem of quality assessment of VGI data. Then presents a model to measure trustworthiness of information and reputation of contributors by analyzing geometric, qualitative, and semantic aspects of edits over time. An implementation of the model is running on a small data-set for a preliminary empirical validation. The results indicate that the computed trustworthiness provides a valid approximation of VGI quality