Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy with 177Lu-octreotate: clinical aspects

Somatostatin is a neuropeptide with a variety of functions and is produced in several tissues. The isoform somatostatin-14 (SS-14) is more biologically active than SS-28. Its main physiological function is to inhibit secretion of hormones such as growth hormone or thyroid stimulating hormone in the pituitary, insulin or glucagon in the pancreas and of exocrine gut secretion. The effects of somatostatin are mediated by binding to the somatostatin receptor (sst), which are G-protein-coupled receptors. Five sst subtypes have been identified (sst1 - sst5) which all have different roles. The naturally occurring SS-14 and SS-28 have high affinity for all these subtypes. Several tumours (Table 1), amongst others gastroenteropancreatic tumours (GEPNET), have overexpression of sst on the cell surface. This makes sst a possible target for therapy with somatostatin analogues to try and inhibit the secretion of bioactive substances by these tumours and possibly to slow down tumour growth. However, the biological half-life of SS-14 and SS-28 is short, and this makes it impossible to use them for therapeutic goals. With the invention of the cyclic octapeptide octreotide, half-life increased significantly and octreotide then could be used in treatment of patients with sst-positive tumours

Stereotyping: An Open Conversation on the Establishment, Nature, and Impact of Stereotypes on Society

Stereotypes are generalizations about groups of people that have impacted predominantly marginalized communities. We typically use stereotypes against a generalized other and some stereotypes have become part of our perceptual sets. This activity attempts to re-humanize stereotypes by confronting students with known stereotypes and makes students reflect on the impact of stereotypes on people’s lives

Symmetric Jacobians

This article is about polynomial maps with a certain symmetry and/or antisymmetry in their Jacobians, and whether the Jacobian Conjecture is satisfied for such maps, or whether it is sufficient to prove the Jacobian Conjecture for such maps. For instance, we show that it suffices to prove the Jacobian conjecture for polynomial maps x + H over C such that JH satisfies all symmetries of the square, where H is homogeneous of arbitrary degree d >= 3.Comment: 18 pages, minor corrections, grayscale eepic boxes have been replaced by colorful tikz boxe

Remarks on a normal subgroup of GA_n

We show that the subgroup generated by locally finite polynomial automorphisms of k^n is normal in GA_n. Also, some properties of normal subgroups of GA_n containing all diagonal automorphisms are given.Comment: 5 page

Improve OR-schedule to reduce number of required beds

After surgery most of the surgical patients have to be admitted in a ward in the hospital. Due to financial reasons and an decreasing number of available nurses in the Netherlands over the years, it is important to reduce the bed usage as much as possible. One possible way to achieve this is to create an operating room (OR) schedule that spreads the usage of beds nicely over time, and thereby minimizes the number of required beds. An OR-schedule is given by an assignment of OR-blocks to specific days in the planning horizon and has to fulfill several resource constraints. Due to the stochastic nature of the length of stay of patients, the analytic calculation of the number of required beds for a given OR-schedule is a complex task involving the convolution of discrete distributions. In this paper, two approaches to deal with this complexity are presented. First, a heuristic approach based on local search is given, which takes into account the detailed formulation of the objective. A second approach reduces the complexity by simplifying the objective function. This allows modeling and solving the resulting problem as an ILP. Both approaches are tested on data provided by Hagaziekenhuis in the Netherlands. Furthermore, several what-if scenarios are evaluated. The computational results show that the approach that uses the simplified objective function provides better solutions to the original problem. By using this approach, the number of required beds for the considered instance of HagaZiekenhuis can be reduced by almost 20%

Quantitative assessment of prefrontal cortex in humans relative to nonhuman primates

Significance A longstanding controversy in neuroscience pertains to differences in human prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared with other primate species; specifically, is human PFC disproportionately large? Distinctively human behavioral capacities related to higher cognition and affect presumably arose from evolutionary modifications since humans and great apes diverged from a common ancestor about 6–8 Mya. Accurate determination of regional differences in the amount of cortical gray and subcortical white matter content in humans, great apes, and Old World monkeys can further our understanding of the link between structure and function of the human brain. Using tissue volume analyses, we show a disproportionately large amount of gray and white matter corresponding to PFC in humans compared with nonhuman primates.</jats:p

Designing for multi-user interaction in the home environment: Implementing social translucence

© 2016 ACM. Interfaces of interactive systems for domestic use are usually designed for individual interactions although these interactions influence multiple users. In order to prevent conflicts and unforeseen influences on others we propose to leverage the human ability to take each other into consideration in the interaction. A promising approach for this is found in the social translucence framework, which was originally described by Erickson & Kellogg. In this paper, we investigate how to design multi-user interfaces for domestic interactive systems through two design cases where we focus on the implementation of social translucence constructs (visibility, awareness, and accountability) in the interaction. We use the resulting designs to extract design considerations: interfaces should not prescribe behavior, need to offer sufficient interaction alternatives, and previous settings need to be retrievable. We also identify four steps that can be integrated in any design process to help designers in creating interfaces that support multi-user interaction through social translucence