Spectrophotometric Determination of Pt(IV) Using N-(2'-Mercaptophenyl)salicylaldimine & Stepwise Formation Constants of Pt(IV) Complexes

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Transrectal Prostate Biopsy and Fiducial Marker Placement in a Standart 1.5T Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanner

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Purpose: We investigated the accuracy and feasibility of a system that provides transrectal needle access to the prostate concurrent with 1.5 Tesla MRI which previously has not been possible. Materials and Methods: In 5 patients with previously diagnosed prostate cancer, MRI guided intraprostatic placement of gold fiducial markers (4 procedures) and/or prostate biopsy (3 procedures) was performed using local anesthesia. Results: Mean procedure duration was 76 minutes and all patients tolerated the intervention well. Procedure related adverse events included self-limited hematuria and hematochezia following 3 of 8 procedures (all resolved in less than 1 week). Mean needle placement accuracy was 1.9 mm for the fiducial marker placement studies and 1.8 mm for the biopsy procedures. Mean fiducial marker placement accuracy was 4.8 mm and the mean fiducial marker placement accuracy transverse to the needle direction was 2.6 mm. All patients who underwent the procedure were able to complete their course of radiotherapy without delay or complication. Conclusions: While studies of clinical usefulness are warranted, transrectal 1.5 T MRI guided prostate biopsy and fiducial marker placement is feasible using this system, providing new opportunities for image guided diagnostic and therapeutic prostate interventions

System for prostate brachytherapy and biopsy in a standard 1.5 T MRI scanner

A technique for transperineal high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy and needle biopsy in a standard 1.5 T MRI scanner is demonstrated. In each of eight procedures (in four patients with intermediate to high risk localized prostate cancer), four MRI-guided transperineal prostate biopsies were obtained followed by placement of 14-15 hollow transperineal catheters for HDR brachytherapy. Mean needle-placement accuracy was 2.1 mm, 95% of needle-placement errors were less than 4.0 mm, and the maximum needle-placement error was 4.4 mm. In addition to guiding the placement of biopsy needles and brachytherapy catheters, MR images were also used for brachytherapy treatment planning and optimization. Because 1.5 T MR images are directly acquired during the interventional procedure, dependence on deformable registration is reduced and online image quality is maximized

Two philosophies for solving non-linear equations in algebraic cryptanalysis

Algebraic Cryptanalysis [45] is concerned with solving of particular systems of multivariate non-linear equations which occur in cryptanalysis. Many different methods for solving such problems have been proposed in cryptanalytic literature: XL and XSL method, Gröbner bases, SAT solvers, as well as many other. In this paper we survey these methods and point out that the main working principle in all of them is essentially the same. One quantity grows faster than another quantity which leads to a “phase transition” and the problem becomes efficiently solvable. We illustrate this with examples from both symmetric and asymmetric cryptanalysis. In this paper we point out that there exists a second (more) general way of formulating algebraic attacks through dedicated coding techniques which involve redundancy with addition of new variables. This opens numerous new possibilities for the attackers and leads to interesting optimization problems where the existence of interesting equations may be somewhat deliberately engineered by the attacker

The influence of skeletal muscle anisotropy on electroporation: in vivo study and numerical modeling

The aim of this study was to theoretically and experimentally investigate electroporation of mouse tibialis cranialis and to determine the reversible electroporation threshold values needed for parallel and perpendicular orientation of the applied electric field with respect to the muscle fibers. Our study was based on local electric field calculated with three-dimensional realistic numerical models, that we built, and in vivo visualization of electroporated muscle tissue. We established that electroporation of muscle cells in tissue depends on the orientation of the applied electric field; the local electric field threshold values were determined (pulse parameters: 8 × 100 μs, 1 Hz) to be 80 V/cm and 200 V/cm for parallel and perpendicular orientation, respectively. Our results could be useful electric field parameters in the control of skeletal muscle electroporation, which can be used in treatment planning of electroporation based therapies such as gene therapy, genetic vaccination, and electrochemotherapy

AD51B in Familial Breast Cancer

Common variation on 14q24.1, close to RAD51B, has been associated with breast cancer: rs999737 and rs2588809 with the risk of female breast cancer and rs1314913 with the risk of male breast cancer. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of RAD51B variants in breast cancer predisposition, particularly in the context of familial breast cancer in Finland. We sequenced the coding region of RAD51B in 168 Finnish breast cancer patients from the Helsinki region for identification of possible recurrent founder mutations. In addition, we studied the known rs999737, rs2588809, and rs1314913 SNPs and RAD51B haplotypes in 44,791 breast cancer cases and 43,583 controls from 40 studies participating in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC) that were genotyped on a custom chip (iCOGS). We identified one putatively pathogenic missense mutation c.541C>T among the Finnish cancer patients and subsequently genotyped the mutation in additional breast cancer cases (n = 5259) and population controls (n = 3586) from Finland and Belarus. No significant association with breast cancer risk was seen in the meta-analysis of the Finnish datasets or in the large BCAC dataset. The association with previously identified risk variants rs999737, rs2588809, and rs1314913 was replicated among all breast cancer cases and also among familial cases in the BCAC dataset. The most significant association was observed for the haplotype carrying the risk-alleles of all the three SNPs both among all cases (odds ratio (OR): 1.15, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.11–1.19, P = 8.88 x 10−16) and among familial cases (OR: 1.24, 95% CI: 1.16–1.32, P = 6.19 x 10−11), compared to the haplotype with the respective protective alleles. Our results suggest that loss-of-function mutations in RAD51B are rare, but common variation at the RAD51B region is significantly associated with familial breast cancer risk

Combined Algebraic and Truncated Differential Cryptanalysis on Reduced-round Simon

Recently, two families of ultra-lightweight block ciphers were proposed, SIMON and SPECK, which come in a variety of block and key sizes (Beaulieu et al., 2013). They are designed to offer excellent performance for hardware and software implementations (Beaulieu et al., 2013; Aysu et al., 2014). In this paper, we study the resistance of SIMON-64/128 with respect to algebraic attacks. Its round function has very low Multiplicative Complexity (MC) (Boyar et al., 2000; Boyar and Peralta, 2010) and very low non-linearity (Boyar et al., 2013; Courtois et al., 2011) since the only non-linear component is the bitwise multiplication operation. Such ciphers are expected to be very good candidates to be broken by algebraic attacks and combinations with truncated differentials (additional work by the same authors). We algebraically encode the cipher and then using guess-then-determine techniques, we try to solve the underlying system using either a SAT solver (Bard et al., 2007) or by ElimLin al gorithm (Courtois et al., 2012b). We consider several settings where P-C pairs that satisfy certain properties are available, such as low Hamming distance or follow a strong truncated differential property (Knudsen, 1995). We manage to break faster than brute force up to 10(/44) rounds for most cases we have tried. Surprisingly, no key guessing is required if pairs which satisfy a strong truncated differential property are available. This reflects the power of combining truncated differentials with algebraic attacks in ciphers of low non-linearity and shows that such ciphers require a large number of rounds to be secure