A planning study for palliative spine treatment using StatRT and megavoltage CT simulation.

Megavoltage CT (MVCT) simulation on the TomoTherapy Hi·Art system is an alternative to conventional CT for treatment planning in the presence of severe metal artifact. StatRT is a new feature that was implemented on the TomoTherapy operator station for performing online MVCT scanning, treatment planning and treatment delivery in one session. The clinical feasibility of using the StatRT technique and MVCT simulation to palliative treatment for a patient with substantial spinal metallic hardware is described. A patient with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer involving the thoracic spine underwent conventional kilovoltage CT simulation. The metal artifact due to stainless steel spine-stabilizing rods was too severe for treatment planning, despite attempts to correct using density override. The patient was then re-scanned using MVCT on a tomotherapy unit. Plans were generated using both StatRT and conventional tomotherapy planning (Tomo plan) with different settings for comparison. StatRT planning ran a total of five iterations in a short planning window (10-15 min). Two Tomo plans were generated using: (1) five iterations in the "full scatter" mode, and (2) 300 iterations in the "beamlet" mode. It was noted that the DVH of the StatRT plan was almost identical to the Tomo plan optimized by the "full scatter" mode and the same number of iterations. Dose distribution analysis reveals that these three planning methods yielded comparable doses to heart, lungs and targets. This work also demonstrated that undermodulation can result in a high degree of thread effects. The overall time for the treatment process (including 7 minutes for simulation, 15 minutes for contouring, 10 minutes for planning and 5 minutes for delivery) decreases from hours to around 40 minutes using the StatRT procedure. StatRT is a feasible treatment-planning tool for physicians to scan, contour and treat patients within one hour. This can be particularly beneficial in urgent palliative treatments

Ruscheweyh-Goyal Derivative of Fractional Order, its Properties Pertaining to Pre-starlike Type Functions and Applications

The study of the operators possessing convolution form and their properties is considered advantageous in geometric function theory. In 1975 Ruscheweyh defined operator for analytic functions using the technique of convolution. In 2005, Goyal and Goyal generalized the Ruscheweyh operator to fractional order (which we call here Ruscheweyh-Goyal differential operator) using Srivastava-Saigo fractional differential operator involving hypergeometric function. Inspired by these earlier efforts, we discuss the properties of the Ruscheweyh-Goyal derivative of arbitrary order. We define a class of pre-starlike type functions involving the Ruscheweyh-Goyal fractional derivative and obtain the inclusion relation. Further, we prove that Ruscheweyh-Goyal derivative operator preserve the convexity and starlikeness for an analytic function. The majorization results for fractional Ruscheweyh-Goyal derivative has been discussed using a newly defined subclass

A Topology Based Routing Protocols Comparative Analysis for MANETs

MANET is a dynamic topology wireless network in which each mobile works as a sender and receiver wireless router. MANET have very low deployment cost, a low cost option to extend network coverage and ease of maintenance due to their self healing properties. MANETs are powered by batteries that have very limited capacity and it is a very important issue. The primary goal of MANET routing protocols is to find out an efficient route between any two mobile nodes with minimum time and less resource consumption. The MANET routing protocol designing is a very challenging due to various challenges such as the nodes have short battery life, small bandwidth, number of paths between source and destination, variable population of nodes and lose links. The central focus of this paper is to comparative study of different kinds of routing protocols and comparing on the basis of some common properties. Therefore, it is quite difficult to determine which protocols may perform best under a number of different network scenarios, such as increasing node density and traffic mobility. In this paper, we try to provide an overview of a topology based routing protocols proposed in the literature

A synthesis-based method for pitch extraction

A synthesis-based method for pitch extraction of the speech signal is proposed. The method synthesizes a number of log power spectra for different values of fundamental frequency and compares them with the log power spectrum of the input speech segment. The average magnitude (AM) difference between the two spectra is used for comparison. The value of fundamental frequency that gives the minimum AM difference between the synthesized spectrum and the input spectrum is chosen as the estimated value of fundamental frequency. The voiced/unvoiced decision is made on the basis of the value of the AM difference at the minimum. For synthesizing the log power spectrum, the speech signal is assumed to be the output of an all-pole filter. The transfer function of the all-pole filter is estimated from the input speech segment by using the autocorrelation method of linear prediction. The synthesis-based method is tried out on real speech data and the results are discussed

Comparative study of electroencephalography changes in dementia

Background: Dementia affected about 46 million people in 2015and this number will roughly triple within the next 40 years. In 2011 Alzheimer's Disease International argue that dementia has become one of the most urgent health and social care challenges of the 21st century and its potential effect on economies around the world is attracting global attention. Predicting dementia in the early stages would be essential for better treatment before significant brain damage occurs. Current difficulty is the lack of specific biomarkers. In some previous studies electroencephalography (EEG) have shown the capability to identify dementia early and even classify the degree of its severity at a lower cost for mass screening. The aim and objective of this study was to EEG changes in vascular dementia and Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias (ADRD) or dementia where no cause is identifiable, to measure severity of dementia by using DSR scale in different subjects and to correlate DSRS with EEG findings.Methods: Study sample was the 40 patients in each three groups- Dementia patients without any known cause of dementia or Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias (ADRD), Vascular dementia (VaD) patients and Controls (age and sex matched subjects scoring more than the cut of score on dementia Scale). Written informed consent will be taken after explaining the objectives and procedure of study in detail. EEG were recorded in eyes closed, on intermittent photic stimulation and hyperventilation, only eyes closed data was used in study and these data were entered in excel sheet and analyzed using SPSS Software, appropriate statistical test was applied wherever necessary.Results: Participants with VaD have theta waves while ADRD group have delta waves preponderance as compare to control.Conclusions: EEG can have additive value in diagnosing VaD as well as it alone can be helpful in differentiating healthy individuals from dementia patients

Nutrient Cycling in a Tropical Grazing Land Ecosystem of Southern India

The nutrient component of any ecosystem operates in a dynamic state through a series of inputs and outputs of the essential elements. Nutrients from plants are continuously transferred to soil via litter formation, which act as a reservoir for the plants in an ecosystem. Most of the studies on nutrient budgets and flux rates have been reported in forest communities and to a lesser degree in grassland. The present study was, therefore, aims to understand the variation of calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) in the vegetation compartments and to quantify annual budget by estimating the annual uptake from soil and its release to soil

Families of Multivalent Analytic Functions Associated with the Convolution Structure

The main aim of the present paper is to introduce a new class of multivalent analytic functions by using the familiar concept’s of convolution structure. The results investigated in the present paper include the characterization properties for this class of analytic functions. Some new and interesting consequences of our results are also pointed out

North-Holland Publishing Company SHORT COMMUNICATION EVALUATION OF VARIOUS LINEAR PREDICTION PARAMETRIC REPRESENTATIONS IN VOWEL RECOGNITION

Abstract. Several alternate linear prediction parametric representations are experimentally compared as to their vowel recognition performance. The speech data used for this purpose consist of 900 utterances of 10 different vowels spoken by 3 speakers in a/b/-vowel-/b/context. The cepstral coefficients representation is found to be the best linear prediction parametric representation. Zusammeniassu'ag. In diesem Beitrag werden verschiedene parametrische Darstellungen yon Sprachsignalen, die auf dem Prinzip der linearen Pr;,idiktion (LPC) basieren, auf ihre Verwendbarkeit in einem Spracherkennungssystem f~r Vokale experimentell untersucht. Das verwendete Sprachmaterial besteht hierbei aus 900 Beispielen yon 10 verschiedenen Vokale

Elastic properties and zone centre frequencies of Cu2O by LCAO method

918-922The elastic properties and the phonon frequencies at the Brillouin zone centre have been investigated for the cubic cuprous oxide. The calculations under the framework of density functional theory have been carried out by deploying the periodic linear combination of atomic orbitals method. After settling the crystal structure the elastic constants have been determined. The absolute values of elastic constants are well in agreement with the experimental reports. The vibrational frequencies at the centre of the Brillouin zone are classified as the Raman and Infrared active modes and compared with the available experimental data. The contribution of vibrational modes to the Gibbs free energy, entropy and heat capacity has also been found