Comparison of CT based and integrated f 18 FDG pet CT scan based gross tumour volume in head and neck cancers and evaluation of the different segmentation method for delineation of the target on pet scan.

Head and neck malignancy are a major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout the world. The incidence of head and neck malignancies are very high in India and it ranks third commonest, after breast and cervical cancer. The SBR technique was superior to the fixed threshold technique using SUV 40% and SUV 50% for target volume delineation and therefore should be the method for autocontouring on PET scan. Creating metabolic tumour volume from PET alone without considering the anatomical part from the CT scan can fail in most cases to give an accurate delineation of tumour. Integrating the metabolic tumour volume obtained with autocontouring using the SBR technique on the PET scan along with anatomical part on CT which does not show uptake on the PET scan and clinical findings probably will be the best method of target volume delineation

Efficacy of vaginal dilator use in preventing vaginal stenosis among cervical and endometrial cancer patients underwent radiotherapy

Background: Vaginal dilators (VD) are effective in the prevention of vaginal stenosis in patients undergoing pelvic radiotherapy for gynaecological malignancies. This study was aimed to assess the efficacy of VD use in preventing post radiotherapy vaginal stenosis in cervical and endometrial cancer patients.Methods: A cohort study was designed among patients (20-70 years) with biopsy proven endometrial and cervical carcinoma who underwent pelvic radiotherapy were included. Patients with cervical carcinoma (FIGO stage-IA to IVA), endometrial carcinoma (FIGO stage IB grade III, FIGO stage II), histology of squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma and performance score-ECOG 1 were included in the study. Assessment included clinical history, general examination, pelvic examination at 3 monthly intervals till 1 year. Grading of vaginal stenosis was assessed using LENT SOMA grading system.Results: A total of 42 patients with 20 patients using vaginal dilators and 22 patients who refused to use VD were assigned. It was effective for 60% of VD users compared to 20% of nonusers (p=0.007) at 9 months follow up. While at 12 months follow up, it was effective for 58% of VD users compared to 16.6% of nonusers (p=0.066). Percent adherence was maximum in the 1st and 2ndquarter and declined to 61% by the 4th quarter. The total adherence was 97%.Conclusions: There was 55% vs 22.7% effectiveness to prevent the vaginal stenosis among VD users.  All patients need proper counselling, motivation and support for regular usage of VD which will ultimately help in reducing the incidence of vaginal stenosis

Bridge Inspecting with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles R&D

Corresponding data set for Tran-SET Project No. 17STLSU11. Abstract of the final report is stated below for reference: The project achieves through research including literature, on site interviews, and experimentation: 1) a recommendation for a UAV-based system to practically assist in routine bridge inspection work in the State of Louisiana, 2) the identification and description of advantages, disadvantages, and limitations in the use of UAVs for routing bridge inspection work in Louisiana, and 3) provided recommendations for future work. The Yuneec H520 aircraft and its E90 camera are recommended, as is the need for a boat to be included as part of the system. The recommended system has advantages in reaching portions of the bridge that are difficult to reach by human inspectors and includes sufficient image resolution to assist the bridge inspection process. A disadvantage though, is that of the overburden of regulations both from the FAA and for getting permission to inspect a bridge using a UAV. These regulations my render negligible, any gains in efficiency perceived in the use of UAVs for bridge inspection. Also, the UAV is described by the project as an assistance tool for the manual bridge inspection process and cannot replace the needed work of bridge inspectors, as it has limitations. For example, the UAV cannot perform inspections beneath the bridge deck since it may lose its GPS navigation reference. Likewise, it cannot see beneath the surface to tell of concrete components have subsurface cracks or timbers might be hollow. These tests are still the domain of manual bridge inspection. The project provided recommendations with respect to changes in how inspections should be done using the UAV, i.e. in the pre-inspection phase, needed field studies using the UAV, needed economics alternative-tradeoffs studies, and recommendations for augmenting the aircraft and its instruments. The Second phase, i.e. the Implementation Phase, will utilize the information and educational fruits of the technical research phase for tutorials, seminars and to facilitate feedback surveys with engineering firms, the LADOTD, engineering societies, and students

Fibroblast heterogeneity and its implications for engineering organotypic skin models in vitro

AbstractAdvances in cell culture methods, multidisciplinary research, clinical need to replace lost skin tissues and regulatory need to replace animal models with alternative test methods has led to development of three dimensional models of human skin. In general, these in vitro models of skin consist of keratinocytes cultured over fibroblast-populated dermal matrices. Accumulating evidences indicate that mesenchyme-derived signals are essential for epidermal morphogenesis, homeostasis and differentiation. Various studies show that fibroblasts isolated from different tissues in the body are dynamic in nature and are morphologically and functionally heterogeneous subpopulations. Further, these differences seem to be dictated by the local biological and physical microenvironment the fibroblasts reside resulting in “positional identity or memory”. Furthermore, the heterogeneity among the fibroblasts play a critical role in scarless wound healing and complete restoration of native tissue architecture in fetus and oral mucosa; and excessive scar formation in diseased states like keloids and hypertrophic scars. In this review, we summarize current concepts about the heterogeneity among fibroblasts and their role in various wound healing environments. Further, we contemplate how the insights on fibroblast heterogeneity could be applied for the development of next generation organotypic skin models

Nonlinear inversion of acoustic scalar and vector field transfer functions

A study to investigate the use of the acoustic vector field, separately or in combination with the scalar field, to invert for geoacoustic properties of the seafloor was conducted. The analysis was performed in the context of the 2004 Sediment Acoustics Experiment (SAX04) conducted in the Northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) where a small number of acoustic vector sensors were deployed in close proximity to the seafloor. The acoustic vector sensors were located both above and beneath the seafloor interface where they measured the acoustic pressure and the acoustic particle acceleration. A variety of acoustic waveforms were transmitted into the seafloor at normal incidence. Motion data provided by the buried vector sensors were affected by a suspension response that was sensitive to the mass properties of the sensor, the sediment density, and shear wave speed. The suspension response for the buried vector sensors included a resonance within the analysis band of 0.4-2.0 kHz. The response was sufficiently sensitive to the local geoacoustic properties, that it was integrated into the inverse methods developed for this study. Inversions of real and synthetic data sets showed that information about sediment shear wave speed was carried by the suspension response of the buried sensors, as opposed to being contained inherently within the vector acoustic field. © 1976-2012 IEEE

In Vivo Studies of the Drug Carrying Magnetic Nanocomposite Spheres via Fluorescent Molecules

Click on the DOI link to access the article (may not be free).Nanospheres utilized in targeted drug delivery systems have seen much attention, however it is difficult to detect the nanospheres in an in-vivo test due to their nanoscale in size.,. This is a crucial step in targeted drug delivery to show the nanosphere being concentrated at the spot of interest. Nanospheres developed by oil in oil (o/o) emulsion technique have the advantage of encapsulating molecules, such as 1,6-Diphenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene (DPH), without damages and chemical alterations. In current study, DPH was encapsulated into a nanosphere as a fluorescing tracer to visualize the nanospheres trafficking in a mouse model of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The SCC tumors were established on nude mice. 0.5 ml of a 0.3 mg/ml solution of fluorcescent nanospheres were subcutaneously injected around the tumor. The injections of the drug carrier system were repeated at 2-day intervals till the sacrifice of the tumor-bearing animals on day 10. The tumors were retrieved for frozen and paraffin-embedded histological preparation. Fluorsescent microscopy was used to image the frozen sections, and compared with H&E stained sections. The fluorescence nanoparticles were easily identifiable under fluorescent microscopy, while typical histology images were unable to detect the nanospheres. The data suggest that fluorescent nanoparticles can be used to identify the location or localization of the nanospheres in an in-vivo environment in a simple and straightforward method that aids in characterization of targeted drug delivery

Bridge Inspecting With Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, R&D [Supporting Dataset]

69A3551747106National Transportation Library (NTL) Curation Note: As this dataset is preserved in a repository outside U.S. DOT control, as allowed by the U.S. DOT's Public Access Plan (https://doi.org/10.21949/1503647) Section 7.4.2 Data, the NTL staff has performed NO additional curation actions on this dataset. The current level of dataset documentation is the responsibility of the dataset creator. NTL staff last accessed this dataset at its repository URL on 2022-11-11. If, in the future, you have trouble accessing this dataset at the host repository, please email [email protected] describing your problem. NTL staff will do its best to assist you at that time.The project achieves through research including literature, on site interviews, and experimentation: 1) a recommendation for a UAV-based system to practically assist in routine bridge inspection work in the State of Louisiana, 2) the identification and description of advantages, disadvantages, and limitations in the use of UAVs for routing bridge inspection work in Louisiana, and 3) provided recommendations for future work. The Yuneec H520 aircraft and its E90 camera are recommended, as is the need for a boat to be included as part of the system. The recommended system has advantages in reaching portions of the bridge that are difficult to reach by human inspectors and includes sufficient image resolution to assist the bridge inspection process. A disadvantage though, is that of the overburden of regulations both from the FAA and for getting permission to inspect a bridge using a UAV. These regulations my render negligible, any gains in efficiency perceived in the use of UAVs for bridge inspection. Also, the UAV is described by the project as an assistance tool for the manual bridge inspection process and cannot replace the needed work of bridge inspectors, as it has limitations. For example, the UAV cannot perform inspections beneath the bridge deck since it may lose its GPS navigation reference. Likewise, it cannot see beneath the surface to tell of concrete components have subsurface cracks or timbers might be hollow. These tests are still the domain of manual bridge inspection. The project provided recommendations with respect to changes in how inspections should be done using the UAV, i.e. in the pre-inspection phase, needed field studies using the UAV, needed economics alternative-tradeoffs studies, and recommendations for augmenting the aircraft and its instruments. The Second phase, i.e. the Implementation Phase, will utilize the information and educational fruits of the technical research phase for tutorials, seminars and to facilitate feedback surveys with engineering firms, the LADOTD, engineering societies, and students. PPTX files are presentation files created using Microsoft PowerPoint. These files can be used using Microsoft PowerPoint or a free program such as Google Slides