30 research outputs found
Cutaneous Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma with Regional Metastases: The Prognostic Importance of Soft Tissue Metastases and Extranodal Spread
Extranodal spread (ENS) is an established adverse prognostic factor in metastatic cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC); however, the clinical significance of soft tissue metastases (STM) is unknown. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prognosis of patients with STM from head and neck cSCC, and to compare this with that of node metastases with and without ENS. Patients with cSCC metastatic to the parotid and/or neck treated by primary surgical resection between 1987 and 2007 were included. Metastatic nodes > 3 cm in size were an exclusion criterion. A Cox proportional hazard model was used to determine the effect of STM adjusting for other relevant prognostic factors. The population included 164 patients with a median follow-up of 26 months. There were 8 distant and 37 regional recurrences. There were 22 were cancer-specific deaths, and 29 patients died. STM was a significant predictor of reduced overall (hazard ratio 3.3; 95% confidence interval 1.6-6.4; P = 0.001) and disease-free survival (hazard ratio 2.4; 95% confidence interval 1.4-4.1; P = 0.001) when compared to patients with node disease with or without ENS. After adjusting for covariates, STM and number of involved nodes were significant independent predictors of overall and disease-free survival. In metastatic cSCC of the head and neck, the presence of STM is an independent predictor of reduced survival and is associated with a greater adverse effect than ENS alone
Dispersive, superfluid-like shock waves in nonlinear optics
In most classical fluids, shock waves are strongly dissipative, their energy
being quickly lost through viscous damping. But in systems such as cold
plasmas, superfluids, and Bose-Einstein condensates, where viscosity is
negligible or non-existent, a fundamentally different type of shock wave can
emerge whose behaviour is dominated by dispersion rather than dissipation.
Dispersive shock waves are difficult to study experimentally, and analytical
solutions to the equations that govern them have only been found in one
dimension (1D). By exploiting a well-known, but little appreciated,
correspondence between the behaviour of superfluids and nonlinear optical
materials, we demonstrate an all-optical experimental platform for studying the
dynamics of dispersive shock waves. This enables us to observe the propagation
and nonlinear response of dispersive shock waves, including the interaction of
colliding shock waves, in 1D and 2D. Our system offers a versatile and more
accessible means for exploring superfluid-like and related dispersive
phenomena.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures Revised abstrac
NNMF for Image Processing Derivation
NNMF (Nonnegative Matrix Factorization) can be used to approximate high-dimensional data having nonnegative components. Lee and Seung (1999) demonstrated its use as a sum-by-parts representation of image data in order to both identify and classify image features. Xu et al. (2003) demonstrated how NNMF-based indexing could outperform SVD-based Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for some information retrieval tasks