22,302 research outputs found
A call for the aggressive treatment of oligometastatic and oligo-recurrent non-small cell lung cancer.
Metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) carries a dismal prognosis. Clinical evidence suggests the existence of an intermediate, or oligometastatic, state when metastases are limited in number and/or location. In addition, following initial curative therapy, many patients present with limited metastatic disease, or oligo-recurrence. Metastasis-directed, anti-cancer therapies may benefit these patients. A growing evidence-base supports the use of hypofractionated, image-guided radiotherapy (HIGRT) for a variety of malignant conditions including inoperable stage I NSCLC and many metastatic sites. When surgical resection is not possible, HIGRT offers an effective alternative for local treatment of limited metastatic disease. Early studies have produced promising results when HIGRT was delivered to all known sites of disease in patients with oligometastatic/oligo-recurrent NSCLC. In a population of patients formerly considered rapidly terminal, these studies report five year overall survival rates of 13-22%. HIGRT for metastatic NSCLC warrants further study. We call for large, intergroup, and even international randomized trials incorporating HIGRT and other metastasis-directed therapies into the treatment of patients with oligometastatic/oligo-recurrent NSCLC
Stochastic Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Gliders with Safety Constraints
© 2019 IEEE. Autonomous underwater gliders frequently execute extensive missions with high levels of uncertainty due to limitations of sensing, control and oceanic forecasting. Glider path planning seeks an optimal path with respect to conflicting objectives, such as travel cost and safety, that must be explicitly balanced subject to these uncertainties. In this paper, we derive a set of recursive equations for state probability and expected travel cost conditional on safety, and use them to implement a new stochastic variant of FMT-{ast } in the context of two types of objective functions that allow a glider to reach a destination region with minimum cost or maximum probability of arrival given a safety threshold. We demonstrate the framework using three simulated examples that illustrate how user-prescribed safety constraints affect the results
Test Set Diameter: Quantifying the Diversity of Sets of Test Cases
A common and natural intuition among software testers is that test cases need to differ if a software system is to be tested properly and its quality ensured. Consequently, much research has gone into formulating distance measures for how test cases, their inputs and/or their outputs differ. However, common to these proposals is that they are data type specific and/or calculate the diversity only between pairs of test inputs, traces or outputs. We propose a new metric to measure the diversity of sets of tests: the test set diameter (TSDm). It extends our earlier, pairwise test diversity metrics based on recent advances in information theory regarding the calculation of the normalized compression distance (NCD) for multisets. A key advantage is that TSDm is a universal measure of diversity and so can be applied to any test set regardless of data type of the test inputs (and, moreover, to other test-related data such as execution traces). But this universality comes at the cost of greater computational effort compared to competing approaches. Our experiments on four different systems show that the test set diameter can help select test sets with higher structural and fault coverage than random selection even when only applied to test inputs. This can enable early test design and selection, prior to even having a software system to test, and complement other types of test automation and analysis. We argue that this quantification of test set diversity creates a number of opportunities to better understand software quality and provides practical ways to increase it
Erlang Code Evolution Control
During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for
different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of
an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or
modules, so it can be difficult to know whether the correct behaviour of the
previous releases has been preserved in the new release. Most developers rely
on a previously defined test suite to check this behaviour preservation. We
propose here an alternative approach to automatically obtain a test suite that
specifically focusses on comparing the old and new versions of the code. Our
test case generation is directed by a sophisticated combination of several
already existing tools such as TypEr, CutEr, and PropEr; and other ideas such
as allowing the programmer to chose an expression of interest that must
preserve the behaviour, or the recording of the sequences of values to which
this expression is evaluated. All the presented work has been implemented in an
open-source tool that is publicly available on GitHub.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium
on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur,
Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854
The influence of position in overlap joints of Mg and Al alloys on microstructure and hardness of laser welds
Structure and properties of laser beam welding zone of dissimilar materials, AZ31 magnesium alloy and A5754 Aluminum alloy, are investigated. The microstructure and quality of the Mg/Al weld were studied by metallography, microhardness and optical microscopy. Differences in physical and mechanical properties of both materials, magnesium and aluminum, affect weldability and resistance of this combination, and lead to the formation of intermetallic compounds in the welded metal
New Perspective on Galaxy Clustering as a Cosmological Probe: General Relativistic Effects
We present a general relativistic description of galaxy clustering in a FLRW
universe. The observed redshift and position of galaxies are affected by the
matter fluctuations and the gravity waves between the source galaxies and the
observer, and the volume element constructed by using the observables differs
from the physical volume occupied by the observed galaxies. Therefore, the
observed galaxy fluctuation field contains additional contributions arising
from the distortion in observable quantities and these include tensor
contributions as well as numerous scalar contributions. We generalize the
linear bias approximation to relate the observed galaxy fluctuation field to
the underlying matter distribution in a gauge-invariant way. Our full formalism
is essential for the consistency of theoretical predictions. As our first
application, we compute the angular auto correlation of large-scale structure
and its cross correlation with CMB temperature anisotropies. We comment on the
possibility of detecting primordial gravity waves using galaxy clustering and
discuss further applications of our formalism.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review
Superconductivity and Lattice Instability in Compressed Lithium from Fermi Surface Hot Spots
The highest superconducting temperature T observed in any elemental metal
(Li with T ~ 20 K at pressure P ~ 40 GPa) is shown to arise from critical
(formally divergent) electron-phonon coupling to the transverse T phonon
branch along intersections of Kohn anomaly surfaces with the Fermi surface.
First principles linear response calculations of the phonon spectrum and
spectral function reveal (harmonic) instability already at
25 GPa. Our results imply that the fcc phase is anharmonically stabilized in
the 25-38 GPa range.Comment: 4 pages, 3 embedded figure
Redshift Drift in LTB Void Universes
We study the redshift drift, i.e., the time derivative of the cosmological
redshift in the Lema\^itre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) solution in which the observer is
assumed to be located at the symmetry center. This solution has often been
studied as an anti-Copernican universe model to explain the acceleration of
cosmic volume expansion without introducing the concept of dark energy. One of
decisive differences between LTB universe models and Copernican universe models
with dark energy is believed to be the redshift drift. The redshift drift is
negative in all known LTB universe models, whereas it is positive in the
redshift domain in Copernican models with dark energy. However,
there have been no detailed studies on this subject. In the present paper, we
prove that the redshift drift of an off-center source is always negative in the
case of LTB void models. We also show that the redshift drift can be positive
with an extremely large hump-type inhomogeneity. Our results suggest that we
can determine whether we live near the center of a large void without dark
energy by observing the redshift drift.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure
Split spectrum: a multi-channel approach to elastic optical networking
This paper introduces Split Spectrum, which enhances elastic optical networking by splitting a bulk traffic demand into multiple channels, when a single-channel transmission is prohibited by distance or spectrum availability. We performed transmission simulations to determine the maximum reach as a function of modulation format (dual polarization BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM), baud-rate (from 5 to 28 GBd), and number of ROADMs, for a Nyquist WDM super-channel with subcarrier spacing equal to 1.2 x baud-rate. Performance evaluation on two representative topologies shows that, compared to the previously proposed elastic optical networking, Split Spectrum doubles the zero-blocking load and achieves 100% higher network spectral efficiency at zero-blocking loads as a result of extended transmission distance and efficient utilization of spectrum fragments. (C) 2012 Optical Society of Americ
Complete Treatment of Galaxy Two-Point Statistics: Gravitational Lensing Effects and Redshift-Space Distortions
We present a coherent theoretical framework for computing gravitational
lensing effects and redshift-space distortions in an inhomogeneous universe and
investigate their impacts on galaxy two-point statistics. Adopting the
linearized FRW metric, we derive the gravitational lensing and the generalized
Sachs-Wolfe effects that include the weak lensing distortion, magnification,
and time delay effects, and the redshift-space distortion, Sachs-Wolfe, and
integrated Sachs-Wolfe effects, respectively. Based on this framework, we first
compute their effects on observed source fluctuations, separating them as two
physically distinct origins: the volume effect that involves the change of
volume and is always present in galaxy two-point statistics, and the source
effect that depends on the intrinsic properties of source populations. Then we
identify several terms that are ignored in the standard method, and we compute
the observed galaxy two-point statistics, an ensemble average of all the
combinations of the intrinsic source fluctuations and the additional
contributions from the gravitational lensing and the generalized Sachs-Wolfe
effects. This unified treatment of galaxy two-point statistics clarifies the
relation of the gravitational lensing and the generalized Sachs-Wolfe effects
to the metric perturbations and the underlying matter fluctuations. For near
future dark energy surveys, we compute additional contributions to the observed
galaxy two-point statistics and analyze their impact on the anisotropic
structure. Thorough theoretical modeling of galaxy two-point statistics would
be not only necessary to analyze precision measurements from upcoming dark
energy surveys, but also provide further discriminatory power in understanding
the underlying physical mechanisms.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Fig.4 corrected, appendix added, accepted for
publication in Physical Review
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