Identifying Promising Candidate Radiotherapy Protocols via GPU-GA in-silico

Around half of all cancer patients, world-wide, will receive some form of radiotherapy (RT) as part of their treatment. And yet, despite the rapid advance of high-throughput screening to identify successful chemotherapy drug candidates, there is no current analogue for RT protocol screening or discovery at any scale. Here we introduce and demonstrate the application of a high-throughput/high-fidelity coupled tumour-irradiation simulation approach, we call "GPU-GA", and apply it to human breast cancer analogue - EMT6/Ro spheroids. By analysing over 9.5 million candidate protocols, GPU-GA yields significant gains in tumour suppression versus prior state-of-the-art high-fidelity/-low-throughput computational search under two clinically relevant benchmarks. By extending the search space to hypofractionated areas (> 2 Gy/day) yet within total dose limits, further tumour suppression of up to 33.7% compared to state-of-the-art is obtained. GPU-GA could be applied to any cell line with sufficient empirical data, and to many clinically relevant RT considerations

Measurement of psychological entitlement in 28 countries

This article presents the cross-cultural validation of the Entitlement Attitudes Questionnaire, a tool designed to measure three facets of psychological entitlement: active, passive, and revenge entitlement. Active entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect individual rights based on self-worthiness. Passive entitlement was defined as the belief in obligations to and expectations toward other people and institutions for the fulfillment of the individual’s needs. Revenge entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect one’s individual rights when violated by others and the tendency to reciprocate insults. The 15-item EAQ was validated in a series of three studies: the first one on a general Polish sample (N = 1,900), the second one on a sample of Polish students (N = 199), and the third one on student samples from 28 countries (N = 5,979). A three-factor solution was confirmed across all samples. Examination of measurement equivalence indicated partial metric invariance of EAQ for all national samples. Discriminant and convergent validity of the EAQ was also confirmed

Travelling Waves for Low–Grade Glioma Growth and Response to A Chemotherapy Model

Low-grade gliomas (LGGs) are primary brain tumours which evolve very slowly in time, but inevitably cause patient death. In this paper, we consider a PDE version of the previously proposed ODE model that describes the changes in the densities of functionally alive LGGs cells and cells that are irreversibly damaged by chemotherapy treatment. Besides the basic mathematical properties of the model, we study the possibility of the existence of travelling wave solutions in the framework of Fenichel’s invariant manifold theory. The estimates of the minimum speeds of the travelling wave solutions are provided. The obtained analytical results are illustrated by numerical simulations

Lewis lung cancer growth prediction during the first month.

<p>(A) and (B), comparison of the experimental tumour Lewis lung cancer data from [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0155553#pone.0155553.ref038" target="_blank">38</a>] (red circles) and solutions of <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0155553#pone.0155553.e035" target="_blank">model (23)</a> for <i>δ</i>_<i>P</i> = 8.9112 day⁻¹ (blue lines) for the best fitted parameters, with MSE error equal to 0.07%. (C), (D), (E) and (F), comparison of solutions <i>P</i>*, <i>E</i> and <i>V</i>* of <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0155553#pone.0155553.e035" target="_blank">system (23)</a> with <i>δ</i>_<i>P</i> = 8.9112 day⁻¹ (blue lines). Solid green lines show the behaviour of the model for a high suppression of VEGF (<i>δ</i>_<i>P</i> = 2 × 10⁴ day⁻¹). For <i>δ</i>_<i>P</i> > <i>δ</i>_{<i>P</i>_<i>cr</i>,2} the model has only one stable steady state with a small amount of tumour cells. Rest of parameters are given in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0155553#pone.0155553.t003" target="_blank">Table 3</a>.</p