Feasibility of tumour-focused adaptive radiotherapy for bladder cancer on the MR-linac.

Bladder tumour-focused magnetic resonance image-guided adaptive radiotherapy using a 1.5 Tesla MR-linac is feasible. A full online workflow adapting to anatomy at each fraction is achievable in approximately 30 min. Intra-fraction bladder filling did not compromise target coverage with the class solution employed

Modeling Denitrification : Can We Report What We Don't Know?

Funding Information: This study is the products of a workshop funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the research unit DFG‐FOR 2337: Denitrification in Agricultural Soils: Integrated Control and Modelling at Various Scales (DASIM), and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the “Make our Planet Great Again—German Research Initiative”, Grant 306060, implemented by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme project VERIFY (grant agreement no. 776810). We would like to thank the contribution of all workshop participants of the II. DASIM Modeler Workshop. Publisher Copyright: © 2023. The Authors.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Early variation of ultrasound halo sign with treatment and relation with clinical features in patients with giant cell arteritis

Objectives To compare the ultrasound characteristics with clinical features, final diagnosis and outcome; and to evaluate the halo size following glucocorticoid treatment in patients with newly diagnosed GCA. Methods Patients with suspected GCA, recruited from an international cohort, had an ultrasound of temporal (TA) and axillary (AX) arteries performed within 7 days of commencing glucocorticoids. We compared differences in clinical features at disease presentation, after 2 weeks and after 6 months, according to the presence or absence of halo sign. We undertook a cross-sectional analysis of the differences in halo thickness using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Results A total of 345 patients with 6 months follow-up data were included; 226 (65.5%) had a diagnosis of GCA. Jaw claudication and visual symptoms were more frequent in patients with halo sign (P =0.018 and P =0.003, respectively). Physical examination abnormalities were significantly associated with the presence of ipsilateral halo (P 0.05). However, the presence of halo at baseline failed to predict future ischaemic events occurring during follow-up. Conclusion In newly diagnosed GCA, TA halo is associated with the presence of ischaemic features and its size decreases following glucocorticoid treatment, supporting its early use as a marker of disease activity, in addition to its diagnostic role

Bevacizumab dose adjustment to improve clinical outcomes of glioblastoma.

Background Glioblastoma (GBM) is one of the most aggressive and vascularized brain tumors in adults, with a median survival of 20.9 months. In newly diagnosed and recurrent GBM, bevacizumab demonstrated an increase in progression-free survival, but not in overall survival. Methods We conducted an in silico analysis of VEGF expression, in a cohort of 1082 glioma patients. Then, to determine whether appropriate bevacizumab dose adjustment could increase the anti-angiogenic response, we used in vitro and in vivo GBM models. Additionally, we analyzed VEGFA expression in tissue, serum, and plasma in a cohort of GBM patients before and during bevacizumab treatment. Results We identified that 20% of primary GBM did not express VEGFA suggesting that these patients would probably not respond to bevacizumab therapy as we proved in vitro and in vivo. We found that a specific dose of bevacizumab calculated based on VEGFA expression levels increases the response to treatment in cell culture and serum samples from mice bearing GBM tumors. Additionally, in a cohort of GBM patients, we observed a correlation of VEGFA levels in serum, but not in plasma, with bevacizumab treatment performance. Conclusions Our data suggest that bevacizumab dose adjustment could improve clinical outcomes in Glioblastoma treatment.post-print1360 K

Complementarities between IT and Organizational Structure: The Role of Corporate Exploration and Exploitation

The decentralization of organizational decision authority has been shown to be complementary to Information Technology (IT) in prior research. We draw from the information processing view of organizations, the IT and de/centralization debate, and organizational learning theory to argue that IT payoffs can also be improved by greater centralization of decision authority, contingent on a firm’s corporate learning type. We argue that an exploratory learning type is best pursued with a decentralized organization design, while an exploitative learning type requires a centralized organization design. We hypothesize that under corporate exploration, IT payoffs are enhanced through greater decentralization, whereas under corporate exploitation, returns to IT are improved by greater centralization. Our study uses a novel multi‐source panel on the IT capital, the degree of de/centralization, and the performance of almost 260 German manufacturing firms. We estimate production functions to assess the contribution of combning IT with de/centralization to firmlevel productivity under different corporate learning types. Our results strongly support our hypotheses and hold up to a variety of robustness tests