Artificial Intelligence in Radiotherapy Treatment Planning: Present and Future.

Treatment planning is an essential step of the radiotherapy workflow. It has become more sophisticated over the past couple of decades with the help of computer science, enabling planners to design highly complex radiotherapy plans to minimize the normal tissue damage while persevering sufficient tumor control. As a result, treatment planning has become more labor intensive, requiring hours or even days of planner effort to optimize an individual patient case in a trial-and-error fashion. More recently, artificial intelligence has been utilized to automate and improve various aspects of medical science. For radiotherapy treatment planning, many algorithms have been developed to better support planners. These algorithms focus on automating the planning process and/or optimizing dosimetric trade-offs, and they have already made great impact on improving treatment planning efficiency and plan quality consistency. In this review, the smart planning tools in current clinical use are summarized in 3 main categories: automated rule implementation and reasoning, modeling of prior knowledge in clinical practice, and multicriteria optimization. Novel artificial intelligence-based treatment planning applications, such as deep learning-based algorithms and emerging research directions, are also reviewed. Finally, the challenges of artificial intelligence-based treatment planning are discussed for future works

Existence of solutions for fourth order differential equation with four-point boundary conditions

AbstractIn this paper we investigate the existence of solutions of a class of four-point boundary value problems for a fourth order ordinary differential equation. Our analysis relies on a nonlinear alternative of Leray–Schauder type

Double crisis: China and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

The 1956 crisis in Hungary had a profound impact on China's international affairs and domestic politics. The Chinese Communist Party leadership - party chairman Mao Zedong in particular - had by the end of mid-1950s begun to conceive of "a great Chinese revolution", which would largely take the form of large-scale industrial modernization. At the same time, China's awareness that it could develop into a leading player in the international socialist camp led Mao and his colleagues actively to intervene on the East European scene, posing an implicit challenge to the Soviet dominance in the bloc. The apparent desire of the Hungarian people to break free from Stalinist socialism, and the real risk, as Mao saw it, of the bloc foundering, convinced the Chinese Party that only reverting to a Stalinist pattern of inter-state socialism could keep the camp intact. In the domestic context, the Hungarian events likewise played a formative role in the evolution of Chinese social policy as top officials critically reviewed the Soviet experience of collectivization. Intellectuals and statesmen began to doubt the efficiency of the party's rule, while Mao rejected meaningful reforms of institutional socialism in favour of "soft" means of conscripting the intellectuals and "remolding" popular thought. Having opened up to party to criticism from outside, Mao cited the risk of domestic opponents fomenting a Hungarian-style crisis in China in terminating the Hundred Flowers campaign and moving to a program of ideological purges and massive economic stimulation. By 1958 China was definitively set on the course of the Great Leap Forward and the break with the Soviet Union

China's Involvement in the Hungarian Revolution, October-November 1956

The 1956 crises in the Soviet Bloc states, and the Hungarian October events in particular, had a profound impact on China's international and domestic policies. The Chinese Communist Party leadership – party chairman Mao Zedong in particular – had by the end of mid-1950s begun to conceive of "a great Chinese revolution," which would largely take the form of large-scale industrial modernization. At the same time, China's awareness that it could develop into a leading player in the international socialist camp led Mao and his colleagues to actively intervene on the East European scene, posing an implicit challenge to the Soviet dominance in the bloc. The apparent desire of the Hungarian and Polish people to break free from Stalinist socialism, and the real risk, as Mao saw it, of the bloc foundering, convinced the Chinese Party that only reforming institutional socialism and revising the Stalinist pattern of inter-state relations could keep the camp intact

Determinants Of Risk Tolerance In The Baby Boomer Cohort

Using data from 26,759 respondents, this study examined the differences in financial risk tolerance among leading baby boomers and trailing baby boomers. The study also investigated differences between these two sub-cohorts in perceived risk tolerance and measured risk tolerance as determined by the FinaMetrica Risk Profiling System. The results of this study found that leading boomers were less risk tolerant than trailing boomers. Variables with a positive association with risk tolerance for both groups include higher educational attainment, income, net worth, and gender with men having higher risk tolerance than women. There was dissimilarity between married for leading boomer and trailing boomer. Being marred was negatively associated with risk tolerance for leading boomers and positive for trailing boomers. It was also found that leading boomers, those with less educational attainment, lower income earners and those with a greater number of financial dependents tend to underestimate their risk tolerance