Quality assurance (QA) of the multileaf collimator (MLC) is a critical step for the delivery of intensity modulated radiation therapy treatment plan. While QA procedures for motor-driven MLC have been published extensively, those for binary MLCs such as the one used for helical tomotherapy have not been presented in the literature, as this is still a fairly new technology. In this study, seven ...

Quality assurance (QA) and risk management (RM) programs are intended to improve patient care, meet accreditation standards, and ensure compliance with liability insurance policies. The purpose of this project was to obtain and disseminate information on whether dental schools integrate QA and RM and what mechanisms have been most effective in measuring accomplishments in these programs. All si...

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA) is often performed using a 2D device and compares measured and computed fluence maps to determine if a field passes or fails certain dose and position criteria. The effects of a measured deviation to the 3D patient spatial dosimetry and dose volume histogram (DVH) are largely unknown because they cannot be analyzed using commer...

The field of Question Answering (QA) is very multi-disciplinary as it requires expertise from a large number of areas such as natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval, speech recognition and semantic technologies. In the past years a large number of QA systems were proposed using approaches from different fields and focusing on particul...

This work aims at three goals: first, to define a set of statistical parameters and plan structures for a 3D pretreatment thoracic and prostate intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA) protocol; secondly, to test if the 3D QA protocol is able to detect certain clinical errors; and third, to compare the 3D QA method with QA performed with single ion chamber and 2D gamm...

The loading of MHC class I molecules with peptides involves a variety of accessory proteins, including TAP-associated glycoprotein (tapasin), which tethers empty MHC class I molecules to the TAP peptide transporter. We have evaluated the role of tapasin for the assembly of peptides with the class Ib molecule Qa-1b. In normal cells, Qa-1b is predominantly bound by a peptide, the Qa-1 determinant...

Cardiovascular perfusionists have always been interested in quality assurance (QA), most often in the form of equipment maintenance and record keeping. However, these activities have tended to be fragmented. In an attempt to define a more global approach to QA, basic concepts are identified and the steps used to start a formal QA program are illustrated. In the usual approach to QA, three area...

This paper studies quantum annealing (QA) for clustering, which can be seen as an extension of simulated annealing (SA). We derive a QA algorithm for clustering and propose an annealing schedule, which is crucial in practice. Experiments show the proposed QA algorithm finds better clustering assignments than SA. Furthermore, QA is as easy as SA to implement.

Question answering (QA) systems on the Web try to provide crisp answers information needs posed in natural language, replacing traditional ranked list of documents. QA, posing a multitude re