BACKGROUND Changes in head and neck anatomy during radiation therapy (RT) produce setup uncertainties of nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) irradiation. We retrospectively analyzed image guidance data to identify clinical predictors of setup errors. PATIENTS AND METHODS The data of 217 NPC patients undergoing definitive RT on a helical tomotherapy (HT) unit were analyzed. Factors including tumor sta...

Recent experimental developments have enabled the measurement of dynamical forces between two moving liquid drops in solution using an atomic force microscope (AFM). The drop sizes, interfacial tension, and approach velocities used in the experiments are in a regime where surface forces, hydrodynamics, and drop deformation are all significant. A detailed theoretical model of the experimental se...

The work presented herein sets out to investigate experimentally, via drop-weight testing, the behavior of slender reinforced concrete (RC) beam specimens under impact loading. During each specimen is established through combined use conventional instrumentation and a high-speed video camera. primary objective this reasons that trigger observed shift in (compared from static tests) with increas...

The motivation for this thesis resulted from a study of semi-automated rail mounted gantry cranes at an Australian seaport container terminal. The Sequential Ordering Problem with Time Windows (SOP-TW) can arise as a subproblem of these crane operations. The SOP-TW corresponds to the task of scheduling a single crane to move a set of containers, where each container has: a fixed pick-up locatio...

background drop-out (discontinuing treatment after the first visit) is one of the main causes of failure in obesity treatment. the aim of this study was to investigate the pattern of drop-out in overweight or obese outpatients in ahvaz, iran. material and methods a total of 575 overweight or obese individuals (female: 469, male: 106) aged 18 – 65 attending an outpatient dietician office for the...

BACKGROUND Although rare, the relationship between peroneal nerve palsy and weight loss has been well documented over the last decades. Of the 160 patients operated for persisting foot drop in our institution, weight loss was considered to be the major contributing factor for 78 patients (43.5%). METHODS We compared patients who developed a foot drop after bariatric surgery with a control gro...

The optimal perceptual decision making strategy for weighting serially presented information depends on the degree of sample dependence. Uniform weighting produces optimal estimates from independent samples, but increases in autocorrelation should be matched by increasing and symmetric overweighting of early and late samples in order to maintain optimal performance. In the current experiment, p...