The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of the electron Monte Carlo (eMC) dose calculation algorithm included in a commercial treatment planning system and compare its performance against an electron pencil beam algorithm. Several tests were performed to explore the system's behavior in simple geometries and in configurations encountered in clinical practice. The first series of t...

Given a regular matrix pencil A + μE, we consider the problem of determining the nearest singular matrix pencil with respect to the Frobenius norm. We present new approaches based on the solution of matrix differential equations for determining the nearest singular pencil A+∆A+ μ(E +∆E), one approach for general singular pencils and another one such that A+∆A and E + ∆E have a common left/right...

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The main objective of this study was to examine Steel's [Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 21 (1988) 261] self-affirmation theory, by checking the effects of different levels of manipulated control on participants' performance on personality tests. Specifically, we assessed the impact of participants' level of control (i.e. prior familiarity of questionnaire's items, choosing of test c...

The Semantic Verification Test (SVT) consists of brief, simple statements, which are either true or false. about various arrangements of the letters ABC (e.g. B after A). Mean reaction time (RT) for confirming or disconfirming the various statements varies according to their complexity. In independent studies of university students and Navy recruits, RT and other response latency parameters (in...

We have designed a toolbox that provides an environment for testing radiotherapy optimization techniques, objective functions, and constraints. A set of three-dimensional (3D) pencil beam dose distributions have been computed for a cylindrical phantom. The 6 MV pencil beams were computed using a superposition-based dose engine commissioned for an Elekta SL20 linear accelerator. Due to the cylin...

Mirror therapy is one of the promising rehabilitation therapeutic interventions but the neural basis of the therapeutic effect remains unknown. It has been reported that the 20-Hz rhythmic activity is induced in the primary motor cortex after median nerve stimulation and the amount of the induced activity is decreased when the primary motor cortex is activated. In the present study, to elucidat...