BACKGROUND This study investigated and quantified the dosimetric impact of the distance from the tumor to the spinal cord and fractionation schemes for patients who received stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) and hypofractionated simultaneous integrated boost (HF-SIB). MATERIAL AND METHODS Six modified planning target volumes (PTVs) for 5 patients with spinal metastases were created by ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the respiratory variation of the inferior vena cava diameter (∆DIVC) and right internal jugular vein diameter (∆DRIJ) are correlated in mechanically ventilated patients. METHODS This study was a prospective clinical analysis in an intensive care unit at a university hospital. Thirty-nine mechanically ventilated patients with hemodynamic instability were includ...

OBJECTIVE Thromboxane A2 (TXA2) is reported to induce bronchial hyperresponsiveness along with the well-documented bronchoconstrictor action on smooth muscles. We examined the effect of the TXA2 antagonist, BAY u3405, on bronchial hyperresponsiveness to methacholine (MCh) in asthmatics. PATIENTS Twelve adult asthmatics were studied in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover ...

In this paper we describe a method, based on a genetic algorithm, for generating good (in terms of minimum distance) linear block error-correcting codes. Preliminary experimental results indicate that the method can be very effective, especially in terms of fast generation of good sub-optimal codes. The search space for the problem of finding good codes is too large for many of the standard sea...

In this paper we discuss the index problem for geometric differential operators (Spin-Dirac operator, Gauß-Bonnet operator, Signature operator) on manifolds with metric horns. On singular manifolds these operators in general do not have unique closed extensions. But there always exist two extremal extensions Dmin and Dmax. We describe the quotient D(Dmax)/D(Dmin) explicitely in geometric resp. ...

We propose an incremental approach to compute the order-k maximum Voronoi diagram of disks in the plane. In our approach, we start with an order-k Voronoi diagram of disk centers and iteratively expand disks and update the changes of the diagram until all disks reach their targeted size. When disks expand continuously, the structure of the diagram changes discretely. The algorithm takes O (⌈ rm...

A graph G = (V, E) is a pairwise compatibility graph (PCG) if there exists an edgeweighted tree T and two nonnegative real numbers dmin and dmax such that each leaf u of T is a node of V and there is an edge (u, v) ∈ E if and only if dmin ≤ dT (u, v) ≤ dmax, where dT (u, v) is the sum of weights of the edges on the unique path from u to v in T . In this article, we survey the state of the art c...

Suppose that D is an acyclic orientation of a graph G. An arc of D is called dependent if its reversal creates a directed cycle. Let dmin(G) (dmax(G)) denote the minimum (maximum) of the number of dependent arcs over all acyclic orientations of G. We call G fully orientable if G has an acyclic orientation with exactly d dependent arcs for every d satisfying dmin(G) 6 d 6 dmax(G). A graph G is c...