Stereotactic radiotherapy and the potential role of magnetic resonance-guided adaptive techniques for pancreatic cancer

BACKGROUND Pancreatic cancer is a malignancy with one of the poorest prognoses amongst all cancers.Patients with unresectable tumours either receive palliative care or undergo various chemoradiotherapy regimens.Conventional techniques are often associated with acute gastrointestinal toxicities,as adjacent critical structures such as the duodenum ultimately limits delivered doses.Stereotactic body radiotherapy(SBRT)is an advanced radiation technique that delivers highly ablative radiation split into several fractions,with a steep dose fall-off outside target volumes.AIM To discuss the latest data on SBRT and whether there is a role for magnetic resonance-guided techniques in multimodal management of locally advanced,unresectable pancreatic cancer.METHODS We conducted a search on multiple large databases to collate the latest records on radiotherapy techniques used to treat pancreatic cancer.Out of 1229 total records retrieved from our search,36 studies were included in this review.RESULTS Studies indicate that SBRT is associated with improved clinical efficacy and toxicity profiles compared to conventional radiotherapy techniques.Further dose escalation to the tumour with SBRT is limited by the poor soft-tissue visualisation of computed tomography imaging during radiation planning and treatment delivery.Magnetic resonance-guided techniques have been introduced to improve imaging quality,enabling treatment plan adaptation and re-optimisation before delivering each fraction.CONCLUSION Therefore,SBRT may lead to improved survival outcomes and safer toxicity profiles compared to conventional techniques,and the addition of magnetic resonance-guided techniques potentially allows dose escalation and conversion of unresectable tumours to operable cases.

Multidither coherent optical adaptive technique for deep tissue two-photon microscopy

Two-photon microscopy normally suffers from the scattering of the tissue in biological imaging.Multidither coberent optical adaptive technique(COAT)can correct the scattered wavefront in parallel.However,the determination of the corrective phases may not be completely accurate using conventional method,which undermines the performance of this technique.In this paper,we theoretically demonstrate a method that can obtain more accurate corrective phases by determining the phase values from the square root of the fuorescence signal.A numnerical simulation model is established to study the performance of adaptive optics in two-photon micros-copy by combining scalar diffraction theory with vector diffraction theory.The results show that the distortion of the wavefront can be corrected more thoroughly with our method in two-photon imaging.In our simulation,with the scattering from a 450-mn-thick mouse brain tissue,excitation focal spots with higher peak-to background ratio(PBR)and images with higher contrast can be obtained.Hence,further enhancement of the multidither COAT correction performance in two-photon imaging can be expected.

Coherent optical adaptive technique improves the spatial resolution of STED microscopy in thick samples

Stimulated emission depletion(STED) microscopy is one of far-field optical microscopy techniques that can provide sub-diffraction spatial resolution. The spatial resolution of the STED microscopy is determined by the specially engineered beam profile of the depletion beam and its power. However, the beam profile of the depletion beam may be distorted due to aberrations of optical systems and inhomogeneity of a specimen's optical properties, resulting in a compromised spatial resolution. The situation gets deteriorated when thick samples are imaged. In the worst case, the severe distortion of the depletion beam profile may cause complete loss of the superresolution effect no matter how much depletion power is applied to specimens. Previously several adaptive optics approaches have been explored to compensate aberrations of systems and specimens. However, it is difficult to correct the complicated high-order optical aberrations of specimens. In this report, we demonstrate that the complicated distorted wavefront from a thick phantom sample can be measured by using the coherent optical adaptive technique. The full correction can effectively maintain and improve spatial resolution in imaging thick samples.

Adaptive projective synchronization of different chaotic systems with nonlinearity inputs

We investigate the projective synchronization of different chaotic systems with nonlinearity inputs. Based on the adaptive technique, sliding mode control method and pole assignment technique, a novel adaptive projective synchro- nization scheme is proposed to ensure the drive system and the response system with nonlinearity inputs can be rapidly synchronized up to the given scaling factor.

Adaptive neural network tracking control for a class of unknown nonlinear time-delay systems

For a class of unknown nonlinear time-delay systems, an adaptive neural network （NN） control design approach is proposed. Backstepping, domination and adaptive bounding design technique are combined to construct a robust memoryless adaptive NN tracking controller. Unknown time-delay functions are approximated by NNs, such that the requirement on the nonlinear time-delay functions is relaxed. Based on Lyapunov-Krasoviskii functional, the sem-global uniformly ultimately boundedness （UUB） of all the signals in the closed-loop system is proved. The arbitrary output tracking accuracy is achieved by tuning the design parameters. The feasibility is investigated by an illustrative simulation example.

Stochastic parallel gradient descent based adaptive optics used for a high contrast imaging coronagraph

An adaptive optics （AO） system based on a stochastic parallel gradient descent （SPGD） algorithm is proposed to reduce the speckle noises in the optical system of a stellar coronagraph in order to further improve the contrast. The principle of the SPGD algorithm is described briefly and a metric suitable for point source imaging optimization is given. The feasibility and good performance of the SPGD algorithm is demonstrated by an experimental system featured with a 140-actuator deformable mirror and a Hartrnann-Shark wavefront sensor. Then the SPGD based AO is applied to a liquid crystal array （LCA） based coronagraph to improve the contrast. The LCA can modulate the incoming light to generate a pupil apodization mask of any pattern. A circular stepped pattern is used in our preliminary experiment and the image contrast shows improvement from 10^-3 to 10^-4.5 at an angular distance of 2A/D after being corrected by SPGD based AO.

Euler solution using adaptive Cartesian grid with a gridless boundary treatment

A quadtree-based adaptive Cartesian grid generator and flow solver were developed. The grid adaptation based on pressure or density gradient was performed and a gridless method based on the least-square fashion was used to treat the wall surface boundary condition, which is generally difficult to be handled for the common Cartesian grid. First, to validate the technique of grid adaptation, the benchmarks over a forward-facing step and double Mach reflection were computed. Second, the flows over the NACA 0012 airfoil and a two-element airfoil were calculated to validate the developed gridless method. The computational results indi- cate the developed method is reasonable for complex flows.

ADAPTIVE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF POLLUTANT DISPERSION IN SHALLOW WATER

A finite element method for analysis of pollutant dispersion in shallow water is presented. The analysis is divided into two parts ： （ 1 ） computation of the velocity flow field and water surface elevation, and （2） computation of the pollutant concentration field from the dispersion model. The method was combined with an adaptive meshing technique to increase the solution accuracy, as well as to reduce the computational time and computer memory. The finite element formulation and the computer programs were validated by several examples that have known solutions. In addition, the capability of the combined method was demonstrated by analyzing pollutant dispersion in Chao Phraya River near the gulf of Thailand.

An effective technique to improve photosynthetic productivity and adaptability of rice

High photosynthetic productivity and widephotosynthetic adaptability are two importantphysiological characteristics for the sustained highyield and wider growing range of rice.Preliminaryexperiments indicated that the utilization ofbeterosis between two different ecotype rices,US

Linear generalized synchronization of chaotic systems with uncertain parameters

A more general form of projective synchronization, so called linear generalized synchronization （LGS） is proposed, which includes the generalized projective synchronization （GPS） and the hybrid projective synchronization （HPS） as its special cases, Based on the adaptive technique and Lyapunov stability theory, a general method for achieving the LGS between two chaotic or hyperehaotic systems with uncertain parameters in any scaling matrix is presented. Some numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed synchronization method.

Three dimensional numerical simulation of welding temperature fields in stainless steel

Three kinds of mathematical models representing welding heat sources are presented. Among them, Gaussian model and double ellipsoidal model are used to analyze the thermal distributions with finite element method. At the same time, this paper analyzed the influences of the heat source models, the latent heat and the welding parameters on the temperature distributions. The comparisons between the simulated results and the experiments show double ellipsoidal model is good for three-dimensional numerical simulations. Furthermore, the adaptive mesh technique is applied in the three-dimensional model which greatly reduces the number of nodes and elements in the simulation.

An adaptive laser beam shaping technique based on a genetic algorithm

A new adaptive beam intensity shaping technique based on the combination of a 19-element piezo-electricity deformable mirror （DM） and a global genetic algorithm is presented. This technique can adaptively adjust the voltages of the 19 actuators on the DM to reduce the difference between the target beam shape and the actual beam shape. Numerical simulations and experimental results show that within the stroke range of the DM, this technique can be well used to create the given beam intensity profiles on the focal plane.

Application of subband adaptive filtering techniques to ultrasonic detection in multilayers

The ultrasonic testing for the defects of complete disbond in multi-layered structure with lower acoustic impedance beneath a high acoustic impedance overburden is one of the difficult problems in ultrasonic nondestructive testing field. A model of a multi-layered steel-rubber composite plate is depicted. Because the acoustic impedance of the steel differs far from that of the couplant water and the rubber, the energy of the signal reflected from the debonded rubber layers is very weak. More over, the flaw echoes are masked by the strong echoes reverberated in the steel plate. It's nearly impossible to identify the debonding echoes directly. The subband adaptive filtering method is discussed in the paper, where the subband decomposition is performed by mutual wavelet packets decomposition on the criterion of maximizing the cross-correlation between the signals. The simulations on both synthetic and real signals are presented. The echoes from the delaminated flaw at the depth of 5 mm in the rubber from the calculated signal, and echoes from the flaw at the depth of 3 mm from the real signal are extracted successfully.

New vacuum solar telescope and observations with high resolution

The New Vacuum Solar Telescope （NVST） is a one meter vacuum solar telescope that aims to observe fine structures on the Sun. The main goals of NVST are high resolution imaging and spectral observations, including measurements of the solar magnetic field. NVST is the primary ground-based facility used by the Chinese solar research community in this solar cycle. It is located by Fuxian Lake in southwest China, where the seeing is good enough to perform high resolution observations. We first introduce the general conditions at the Fuxian Solar Observatory and the primary science cases of NVST. Then, the basic structures of this telescope and instruments are described in detail. Finally, some typical high resolution data of the solar photosphere and chromosphere are also shown.

A VHF RFPGA with adaptive phase-correction technique

This paper presents a VHF（30-300 MHz） RF programmable gain amplifier（PGA） with an adaptive phase correction technique.The proposed technique effectively mitigates phase errors over the VHF band,and the RFPGA as a whole satisfies all the specifications of the China mobile multimedia broadcasting VHF band applications.The RFPGA is implemented with a TSMC 0.25μm CMOS process.Measurement results reveal a gain range of around 61 dB,an ⅡP3 of-7 dBm at maximum gain,a power consumption of 10.2 mA at maximum gain,and a phase imbalance of less than 0.3 degrees.

An experimental indoor phasing system based on active optics using dispersed Hartmann sensing technology in the visible waveband

A telescope with a larger primary mirror can collect much more light and resolve objects much better than one with a smaller mirror, and so the larger version is always pursued by astronomers and astronomical technicians. Instead of using a monolithic primary mirror, more and more large telescopes, which are currently being planned or in construction, have adopted a segmented primary mirror design. Therefore, how to sense and phase such a primary mirror is a key issue for the future of extremely large optical/infrared telescopes. The Dispersed Fringe Sensor （DFS）, or Dispersed Hartmann Sensor （DHS）, is a non-contact method using broadband point light sources and it can estimate the piston by the two-directional spectrum formed by the transmissive grating＇s dispersion and lenslet array. Thus it can implement the combination of co-focusing by Shack-Hartmann technology and phasing by dispersed fringe sensing technologies such as the template-mapping method and the Hartmann method. We introduce the successful design, construction and alignment of our dis- persed Hartmann sensor together with its design principles and simulations. We also conduct many successful real phasing tests and phasing corrections in the visible waveband using our existing indoor segmented mirror optics platform. Finally, some conclusions are reached based on the test and correction of experimental results.

Linearly and Quadratically Separable Classifiers Using Adaptive Approach

This paper presents a fast adaptive iterative algorithm to solve linearly separable classification problems in R n.In each iteration,a subset of the sampling data （n-points,where n is the number of features） is adaptively chosen and a hyperplane is constructed such that it separates the chosen n-points at a margin and best classifies the remaining points.The classification problem is formulated and the details of the algorithm are presented.Further,the algorithm is extended to solving quadratically separable classification problems.The basic idea is based on mapping the physical space to another larger one where the problem becomes linearly separable.Numerical illustrations show that few iteration steps are sufficient for convergence when classes are linearly separable.For nonlinearly separable data,given a specified maximum number of iteration steps,the algorithm returns the best hyperplane that minimizes the number of misclassified points occurring through these steps.Comparisons with other machine learning algorithms on practical and benchmark datasets are also presented,showing the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Observer-based Variable Universe Adaptive Fuzzy Controller Without Additional Dynamic Order

A high-precision fuzzy controller, based on a state observer, is developed for a class of nonlinear single-input-single-output(SISO) systems with system uncertainties and external disturbances. The state observer is introduced to resolve the problem of the unavailability of state variables. Assisted by the observer, a variable universe fuzzy system is designed to approximate the ideal control law. Being auxiliary components, a robust control term and a state feedback control term are designed to suppress the influence of the lumped uncertainties and remove the observation error, respectively. Different from the existing results, no additional dynamic order is required for the control design. All the adaptive laws and the control law are built based on the Lyapunov synthesis approach, and the signals involved in the closed-loop system are guaranteed to be uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulation results performed on Duffing forced oscillation demonstrate the advantages of the proposed control scheme.

Transition of Liesegang Precipitation Systems: Simulations with an Adaptive Grid PDE Method

The dynamics of the Liesegang type pattern formation is investigated in a centrally symmetric two-dimensional setup.According to the observations in real experiments,the qualitative change of the dynamics is exhibited for slightly different initial conditions.Two kinds of chemical mechanisms are studied;in both cases the pattern formation is described using a phase separation model including the CahnHilliard equations.For the numerical simulations we make use of an adaptive grid PDE method,which successfully deals with the computationally critical cases such as steep gradients in the concentration distribution and investigation of long time behavior.The numerical simulations show a good agreement with the real experiments.

Modeling the Earth's magnetosphere under the influence of solar wind with due northward IMF by the AMR-CESE-MHD model

We present a newly developed global magnetohydrodynamic(MHD) model to study the responses of the Earth's magnetosphere to the solar wind. The model is established by using the space-time conservation element and solution element(CESE) method in general curvilinear coordinates on a six-component grid system. As a preliminary study, this paper is to present the model's numerical results of the quasi-steady state and the dynamics of the Earth's magnetosphere under steady solar wind flow with due northward interplanetary magnetic field(IMF). The model results are found to be in good agreement with those published by other numerical magnetospheric models.