Hepatocellular carcinoma Liver Imaging Reporting and Data Systems treatment response assessment: Lessons learned and future directions

Hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide,with rising clinical and economic burden as incidence increases.There are a multitude of evolving treatment options,including locoregional therapies which can be used alone,in combination with each other,or in combination with systemic therapy.These treatment options have shown to be effective in achieving remission,controlling tumor progression,improving disease free and overall survival in patients who cannot undergo resection and providing a bridge to transplant by debulking tumor burden to downstage patients.Following locoregional therapy(LRT),it is crucial to provide treatment response assessment to guide management and liver transplant candidacy.Therefore,Liver Imaging Reporting and Data Systems(LI-RADS)Treatment Response Algorithm(TRA)was created to provide a standardized assessment of HCC following LRT.LIRADS TRA provides a step by step approach to evaluate each lesion independently for accurate tumor assessment.In this review,we provide an overview of different locoregional therapies for HCC,describe the expected post treatment imaging appearance following treatment,and review the LI-RADS TRA with guidance for its application in clinical practice.Unique to other publications,we will also review emerging literature supporting the use of LI-RADS for assessment of HCC treatment response after LRT.

Electromagnetic response function for the semi-annual variations estimated by the single-station method using the night-time values of the geomagnetic fields

The geomagnetic night-time values were used to estimate the electromagnetic response function Q1 for half-year period. If the spatial structure of the source field can be described by the approximation, one can estimate the Q1 value using the single-station Z/H method. This technique enables us to carry out regional deep gcomagnetic sounding by the method. The data used for analyses are geomagnetic night-time values for about, typically, 26 years from 5 good-quality stations and for several years from 34 stations distributed over the globe. The results indicate that the night-time values yield more reliable response estimates for half-year period compared to the usual estimates obtained from daily means. It implies that the approximation for the night-time fields holds good for the half-year period, but the daily means are not suitable for estimating the response function of the semi-annual variations by using the single-station method. Source field analyses for daily means data and night-time means data have also been carried out in this paper.

Evaluation of a Micro-scale Wind Model's Performance over Realistic Building Clusters Using Wind Tunnel Experiments

The simulation performance over complex building clusters of a wind simulation model（Wind Information Field Fast Analysis model, WIFFA） in a micro-scale air pollutant dispersion model system（Urban Microscale Air Pollution dispersion Simulation model, UMAPS） is evaluated using various wind tunnel experimental data including the CEDVAL（Compilation of Experimental Data for Validation of Micro-Scale Dispersion Models） wind tunnel experiment data and the NJU-FZ experiment data（Nanjing University-Fang Zhuang neighborhood wind tunnel experiment data）. The results show that the wind model can reproduce the vortexes triggered by urban buildings well, and the flow patterns in urban street canyons and building clusters can also be represented. Due to the complex shapes of buildings and their distributions, the simulation deviations/discrepancies from the measurements are usually caused by the simplification of the building shapes and the determination of the key zone sizes. The computational efficiencies of different cases are also discussed in this paper. The model has a high computational efficiency compared to traditional numerical models that solve the Navier–Stokes equations, and can produce very high-resolution（1–5 m） wind fields of a complex neighborhood scale urban building canopy（～ 1 km ×1km） in less than 3 min when run on a personal computer.

CONFIDENCE LOWER LIMITS FOR RESPONSE PROBABILITIES UNDER THE LOGISTIC RESPONSE MODEL

The lower confidence limits for response probabilities based on binary response data under the logistic response model are considered by saddlepoint approach.The high order approximation to the conditional distribution of a statistic for an interested parameter and then the lower confidence limits of response probabilities are derived.A simulation comparing these lower confidence limits with those obtained from the asymptotic normality is conducted.The proposed approximation is applied to two real data sets.Numerical results show that the saddlepoint approximations are much more accurate than the asymptotic normality approximations,especially for the cases of small or moderate sample sizes.

Development and case study of a science-based software platform to support policy making on air quality

This article describes the development and implementations of a novel software platform that supports real-time, science-based policy making on air quality through a user-friendly interface. The software, RSM-VAT, uses a response surface modeling（RSM） methodology and serves as a visualization and analysis tool（VAT） for three-dimensional air quality data obtained by atmospheric models. The software features a number of powerful and intuitive data visualization functions for illustrating the complex nonlinear relationship between emission reductions and air quality benefits. The case study of contiguous U.S.demonstrates that the enhanced RSM-VAT is capable of reproducing the air quality model results with Normalized Mean Bias 〈 2% and assisting in air quality policy making in near real time.