76 research outputs found
Neoadjuvant chemotherapy for newly diagnosed, advanced ovarian cancer: Society of Gynecologic Oncology and American Society of Clinical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline
No full textTo provide guidance to clinicians regarding the use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy and interval cytoreduction among women with stage IIIC or IV epithelial ovarian cancer.sponsorship: The authors wish to thank Jason Wright, Christina Annunziata, Neelima Denduluri, Cynthia Anderson, the ASCO Clinical Practice Guidelines Committee, the SGO Publications Committee, and the SGO Clinical Practice Committee for their thoughtful reviews and insightful comments on this guideline document. Dr. Tew received support through the NIH/NCI Cancer Center Support Grant P30 CA008748 and Dr. Wright received support from NIH/NCI K07 CA166210 award. (NIH/NCI Cancer Center Support|P30 CA008748, NIH/NCI|K07 CA166210)status: Publishe
Measuring the growth of structure with multi-wavelength surveys of galaxy clusters
No full textCurrent and near-future galaxy cluster surveys at a variety of wavelengths are expected to provide a promising way to obtain precision measurements of the growth of structure over cosmic time. This in turn would serve as an important precision probe of cosmology. However, to realize the full potential of these surveys, systematic uncertainties arising from, for example, cluster mass estimates and sample selection must be well understood. This work follows several different approaches towards alleviating these uncertainties.
Cluster sample selection is investigated in the context of arcminute-resolution millimeter-wavelength surveys such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). Large-area, realistic simulations of the microwave sky are constructed and cluster detection is simulated using a multi-frequency Wiener filter to separate the galaxy clusters, via their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal, from other contaminating microwave signals. Using this technique, an ACT-like survey can expect to obtain a cluster sample that is 90% complete and 85% pure above a mass of 3 x 10^14 Msun.
Cluster mass uncertainties are explored by comparing X-ray and weak-lensing mass estimates for shear-selected galaxy clusters in the Deep Lens Survey (DLS) to study possible biases in using cluster baryons or weak-lensing shear as tracers of the cluster total mass. Results are presented for four galaxy clusters that comprise the top-ranked shear-selected system in the DLS, and for three of these clusters there is agreement between X-ray and weak-lensing mass estimates. For the fourth cluster, the X-ray mass estimate is higher than that from weak-lensing by 2-sigma, and X-ray images suggest this cluster may be undergoing a merger with a smaller cluster, which may be biasing the X-ray mass estimate high.
The feasibility of measuring galaxy cluster peculiar velocities using an ACT-like instrument is also investigated. Such a possibility would allow one to measure structure growth via large-scale velocity fields and circumvent the uncertainties associated with measuring cluster masses. We show that such measurements are possible and yield statistical uncertainties of roughly 100 km/sec given either a temperature prior with 1-sigma errors of less than 2 keV or additional lower frequency millimeter-band observations.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references
Using a Neoadjuvant Approach for Evaluating Novel Therapies for Patients With Breast Cancer
No full text Preoperative systemic therapy, though primarily used to downstage breast cancers, can offer, using pathologic complete response (pCR) as an endpoint, a rapid assessment of efficacy of a given therapeutic approach, particularly in triple-negative (TNBC) and HER2-positive breast cancers. Recently, this approach resulted in the approval of pertuzumab for HER2-positive cancers, in a considerably quicker timeline than would have been possible with its assessment in the adjuvant setting. However, the use of preoperative systemic therapy remains controversial, as the higher response rates noted with newer approaches have not routinely translated into improved longer-term outcomes, nor have they been confirmed in larger adjuvant trials. Almost all trials have demonstrated that pCR is a robust prognostic marker in patients with TNBC and HER2-positive cancers, so part of this discrepancy may be due to inadequate power in the preoperative trials and/or due to the heterogeneous nature of breast cancers. PCR following preoperative chemotherapy is not prognostic in many hormone receptor (HR)-positive breast cancers, especially those with a luminal A phenotype, which typically has minimal response to chemotherapy. Given this lack of response to chemotherapy, there is considerable interest in the use of neoadjuvant endocrine therapy (NET). The rate of pCR to NET in HR-positive cancers is low, leading to the use of surrogate markers, including changes in Ki-67 and the preoperative endocrine prognostic index (PEPI) score, as biomarkers of efficacy. Overall, the use of neoadjuvant approaches offers a rapid assessment of efficacy of novel therapies and remains a useful research tool for drug evaluation. </jats:p
Selection of Optimal Adjuvant Chemotherapy and Targeted Therapy for Early Breast Cancer: ASCO Clinical Practice Guideline Focused Update Summary
No full textReforming institutions for service delivery : a framework for development assistance with an application to the health, nutrition, and population portfolio
No full textWorld Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (report no. 17300) argued that institutions-the rules of the game that govern production and exchange-shape a country's prospects for sustained market-led growth. The author provides an institutional framework for service delivery, an essential component of state capability. He applies this framework to an evaluation of Bank support for service delivery in the health, nutrition, and population sector. He argues for greater institutional pluralism in the ways the World Bank does business in infrastructure, rural, and social sectors, but cautions against making efficient service delivery an issue of"state versus market."The Bank and its clients face the challenge of fitting menus of"better practice"delivery options to maps of institutional reality. In the health, nutrition, and population sector, the Bank should (1) unbundle and categorize essential health and clinical services according to goods characteristics and (2) integrate country knowledge into operations through upstream assessments of state, political, and social institutions. Overall, the Bank has made progress toward a"goods characteristics"approach, particularly in infrastructure and some rural services-but it has lagged in the social sectors, where support remains largely technocratic. Cross-sector comparisons reveal four generations of support for service delivery. First-generation support focused mainly on physical implementation of projects. Second-generation interventions, which characterized most social service interventions, focused on improving the financial and organizational viability of implementing agencies through technical assistance. Third-generation support was marked by significant unbundling of service delivery activities and clearer links to goods characteristics. In irrigation (1982-94), telecommunications (1980s-present), and transport (1990s), the one-size-fits-all monopoly model gave way to a range of options based on greater private sector and citizen participation in delivery. These included leases, concessions, outsourcing, and contracting as well as building, operating, transfer, and turnover schemes. Fourth-generation interventions are works-in-progress and represent efforts to develop new governance arrangements that systematically combine competition, voice, and hierarchy in the design, delivery, and monitoring of Bank projects. The Bank has a poor track record building country knowledge of institutional endowments that affect service delivery. The author identifies concepts and tools valuable for sector specialists'operations.Enterprise Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance
Phase II, randomized, placebo-controlled study of dovitinib in combination with fulvestrant in postmenopausal patients with HR(+), HER2(-) breast cancer that had progressed during or after prior endocrine therapy
No full textOverexpression of fibroblast growth factor receptor 1 (FGFR1), found in ≤8% of hormone receptor-positive (HR(+)), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (HER2(-)) breast cancer cases, is correlated with decreased overall survival and resistance to endocrine therapy (ET). Dovitinib, a potent FGFR inhibitor, has demonstrated antitumor activity in heavily pretreated patients with FGFR pathway-amplified breast cancer.sponsorship: This study was sponsored and funded by Novartis Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland). (Novartis Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland))status: Publishe
Performance Assessment of TMOs
No full textAbstractHigh dynamic range (HDR) imaging has gained momentum with the growth in digital photography technology. In this paper, performance assessment of various tone mapping techniques has been presented. HDR images were used and Tone Mapping Operators (TMOs) such as Gamma Correction, Reinhard, Drago, Ashkmin were applied to generate Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images. After that, LDR images are rated using objective assessment parameters such as luminance, mean, MSE and mPSNR. A new modified Ashikmin TMO is reported in this work. The results have shown that modified Ashikhmin has generated better LDR image than other TMOs. In addition, the profiles of objective performance assessment were also included to compare the usability of TMOs for generating better LDR images
Building blocks of Cwebs in multiparton scattering amplitudes
No full textThe correlators of Wilson-line operators in non-abelian gauge theories are known to exponentiate, and their logarithms can be organised in terms of the collections of Feynman diagrams called Cwebs. The colour factors that appear in the logarithm correspond to completely connected diagrams and are determined by the web mixing matrices. In this article we introduce several new concepts: (a) Normal ordering of the diagrams of a Cweb, (b) Fused-Webs (c) Basis and Family of Cwebs. We use these ideas together with a Uniqueness theorem that we prove to arrive at an understanding of the diagonal blocks, and several null matrices that appear in the mixing matrices. We demonstrate using our formalism that, once the basis Cwebs present upto order αsn are determined, the number of exponentiated colour factors for several classes of Cwebs starting at order αsn+1 can be predicted. We further provide complete results for the mixing matrices, to all orders in perturbation theory, for two special classes of Cwebs using our framework. © 2022, The Author(s)
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