Phase I trial of weekly scheduling and pharmacokinetics of titanocene dichloride in patients with advanced cancer

PURPOSE: To determine the maximum-tolerated dose (MTD) and the dose-limiting toxicities (DLTs) of a weekly schedule of titanocene dichloride (TD) and to define the pharmacokinetics of titanium in plasma and urine. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Twenty patients with a median age of 58 years received 83 courses of TD. TD was given as 1-hour infusion at escalating doses from 70 to 185 mg/m2/wk. Pharmacokinetic analysis was performed in eight patients for total plasma titanium (TPTi) and in three patients for ultrafiltrable titanium (UFTi). RESULTS: At the fifth dose level (185 mg/m2/wk), a variety of DLTs were seen in five patients: fatigue in three, bilirubinemia in one, and hypokalemia in two. A further six patients were treated at 140 mg/m2; only one had dose-limiting creatinine elevation and this dose was therefore defined as the MTD. No myelosuppression or alopecia were observed. One patient with adenocarcinoma of unknown primary had a minor response. Pharmacokinetic analysis showed that TPTi maximum concentration (Cmax) values were linear with dose and elimination of TPTi was triphasic with a long terminal half-life (t1/2; median, 165 hours; range, 89 to 592). Between 7% and 24.3% of the total of administered titanium was eliminated in urine over the first 24 hours. In contrast, UFTi elimination was described by a one-compartment model with a t1/2 of 0.41 hours; peak levels of UFTi were 5.2% +/- 2.5% those of TPTi. CONCLUSION: The MTD of TD given on a weekly schedule is 140 mg/m2, with cumulative, but reversible creatinine and bilirubin elevation being the DLTs.     

Temperature monitoring

Central temperature is usually tightly regulated in human beings. Anesthesia alters the normal thermoregulatory controls of the body. Intraoperatively, mild degrees of hypothermia may provide some cerebral protection. However, the risk of organ dysfunction and shivering require that the anesthesiologist be prepared to treat severe hypothermia. Appropriate measures such as warning the operating room and using forced air blankets can prevent both intraoperative hypothermia and postoperative shivering. The use of temperature measurement is not limited to the operative and immediate recovery periods. Anesthesiologists practicing in intensive care units and in pain clinics use temperature monitoring as a diagnostic tool in a variety of situations.     

Hybrid verrucous squamous cell carcinoma of sinonasal tract: a case report

Verrucous carcinoma is a variant of squamous cell carcinoma and should be distinguished from benign papilloma and well-differentiated nonverrucous squamous cell carcinoma. It is rare tumor of the sinonasal tract. Occasionally, conventional squamous cell carcinomatous components may be seen in verrucous carcinoma. This entity is called a hybrid verrucous squamous cell carcinoma. We report a case of hybrid verrucous squamous cell carcinoma occurring in the nasal cavity and paranasal sinus of a 67-year-old male. The removed mass shows the typical feature of verrucous carcinoma, but focally conventional squamous cell carcinomatous area is also noted. The treatment of this case follows verrucous carcinoma, but close follow up is mandatory because it may potentially spread to regional lymph nodes in contrast to pure form of verrucous carcinoma.     

A note on circle packing

The problem of packing circles into a domain of prescribed topology is considered. The circles need not have equal radii. The Collins-Stephenson algorithm computes such a circle packing. This algorithm is parallelized in two different ways and its performance is reported for a triangular, planar domain test case. The implementation uses the highly parallel graphics processing unit (GPU) on commodity hardware. The speedups so achieved are discussed based on a number of experiments.     

The effect of silica characterization on the microstructure of BaFe12O19 ferrites

The anisotropically formed BaFe₁₂O₁₉ ferrites were prepared from the hot-rolled mill scale and silica was added to the ferrite during fine milling in the range 0.15 to 0.50 wt%. These ferrites were sintered at 1220° C for 2 h. The grain growth of the ferrites is dominantly influenced by the sizes of the silica added. Coarse-grain ( 1m) silica tends to promote discontinuous grain growth, which increases drastically with slightly increasing amounts of silica added, while fine-grain ( 0.013m) silica tends to retain fine grain microstructures with the same increasing amount of silica. The average grain size of the ferrite without silica addition was 8 to 10m. The size was increased to as large as 30m on addition of 0.15% coarse-grain silica and the microstructure was full of extremely large grains on the addition of 0.50% coarse-grain silica.     

Multitask learning for health condition identification and remaining useful life prediction: deep convolutional neural network approach

Predicting remaining useful life (RUL) is crucial for system maintenance. Condition monitoring makes not only degradation data available for RUL estimation but also categorized health status data for health state identification. However, RUL prediction has been treated as an independent process in most cases even though potential relevance exists with health status detection process. In this paper, we propose a convolution neural network based multi-task learning method to reflect the relatedness of RUL estimation with health status detection process. The proposed method applied to the C-MAPSS dataset for aero-engine unit prognostics supported superior performances to existing baseline models.

     

Simple culling methods for continuous collision detection of deforming triangles

We present a simple and efficient approach for continuous collision detection of deforming triangles based on conservative advancement. The efficiency of our approach is due to a sequence of simple collision-free conditions for deforming triangles. In our experiment, we show that our CCD algorithm achieves 2-30 times performance improvement over existing algorithms for triangle primitives.     

Performance of TZCD-MBOK watermarking scheme in T-DMB systems

Recently, watermarking based data transmission techniques using terrestrial digital TV signal have been proposed since they are also cost-free and can overcome the limitations of GPS. However, in the previous watermarking based methods, the detection accuracy is low and additional data rate is too low. Thus, we propose the throughput enhancement method by employing the TZCD-MBOK watermarking technique in T-DMB system. By applying the proposed scheme to T-DMB, it allows additional data transmission for disaster broadcasting and improves efficiency of data transmission in shadow region and indoor to mobile environment through watermarking spread code. From the simulation results, we confirm the proposed watermarking scheme affected on the existing T-DMB signal. Moreover, it was also confirmed that the system capacity increases as the power of additional watermarking signal rose. The results of the paper can be applied to wireless multimedia digital broadcasting systems.     

Intelligent copyright protection system using a matching video retrieval algorithm

Many video service sites headed by YouTube know what content requires copyright protection. However, they lack a copyright protection system that automatically distinguishes whether uploaded videos contain legal or illegal content. Existing protection techniques use content-based retrieval methods that compare the features of video. However, if the video encoding has changed in resolution, bit-rate or codec, these techniques do not perform well. Thus, this paper proposes a novel video matching algorithm even if the type of encoding has changed. We also suggest an intelligent copyright protection system using the proposed algorithm. This can serve to automatically prevent the uploading of illegal content. The proposed method has represented the accuracy of 97% with searching algorithm in video-matching experiments and 98.62% with automation algorithm in copyright-protection experiments. Therefore, this system could form a core technology that identifies illegal content and automatically excludes access to illegal content by many video service sites.