High-dose chemotherapy with carboplatin, etoposide and cyclophosphamide followed by a haematopoietic stem cell rescue in patients with high-risk retinoblastoma: a SFOP and SFGM study

This study investigates the role of high-dose chemotherapy with haematopoietic stem cell rescue as consolidation treatment in high-risk retinoblastoma (extraocular disease at diagnosis or relapse or invasion of cut end of optic nerve). 25 patients received high-dose chemotherapy including carboplatin (250 mg/m2/day from day 1 to day 5 for the 6 first patients and 350 mg/m2/day from day 1 to day 5 for the other patients), etoposide (350 mg/m2/day from day 1 to day 5) and cyclophosphamide (1.6 g/m2/day from day 2 to day 5) (CARBOPEC) followed by autologous haematopoietic stem cell rescue. 19 patients received this drug combination for chemosensitive extraocular relapse. The other 6 patients with histological high-risk factors were given this treatment as consolidation after enucleation and conventional chemotherapy. The three year disease-free survival was 67.1%. In 7 of the 9 relapsing patients, the first site of relapse was the central nervous system. All patients with central nervous system disease died except one. The main toxicity was haematological and digestive (mucositis and diarrhoea). 2 of the 13 evaluable patients had grade III and IV ototoxicity. One patient experienced an acute grade I reversible cardiotoxicity. The CARBOPEC regimen seems to be a promising therapeutic strategy in patients with high-risk retinoblastoma, especially those with bone and/or bone marrow involvement. This treatment did not improve the outcome of patients with central nervous system disease.     

Structural Ultrafine Grained Steels Obtained by Advanced Controlled Rolling

Steels with ultrafine grains (lower than 5 μm), which usually known as ultrafine ferrite or ultrafine grained materials, are presently the object of intense research, because of the improvement in resistance and fracture toughness they may reach compared to conventional steels (with grain sizes above this value). It is shown that the forenamed steels designated in the Euronorm EN 10149-2, which are manufactured by advanced techniques of controlled rolling and mainly used in automotive industry, have an ultrafine grain size in the range of 2.5 to 3.5 μm, and with elastic yield stresses higher than 400 MPa. Based on the Morrison-Miller criterion, it is shown that values of the strain-hardening coefficient lower than 0.08 would make the industrial application of these steels unfeasible.     

Modeling power and energy consumption of dense matrix factorizations on multicore processors

In this paper, we propose a model for the energy consumption of the concurrent execution of three key dense matrix factorizations, with task parallelism leveraged via the Symmetric Multi‐Processing Superscalar (SMPSs) runtime, on a multicore processor. Our model decomposes the power dissipation into the system, static and dynamic components, with the former two being estimated from basic, off‐line experiments. The dynamic power, on the other hand, requires significantly more care, and we introduce a contention‐aware model that accommodates for the variability of power consumption due to memory contention. Experimental results on an Intel Xeon E5504 processor with four cores, using an internal powermeter that samples the power drawn by the mainboard with a frequency of 1 KHz, show the reliability of the energy model for the Cholesky, LU, and QR factorizations on this platform. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Internalization of interpersonal process in time-limited dynamic psychotherapy.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 31(3) of Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training (see record 2009-17141-002). This article contained, as Figure 1, an SASB model. The authorship and copyrights for the model were not acknowledged. The following acknowledgement should have been included: "Adapted from Benjamin (1984). Principles of Prediction using Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB). In R. A. Zucker, J. Aronoff, and A. J. Rabin (Eds.), Personality and the Prediction of Behavior (pp. 121- 174). New York: Academic." An apology is offered to the author, Dr. Lorna Smith Benjamin. The particular version used in the article was developed in collaboration with Clinton W. McLemore.] Investigated the internalization of positive aspects of therapist–patient (TP) interactions among 70 patients and their 16 therapists who participated in a 5-yr study (H. H. Strupp et al, unpublished) of time-limited dynamic psychotherapy. Patients sought help for anxiety, depression, or other problems with a clear interpersonal component and qualified for an Axis I or Axis II diagnosis on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III (DSM-III). Instruments included the Structural Analysis of Social Behavior and outcome measures of depression, anxiety, and psychological functioning. Patients' intrapsychic functioning became more similar to interpersonal activity in the TP relationship over the course of psychotherapy. Intrapsychic movement toward interpersonal activity in the TP relationship was associated with positive outcome on measures of depression, anxiety, and on independent clinician ratings of patient psychological functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Efficient dynamic resampling for dominance-based multiobjective evolutionary optimization

Multi-objective optimization problems are often subject to the presence of objectives that require expensive resampling for their computation. This is the case for many robustness metrics, which are frequently used as an additional objective that accounts for the reliability of specific sections of the solution space. Typical robustness measurements use resampling, but the number of samples that constitute a precise dispersion measure has a potentially large impact on the computational cost of an algorithm. This article proposes the integration of dominance based statistical testing methods as part of the selection mechanism of evolutionary multi-objective genetic algorithms with the aim of reducing the number of fitness evaluations. The performance of the approach is tested on five classical benchmark functions integrating it into two well-known algorithms, NSGA-II and SPEA2. The experimental results show a significant reduction in the number of fitness evaluations while, at the same time, maintaining the quality of the solutions.     

LOADng-AT: a novel practical implementation of hybrid AHP-TOPSIS algorithm in reactive routing protocol for intelligent IoT-based networks

The Journal of Supercomputing - Despite that IoT technology provides a promising future for human life, some significant challenges such as routing, security, low-cost equipment, energy...     

Photocatalytic Activity of Degussa P25 TiO2/Au Obtained Using Argon (Ar) and Nitrogen (N2) Plasma

Titania Degussa P25 powder was treated with Argon (Ar) and Nitrogen (N₂) gas plasma inside of a closed homemade chamber system at 50 Pa of pressure. The electric discharge was generated applying an AC voltage (0–15,000 V) to a pair of aluminum electrodes. Two sets of samples were analyzed. In the first one, the plasma is applied directly on a layer of titania P25 that is spread out on top of one of the electrodes and, in the second one, a gold foil substrate is positioned between the titania powder and the electrode, named TiO₂/Au. In the last sample, gold coated titania nanoparticles or clusters of gold are formed, changing the optical properties of the material. The evolution of the optical properties of the obtained samples was analized using UV–Vis diffuse reflectance. The spectra show a shift in the band gap and a broad band in P25/Au associated with the gold plasmonic band. Additionally, the photocatalytic activity was evaluated by monitoring the photodegradation of methylene blue solution (0.01 g/L), using UV–Vis absorption analysis in the range 250–850 nm. After the plasma is applied, the gold impregnation over the titania surface increases the photocatalytic activity.