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For both cameras, we used a wider angle (~55 degrees) pinhole collimator to measure the phantom closer to improve sensitivity. Although the 40 mm × 40-mm YAP(Ce) camera had high system spatial resolution, the background count fractions were high and produced a high count area at the center of the images due to the pulse pileup of the signals. With the 20 mm × 20-mm YAP(Ce) camera, we obtained X-ray images with low background counts without a high count area at the image center. By smoothing the measured images, we were able to estimate the ranges even for clinical dose levels. We therefore confirmed that one of our newly developed YAP(Ce) cameras had high sensitivity and is promising for the imaging of secondary electron bremsstrahlung X-rays during irradiation of carbon ions in clinical conditions. © 2020 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.In order to fully exploit the ballistic potential of particle therapy, we propose an online range monitoring concept based on Time-Of-Flight (TOF)-resolved Prompt Gamma (PG) detection in a single proton counting regime. In a proof of principle experiment, different types of monolithic scintillating gamma detectors are read in time coincidence with a diamond-based beam hodoscope, in order to build TOF spectra of PG generated in a target presenting an air cavity of variable thickness. Since the measurement was carried out at low beam currents ( less then 1 proton/bunch) it was possible to reach excellent coincidence time resolutions, of the order of 100 ps (σ). Our goal is to detect possible deviations of the proton range with respect to treatment planning within a few intense irradiation spots at the beginning of the session and then carry on the treatment at standard beam currents. The measurements were limited to 10 mm proton range shift. A Monte Carlo simulation study reproducing the experiment has shown that a 3 mm shift can be detected at 2σ by a single detector of ∼ 1.4 × 10-3absolute detection efficiency within a single irradiation spot (∼108 protons) and an optimised experimental set-up. © 2020 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.OBJECTIVE The efficacy of deep brain stimulation can be limited by factors including poor selectivity of stimulation, targeting error, and complications related to implant reliability and stability. We aimed to improve surgical outcomes by evaluating electrode leads with smaller diameter electrode and microelectrodes incorporated which can be used for assisting targeting. APPROACH Electrode arrays were constructed with two different diameters of 0.65 mm and the standard 1.3 mm. Micro-electrodes were incorporated into the slim electrode arrays for recording spiking neural activity. Arrays were bilaterally implanted into the medial geniculate body (MGB) in nine anaesthetised cats for 24-40 hours using stereotactic techniques. Recordings of auditory evoked field potentials and multi-unit activity were obtained at 1 mm intervals along the electrode insertion track. Insertion trauma was evaluated histologically. MAIN RESULTS Evoked auditory field potentials were recorded from ring and micro-electrodes in the vicin2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.This work proposes to use Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for the regression of dosimetric quantities employed in mammography. The data were generated by Monte Carlo simulations using a modified and validated version of PENELOPE (v. 2014) + penEasy (v. 2015) code. A breast model of homogeneous mixture of adipose and glandular tissue was adopted. The ANN were constructed with Keras and scikit-learn libraries for Mean Glandular Dose (MGD) and Air Kerma (Kair) regressions, respectively. In total, seven parameters were considered, including the incident photon energies (from 8.25 to 48.75 keV), the breast geometry, breast glandularity and Kair acquisition geometry. Two ensembles of 5 ANN networks each were formed to calculate MGD and Kair. The Normalized Glandular Dose coefficients (DgN) are calculated by the ratio of the ensembles outputs for MGD and Air Kerma. Polyenergetic DgN values were calculated weighting monoenergetic values by the spectra bin probabilities. The results indicated a very good ANN prediction performance when compared to the validation data, with median errors on the order of the average simulation uncertainties (0.2%). Moreover, the predicted DgN values compared with works previously published were in good agreement, with mean(maximum) differences up to 2.2(9.3)%. Therefore, it was showed that ANN could be a complementary or alternative technique to tables, parametric equations and polynomial fits to estimate DgN values obtained via MC simulations. © 2020 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.The annotation of three-dimensional (3D) cephalometric landmarks in 3D computerized tomography (CT) has become an essential part of cephalometric analysis, which is used for diagnosis, surgical planning, and treatment evaluation. The automation of 3D landmarking with high-precision remains challenging due to the limited availability of training data and the high computational burden. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a hierarchical deep-learning method consisting of four stages 1) a basic landmark annotator for 3D skull pose normalization, 2) a deep-learning-based coarse-to-fine landmark annotator on the midsagittal plane, 3) a low-dimensional representation of the total number of landmarks using variational autoencoder (VAE), and 4) a local-to-global landmark annotator. The implementation of the VAE allows two-dimensional-image-based 3D morphological feature learning and similarity/dissimilarity representation learning of the concatenated vectors of cephalometric landmarks. The proposed method achieves an average 3D point-to-point error of 3.63 mm for 93 cephalometric landmarks using a small number of training CT datasets. Notably, the VAE captures variations of craniofacial structural characteristics. EHT 1864 solubility dmso Creative Commons Attribution license.We demonstrate the HfSe2 saturable absorber (SA) for the generation of ultrafast pulse laser. The HfSe2 SA device is fabricated by integrating HfSe2 nanosheets (NSs) with a microfiber. The materials and optical characteristics of HfSe2 NSs show their high quality. The nonlinear optical absorption of HfSe2 SA is measured with a modulation depth of 5.8%. Stable soliton mode-locked laser based on HfSe2 SA is realized at the central wavelength of 1561.43 nm with pulse duration of 297 fs and the maximum pulse energy of 2.68 nJ. Our soliton fiber laser has a maximum output power of 48.5 mW with a high slope efficiency of 12.8%, which indicate that HfSe2 is a good candidate of SA for high efficient ultrashort pulses generation. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.Monte Carlo (MC) track structure simulation tools are commonly used for predicting radiation induced DNA damage by modeling the physical and chemical reactions at the nanometer scale. However, the outcome of these MC simulations is particularly sensitive to the adopted parameters which vary significantly across studies. In this study, a previously developed full model of nuclear DNA was used to describe the DNA geometry. The TOPAS-nBio MC toolkit was used to investigate the impact of physics and chemistry models as well as three key parameters (the energy threshold for direct damage, the chemical stage time length, and the probability of damage between hydroxyl radical reactions with DNA) on the induction of DNA damage. Our results show that the difference in physics and chemistry models alone can cause differences up to 34% and 16% in the DNA double strand break (DSB) yield, respectively. Additionally, changing the direct damage threshold, chemical stage length, and hydroxyl damage probability can cause differences of up to 26%, 51%, and 71% in predicted DSB yields, respectively, for the configurations in this study. © 2020 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.We review the binding and energy level alignment of π-conjugated systems on metals, a field which during the last two decades has seen tremendous progress both in terms of experimental characterization as well as in the depth of theoretical understanding. Precise measurements of vertical adsorption distances and the electronic structure together with ab-initio calculations have shown that most of the molecular systems have to be considered as intermediate cases between weak physisorption and strong chemisorption. In this regime, the subtle interplay of different effects such as covalent bonding, charge transfer, electrostatic and van der Waals interactions yields a complex situation with different adsorption mechanisms. In order to establish a better understanding of the binding and the electronic level alignment of π-conjugated molecules on metals, we provide an up-to-date overview of the literature, explain the fundamental concepts as well as the experimental techniques and discuss typical case studies. Thereby, we relate the geometric with the electronic structure in a consistent picture and cover the entire range from weak to strong coupling. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.While the pursuit of better time resolution in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is rapidly evolving, little work has been performed on Time of Flight (TOF) image quality at high time resolution in the presence of modelling inconsistencies. This works focuses on the effect of using the wrong attenuation map in the system model, causing perturbations in the reconstructed radioactivity image. Previous work has usually considered the effects to be local to the area where there is attenuation mismatch, and has shown that the quantification errors in this area tend to reduce with improved time resolution. link2 This publication shows however that errors in the PET image at a distance from the mismatch increase with time resolution. The errors depend on the reconstruction algorithm used. We quantify the errors in the hypothetical case of perfect time resolution for maximum likelihood reconstructions. In addition, we perform reconstructions on simulated and patient data. In particular, for respiratory-gated reconstructions from a wrong attenuation map, increased errors are observed with improved time resolutions in areas close to the lungs (e.g., from 13.3% in non-TOF to up to 20.9% at 200 ps in the left ventricle). Creative Commons Attribution license.Spin-crossover (SCO) solids have been studied for several years due to their fascinating physical properties and their potential applications as optical switches and reversible high-density memories for information storage. Through this article, we will examine in details the effects of substrate's lattice parameters, R_sub, on a deformable spin crossover membrane, simulated using an electro-elastic model taking into account the volume change at the transition. link3 The molecules of the membrane can be either in the low spin state (LS) or the high spin state (HS), while those of the substrate are electronically neutral. Magnetic properties of the SCO membrane and the pressure distribution as a function of the lattice parameter of the substrate have been investigated. We demonstrated that the thermally induced first-order spin transition is significantly affected by the structural properties of the substrate, where a rise in the lattice parameter of the latter lowers the transition temperature and reduces the width of the thermal hysteresis loop.