Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA) is often performed using a 2D device and compares measured and computed fluence maps to determine if a field passes or fails certain dose and position criteria. The effects of a measured deviation to the 3D patient spatial dosimetry and dose volume histogram (DVH) are largely unknown because they cannot be analyzed using commer...

The field of Question Answering (QA) is very multi-disciplinary as it requires expertise from a large number of areas such as natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval, speech recognition and semantic technologies. In the past years a large number of QA systems were proposed using approaches from different fields and focusing on particul...

This work aims at three goals: first, to define a set of statistical parameters and plan structures for a 3D pretreatment thoracic and prostate intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA) protocol; secondly, to test if the 3D QA protocol is able to detect certain clinical errors; and third, to compare the 3D QA method with QA performed with single ion chamber and 2D gamm...

The loading of MHC class I molecules with peptides involves a variety of accessory proteins, including TAP-associated glycoprotein (tapasin), which tethers empty MHC class I molecules to the TAP peptide transporter. We have evaluated the role of tapasin for the assembly of peptides with the class Ib molecule Qa-1b. In normal cells, Qa-1b is predominantly bound by a peptide, the Qa-1 determinant...

Cardiovascular perfusionists have always been interested in quality assurance (QA), most often in the form of equipment maintenance and record keeping. However, these activities have tended to be fragmented. In an attempt to define a more global approach to QA, basic concepts are identified and the steps used to start a formal QA program are illustrated. In the usual approach to QA, three area...

This paper studies quantum annealing (QA) for clustering, which can be seen as an extension of simulated annealing (SA). We derive a QA algorithm for clustering and propose an annealing schedule, which is crucial in practice. Experiments show the proposed QA algorithm finds better clustering assignments than SA. Furthermore, QA is as easy as SA to implement.

Question answering (QA) systems on the Web try to provide crisp answers information needs posed in natural language, replacing traditional ranked list of documents. QA, posing a multitude re

This paper briefly describes UAIC’s participation in this year's CLEF question answering competition, focusing on the main challenges and changes compared to our last year participation. An analysis of the errors introduced by each module is also discussed.

This paper presents QA@LF, the question-answering system developed at LF, INESC-ID. QA@LF follows different strategies according with the question type, and relies strongly on named entity recognition and on the pre-detection of linguistic patterns. Each question type is mapped into a single strategy; however, if no answer is found, the system proceeds and tries to find an answer using one of t...

Quinolinic acid (QA) is a potent endogenous excitotoxin; elevation of its concentration in an organism has been implicated in the pathogenesis of various disorders. The purpose of this study was the assessment of QA impact on the process of erythropoiesis. Marked increase of QA concentration was observed in plasma and peripheral tissues of uremic rats. These changes were proportional to the amo...