BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE High dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy is a highly extended practice in clinical brachytherapy today. Quality dose rate distribution datasets of the HDR sources used in a clinical treatment are required. Because of the different source designs, a specific dosimetry dataset is required for each source model. In the recently published BRAPHYQS-ESTRO Report, an overview of avail...

OBJECTIVES Prior studies have found that cardiac surgery patients receiving blood transfusions are at risk for increased mortality and morbidity following surgery. It is not clear whether this increased risk occurs across all haematocrit (HCT) levels. The goal of this study was to compare operative mortality in propensity-matched cardiac surgery patients based on stratification of the preoperat...

We present the case of a 43-year-old woman who underwent total thyroidectomy with bilateral lymphadenectomy for a papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), solid variant (T4bN1bMx), with V600E BRAF mutation. After ablative therapy, she presented undetectable thyroglobulin (Tg) but progressively increasing anti-Tg antibodies (TgAbs). During follow-up, nodal, lung and brain metastases were identified. S...

We investigated epidemiologic and clinical aspects of rickettsial diseases in 280 international travelers reported to the GeoSentinel surveillance Network during 1996-2008. Of these 280 travelers, 231 (82.5%) had spotted fever (SFG) rickettsiosis, 16 (5.7%) scrub typhus, 11 (3.9%) Q fever, 10 (3.6%) typhus group (TG) rickettsiosis, 7 (2.5%) bartonellosis, 4 (1.4%) indeterminable SFG/TG ricketts...

BACKGROUND HDR brachytherapy is one of the commonest methods of nasopharyngeal cancer treatment. In this method, depending on how advanced one tumor is, 2 to 6 Gy dose as intracavitary brachytherapy is prescribed. Due to high dose rate and tumor location, accuracy evaluation of treatment planning system (TPS) is particularly important. Common methods used in TPS dosimetry are based on computati...

Monte Carlo simulations are widely used for calculation of the dosimetric parameters of brachytherapy sources. MCNP4C2, MCNP5, MCNPX, EGS4, EGSnrc, PTRAN, and GEANT4 are among the most commonly used codes in this field. Each of these codes utilizes a cross-sectional library for the purpose of simulating different elements and materials with complex chemical compositions. The accuracies of the f...

We describe a fast, PC-based optimization planning system for a planar permanent-seed implant. Sites where this system is applicable include brain, lung, and head and neck. The system described here allows placing ribbons of different strengths and of different lengths along and across the implant plane. The program takes full advantage of the availability of different source strengths in inven...

Purpose: Recently a new design of a 125 I brachytherapy source was introduced for interstitial seed implants, particularly for prostate seed implants. This new source is the EchoSeedTMModel 6733 125 I brachytherapy source. Due to the differences in source design and manufacturing process from one new source to the next, their dosimetric parameters should be determined according to the American ...