BACKGROUND The molecular diagnostics laboratory faces the challenge of improving test turnaround time (TAT). Low and consistent TATs are of great clinical and regulatory importance, especially for molecular virology tests. Laboratory information systems (LISs) contain all the data elements necessary to do accurate quality assurance (QA) reporting of TAT and other measures, but these reports are...

Linacs equipped with flattening filter-free (FFF) megavoltage photon beams are now commercially available. However, the commissioning of FFF beams poses challenges that are not shared with traditional flattened megavoltage X-ray beams. The planning system must model a beam that is peaked in the center and has an energy spectrum that is softer than the flattened beam. Removing the flattening fil...

PURPOSE The purpose of the present study was to investigate the ability of commercial patient quality assurance (QA) systems to detect linear accelerator-related errors. METHODS Four measuring systems (Delta(4®), OCTAVIUS(®), COMPASS, and Epiqa™) designed for patient specific quality assurance for rotational radiation therapy were compared by measuring four clinical rotational intensity modul...

For most computed tomography (CT) simulators, radiation therapists must remove the flat couch top to perform daily CT quality assurance (QA), and then use separate tools to perform localization-laser QA. This process wastes time and effort and creates the opportunity for accidents to occur. In this study, we tested a simple yet comprehensive daily QA program and phantom that we designed for CT ...

In closed-domain Question Answering (QA), the goal is to retrieve answers questions within a specific domain. The main challenge of QA develop model that only requires small datasets for training since large-scale corpora may not be available. One approach flexible can adapt different closed domains and train on their corpora. this paper, we present novel versatile reading comprehension style (...

A new series of poly(arylene piperidinium)-based anion exchange membranes (AEMs) are proposed for vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs). The AEMs fabricated via the Menshutkin reaction between piperidine) without ether bonds in backbone and various quaternizing agents, including iodomethane, 1-bromopentane, (5-bromopentyl)-trimethylammonium bromide. properties investigated terms sulfuric acid d...

PURPOSE To develop a GPU-based Monte Carlo (MC) 3D dosimetry quality assurance (QA) tool employing patient geometry and actual delivery information. METHODS First, we generate fluence maps at all beam angles from the initial treatment plan. A GPU-based MC dose engine, gDPM, is employed for the secondary dose calculation (SDC) on patient CT. This SDC is used to verify the TPS plan dose (PD) ac...

Recently there has been considerable interest in the utilization of covalent-organic frameworks (COFs) as ion-exchange membranes. While rapid ion conduction is experimentally observed COF membranes, underlying mechanism remains elusive. Herein, we report a molecular simulation study on chloride (Cl−) four membranes functionalized with quaternary ammonium groups (QA-2, QA-4, QA-6 and QA-EO) diff...