As radiation therapy transitions from intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) to volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) it is important to consider the quality assurance (QA) of VMAT plans in light of what has previously been learned and developed in IMRT QA. This technical note assesses if IMRT based plan QA software, which has reduced the need in IMRT for phantom dose measurements on th...

The first three reactions in the catabolism of qainic acid in Neurospora crassa are under the genetic control of the qa gene cluster. This cluster consists of three structural genes encoding three inducible enzymes plus a regulatory gene (qa-1+) whose diffusible product apparently acts in a positive fashion to initiate coordinate synthesis of the three enzymes when an appropriate inducer is pre...

Quality attributes (QA) play a fundamental role when architecting software systems. However, in contrast to QA in traditional software systems, the role of QA when architecting service-based systems (SBS) has not yet been studied in depth. Thus, we conducted a descriptive survey to explore how QA are treated during the architecting of SBS. Data were collected using an online questionnaire targe...

The demand for interfaces that allow users to interact with computers in an intuitive, effective, and efficient way is increasing. Question Answering (QA) systems address this need by answering questions posed by humans using knowledge bases. In recent years, many QA systems and related components have been developed both by practitioners and the research community. Since QA involves a vast num...

BACKGROUND Vascular access surveillance by ultrasound dilution blood flow rate (Qa) measurement is widely recommended; however, optimal criteria for detecting stenosis and predicting thrombosis in arteriovenous fistulae (AVFs) are still not clearly defined. METHODS In a blinded trial, we evaluated the accuracy of single Qa measurement, Qa adjusted for mean arterial pressure (Qa/MAP), and decr...

We describe the design and use of a daily quality assurance (QA) system for proton therapy. The QA system is designed to check the overall readiness of proton therapy system consistently within certain reference tolerances by a home-made QA device (the QA device). The QA device is comprised of a commercially available QA device, rf-Daily QA 3, a home-made acrylic phantom, a set of acrylic compe...

In Neurospora crassa, the enzyme quinate (shikimate) dehydrogenase catalyzes the first reaction in the inducible quinic acid catabolic pathway and is encoded in the qa-3 gene of the qa cluster. In this cluster, the order of genes has been established as qa-1 qa-3 qa-4 qa-2. Amino-terminal sequences have been determined for purified quinate dehydrogenase from wild type and from UV-induced revert...

In this paper, we motivate the need for a publicly available, generic software framework for question-answering (QA) systems. We present an open-source QA framework QANUS which researchers can leverage on to build new QA systems easily and rapidly. The framework implements much of the code that will otherwise have been repeated across different QA systems. To demonstrate the utility and practic...

This work applied statistical process control to establish the control limits of the % gamma pass of patient-specific intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) quality assurance (QA), and to evaluate the efficiency of the QA process by using the process capability index (Cpml). A total of 278 IMRT QA plans in nasopharyngeal carcinoma were measured with ...