BACKGROUND Radiation therapy is the mainstay of treatment for nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Importance of tumor coverage and challenges posed by its unique and critical location are well evident. Therefore we aimed to evaluate our radiation treatment plan through dose volume histograms (DVHs) to find planning target volume (PTV) dose coverage and factors affecting it. MATERIALS AND METHODS This r...

BACKGROUND To analyze patterns of local-regional failure after primary intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). METHODS A total of 370 non-metastatic NPC patients consecutively treated with IMRT (with or without chemotherapy) were analyzed. Radiotherapy was administered using a simultaneous integrated boost (SIB) technique at the total prescribed dose of 66-...

UNLABELLED The detection of myocardial perfusion abnormalities after radiation therapy (RT) has been investigated previously in patients with lymphoma and breast cancer. However, the prevalence and association of such abnormalities with RT in esophageal cancer patients have not been investigated previously. METHODS The prevalence of myocardial perfusion abnormalities detected using gated myoc...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my adviser Michael Zieve for teaching me to fish. I would like to thank Jeffrey Lagarias for helpful feedback in writing this thesis. I would like to thank my family (Peter, Susan, and Holly), my beautiful girlfriend Becky, and the community of Michigan graduate students for keeping me sane.

[1] The strong jet, with a speed between 500 and 600 m/s, is inferred in the equatorial region of Saturn by combining the nadir and limb observations of Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) aboard the Cassini spacecraft. A similar jet was discovered on Jupiter (F. M. Flasar et al., 2004a). These discoveries raise the possibility that intense jets are common in the equatorial stratospheres of ...

Introduction: The determination of accurate dose distribution is an issue of fundamental importance in radiotherapy, especially with regard to the fact that the human body is a heterogeneous medium. Therefore, the present study aimed to analyze the density and isodose depth profiles of 6 MV beam in a SP34 slab-wooden dust (pine)-SP34 slab (SWS) heterogeneous phantom.  Materials and Methods: Th...

Introduction: GafChromic EBT films are one of the self-developing and modern films commercially available for dosimetric verification of treatment planning systems (TPSs). Their high spatial resolution, low energy dependence and near-tissue equivalence make them suitable for verification of dose distributions in radiation therapy. This study was designed to evaluate the dosimetric parameters of...

In this paper a class of quartic trigonometric Bézier curve, called QT Bézier curve, with two shape parameters is presented. These curves not only inherit most properties of the usual quartic Bézier curves in the polynomial space, but also enjoy some other advantageous properties for shape modelling. The shape of the curve can be adjusted by altering the values of shape parameters while the con...

We show that one can find two nonisomorphic curves over a field K that become isomorphic to one another over two finite extensions of K whose degrees over K are coprime to one another. More specifically, let K0 be an arbitrary prime field and let r > 1 and s > 1 be integers that are coprime to one another. We show that one can find a finite extension K of K0, a degree-r extension L of K, a degr...

This talk gives an introduction into the subject of Seiberg-Witten curves and their relation to integrable systems. We discuss some motivations and origins of this relation and consider explicit construction of various families of Seiberg-Witten curves in terms of corresponding integrable models.