Background: Craniospinal radiotherapy faces technical challenges which are due to the sensitivity of the location in which the gross tumor is, and to organs at risk around planning target volume. Using modern treatment planning systems causes a reduction in the complexities of the treatment techniques. The most effective method to assess the dosimetric accuracy and the validity of the ...

Mitigating disaster impact requires identifying risk factors. The increased vulnerability of the physically fragile is easily understood. Less obvious are the socio-economic risk factors, especially within relatively affluent societies. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated many of these risks within the United States. These factors include poverty, home ownership, poor English language proficiency, e...

Methods for planning in stochastic domains often aim for finding plans that minimize expected execution cost or maximize the probability of goal achievement. Researchers have largely ignored the question how to incorporate risk-sensitive attitudes into their planning mechanisms. Since utility theory shows that it can be rational to maximize xpected utility, one might believe that by replacing a...

We consider a production planning problem under uncertainty in which companies have to make product allocation decisions such that the risk of failing regulatory inspections of sites and consequently losing revenue is minimized. In the proposed decision model the regulatory authority is an adversary. The outcome of an inspection is a Bernoulli-distributed random variable whose parameter is a fu...

This paper summarizes the risk assessment and management workflow developed applied to Southwest Regional Partnership on Carbon Sequestration (SWP) Phase III Demonstration Project. The consists of six primary tasks, including planning, identification, qualitative analysis, quantitative response monitoring. Within workflow, SWP assembled iteratively updated a registry that identifies risks for a...

Depression is one of the main risk factors for suicide. However, little is known about the intricate relationships among depressive symptomatology in unipolar depression, suicide risk, and the characteristics of executive dysfunction in depressed patients. We compared 20 non-psychotic unipolar depressed suicide attempters to 20 matching depressed non-attempters and to 20 healthy controls to fur...

We are investigating the feasibility of interstitial (iPDT), using multiple linear light sources positioned within the tumour. In an on-going feasibility study, 16 patients with incurable SCC at the base tongue have been treated with iPDT as a last treatment option. Preliminary results are encouraging with a long-term complete response in 8 out of 16 patients who have failed standard treatment....