0000000000342066
AUTHOR
Michele Basso
Predictors of survival in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma who permanently discontinued sorafenib
Treatment with sorafenib of patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma is challenged by anticipated discontinuation due to tumor progression, liver decompensation, or adverse effects. While postprogression survival is clearly determined by the pattern of tumor progression, understanding the factors that drive prognosis in patients who discontinued sorafenib for any reason may help to improve patient management and second-line trial design. Patients consecutively admitted to three referral centers who were receiving best supportive care following permanent discontinuation of sorafenib for any reason were included. Postsorafenib survival (PSS) was calculated from the last day of treatmen…
Complex Dynamics in a Harmonically Excited Lennard-Jones Oscillator: Microcantilever-Sample Interaction in Scanning Probe Microscopes1
In this paper we model the microcantilever-sample interaction in an atomic force microscope (AFM) via a Lennard-Jones potential and consider the dynamical behavior of a harmonically forced system. Using nonlinear analysis techniques on attracting limit sets, we numerically verify the presence of chaotic invariant sets. The chaotic behavior appears to be generated via a cascade of period doubling, whose occurrence has been studied as a function of the system parameters. As expected, the chaotic attractors are obtained for values of parameters predicted by Melnikov theory. Moreover, the numerical analysis can be fruitfully employed to analyze the region of the parameter space where no theoret…
NARX Models of an Industrial Power Plant Gas Turbine
This brief reports the experience with the identification of a nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous inputs (NARX) model for the PGT10B1 power plant gas turbine manufactured by General Electric-Nuovo Pignone. Two operating conditions of the turbine are considered: isolated mode and nonisolated mode. The NARX model parameters are estimated iteratively with a Gram-Schmidt procedure, exploiting both forward and stepwise regression. Many indexes have been evaluated and compared in order to perform subset selection in the functional basis set and determine the structure of the nonlinear model. Various input signals (from narrow to broadband) for identification and validation have been consider…