Search results for "reduction"
showing 10 items of 2058 documents
Second Cancer Incidence Among Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) Patients: A French Population-Based Study
2014
Abstract Introduction. The risk of developing a second primary cancer (SPC) is increased in patients with CLL. The mechanisms explaining this association could be related to lifestyle, environment, host factors or interactions or other influences. We conducted an epidemiological study based on 10 French registries and evaluated the risk of developing SPC in patients with CLL. Methods. Data from French population-based registries were used to establish a cohort of all patients diagnosed with a first cancer between 1989 and 2004 and followed-up until December 31, 2007. The person-year approach was used to estimate Standardized Incidence Ratios (SIRs) and Excess Absolute Risks (EARs) of metach…
The Assessment of Second Primary Cancers (SPCs) in a Series of Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma (SMZL) Patients
2006
The purpose of this study is to estimate the risk of second primary cancer (SPC) in 129 consecutive patients with splenic marginal zone lymphoma (SMZL) diagnosed in three Italian haematological centres. The person-years method deriving as a sum of products of age- and sex- specific rates and of the corresponding time at risk was used. The SPC Standardized Incidence Ratio (SIR) was 2.03 with a 95% confidence interval: [1.05, 3.56] (p < 0.05) and the corresponding Absolute Excess Risk (AER) was 145.8 (per 10000 SMZL patients per year). Our findings evidence a high frequency of additional cancers in patients with SMZL and suggest that the incidence rate of SPCs is significantly different from …
Peritoneal carcinosis of ovarian origin
2010
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the second most common genital malignancy in women and is the most lethal gynecological malignancy, with an estimated five-year survival rate of 39%. Despite efforts to develop an effective ovarian cancer screening method, 60% of patients still present with advanced disease. Comprehensive management using surgical cytoreduction to decrease the tumor load to a minimum, and intraperitoneal chemotherapy to eliminate microscopic disease on peritoneal surface, has the potential to greatly improve quality of life and to have an impact on survival in ovarian cancer patients. Despite achieving clinical remission after completion of initial treatment, most patients…
Linguistic Approach to Support Human Reliability Analysis and Validation Work in Advanced Radiotherapy Technologies
2019
An integrated methodology, that combines Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA), Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) and a modified Human Error Assessment and Reduction Technique (HEART), is proposed to identify safety-relevant human actions in innovative and advanced facilities. It is suggested to use in HEART the concept of linguistic expressions for proportion assessment factors. To prove its applicability, a case study is presented. The validation work has related to safety analyses of accidental events that can involve radiological over-exposure of patients during proton therapy treatments carried out by CATANA (Centro di AdroTerapia Applicazioni Nucleari Avanzate) centre, Italy. CATANA is the fir…
The application of AI techniques in the optimal design of multi-pass cold drawing processes
2001
Abstract In the paper the problem of optimal pass schedule design in multi-pass wire drawing process is investigated. An automatic design procedure based on an effective artificial intelligence (AI) technique, namely simulated annealing (SA), is proposed. The developed algorithm is aimed to achieve a satisfactory balance of the drawing stresses on the material along the reduction sequence, maintaining in the meantime the drawing stress at each pass below a safety value. In this way both the optimal number of passes and the optimal drawing sequence are determined. The effectiveness of the design procedure is tested through the comparison of the sequences suggested by the algorithm with a set…
Optimal design of cogeneration plants for seawater desalination
2004
Multi-stage flash (MSF) and reverse osmosis (RO) are the most common techniques for seawater desalination. A significant difference between these methodologies consists of their different energy requirements, i.e., thermal energy for MSF and mechanical energy for RO plants. The presence of both desalination systems (MSF and RO) appears to be suitable for cogeneration plants. The reject heat from the power cycle can feed an MSF section, while some power feeds the RO section and the MSF auxiliary equipment; the rest is sold to the grid. A criterion for the optimal design of such tri-functional cogeneration plants is proposed, based on exergo-economics and on profit maximization. In particular…
3D-2D dimensional reduction for a nonlinear optimal design problem with perimeter penalization
2012
A 3D-2D dimension reduction for a nonlinear optimal design problem with a perimeter penalization is performed in the realm of $\Gamma$-convergence, providing an integral representation for the limit functional.
Crowded comparison operators for constraints handling in NSGA-II for optimal design of the compensation system in electrical distribution networks
2006
This paper proposes an improvement of an efficient multiobjective optimization algorithm, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II, NSGA-II, that has been here applied to solve the problem of optimal capacitors placement in distribution systems. The studied improvement involves the Crowded Comparison Operator and modifies it in order to handle several constraints. The problem of optimal location and sizing of capacitor banks for losses reduction and voltage profile flattening in medium voltage (MV) automated distribution systems is a difficult combinatorial constrained optimization problem which is deeply studied in literature. In this paper, the efficiency of the proposed Crowded Compari…
Optimal tuning of tuned liquid column damper systems in random vibration by means of an approximate formulation
2014
Passive control devices are often added to slender and flexible systems in order to increase their structural safety. Several types of devices have been proposed in order to reduce the dynamic responses of different kind of structural systems. Among them, the tuned liquid column damper (TLCD) proved to be very effective in reducing vibration of various type of structures by means of a combined action which involves the motion of the liquid mass within the tube. The restoring force, in particular, is produced by the force of gravity acting on the liquid and the damping effect is generated by the hydrodynamic head losses that arise during the motion of the liquid inside the TLCD. Since the in…
On Optimizing Locally Linear Nearest Neighbour Reconstructions Using Prototype Reduction Schemes
2010
This paper concerns the use of Prototype Reduction Schemes (PRS) to optimize the computations involved in typical k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) rules. These rules have been successfully used for decades in statistical Pattern Recognition (PR) applications, and have numerous applications because of their known error bounds. For a given data point of unknown identity, the k-NN possesses the phenomenon that it combines the information about the samples from a priori target classes (values) of selected neighbors to, for example, predict the target class of the tested sample. Recently, an implementation of the k-NN, named as the Locally Linear Reconstruction (LLR) [11], has been proposed. The salien…