Intraoperative breast radiotherapy: survival,local control and risk factors for recurrence

BackgroundWhole breast irradiation reduces loco-regional recurrence and risk of death in patients submitted to breast-conserving treatment. Data show that radiation to the index quadrant alone may be enough in selected patients.AimTo report the experience with intra-operative radiotherapy (IORT) with Electron-beam Cone in Linear Accelerator (ELIOT) and the results in overall survival, local control and late toxicity of patients submitted to this treatment.Materials and Methods147 patients treated with a median follow up of 6.9 years (0.1?11.5 years). The actuarial local control and overall survival probabilities were estimated using the Kaplan Meier method. All tests were two-sided and p ? 0.05 was considered statistically significant.ResultsOverall survival of the cohort in 5 years, in the median follow up and in 10 years was of 98.3%, 95.1% and 95.1%, respectively, whereas local control in 5 years, in the median follow up and in 10 years was of 96%, 94.9% and 89.5%, respectively. Two risk groups were identified for local recurrence depending on the estrogen or progesterone receptors, axillary or margin status and lymphovascular invasion (LVI) (p = 0.016).ConclusionsIORT is a safe and effective treatment. Rigorous selection is important to achieve excellent local control results.     

Janus: a framework to boost HPC applications in the cloud based on SDN path provisioning

Data centers, clusters, and grids have historically supported High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Due to the high capital and operational expenditures associated with such infrastructures, we have witnessed consistent efforts to run HPC applications in the cloud in the recent past. The potential advantages of this shift include higher scalability and lower costs. If, on the one hand, app instantiation—through customized Virtual Machines (VMs)—is a well-solved issue, on the other, the network still represents a significant bottleneck. When switching HPC applications to be executed on the cloud, we lose control of where VMs will be positioned and of the paths that will be traversed for processes to communicate with one another. To bridge this gap, we present Janus, a framework for dynamic, just-in-time path provisioning in cloud infrastructures. By leveraging emerging software-defined networking principles, the framework allows for an HPC application, once deployed, to have interprocess communication paths configured upon usage based on least-used network links (instead of resorting to shortest, pre-computed paths). Janus is fully configurable to cope with different operating parameters and communication strategies, providing a rich ecosystem for application execution speed up. Through an extensive experimental evaluation, we provide evidence that the proposed framework can lead to significant gains regarding runtime. Moreover, we show what one can expect in terms of system overheads, providing essential insights on how better benefiting from Janus.

     

Coupling physiological analysis with proteomic profile to understand the photosynthetic responses of young Euterpe oleracea palms to drought

Photosynthesis Research - This study examined whether drought sensitivity in açaí (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) is associated with reductions in photosynthesis and increasing oxidative stress...