Assessing the need for adaptive radiotherapy in head and neck cancer patients using an automatic planning tool.

Background: Unbiased analysis of the impact of adaptive radiotherapy (ART) is necessary to evaluate dosimetric benefit and optimize clinics' workflows. The aim of the study was to assess the need for adaptive radiotherapy (ART) in head and neck (H&N) cancer patients using an automatic planning tool in a retrospective planning study.

Materials And Methods: Thirty H&N patients treated with adaptive radiotherapy were analysed.

Emergence of abstract sound representations in the ascending auditory system.

Auditory processing begins by decomposing sounds into their frequency components, raising the question of where the representation of sounds as wholes emerges in the auditory system. To address this question, we used stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA), the reduction in the responses of a neuron to a common sound (standard) which does not generalize to another, rare sound (deviant). SSA to tone frequency has been demonstrated in multiple stations of the auditory pathway, including the inferior colliculus (IC), medial geniculate body (MGB) and auditory cortex.

ACE-27 as a prognostic tool of severe acute toxicities in patients with head and neck cancer treated with chemoradiotherapy: a real-world, prospective, observational study.

Purpose: To evaluate the association between comorbidities as assessed by the "Adult Comorbidity Evaluation 27" (ACE-27) and the development of severe acute toxicities in patients with head and neck cancer treated with chemoradiotherapy.

Methods: Prospective, single-center cohort of patients with head and neck cancer treated with chemoradiotherapy (cisplatin 100 mg/m on days 1, 22, and 43; intensity-modulated radiotherapy 60 to 69.96 gray, in 30 to 33 fractions,) between June 2018 and December 2019.

Clinical validation of a graphical method for radiation therapy plan quality assessment.

Background: This work aims at clinically validating a graphical tool developed for treatment plan assessment, named SPIDERplan, by comparing the plan choices based on its scoring with the radiation oncologists (RO) clinical preferences.

Methods: SPIDERplan validation was performed for nasopharynx pathology in two steps. In the first step, three ROs from three Portuguese radiotherapy departments were asked to blindly evaluate and rank the dose distributions of twenty pairs of treatment plans.

Case Report: Sarcoidosis mimicking head and neck cancer progression.

Several case reports have been published describing the coexistence of sarcoidosis and cancer. In the literature, simultaneous occurrence of head and neck cancer and sarcoidosis is rarely reported. In this paper we present a case of a 42-year-old man with squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity, locally advanced, which after surgery and adjuvant radiotherapy developed local persistence and progression in the mediastinal lymph nodes.

Biological dose-escalated definitive radiation therapy in head and neck cancer.

Objective: To compare treatment outcome of patients with head and neck (HN) tumours treated with definitive radiation therapy that, mainly owing to differences in the fractionation scheme used with simultaneous integrated boost techniques, resulted in a different biological dose.

Methods: 181 patients with HN cancer, prescribed to about 70.2 Gy in the primary tumour, were included in this study.

SPIDERplan: A tool to support decision-making in radiation therapy treatment plan assessment.

Aim: In this work, a graphical method for radiotherapy treatment plan assessment and comparison, named SPIDERplan, is proposed. It aims to support plan approval allowing independent and consistent comparisons of different treatment techniques, algorithms or treatment planning systems.

Background: Optimized plans from modern radiotherapy are not easy to evaluate and compare because of their inherent multicriterial nature.

Detecting the unexpected.

Sensory input is inherently dynamic and redundant. Humans and animals alike show a remarkable ability to extract regularities from the sensory scene and dynamically update their responses to the environment. This type of short-term plasticity occurs on time scales ranging from seconds to minutes (and possibly longer).

Assessment and topographic characterization of locoregional recurrences in head and neck tumours.

Purpose: To evaluate the differences between three methods of classification of recurrences in patients with head and neck tumours treated with Radiation Therapy (RT).

Materials And Methods: 367 patients with head and neck tumours were included in the study. Tumour recurrences were delineated in the CT images taken during patient follow-up and deformable registration was used to transfer this volume into the planning CT.

[Secondary hypothyroidism after cervical irradiation: systematic evaluation of thyroid function in follow-up].

Introduction: Sometimes Thyroid dysfunction is an underestimated consequence of radiation exposure. The underlying mechanism is not clearly understood, but it is likely to be multifactorial. As so, the specific risk factors associated with the development of secondary radiotherapy hypothyroidism remain undefined.

Neuronal adaptation translates stimulus gaps into a population code.

Neurons in sensory pathways exhibit a vast multitude of adaptation behaviors, which are assumed to aid the encoding of temporal stimulus features and provide the basis for a population code in higher brain areas. Here we study the transition to a population code for auditory gap stimuli both in neurophysiological recordings and in a computational network model. Independent component analysis (ICA) of experimental data from the inferior colliculus of Mongolian gerbils reveals that the network encodes different gap sizes primarily with its population firing rate within 30 ms after the presentation of the gap, where longer gap size evokes higher network activity.

Impaired auditory temporal selectivity in the inferior colliculus of aged Mongolian gerbils.

Aged humans show severe difficulties in temporal auditory processing tasks (e.g., speech recognition in noise, low-frequency sound localization, gap detection).