Comparing Interfractional Stability of Heart Dose Among Three Breath-Hold Radiotherapy Techniques in Breast Cancer.

Aims: Breath holding can reduce the cardiac dose in radiotherapy for left-sided breast cancer. We evaluated whether any of the existing commonly used breath-hold techniques was superior in maintaining a more reproducible mean heart dose (MHD) during treatment.

Materials And Methods: This was a single-institution, interventional, nonrandomised, three-armed prospective trial, comparing the reproducibility of MHD in breath-hold radiotherapy using voluntary deep inspiration breath hold (vDIBH), active breathing control (ABC), and surface-guided radiotherapy (SGRT).

Prospective Trial on the Impact of Weekly Cone Beam Computed Tomography-Guided Correction on Mean Heart Dose in Breast Cancer Breath-Hold Radiation Therapy.

Purpose: Surface guided radiation therapy (SGRT) in breast cancer radiation therapy (RT) may decrease the need for image guidance such as cone beam computed tomography (CBCT). The goal of this study was to evaluate the impact of CBCT image guidance on the cumulative and interfractional variation of mean heart dose (MHD) during breath-hold RT in patients with breast cancer. We hypothesized that weekly CBCT is not necessary for SGRT-assisted breath-hold but is still needed in patients treated with voluntary deep inspiration breath-hold (vDIBH) and active breathing control (ABC) to maintain a stable MHD.

Electrochemical removal of antiretroviral drug - raltegravir from aquatic media: Multivariate optimization, degradation studies and transformation products characterization.

Electrochemical degradation of the antiretroviral drug raltegravir was investigated using different electrode materials (platinum, glassy carbon and boron-doped diamond). After preliminary studies with the use of multivariate chemometric method, electrochemical degradation was conducted with a boron-doped diamond electrode and phosphate buffer at pH 9. To assess the role of different variable in degradation kinetics, final experiments were conducted with varying applied current densities, chloride and humic acid concentrations, and using a natural river water sample.