Travel burden and clinical presentation of retinoblastoma: analysis of 1024 patients from 43 African countries and 518 patients from 40 European countries.

Background: The travel distance from home to a treatment centre, which may impact the stage at diagnosis, has not been investigated for retinoblastoma, the most common childhood eye cancer. We aimed to investigate the travel burden and its impact on clinical presentation in a large sample of patients with retinoblastoma from Africa and Europe.

Methods: A cross-sectional analysis including 518 treatment-naïve patients with retinoblastoma residing in 40 European countries and 1024 treatment-naïve patients with retinoblastoma residing in 43 African countries.

High frame-rate multichannel beam-scanning microscopy based on Lissajous trajectories.

A simple beam-scanning optical design based on Lissajous trajectory imaging is described for achieving up to kHz frame-rate optical imaging on multiple simultaneous data acquisition channels. In brief, two fast-scan resonant mirrors direct the optical beam on a circuitous trajectory through the field of view, with the trajectory repeat-time given by the least common multiplier of the mirror periods. Dicing the raw time-domain data into sub-trajectories combined with model-based image reconstruction (MBIR) 3D in-painting algorithms allows for effective frame-rates much higher than the repeat time of the Lissajous trajectory.

Vapor detection performance of vertically aligned, ordered arrays of silicon nanowires with a porous electrode.

Vertically aligned, ordered arrays of silicon nanowires capped with a porous top electrode are used to detect gas phase ammonia and nitrogen dioxide in humidified air. The sensors had very fast response times and large signal-to-noise ratios. Calibration curves were created using both an initial slope method and a fixed-time point method.

Improved peak selection strategy for automatically determining minute compositional changes in fuels by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

During the development of automated computational methods to detect minute compositional changes in fuels, it became apparent that peak selection through the spectral deconvolution of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) data is limited by the complexity and noise levels inherent in the data. Specifically, current techniques are not capable of detecting minute, chemically relevant compositional differences with sufficient sensitivity. Therefore, an alternative peak selection strategy was developed based on spectral interpretation through interval-oriented parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC).

Chemically selective analysis of molecular monolayers by nonlinear optical stokes ellipsometry.

The application of nonlinear optical Stokes ellipsometry (NOSE) coupled with principal component analysis (PCA) is demonstrated for the chemically selective analysis of molecular monolayers. NOSE allows for rapid polarization measurements of nonlinear optical materials and thin surface films, which in turn benefits from comparably fast data analysis approaches. PCA combined with linear curve fitting techniques greatly reduce the analysis time relative to nonlinear curve fitting.