Let
f
:
V
→
{
0
,
1
,
2
}
be a function,
G
=
(
V
,
E
)
be a graph with a vertex set
V
and a set of edges
E
and let the weight of the vertex
u
∈
V
be defined by
f
(
u
). A vertex
u
with property
f
(
u
...)
=
0
is considered to be defended with respect to the function
f
if it is adjacent to a vertex with positive weight. Further, the function
f
is called a weak Roman dominating function (WRDF) if for every vertex
u
with property
f
(
u
)
=
0
there exists at least one adjacent vertex
v
with positive weight such that the function
f
′
:
V
→
{
0
,
1
,
2
}
defined by
f
′
(
u
)
=
1
,
f
′
(
v
)
=
f
(
v
)
-
1
and
f
′
(
w
)
=
f
(
w
)
,
w
∈
V
\
{
u
,
v
}
has no undefended vertices. In this paper, an optimization problem of finding the WRDF
f
such that
∑
u
∈
V
f
(
u
)
is minimal, known as the weak Roman domination problem (WRDP), is considered. Therefore, a new integer linear programing (ILP) formulation is proposed and compared with the one known from the literature. Comparison between the new and the existing formulation is made through computational experiments on a grid, planar, net and randomly generated graphs known from the literature and up to 600 vertices. Tests were run using standard CPLEX and Gurobi optimization solvers. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed new ILP formulation clearly outperforms the existing formulation in the sense of solutions’ quality and running times.
Background
Immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) recently became the standard treatment for patients with advanced non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Here, we present the first ...results of a real‐world observational study on the effectiveness of ICI monotherapy in patients with advanced NSCLC treated at a single academic center in a Central and Eastern European (CEE) country.
Materials and Methods
Overall, 66 consecutive patients with advanced NSCLC treated with ICIs in everyday clinical practice, either with first‐line pembrolizumab (26 patients) or second‐line atezolizumab, nivolumab, or pembrolizumab (40 patients), from August 2015 to November 2018, were included. All data were retrieved from a hospital lung cancer registry, in which the data is collected prospectively.
Results
Included patients had a median age of 64 years, most were male (55%), 6% were in performance status ≥2, and 18% had controlled central nervous system metastases at baseline. In first‐line, the median progression‐free survival (mPFS) was 9.3 months, while the median overall survival (mOS) was not reached. The 1‐year overall survival (OS) was 62%. In second‐line, the mPFS and mOS were 3.5 months and 9.9 months, respectively, with a 1‐year OS of 35%. In the overall population, adverse events of any grade were recorded in 79% of patients and of severe grade (3–4) in 12% of patients.
Conclusion
The first real‐world outcomes of NSCLC immunotherapy from a CEE country suggest comparable effectiveness to those observed in clinical trials and other real‐world series, mainly coming from North America and Western European countries. Further data to inform on the real‐world effectiveness of immunotherapy worldwide are needed.
Implications for Practice
Immunotherapy is a standard treatment of advanced non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The real‐world data on immunotherapy are still limited. This article presents the first data on the effectiveness of mono‐immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors for patients with advanced NSCLC treated at a single academic center in a Central and Eastern European country. The survival rates and toxicity are comparable to those achieved in randomized clinical trials and other real‐world series, coming mainly from North American and Western European countries. There is a pressing need to gather further data on the effectiveness of immunotherapy in everyday practice worldwide.
Immunotherapy has become the standard treatment for advanced non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This article presents the first real‐world results on the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment for advanced NSCLC from a single academic center from Central and Eastern European country.
The efficient, selective, and economical sorbents for the removal of Sr radionuclides are largely needed for the decontamination of effluents with high salinity. In this study, the removal of Sr was ...investigated using the zeolite produced from the Bayer process liquids. Based on the XRD, SEM/EDS analysis, the product was pure and highly crystalline zeolite 4A (Z4A). Removal of Sr was fast (5 min for 100% removal at 8.80 mg/L), with high maximum sorption capacity (252.5 mg/L), and independent on the initial pH in the range 3.5-9.0. Specific sorption of Sr by protonated groups on the Z4A surface was operating in addition to ion-exchange with Na ions. The selectivity of Z4A decreased in the order Sr > Ca > K > Mg > Na. 84% of Sr was separated from seawater within 5 min, at the Z4A dose of 5 g/L, while efficiency increased to 99% using the dose of 20 g/L. Desorption of radioisotope
Sr from seawater/Z4A solid residue was very low in deionized water (0.1-0.2%) and groundwater (0.7%) during 60 days of leaching. Z4A is a cost-effective, selective, and high-capacity medium for Sr removal, which provides high stability of retained radionuclides.
As soil cadmium (Cd) contamination becomes a serious concern and one of the significant environmental pollution issues all over the world, knowledge of the basic chemistry, origin, inputs, sources, ...quantity, chemical forms, reactions, as well as the fate and transport of Cd in different types of soil is crucial for better understanding Cd bioavailability, health risks and remedial options. This study aimed to increase the current knowledge on the complex interdependence between the factors affecting behavior, transport and fate of Cd in the soil and to test and compare the performance of the stabilization agents in different soil types. Soils demonstrated various sorption affinity and capacity for Cd accumulation, which proved to be positively correlated with soil pH and the cation exchange capacity (CEC). With increasing levels of contamination, sequential extraction analysis showed the highest increase of relative Cd amounts in the exchangeable fraction regardless of the soil properties, suggesting that added Cd is principally associated with the easily accessible and mobile fraction. For different initial Cd concentrations and soil types, Cd sorption reached the quasi-equilibrium within 24 h of contact. Prolonged aging (two months) influenced the natural stabilization of Cd in all types of soil, but only at low contamination level. The application of both, conventional (slaked lime Ca(OH)2) and alternative phosphate-rich (annealed bovine bones B400) amendments, resulted in Cd relocation and reduction of exchangeable Cd content. Although the effect was smaller when apatite amendment was utilized, observed re-distribution of Cd to more stable soil fractions is preferable for achieving long-term stabilization. Cd concentrations extracted in exchangeable and acid soluble fractions after the treatments of contaminated soil samples suggest that the practical applicability of in situ immobilization depends on the soil properties and the level of contamination, as well as that effect, should be monitored for the possible re-mobilization of Cd.
Display omitted
•Soil pH and CEC are most influential factors that control Cd sorption capacity.•Mobility of Cd is high in all soil types and increases with contamination level.•Soil pH and CaCO3 content are significant factors of Cd stability in the soil.•Effect of aging on enhanced Cd stability depends on the contamination level.•Amending the soil with Ca(OH)2 and B400 results in Cd relocation and stabilization.
The Roman domination problem is considered. An improvement of two existing
Integer Linear Programing (ILP) formulations is proposed and a comparison
between the old and new ones is given. Correctness ...proofs show that improved
linear programing formulations are equivalent to the existing ones regardless
of the variables relaxation and usage of lesser number of constraints.
In 2019, the Recommendations for the management of patients with lung cancer were published bringing much-needed standardisation of diagnosis and treatment to improve survival of patients with lung ...cancer. Three years after the original Recommendations were published, the update of the Recommendations brings the most innovations in the chapter on systemic treatment of patients with lung cancer. This reflects the remarkable progress made in the field of understanding the oncogenesis and biology of lung cancer and thus the development of new drugs. The burden of lung cancer remains high, as lung cancer is still the most common cause of cancer related death in our country and worldwide. Lung cancer is responsible for one of five cancer-related deaths. Almost one third of patients with lung cancer do not receive any oncological treatment, either because of poor performance status, comorbidities or the extent of the disease. Half of the patients have metastatic disease at diagnosis, resulting in only small improvements in survival despite advances in the treatment of lung cancer patients. These data remind us that if we are to make major shifts in the management of lung cancer patients, we will need to take different approaches. The most promising seems to be the detection of early stages of lung cancer which offers the best treatment results. The Recommendations written here are guidelines for the management of patients with lung cancer. Only with comprehensive multidisciplinary treatment approach, the best outcome from the prognostically unfavourable disease can be offered.
Optimizing timing of defibrillation by evaluating the likelihood of a successful outcome could significantly enhance resuscitation. Previous studies employed conventional machine learning approaches ...and hand-crafted features to address this issue, but none have achieved superior performance to be widely accepted. This study proposes a novel approach in which predictive features are automatically learned.
A raw 4s VF episode immediately prior to first defibrillation shock was feed to a 3-stage CNN feature extractor. Each stage was composed of 4 components: convolution, rectified linear unit activation, dropout and max-pooling. At the end of feature extractor, the feature map was flattened and connected to a fully connected multi-layer perceptron for classification. For model evaluation, a 10 fold cross-validation was employed. To balance classes, SMOTE oversampling method has been applied to minority class.
The obtained results show that the proposed model is highly accurate in predicting defibrillation outcome (Acc = 93.6 %). Since recommendations on classifiers suggest at least 50 % specificity and 95 % sensitivity as safe and useful predictors for defibrillation decision, the reported sensitivity of 98.8 % and specificity of 88.2 %, with the analysis speed of 3 ms/input signal, indicate that the proposed model possesses a good prospective to be implemented in automated external defibrillators.
The learned features demonstrate superiority over hand-crafted ones when performed on the same dataset. This approach benefits from being fully automatic by fusing feature extraction, selection and classification into a single learning model. It provides a superior strategy that can be used as a tool to guide treatment of OHCA patients in bringing optimal decision of precedence treatment. Furthermore, for encouraging replicability, the dataset has been made publicly available to the research community.
Goal: Clinical interpretation of an electrocardiogram (ECG) can be detrimentally affected by noise. Removal of the electromyographic (EMG) noise is particularly challenging due to its spectral ...overlap with the QRS complex. The existing EMG-denoising algorithms often distort signal morphology, thus obscuring diagnostically relevant information. Methods: Here, a new iterative regeneration method (IRM) for efficient EMG-noise suppression is proposed. The main hypothesis is that the temporary removal of the dominant ECG components enables extraction of the noise with the minimum alteration to the signal. The method is validated on SimEMG database of simultaneously recorded reference and noisy signals, MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and synthesized ECG signals, both with the noise from MIT Noise Stress Test Database. Results: IRM denoising and morphology-preserving performance is superior to the wavelet- and FIR-based benchmark methods. Conclusions : IRM is reliable, computationally non-intensive, fast and applicable to any number of ECG channels recorded by mobile or standard ECG devices.
Water hyacinth biomass was used for the synthesis of activated carbons in the process of chemical activation with H3PO4, followed by controlled carbonization. The study investigates the effect of ...various impregnation weight ratios of H3PO4 and dry hyacinth (0.5–3.0), as well as different carbonization temperatures (T = 400–800 °C), on the surface characteristics of the produced activated carbons (AC). The activated carbon obtained with an impregnation ratio of 1.5 and a carbonization temperature of 600 °C (1.5 AC/600) showed the highest values of specific surface area of 1421 m2 g−1, representing a selected adsorbent for metformin removal. The chosen sample was characterized by elemental analysis, adsorption–desorption isotherms of nitrogen at −196 °C, via FTIR spectroscopy and the SEM method. The modeling of the experimental adsorption data showed that metformin adsorption: (i) can be best described by the Langmuir isotherm model, with the value of qmax = 122.47 mg g−1; (ii) led the pseudo-second order kinetic model; and (iii) is a spontaneous (ΔG° = −3.44 kJ mol−1) and endothermic (ΔH° = 8.77 kJ mol−1) process. A desorption study has shown that 92% of metformin was successfully desorbed in the presence of a 0.1 MHCl/ethanol mixture (volume ratio 2:1). The recovery of the adsorbent of 84%, after five successive cycles, indicated that the 1.5 AC/600 has potential to be applied in the real systems for water treatment.
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