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Introduction Several positive clinical trials have demonstrated that capacitive hyperthermia (CHT) improves the effectiveness of radiation therapy for the treatment of various cancer entities. However, the ability of CHT to induce significant heating throughout the body is under debate.Objectives To perform a pilot study involving comparisons of computer simulations and experimental data using different split-phantoms to validate hyperthermia treatment modeling for pre-planning for a clinical CHT system and to investigate the feasibility of split-phantom measurements in capacitive hyperthermia.Materials and methods The CHT system EHY-2030 (Oncotherm, Budapest, Hungary) was used. The system provides two electrode sizes, but only the smaller electrode, indicated as D200 electrode, was investigated in this pilot study. Horizontally and vertically splittable, different multi-slice phantoms with dielectric material properties simulating muscle and electrically low conductive fat were produced and heated. During the heating procedure, temperature-time curves were measured, and thermal images were captured. Specific absorption rate values were derived from the temperature rise (TR) values. Concomitantly, computer field simulations utilizing a detailed CAD-based model of the CHT system were performed using the simulation platform Sim4Life and compared with measurements.Results For the investigated electrode D200 the system power of 75 W was applied, which is half of the maximum power of 150 W and lies in the range of usual values for this electrode applied in patient treatments in our clinic. For 75 W, a heating of 3.6 °C in 6 min in a depth of 1 cm in an agar-based, muscle tissue-equivalent phantom was achieved. The addition of a 1 cm thick, synthetic, low dielectric fat layer reduced the TR up until a depth of 8.5 cm by on average around 38% (from 8.5 cm onwards the absolute local TR is similar, deviations are ≤0.1 °C). In terms of point-to-point absolute SAR comparison (without any normalization), up to a depth of 11 cm in the phantoms central vertical plot, the simulation differs from the measured TR points by on average 25% (ranging from 7% to 36%) for the homogeneous phantom and by on average 43% (ranging from 26% to 60%) for the inhomogeneous phantom.Conclusion Computer simulations and experimental data were compared for the CHT system EHY-2030 using the D200 electrode, applying a thermal imaging technique for different vertically splittable phantoms. This pilot study data can be used as a guidance regarding the expected heating for this commonly used electrode size but also to further elucidate the significance of non-thermal anticancer effects. Further studies are needed for different sizes and geometries of electrodes and phantoms.

Introduction Hyperthermia (HT) at temperatures between 39 °C and 44 °C is utilized as an adjunctive cancer therapy, serving as potent radio- and chemosensitizer. Its effectiveness in treating solid malignancies has been well established. This raises the question of whether HT can also benefit patients with nonsolid tumors, such as lymphomas.Objective To provide an overview of the current literature on research involving the use of HT in the treatment of lymphomas.Material and Methods This systematic literature review was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines. For this purpose, a MeSH-term-defined literature search on MEDLINE (Pubmed) and Embase (Ovid) was conducted from June 25 to June 28, 2024. Included were in vitro studies on lymphoma cell lines and preclinical studies on animal models with lymphoma that were both treated with HT as monotherapy or HT in combination with another treatment, and studies on patients with lymphoma. Excluded were studies that used thermal ablation and hyperthermic perfusions.Results Thirty-nine studies were included, predominantly in vitro studies (n = 32) or studies on animal models (n = 5). The in vitro studies utilized HT either as monotherapy (n = 6), with substances that enhance HT efficacy (n = 18) or as a sensitizer for other treatments (n = 8). Additionally, two clinical case reports on the treatment of lymphoma patients were included.Conclusions In vitro results suggest that HT can have anticancer effects on lymphoma cells and may enhance existing treatments. These findings are supported by in vivo studies and case reports. However, additional clinical data are needed before translation into the clinic can be implemented.

This article presents the scientific outcomes of the 2023 Data Fusion Contest (DFC23) organized by the Image Analysis and Data Fusion Technical Committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. The contest consists of two tracks investigating the fusion of optical and synthetic aperture radar data for: 1) fine-grained roof type classification and 2) height estimation. During the development phase, 1000 people registered for the contest, while at the end 55 and 35 teams competed during the test phase in the two tracks, respectively. This article presents the methods and results obtained by the first and second-ranked teams of each track. In Track 1, both winning teams leveraged pretraining, modern network architectures, model ensembles, and measures to cope with the imbalanced class distribution. The solutions to Track 2 are more diverse and are characterized by modern multitask learning approaches. The data of this contest is openly available to the community for further research, development, and refinement of machine learning methods.

Given the ever-growing availability of remote sensing data (e.g., Gaofen in China, Sentinel in the EU, and Landsat in the USA), multimodal remote sensing techniques have been garnering increasing attention and have made extraordinary progress in various Earth observation (EO)-related tasks. The data acquired by different platforms can provide diverse and complementary information. The joint exploitation of multimodal remote sensing has been proven effective in improving the existing methods of land-use/land-cover segmentation in urban environments. To boost technical breakthroughs and accelerate the development of EO applications across cities and regions, one important task is to build novel cross-city semantic segmentation models based on modern artificial intelligence technologies and emerging multimodal remote sensing data. This leads to the development of better semantic segmentation models with high transferability among different cities and regions. The Cross-City Semantic Segmentation contest is organized in conjunction with the 13th Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing (WHISPERS).

Abstract Anonymization has the potential to foster the sharing of medical data. State-of-the-art methods use mathematical models to modify data to reduce privacy risks. However, the degree of protection must be balanced against the impact on statistical properties. We studied an extreme case of this trade-off: the statistical validity of an open medical dataset based on the German National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON), which was prepared for publication using a strong anonymization procedure. Descriptive statistics and results of regression analyses were compared before and after anonymization of multiple variants of the original dataset. Despite significant differences in value distributions, the statistical bias was found to be small in all cases. In the regression analyses, the median absolute deviations of the estimated adjusted odds ratios for different sample sizes ranged from 0.01 [minimum = 0, maximum = 0.58] to 0.52 [minimum = 0.25, maximum = 0.91]. Disproportionate impact on the statistical properties of data is a common argument against the use of anonymization. Our analysis demonstrates that anonymization can actually preserve validity of statistical results in relatively low-dimensional data.

Abstract In this letter, a design of virtual guarded SiPMs fabricated in a standard 0.35μm standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process is introduced. The performance of these virtual guarded cells (VGC) is compared to that of conventional cells with real guard rings, referred to as physical guarded cells (PGC). Specifically, the photon detection efficiency (PDE) of both types of SiPMs is evaluated. For this, PDE calculations are conducted at different overvoltages (OVs) and the PDE is compared depending on the wavelength before conducting measurements. The results demonstrate that the VGC SiPM outperforms the PGC SiPM, exhibiting a true PDE of (22.5 ± 0.5)%, which is significantly higher than the PDE of (10.9 ± 0.3)% obtained for the PGC SiPM. The superior PDE of the VGC SiPM is attributed to a larger active or photosensitive area due to the virtual guard rings and a thinner n‐layer in the photosensitive region.