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PURPOSEStandard treatment guidelines improve patient outcomes, including disease-specific survival, in cancer care. The African Cancer Coalition was formed in 2016 to harmonize cancer treatment guidelines for sub-Saharan Africa.METHODSThe African Cancer Coalition collaborated with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) and the American Cancer Society to harmonize 46 cancer treatment guidelines for use in sub-Saharan Africa. Harmonization for each guideline was completed by a group of approximately 6-10 African cancer experts from a range of specialties and with representation across resource levels. Each working group was chaired by an African oncologist and included a member of the appropriate NCCN guidelines panel. Treatment recommendations from the parent guidelines were distinguished as options that are generally available and should be considered standard care in most of the region or as highly advanced options for which cost or other resources may limit widespread availability. Additional recommendations specific to sub-Saharan Africa were added.RESULTSThe NCCN Harmonized Guidelines for sub-Saharan Africa, available for download on the NCCN website and mobile application, provide flexible recommendations appropriate for the range of resources seen in African cancer programs, from private comprehensive cancer centers to resource-constrained public hospitals. IBM (Armonk, NY) has developed a digital interface—the Cancer Guidelines Navigator—that allows oncologists to access the treatment recommendations for the first five guidelines through an interactive web-based application.CONCLUSIONHarmonized guidelines that reflect the diversity of resource levels that characterize the current state of clinical care for cancer in Africa have the potential to fill a crucial gap in efforts to standardize and improve cancer care in Africa.

To advance monitoring of surface water resources, new remote sensing technologies including the forthcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite (expected launch 2022) and its experimental airborne prototype AirSWOT are being developed to repeatedly map water surface elevation (WSE) and slope (WSS) of the world’s rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. However, the vertical accuracies of these novel technologies are largely unverified; thus, standard and repeatable field procedures to validate remotely sensed WSE and WSS are needed. To that end, we designed, engineered, and operationalized a Water Surface Profiler (WaSP) system that efficiently and accurately surveys WSE and WSS in a variety of surface water environments using Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) time-averaged measurements with Precise Point Positioning corrections. Here, we present WaSP construction, deployment, and a data processing workflow. We demonstrate WaSP data collections from repeat field deployments in the North Saskatchewan River and three prairie pothole lakes near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. We find that WaSP reproducibly measures WSE and WSS with vertical accuracies similar to standard field survey methods [WSE root mean squared difference (RMSD) ∼8 cm, WSS RMSD ∼1.3 cm/km] and that repeat WaSP deployments accurately quantify water level changes (RMSD ∼3 cm). Collectively, these results suggest that WaSP is an easily deployed, self-contained system with sufficient accuracy for validating the decimeter-level expected accuracies of SWOT and AirSWOT. We conclude by discussing the utility of WaSP for validating airborne and spaceborne WSE mappings, present 63 WaSP in situ lake WSE measurements collected in support of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal and Vulnerability Experiment, highlight routine deployment in support of the Lake Observation by Citizen Scientists and Satellites project, and explore WaSP utility for validating a novel GNSS interferometric reflectometry LArge Wave Warning System.

Influenza A virus (IAV) causes seasonal epidemics of respiratory illness that can cause mild to severe illness and potentially death. Antiviral drugs are an important countermeasure against IAV; however, drug resistance has developed, thus new therapeutic approaches are being sought. Previously, we demonstrated the antiviral activity of a novel nuclear export inhibitor drug, verdinexor, to reduce influenza replication in vitro and pulmonary virus burden in mice. In this study, in vivo efficacy of verdinexor was further evaluated in two animal models or influenza virus infection, mice and ferrets. In mice, verdinexor was efficacious to limit virus shedding, reduce pulmonary pro-inflammatory cytokine expression, and moderate leukocyte infiltration into the bronchoalveolar space. Similarly, verdinexor-treated ferrets had reduced lung pathology, virus burden, and inflammatory cytokine expression in the nasal wash exudate. These findings support the anti-viral efficacy of verdinexor, and warrant its development as a novel antiviral therapeutic for influenza infection.

The classical Ambarzumian's Theorem for Schrodinger operators $-D^2 + q$ on an interval, with Neumann conditions at the endpoints, says that if the spectrum of $(-D^2+q)$ is the same as the spectrum of $(-D^2)$ then $q=0$. This theorem is generalized to Schrodinger operators on metric trees with Neumann conditions at the boundary vertices.

Schrodinger operators on graphs with weighted edges may be defined using possibly infinite systems of ordinary differential operators. This work mainly considers radial trees, whose branching and edge lengths depend only on the distance from the root vertex. The analysis of operators with radial coefficients on radial trees is reduced, by a method analogous to separation of variables, to nonclassical boundary-value problems on the line with interior point conditions. This reduction is used to study self adjoint problems requiring boundary conditions `at infinity'.

A differential operator on a directed graph with weighted edges is characterized as a system of ordinary differential operators. A class of local operators is introduced to clarify which operators should be considered as defined on the graph. When the edge lengths have a positive lower bound, all local self-adjoint extensions of the minimal symmetric operator may be classified by boundary conditions at the vertices.

The analysis of Hill's operator $-D^2 + q(x)$ for $q$ even and periodic is extended from the real line to homogeneous trees ${cal T}$. Generalizing the classical problem, a detailed analysis of Hill's equation and its related operator theory on $L^2({cal T})$ is provided. The multipliers for this new version of Hill's equation are identified and analyzed. An explicit description of the resolvent is given. The spectrum is exactly described when the degree of the tree is greater than two, in which case there are both spectral bands and eigenvalues. Spectral projections are computed by means of an eigenfunction expansion. Long time asymptotic expansions for the associated semigroup kernel are also described. A summation formula expresses the resolvent for a regular graph as a function of the resolvent of its covering homogeneous tree and the covering map. In the case of a finite regular graph, a trace formula relates the spectrum of the Hill's operator to the lengths of closed paths in the graph.

Downstep in the vast majority of cases can be traced to the influence of a low tone [Hyman 1979]. This paper discusses the case of Supyire, a three tone language with downstep unrelated to low tone. Sequences of high tones are automatically downstepped. Confusion with mid tone is in most cases avoided by a rule which raises mid to high tone; the two rules together creating a "flip-flop" effect. Supyire also has automatic downdrift of mid and high tones following a low tone. It thus presents an unusual combination of downstep and downdrift in the same language, but unrelated to each other.