Twenty Years On: RECIST as a Biomarker of Response in Solid Tumours an EORTC Imaging Group – ESOI Joint Paper

Response evaluation criteria in solid tumours (RECIST) v1.1 are currently the reference standard for evaluating efficacy of therapies in patients with solid tumours who are included in clinical trials, and they are widely used and accepted by regulatory agencies. This expert statement discusses the principles underlying RECIST, as well as their reproducibility and limitations. While the RECIST framework may not be perfect, the scientific bases for the anticancer drugs that have been approved using a RECIST-based surrogate endpoint remain valid. Importantly, changes in measurement have to meet thresholds defined by RECIST for response classification within thus partly circumventing the problems of measurement variability. The RECIST framework also applies to clinical patients in individual settings even though the relationship between tumour size changes and outcome from cohort studies is not necessarily translatable to individual cases. As reproducibility of RECIST measurements is impacted by reader experience, choice of target lesions and detection/interpretation of new lesions, it can result in patients changing response categories when measurements are near threshold values or if new lesions are missed or incorrectly interpreted. There are several situations where RECIST will fail to evaluate treatment-induced changes correctly; knowledge and understanding of these is crucial for correct interpretation. Also, some patterns of response/progression cannot be correctly documented by RECIST, particularly in relation to organ-site (e.g. bone without associated soft-tissue lesion) and treatment type (e.g. focal therapies). These require specialist reader experience and communication with oncologists to determine the actual impact of the therapy and best evaluation strategy. In such situations, alternative imaging markers for tumour response may be used but the sources of variability of individual imaging techniques need to be known and accounted for. Communication between imaging experts and oncologists regarding the level of confidence in a biomarker is essential for the correct interpretation of a biomarker and its application to clinical decision-making. Though measurement automation is desirable and potentially reduces the variability of results, associated technical difficulties must be overcome, and human adjudications may be required.

Pandemic Acceleration: Covid-19 and the emergency digitalization of European education

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

An Evertse–Ferretti Nevanlinna constant and its consequences

In this paper, we introduce the notion of an Evertse–Ferretti Nevanlinna constant and compare it with the birational Nevanlinna constant introduced by the authors in a recent joint paper. We then use it to recover several previously known results. This includes a 1999 example of Faltings from his Baker’s Garden article. We also extend the theory of these Nevanlinna constants to what we call “multidivisor Nevanlinna constants,” which allow the proximity function to involve the maximum of Weil functions for finitely many divisors.

Peter Michael Neumann OBE

Peter Neumann was a major figure in UK mathematics during a career spanning over 50 years. His parents, Bernhard and Hanna Neumann, were group theorists, so it was perhaps inevitable that Peter would become a specialist in the same area. A notable occurrence, and a sign of things to come, was the publication in 1962 of a joint paper with his parents which gave rise to the concept of an NNN group. There can be few instances in mathematics of three members of the same family co-authoring a paper. His parents spent many years in Australia and Peter maintained strong links with that country throughout his own professional life.

Mentoring, Institutional Barriers, Structures of Justice: A Dialogue Across Positions of Privilege and Power

This colloquy, by graduate-student-led collective Project Spectrum, attempts to map out existing discussions around inclusion and equity in music academia, with a specific focus on identifying and analyzing the structures in academia that work against minoritized and historically excluded scholars. Matthew Ovalle and Andrew Dell’Antonio contribute a joint-paper outlining the alternative pathways that give people the chance to make their own way through the music academia pipeline. Using personal anecdotes from their positions as teachers, mentors, and the mentored, they offer a representation of academia as one of care, empathy, and optimism.

Over 40 years with jumping spiders: on the 70th birthday of Wanda Wesołowska

Professor Wanda Wesołowska (maiden name Nowysz)—an internationally recognised expert in the taxonomy of jumping spiders (Araneae: Salticidae)—was born in Włocławek (Central Poland) on 11 August 1950. Wanda spent her youth and received her primary and secondary education in Szczecin (NW Poland). After finishing school in 1968, she entered the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where she studied biology. Wanda graduated with a MSc degree in 1973. Her thesis was devoted to birds and was titled “Observations on the water and marsh birds on the storage-reservoir on the Vistula river near Włocławek during migration seasons”. This research was published as a scientific paper (Nowysz-Wesołowska 1976). Thus, Wanda began her scientific career with research on birds, an interest that is not uncommon among arachnologists (e.g., Pontus Palmgren, Michael I. Saaristo and Eugène Simon). This passion was shared with her future husband Tomasz Wesołowski. While still a student, Wanda undertook several regional field trips and published four papers on birds, with most of them being co-authored with Tomasz (Nowysz & Wesołowski 1972, 1973a,b; Nowysz 1973). Recently, Wanda and Tomasz celebrated the 40th anniversary of their marriage with another joint paper devoted to the ecology of the fluke Leucochloridium and its effect on the behaviour of the snail Succinea putris (Wesołowska & Wesołowski 2014). Wanda and Tomasz have one daughter, Olga, who currently works at the Department of Biophysics and Neurobiology at the Wrocław Medical Unversity (Poland), and a grandson, Mikołaj.

WILL FISH DISAPPEAR BY 2048?

In 2006, a tumult arose in the world of fisheries. A controversial paper titled “Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services” by Worm et al. (2006) was published in Science. The paper was sensational since it alluded to a prediction that global populations of marine fish (finfish and invertebrates) will be 100% collapsed by 2048. The paper was written by a group of marine ecologists and economists in which Boris Worm from Dalhousie University Canada led the authorship. After the paper was published, the issue of fish disappearance in 2048 became hot topics in the world’s mass media. In fact, the Worm et al. paper triggered the debates among researchers. Over time the debates heated up. Surprisingly, a reconciliation took place in 2009, marked by a collaboration between Worm’s team and his critics, writing another paper in Science. The present essay reaffirms the invalidity of the global collapse prediction in 2048 as revealed by many researchers. It is also shown that the Worm et al. paper did not state that all fish will disappear and through the joint paper in 2009, Worm and colleagues have indirectly rectified the prediction already.

Modeling Combination of Question Order Effect, Response Replicability Effect, and QQ-Equality with Quantum Instruments

We continue to analyze basic constraints on human's decision making from the viewpoint of quantum measurement theory (QMT). As has been found, the conventional QMT based on the projection postulate cannot account for combination of the question order effect (QOE) and the response replicability effect (RRE). This was an alarm signal for quantum-like modeling of decision making. Recently, it was shown that this objection to quantum-like modeling can be removed on the basis of the general QMT based on quantum instruments. In the present paper we analyse the problem of combination of QOE, RRE, and the famous QQ-equality (QQE). This equality was derived by Busemeyer and Wang and it was shown (in the joint paper with Solloway and Shiffrin) that statistical data from many social opinion polls satisfies it. Now, we construct quantum instruments satisfying QOE, RRE, and QQE. The general features of our approach are formalized with postulates which generalize {\it Wang-Busemeyer} postulates for quantum-like modeling of decision making. Moreover, we show that our model closely reproduces the statistics of the famous Clinton-Gore Poll data with a prior belief state independent of the question order. This model successfully removes the order effect from the data to determine the genuine distribution of the opinions in the Poll. The paper also provides a psychologist-friendly introduction to the theory of quantum instruments - the most general mathematical framework for quantum measurements. We hope that this theory will attract attention of psychologists and will stimulate further applications.