Modern trends in science and practice. Volume 1

Interdisciplinary research of modern trends in science and its practical application

Method of Modelling a Tank with Ribbing using a Spatial Scanner for Optimized Control of Volume Characteristics

Increasing requirements for product quality, whether from the side of technical standards or customers, generate demands on the optimization of measurement and data evaluation processes, which include also dimensional characteristics. The paper deals with determining the volume of the tank of a railway wagon with ribbing. In practice, volume flow meters are usually used to measure the internal volumes of manufactured tanks, which measure the volume of water when filled with water. The method is not only time-consuming but also energy-consuming and generates a large amount of wastewater. Therefore, these obsolete methods are gradually being replaced by those that allow effective inspection of tank wagon dimensions according to the technical documentation. The topic of the paper is a description and verification of the design of a progressive method of determining the internal volume of the tank using a spatial 3D scanner Faro FocusS150 and software processing of measured data. At the same time, verification of compliance with the requirements for the accuracy of determining the internal volume of the tank is presented. The aforementioned methods are therefore compared in terms of accuracy, complexity and time consumption.

A CT-Based Radiomic Signature Can Be Prognostic for 10-Months Overall Survival in Metastatic Tumors Treated with Nivolumab: An Exploratory Study

Baseline clinical prognostic factors for recurrent and/or metastatic (RM) head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) treated with immunotherapy are lacking. CT-based radiomics may provide additional prognostic information. A total of 85 patients with RM-HNSCC were enrolled for this study. For each tumor, radiomic features were extracted from the segmentation of the largest tumor mass. A pipeline including different feature selection steps was used to train a radiomic signature prognostic for 10-month overall survival (OS). Features were selected based on their stability to geometrical transformation of the segmentation (intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC > 0.75) and their predictive power (area under the curve, AUC > 0.7). The predictive model was developed using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) in combination with the support vector machine. The model was developed based on the first 68 enrolled patients and tested on the last 17 patients. Classification performance of the radiomic risk was evaluated accuracy and the AUC. The same metrics were computed for some baseline predictors used in clinical practice (volume of largest lesion, total tumor volume, number of tumor lesions, number of affected organs, performance status). The AUC in the test set was 0.67, while accuracy was 0.82. The performance of the radiomic score was higher than the one obtainable with the clinical variables (largest lesion volume: accuracy 0.59, AUC = 0.55; number of tumoral lesions: accuracy 0.71, AUC 0.36; number of affected organs: accuracy 0.47; AUC 0.42; total tumor volume: accuracy 0.59, AUC 0.53; performance status: accuracy 0.41, AUC = 0.47). Radiomics may provide additional baseline prognostic value compared to the variables used in clinical practice.

COVID-19 and Co-production in Health and Social Care Research, Policy and Practice: Volume 2: Co-production Methods and Working Together at a Distance

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Groups most severely affected by COVID-19 have tended to be those marginalised before the pandemic and are now being largely ignored in developing responses to it. This two-volume set of Rapid Responses explores the urgent need to put co-production and participatory approaches at the heart of responses to the pandemic and demonstrates how policymakers, health and social care practitioners, patients, service users, carers and public contributors can make this happen. The second volume focuses on methods and means of co-producing during a pandemic. It explores a variety of case studies from across the global North and South and addresses the practical considerations of co-producing knowledge both now - at a distance - and in the future when the pandemic is over.

COVID-19 and Co-production in Health and Social Care Research, Policy and Practice: Volume 1: The Challenges and Necessity of Co-production

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Groups most severely affected by COVID-19 have tended to be those marginalised before the pandemic and are now largely being ignored in developing responses to it. This two-volume set of Rapid Responses explores the urgent need to put co-production and participatory approaches at the heart of responses to the pandemic and demonstrates how policymakers, health and social care practitioners, patients, service users, carers and public contributors can make this happen. The first volume investigates how, at the outset of the pandemic, the limits of existing structures severely undermined the potential of co-production. It also gives voice to a diversity of marginalised communities to illustrate how they have been affected and to demonstrate why co-produced responses are so important both now during this pandemic and in the future.