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© 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.OBJECTIVE Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a disorder with a high prevalence rate that may induce serious complications. Recent progress in the area of hypoglossal nerve stimulation has played a role as an alternative to conventional therapies though, some patients having retropalatal collapse still have not benefitted. Therefore, here we propose a new type of upper-airway stimulation, referred to as the palatal implant system, which recovers the upper-airway patency by electrically stimulating the soft palate. check details APPROACH The system consists of two major parts an implant that stimulates the soft palate through electrodes and an intra-oral device that delivers power and data simultaneously to the implant via an inductive link. Evaluations of the system are conducted in bench-top, in vitro, and in vivo tests to evaluate its feasibility as an OSA treatment, and the potential development of the system is addressed in the discussion section. MAIN RESULTS In the bench-top test, the power efficiency was 12.4 % at d = 5 mm and the system could operate up to 8 mm-distance in a bio-medium. Data transmission was also successful at distances ranging 2 to 8 mm within an error margin of 10 %. The measured CSCc and the impedance magnitude of the electrode were 62.25 mC/cm2 and 390 Ω, respectively, proving a feasibility of the electrode as a stimluator interface. The system was applied to a rabbit and contraction of the soft palate muscle was recorded via a C-arm fluoroscopy. Signififcance. As a proof of concept, we suggest and demonstrate the palatal implant system as a new therapy for those undergoing treatment for OSA. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.In-room imaging is a prerequisite for adaptive proton therapy. The use of onboard cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) imaging, which is routinely acquired for patient position verification, can enable daily dose reconstructions and plan adaptation decisions. Image quality deficiencies though, hamper dose calculation accuracy and make corrections of CBCTs a necessity. This study compared three methods to correct CBCTs and create synthetic CTs that are suitable for proton dose calculations. CBCTs, planning CTs and repeated CTs (rCT) from 33 H&N cancer patients were used to compare a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), deformable image registration (DIR) and an analytical image-based correction method (AIC) for synthetic CT (sCT) generation. Image quality of sCTs was evaluated by comparison with a same-day rCT, using mean absolute error (MAE), mean error (ME), Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), structural non-uniformity (SNU) and signal/contrast-to-noise ratios (SNR/CNR) as metrics. Dosimetric accuracy was investigated in an intracranial setting by performing gamma analysis and calculating range shifts. Neural network-based sCTs resulted in the lowest MAE and ME (37/2 HU) and the highest DSC (0.96). While DIR and AIC generated images with a MAE of 44/77 HU, a ME of -8/1 HU and a DSC of 0.94/0.90. Gamma and range shift analysis showed almost no dosimetric difference between DCNN and DIR based sCTs. The lower image quality of AIC based sCTs affected dosimetric accuracy and resulted in lower pass ratios and higher range shifts. Patient-specific differences highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of each method. For the set of patients, the DCNN created synthetic CTs with the highest image quality. Accurate proton dose calculations were achieved by both DCNN and DIR based sCTs. The AIC method resulted in lower image quality and dose calculation accuracy was reduced compared to the other methods. Creative Commons Attribution license.While the effects of structural disorder on the electronic properties of solids are poorly understood, it is widely accepted that spatially isotropic orbitals lead to robustness against disorder. In this paper, we use first-principles calculations to show that a cluster of occupied bands in the coordination polymer semiconductor copper(I) thiocyanate undergo relatively little fluctuation in the presence of thermal disorder - a surprising finding given that these bands are composed of spatially anisotropic d-orbitals. Analysis with the tight-binding method and a stochastic network model suggests that the robustness of these bands to thermal disorder can be traced to the way in which these orbitals are aligned with respect to each other. This special alignment causes strong inverse statistical correlations between orbital-orbital distances, making these bands robust to random fluctuations of these distances. As well as proving that disorder-robust electronic properties can be achieved even with anisotropic orbitals, our results provide a concrete example of when simple 'averaging' methods can be used to treat thermal disorder in electronic structure calculations. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.We have developed a special technique and succeeded to carry out small-angle x-ray scattering measurements for some liquid metal systems. The purpose is to investigate effects of transitions such as liquid-liquid (LLT), liquid-gas (LGT) and metal-nonmetal (MNMT) transitions on mesoscopic density fluctuations in liquids. In liquid Te systems (Se-Te and Ge-Te mixtures), which show continuous LLT accompanying MNMT, parameters of density fluctuations show maxima at almost in the middle of the transition, both in strength and spatial size. This work (and Kajihara et al 2012 Phys. Rev. B86 214202) was the first direct observation that density fluctuations exhibit maximum corresponding to LLT. However in this study, we could not clearly separate the effects of LLT and MNMT on the observed density fluctuations. Thus we also investigated fluid Hg under high pressure and high temperature conditions, which shows MNMT near a critical point of LGT, to investigate how MNMT affects them. We observed distinct density fluctuations; a strength and a correlation length of them show maxima at around a critical isochore of LGT, and the former is basically consistent with a phase diagram (compressibility) of LGT; they do not show any peaks at MNMT region. Precise analysis revealed that MNMT only affects a shift of another parameter, a short-range correlation length. These results in fluid Hg indicate that the density fluctuations are mainly derived from a critical phenomena of LGT and MNMT does not play any critical role on them. We believe that the latter conclusion also holds true for liquid Te systems; MNMT plays no important role on the density fluctuations in liquid Te systems and LLT is the main origin of them. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.
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