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At least 487 records · Page 27
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2014

TU-A-9A-02: Analysis of Variations in Clinical Doppler Ultrasound Peak Velocity Measurements

Purpose: Doppler ultrasound (US) peak velocity (Vmax) measurements show considerable variations due to intrinsic spectral broadening with different scanning techniques, machines and manufacturers. We developed a semi-automated Vmax estimation method and used this method to investigate the performance of a US system for clinical Doppler Vmax measurement. Methods: Semi-automated Vmax is defined as the velocity at which the computed mean spectral profile falls to within 1 background standard deviation of the background mean. GE LOGIQ E9 system with 9L and ML6-15 probes were studied with steady flow (5.3 – 12.5 ml/s) in a Gammex OPTIMIZER 1425A phantom. All Doppler spectra were acquired by 1 operator at the distal end of 5 mm angular tube using a modified clinical carotid artery protocol. Repeatability and variation of Vmax to scanning parameters and probes were analyzed and reported as percentage, i.e. (max-min)/mean. Results: Vmax estimation had good repeatability (3.1% over 6 days for 9L, and 3.6% for ML6-15). For 9L probe, varying gain, compression, scale, SV depth and length, and frequency had minimal impact on Vmax (all variations less than 4.0%). Beam steering had slightly higher influence (largest variations across flow rates were 4.9% for 9L and 6.9% for ML6-15). For both probes, Doppler angle had the greatest effect on Vmax. Percentage increase of Vmax was largely independent of actual flow rates. For Doppler angle varied from 30 to 60°, Vmax increased 24% for 9L, and 20% for ML6-15. Vmax measured by ML6-15 were lower than that by 9L at each Doppler angle with differences less than 5%. Conclusion: The proposed Vmax estimation method is shown to be a useful tool to evaluate clinical Doppler US system performance. For the tested system and probes, Doppler angle had largest impact in measured Vmax.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Performance of low-cost monitors to assess household air pollution

Highlights: • We assessed PM{sub 2.5} and CO low-cost monitors in semi-controlled and field studies. • Devices experienced high failure rate and susceptibility to environmental changes. • Low-cost monitors tested may not be ready to replace more established methods. Exposure to household air pollution is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally. However, due to the lack of validated low-cost monitors with long-lasting batteries in indoor environments, most epidemiologic studies use self-reported data or short-term household air pollution assessments as proxies of long-term exposure. We evaluated the performance of three low-cost monitors measuring fine particulate matter (PM{sub 2.5}) and carbon monoxide (CO) in a wood-combustion experiment conducted in one household of Spain for 5 days (including the co-location of 2 units of HAPEX and 3 units of TZOA-R for PM{sub 2.5} and 3 units of EL-USB-CO for CO; a total of 40 unit-days). We used Spearman correlation (ρ) and Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) to assess accuracy of low-cost monitors versus equivalent research-grade devices. We also conducted a field study in India for 1 week (including HAPEX in 3 households and EL-USB-CO in 4 households; a total of 49 unit-days). Correlation and agreement at 5-min were moderate-high for one unit of HAPEX (ρ = 0.73 / CCC = 0.59), for one unit of TZOA-R (ρ = 0.89 / CCC = 0.62) and for three units of EL-USB-CO (ρ = 0.82–0.89 / CCC = 0.66–0.91) in Spain, although the failure or malfunction rate among low-cost units was high in both settings (60% of unit-days in Spain and 43% in India). Low-cost monitors tested here are not yet ready to replace more established exposure assessment methods in long-term household air pollution epidemiologic studies. More field validation is needed to assess evolving sensors and monitors with application to health studies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2014

SU-E-T-474: IMRT Verification Using the On-Board EPID

Purpose: To verify IMRT and Rapid Arc (RA) plan's agreement with treatment delivery for radiation therapy using an on-board EPID compared to MapCHECK2 and ArcCHECK. Methods: On-board EPID (Exact arm) is commissioned using manufacturer's Preconfigured Data Input Package (PDIP). Portal dose calculation engine for comparison with measurement was commissioned with PDIP. The absolute dosimetric calibration of the EPID is performed using 10×10cm field size at 105cm source to image detector distance with 90.7 CU in the integrated mode. The dark and flood field of EPID were also calibrated in the integrated mode for all energies and dose rates. The output dose-response data from the manufacturer was verified. The improved gamma test method was used for EPID data analysis. Gamma test were used for MapCHECK2 (or ArcCHECK). The sensitivity of the method was tested using collimator rotation at 3 degree and 5 degree. Student T-test was used to distinguish the difference among the groups. Results: IMRT: The average of Gamma passing rate using EPID and MapCHECK2 is 98.9±1.6% and 98.7±2.0% (p = 0.342). There is no statistical difference between two groups.RA: The average of Gamma passing rate using EPID and ArcCHECK is 97.2±2.3% and 93.2±4.1%. (p = 0.002). EPID significantly improved the RapidARC plan passing rate compared to the ArcCHECK. 5% dose change typically causes between 3 – 55% change in Gamma. Conclusion: Using the EPID, we were able to perform QA verification on IMRT plans comparable to MapCHECK2 (p=0.342) and superior to that of ArcCHECK (p=0.002) using Gamma 3%, 3mm criteria. The sensitivity of EPID was found to be comparable to that of the MapCHECK2 and ArcCHECK. EPID dosimetry is faster (4.3 mins vs. 10 mins) due to easier setup and integrated data processing.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2017

Experimental Platform for Ultra-high Dose Rate FLASH Irradiation of Small Animals Using a Clinical Linear Accelerator

Purpose: A key factor limiting the effectiveness of radiation therapy is normal tissue toxicity, and recent preclinical data have shown that ultra-high dose rate irradiation (>50 Gy/s, “FLASH”) potentially mitigates this effect. However, research in this field has been strongly limited by the availability of FLASH irradiators suitable for small animal experiments. We present a simple methodologic approach for FLASH electron small animal irradiation with a clinically available linear accelerator (LINAC). Methods and Materials: We investigated the FLASH irradiation potential of a Varian Clinac 21EX in both clinical mode and after tuning of the LINAC. We performed detailed FLUKA Monte Carlo and experimental dosimetric characterization at multiple experimental locations within the LINAC head. Results: Average dose rates of ≤74 Gy/s were achieved in clinical mode, and the dose rate after tuning exceeded 900 Gy/s. We obtained 220 Gy/s at 1-cm depth for a >4-cm field size with 90% homogeneity throughout a 2-cm-thick volume. Conclusions: We present an approach for using a clinical LINAC for FLASH irradiation. We obtained dose rates exceeding 200 Gy/s after simple tuning of the LINAC, with excellent dosimetric properties for small animal experiments. This will allow for increased availability of FLASH irradiation to the general research community.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Measurement and Analysis of Dose Rate Distribution in the Seismic Base-Isolation pit of the Electron Linac Oncology Facility - Paper 87

Recently electric linac oncology facilities incorporating seismic base-isolation structure have become very popular in Japan to prevent strong impact to the equipment by the earthquakes. When the boundary of the controlled area is set below the base-isolated foundations, additional shielding of iron plate is needed and the cost for shielding sometimes increases up to $1 M Since no one usually accesses underneath the treatment room, except short maintenance period for base-isolation structure, it is reasonable to set the boundary around the downstairs room (pit) by fence. However, it is very difficult to estimate the dose rate of new boundary by using the simple shielding calculation method, because of rotating gantry head and effect of scattering radiation in the base-isolation floor. In this study detail calculations by using Monte-Carlo calculation code MCNP5 have been performed to find out the practical shielding design. To be more specific, investigation for the complicated behavior of photons in the 'pit' have been performed by the analysis, i.e. (1) How much can we reduce the thickness of additional iron plate?, (2) Which angle of the beam direction will influence the most to the dose rate at the new boundary?, (3) Which component of the radiation is dominant at the new boundary? We also verified the calculated results by the measurement. We have performed the analysis of the behavior of photons in the pit and found out no additional iron shielding was necessary, which carried out an extreme reduction of costs. The main contribution to the dose rate at the boundary was scattered photons in the case of 0- degree beam direction. Good agreement between calculated and measured results were obtained, and passed the examination by the authority. It is concluded that the Monte-Carlo calculation code MCNP5 is very effective for the optimistic design of the electron linac oncology facilities incorporating seismic base-isolation structure. (authors)

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Self-consistent approach to beta decay and delayed neutron emission

A brief overview of the recent self-consistent studies of nuclear beta decay is given including the relativistic quasi-particle random-phase approximation or QRPA and Finite Amplitude Method. The results of our self-consistent continuum QRPA model based on the density functional description of the ground states are presented. They are in a good agreement with the recent experimental beta-decay half-lives and delayed neutron emission branchings for the nuclei approaching (and beyond) the neutron closed shells N = 50 near {sup 78}Ni and N = 82 near {sup 132}Sn. A comparison with the recent calculations from relativistic QRPA model, Finite Amplitude Method and semi-microscopic finite-range droplet model is performed. An importance of the quasi-particle phonon coupling is stressed for the description of the beta decay and delayed multi-neutron emission rates. A strategy of extending our approach to the deformed nuclei and the open problems are discussed.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Scalable in situ non-destructive evaluation of additively manufactured components using process monitoring, sensor fusion, and machine learning

Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) Additive Manufacturing (AM) is among the metal 3D printing technologies most broadly adopted by the manufacturing industry. However, the current industry qualification paradigm for critical-application L-PBF parts relies heavily on expensive non-destructive inspection techniques, which significantly limits the use-cases of L-PBF. In situ monitoring of the process promises a less expensive alternative to ex situ testing, but existing sensor technologies and data analysis techniques struggle to detect sub-surface flaws (e.g., porosity and cracking) on production-scale L-PBF printers. In this work, an in situ NDE (INDE) system was engineered to detect subsurface flaws detected in X-Ray Computed Tomography (XCT) directly from process monitoring data. A multilayer, multimodal data input allowed the INDE system to detect numerous subsurface flaws in the size range of 200–1000µm using a novel human-in-the-loop annotation procedure. Furthermore, a framework was established for generating probability-of-detection (POD) and probability-of-false-alarm (PFA) curves compliant with NDE standards by systematically comparing instances of detected subsurface flaws to post-build XCT data. Here, we also introduce for the first time in the AM in situ sensing literature the a 90/95 – the flaw size corresponding to a 90% detection rate on the lower 95% confidence interval of the POD curve. The INDE system successfully demonstrated POD capabilities commensurate with traditional NDE methods. Traditional ML performance metrics were also shown to be inadequate for assessing the ability of the INDE system’s flaw detection performance. It is the hope of the authors that future studies will adopt the POD and PFA approach outlined here to provide better insight into the utility of process monitoring for AM.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

ARCH: Large-scale knowledge graph via aggregated narrative codified health records analysis

Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain a wealth of clinical data stored as both codified data and free-text narrative notes (NLP). The complexity of EHR presents challenges in feature representation, information extraction, and uncertainty quantification. Here, to address these challenges, we proposed an efficient Aggregated naRrative Codified Health (ARCH) records analysis to generate a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) for a comprehensive set of EHR codified and narrative features. Methods: Using data from 12.5 million Veterans Affairs patients, ARCH first derives embedding vectors and generates similarities along with associated p-values to measure the strength of relatedness between clinical features with statistical certainty quantification. Next, ARCH performs a sparse embedding regression to remove indirect linkage between features to build a sparse KG. Finally, ARCH was validated on various clinical tasks, including detecting known relationships between entity pairs, predicting drug side effects, disease phenotyping, as well as sub-typing Alzheimer’s disease patients. Results: ARCH produces high-quality clinical embeddings and KG for over 60,000 codified and narrative EHR concepts. The KG and embeddings are visualized in the R-shiny powered web-API.3 ARCH achieved high accuracy in detecting EHR concept relationships, with AUCs of 0.926 (codified) and 0.861 (NLP) for similar EHR concepts, and 0.810 (codified) and 0.843 (NLP) for related pairs. It detected drug side effects with a 0.723 AUC, which improved to 0.826 after fine-tuning. Using both codified and NLP features, the detection power increased significantly. Compared to other methods, ARCH has superior accuracy and enhances weakly supervised phenotyping algorithms’ performance. Notably, it successfully categorized Alzheimer’s patients into two subgroups with varying mortality rates. Conclusion: The proposed ARCH algorithm generates large-scale high-quality semantic representations and knowledge graph for both codified and NLP EHR features, useful for a wide range of predictive modeling tasks.

Electronic health records↗
DOE OSTI2021

Identification and quantification of distinct active sites in Hf-Beta zeolites for transfer hydrogenation catalysis

Despite the significant progress made in characterizing different framework heteroatom sites that exist in Lewis acidic zeolites with probe molecule adsorption and spectroscopy, methods to reliably quantify site counts remain indefinite and have been primarily limited to Sn and Ti Lewis acid sites. Here, methods to quantify framework Lewis acidic Hf 4+ sites in zeolite Beta (Hf-Beta) with two Lewis base titrants (pyridine, deuterated acetonitrile) were developed using infrared (IR) spectroscopy. Lewis acid site counts for Hf-Beta zeolites were validated by measuring integrated molar extinction coefficients (IMECs; ε, cm μmol –1 ) on Sn-Beta zeolites using identical Lewis base titrants to benchmark site counts with established literature procedures to quantify Lewis acid sites in Beta zeolites from IR spectra. Highlighting the importance of benchmarking active site counts against well-established experimental protocols, IMECs of CD 3 CN bound to open (ε(Sn; 2316 cm –1 ): 1.80 ± 0.25) and closed (ε(Sn; 2308 cm –1 ): 3.76 ± 0.33) Sn sites were ~1.8x larger than those previously reported while total Lewis acid site counts agreed with those measured by pyridine (ε(Sn; 1451 cm –1 ): 1.58 ± 0.16) on six different Sn-Beta zeolites. IMECs measured for IR peaks reflecting pyridine bound to Lewis acidic Hf sites (ε(Hf; 1448 cm –1 ): 1.54 ± 0.21) and CD 3 CN bound to open (ε(Hf; 2313 cm –1 ): 2.40 ± 0.22) and closed (ε(Hf; 2307 cm –1 ): 3.55 ± 0.41) Hf sites, gave similar counts for the total number of Lewis acidic sites across six Hf-Beta zeolites (Si/Hf = 100–413). Consistent with previous reports with Sn-Beta catalysts where open Sn sites are responsible for catalytic turnover, apparent first and zero-order MPVO rate constants (0.01–1 M cyclohexanone in 2-butanol; per total Hf, 373 K) correlated with the total number of open Hf sites, per total Hf, but not with the total number of closed Hf sites or total Lewis acid site counts. Measured initial MPVO rates (0.1 M cyclohexanone in 2-butanol, per open Hf, 373 K) were ~25x higher on hydrophobic Hf-Beta-F than on hydrophilic Hf-Beta-OH zeolites. Overall, the apparent first-order MPVO rate constants (2-butanol solvent, per open Hf, 373 K) were ~6x higher on Hf-Beta-F than on Hf-Beta-OH zeolites. The characterization methods reported here enable normalization of MPVO turnover rates on Sn- and Hf-Beta zeolites by their number of open sites. Finally, this enables performing quantitative rate comparisons across Lewis acid zeolites of varying active site identity, solvation, and pore topology used in liquid-phase catalysis.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2015

Application of Bayes' theorem for pulse shape discrimination

A Bayesian approach is proposed for pulse shape discrimination of photons and neutrons in liquid organic scinitillators. Instead of drawing a decision boundary, each pulse is assigned a photon or neutron confidence probability. In addition, this allows for photon and neutron classification on an event-by-event basis. The sum of those confidence probabilities is used to estimate the number of photon and neutron instances in the data. An iterative scheme, similar to an expectation-maximization algorithm for Gaussian mixtures, is used to infer the ratio of photons-to-neutrons in each measurement. Therefore, the probability space adapts to data with varying photon-to-neutron ratios. A time-correlated measurement of Am–Be and separate measurements of 137 Cs, 60 Co and 232 Th photon sources were used to construct libraries of neutrons and photons. These libraries were then used to produce synthetic data sets with varying ratios of photons-to-neutrons. Probability weighted method that we implemented was found to maintain neutron acceptance rate of up to 90% up to photon-to-neutron ratio of 2000, and performed 9% better than the decision boundary approach. Furthermore, the iterative approach appropriately changed the probability space with an increasing number of photons which kept the neutron population estimate from unrealistically increasing.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2015

High-stroke silicon-on-insulator MEMS nanopositioner: Control design for non-raster scan atomic force microscopy

A 2-degree of freedom microelectromechanical systems nanopositioner designed for on-chip atomic force microscopy (AFM) is presented. The device is fabricated using a silicon-on-insulator-based process and is designed as a parallel kinematic mechanism. It contains a central scan table and two sets of electrostatic comb actuators along each orthogonal axis, which provides displacement ranges greater than ±10 μm. The first in-plane resonance modes are located at 1274 Hz and 1286 Hz for the X and Y axes, respectively. To measure lateral displacements of the stage, electrothermal position sensors are incorporated in the design. To facilitate high-speed scans, the highly resonant dynamics of the system are controlled using damping loops in conjunction with internal model controllers that enable accurate tracking of fast sinusoidal set-points. To cancel the effect of sensor drift on controlled displacements, washout controllers are used in the damping loops. The feedback controlled nanopositioner is successfully used to perform several AFM scans in contact mode via a Lissajous scan method with a large scan area of 20 μm × 20 μm. The maximum scan rate demonstrated is 1 kHz.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2016

Sizing Dynamic Wireless Charging for Light-Duty Electric Vehicles in Roadway Applications

Dynamic wireless charging is a possible cure for the range limitations seen in electric vehicles (EVs) once implemented in highways or city streets. The contribution of this paper is the use of experimental data to show that the expected energy gain from a dynamic wireless power transfer (WPT) system is largely a function of average speed, which allows the power level and number of coils per mile of a dynamic WPT system to be sized for the sustained operation of an EV. First, data from dynamometer testing is used to determine the instantaneous energy requirements of a light-duty EV. Then, experimental data is applied to determine the theoretical energy gained by passing over a coil as a function of velocity and power level. Related simulations are performed to explore possible methods of placing WPT coils within roadways with comparisons to the constant velocity case. Analyses with these cases demonstrate what system ratings are needed to meet the energy requirements of the EV. The simulations are also used to determine onboard energy storage requirements for each driving cycle.

driving cycles↗
DOE OSTI2019

Impact of the SSO-ASTRO Margin Guideline on Rates of Re-excision After Lumpectomy for Breast Cancer: A Meta-analysis

Background: One in five patients undergoing initial lumpectomy for invasive breast cancer subsequently undergoes re-excision or mastectomy. A lack of clarity of when to re-excise based on lumpectomy margin width contributes to this high rate of reoperation. We sought to determine the impact of the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) and American Society of Radiation Oncologist (ASTRO) margin guideline on reoperation rates after lumpectomy. The guideline recommended omission of routine re-excision in specimens with “no ink on tumor”. Methods: A systematic literature review was performed. For eligible studies, a random-effects model was used for a meta-analysis of lumpectomy re-excision prevalence before and after publication of the SSO-ASTRO margin guideline. Study heterogeneity was measured by the Cochran’s Q test. Results: Five institutional, one population-based, and one national registry study met inclusion requirements. Sample size per study ranged from 237 to 26,102. There was significant interstudy heterogeneity (Q = 19.779; p = 0.003). Pooled re-excision prevalence was 22% (confidence interval [CI] 20–23) before and 14% (CI 12–15) after guideline publication. With the pre-guideline re-excision prevalence used as the reference value, the associated odds ratio for re-excision after the guideline was 0.65 (CI 0.54–0.78; p < 0.0001). Conclusions: The findings of a 35% reduction in the odds of re-excision after the guideline publication and a reduction in re-excision prevalence from 22 to 14% supports the notion that the SSO-ASTRO margin guideline was impactful. These findings are congruent with the projected reductions in re-excision at the time of guideline publication.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2019

Monte Carlo Neutronics Analysis of the SNS STS Monolith

The neutronics analysis for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Spallation Neutron Source second target station monolith conceptual design was performed entirely with the Monte Carlo method. It has been demonstrated that even though the monolith provides approximately peta-scale attenuation of the dose rates, Monte Carlo simulations are within reach of computing capabilities of relatively inexpensive Linux clusters. Several monolith configurations achieved or exceeded design requirements and provide basis for the final design.

Remec, Igor↗
DOE OSTI2016

Angular oversampling with temporally offset layers on multilayer detectors in computed tomography

Purpose: Today’s computed tomography (CT) scanners operate at an increasingly high rotation speed in order to reduce motion artifacts and to fulfill the requirements of dynamic acquisition, e.g., perfusion and cardiac imaging, with lower angular sampling rate as a consequence. In this paper, a simple method for obtaining angular oversampling when using multilayer detectors in continuous rotation CT is presented. Methods: By introducing temporal offsets between the measurement periods of the different layers on a multilayer detector, the angular sampling rate can be increased by a factor equal to the number of layers on the detector. The increased angular sampling rate reduces the risk of producing aliasing artifacts in the image. A simulation of a detector with two layers is performed to prove the concept. Results: The simulation study shows that aliasing artifacts from insufficient angular sampling are reduced by the proposed method. Specifically, when imaging a single point blurred by a 2D Gaussian kernel, the method is shown to reduce the strength of the aliasing artifacts by approximately an order of magnitude. Conclusions: The presented oversampling method is easy to implement in today’s multilayer detectors and has the potential to reduce aliasing artifacts in the reconstructed images.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2016

Accelerated simulation of stochastic particle removal processes in particle-resolved aerosol models

Stochastic particle-resolved methods have proven useful for simulating multi-dimensional systems such as composition-resolved aerosol size distributions. While particle-resolved methods have substantial benefits for highly detailed simulations, these techniques suffer from high computational cost, motivating efforts to improve their algorithmic efficiency. Here we formulate an algorithm for accelerating particle removal processes by aggregating particles of similar size into bins. We present the Binned Algorithm for particle removal processes and analyze its performance with application to the atmospherically relevant process of aerosol dry deposition. We show that the Binned Algorithm can dramatically improve the efficiency of particle removals, particularly for low removal rates, and that computational cost is reduced without introducing additional error. In simulations of aerosol particle removal by dry deposition in atmospherically relevant conditions, we demonstrate about 50-times increase in algorithm efficiency.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2016

Analysis of reaction schemes using maximum rates of constituent steps

Significance The design of active and selective catalysts is essential for a wide range of industrial applications and societal issues. A fundamental approach is to identify the key elementary steps and to elucidate the predicted reaction kinetics for potential reaction mechanisms. We present a methodology to analyze analytically the performance of catalytic reaction schemes by calculation of the maximum rates of the constituent steps. This proposed methodology can be used to identify the important transition states and adsorbed species, such that more detailed calculations can be carried out for these species, whereas more approximate methods can be used for the remaining species, thereby substantially reducing the computational time required to elucidate how catalyst performance is controlled by the fundamental surface chemistry.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗