Browsing by Author "McConnell, Yarrow"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) vs Helical Tomotherapy (HT) in Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy (CRT) for Patients with Anal Canal Carcinoma (ACC): an analysis of dose distribution and toxicities(Radiation Oncology, 2015-04-17) Yeung, Rosanna; McConnell, Yarrow; Warkentin, Heather; Graham, Darren; Warkentin, Brad; Joseph, Kurian; Doll, Corinne MPurpose Intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and helical tomotherapy (HT) have been adopted for radiotherapy treatment of anal canal carcinoma (ACC) due to better conformality, dose homogeneity and normal-tissue sparing compared to 3D-CRT. To date, only one published study compares dosimetric parameters of IMRT vs HT in ACC, but there are no published data comparing toxicities. Our objectives were to compare dosimetry and toxicities between these modalities. Methods and materials This is a retrospective study of 35 ACC patients treated with radical chemoradiotherapy at two tertiary cancer institutions from 2008–2010. The use of IMRT vs HT was primarily based on center availability. The majority of patients received fluorouracil (5-FU) and 1–2 cycles of mitomycin C (MMC); 2 received 5-FU and cisplatin. Primary tumor and elective nodes were prescribed to ≥54Gy and ≥45Gy, respectively. Patients were grouped into two cohorts: IMRT vs HT. The primary endpoint was a dosimetric comparison between the cohorts; the secondary endpoint was comparison of toxicities. Results 18 patients were treated with IMRT and 17 with HT. Most IMRT patients received 5-FU and 1 MMC cycle, while most HT patients received 2 MMC cycles (p < 0.01), based on center policy. HT achieved more homogenous coverage of the primary tumor (HT homogeneity and uniformity index 0.14 and 1.02 vs 0.29 and 1.06 for IMRT, p = 0.01 and p < 0.01). Elective nodal coverage did not differ. IMRT achieved better bladder, femoral head and peritoneal space sparing (V30 and V40, p ≤ 0.01), and lower mean skin dose (p < 0.01). HT delivered lower bone marrow (V10, p < 0.01) and external genitalia dose (V20 and V30, p < 0.01). Grade 2+ hematological and non-hematological toxicities were similar. Febrile neutropenia and unscheduled treatment breaks did not differ (both p = 0.13), nor did 3-year overall and disease-free survival (p = 0.13, p = 0.68). Conclusions Chemoradiotherapy treatment of ACC using IMRT vs HT results in differences in dose homogenity and normal-tissue sparing, but no significant differences in toxicities.Item Open Access Performance of variable selection methods using stability-based selection(2017-04-04) Lu, Danny; Weljie, Aalim; de Leon, Alexander R; McConnell, Yarrow; Bathe, Oliver F; Kopciuk, KarenAbstract Background Variable selection is frequently carried out during the analysis of many types of high-dimensional data, including those in metabolomics. This study compared the predictive performance of four variable selection methods using stability-based selection, a new secondary selection method that is implemented in the R package BioMark. Two of these methods were evaluated using the more well-known false discovery rate (FDR) as well. Results Simulation studies varied factors relevant to biological data studies, with results based on the median values of 200 partial area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. There was no single top performing method across all factor settings, but the student t test based on stability selection or with FDR adjustment and the variable importance in projection (VIP) scores from partial least squares regression models obtained using a stability-based approach tended to perform well in most settings. Similar results were found with a real spiked-in metabolomics dataset. Group sample size, group effect size, number of significant variables and correlation structure were the most important factors whereas the percentage of significant variables was the least important. Conclusions Researchers can improve prediction scores for their study data by choosing VIP scores based on stability variable selection over the other approaches when the number of variables is small to modest and by increasing the number of samples even moderately. When the number of variables is high and there is block correlation amongst the significant variables (i.e., true biomarkers), the FDR-adjusted student t test performed best. The R package BioMark is an easy-to-use open-source program for variable selection that had excellent performance characteristics for the purposes of this study.Item Open Access Spiked-in Data Set for BMC Notes paper(2016) Kopciuk, Karen; Bathe, Oliver; McConnell, Yarrow; Welje, Aalim; de Leon, AlexanderItem Open Access Steps involved in designing and creating the spiked-in data set(2016) Kopciuk, Karen; McConnell, Yarrow; Bathe, Oliver; Weljie, Aalim