Partial laryngectomy in the treatment of radiation-failure of early glottic carcinoma

BACKGROUND

This study was undertaken to analyze the functional results, complications, local control rates, and survival in patients undergoing conservation surgery for squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the larynx as a salvage procedure for recurrent tumors after previous radiotherapy.

METHODS

Twenty-one patients underwent frontolateral laryngectomy for radiation failure, T1 and T2 glottic SCC, at the Cancer Institute Hospital, Tokyo, from 1976 to 1991. All patients were men between the ages of 42 and 83 years. The disease-free interval ranged from 1 to 87 months (median, 26 months). The stage at initial treatment was T1 in 17 patients and T2 in four patients. Local recurrence developed in three patients.

RESULTS

The rate of local control was influenced by a surgical margin of less than 1 mm (p < 0.05). Overall voice preservation was achieved in 86% of the patients. The 5-year and 10-year survival rates following frontolateral laryngectomy were 86% and 70%, respectively. Maximum phonation time after surgery ranged from 4 to 18 seconds (median, 8.1 seconds).

CONCLUSIONS

These results indicate that in carefully selected cases, frontolateral laryngectomy may be used for treating radiation failure stage I or II vocal cord carcinomas with good success. Careful follow-up may be necessary in patients with a close surgical margin.

Surgical treatment for pulmonary metastases of squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck

PURPOSE

As locoregional control of head and neck cancer has improved, distant metastases have become increasingly common problems.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

To determine the role of surgical treatment, we reviewed 32 patients with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the head and neck who underwent thoracotomy for pulmonary metastases.

RESULTS

The overall 5-year survival rate was 32%. The 5-year survival rate of the patients with SCC of the oral cavity was significantly poorer than that of the patients with other primary site (15.4% v 45.2%; P = .01). In the patients with single nodule, extent of the tumor was a significant prognostic factor (P = .007). Mediastinal lymph node involvement (P = .004) and pleural invasion (P = .04) also correlated with survival.

CONCLUSION

TNM classification of the primary tumor did not have an impact on survival in this study. Further studies of a large series should be performed to determine the indications and modalities of the surgical treatment for pulmonary metastases of the SCC of head and neck.

Mechanisms in adaptive feedback control: photoisomerization in a liquid

The underlying mechanism for Adaptive Feedback Control in the experimental photoisomerization of 3,3'-diethyl-2,2'-thiacyanine iodide (NK88) in methanol is exposed theoretically. With given laboratory limitations on laser output, the complicated electric fields are shown to achieve their targets in qualitatively simple ways. Further, control over the cis population without laser limitations reveals an incoherent pump-dump scenario as the optimal isomerization strategy. In neither case are there substantial contributions from quantum multiple-path interference or from nuclear wave packet coherence. Environmentally induced decoherence is shown to justify the use of a simplified theoretical model.

Large-Scale Optimization for Evaluation Functions with Minimax Search

This paper presents a new method, Minimax Tree Optimization (MMTO), to learn a heuristic evaluation function of a practical alpha-beta search program. The evaluation function may be a linear or non-linear combination of weighted features, and the weights are the parameters to be optimized. To control the search results so that the move decisions agree with the game records of human experts, a well-modeled objective function to be minimized is designed. Moreover, a numerical iterative method is used to nd local minima of the objective function, and more than forty million parameters are adjusted by using a small number of hyper parameters. This method was applied to shogi, a major variant of chess in which the evaluation function must handle a larger state space than in chess. Experimental results show that the large-scale optimization of the evaluation function improves the playing strength of shogi programs, and the new method performs signicantly better than other methods. Implementation of the new method in our shogi program Bonanza made substantial contributions to the program's rst-place nish in the 2013 World Computer Shogi Championship. Additionally, we present preliminary evidence of broader applicability of our method to other two-player games such as chess.

Soluble immune complexes and squamous cell carcinoma-related antigens in patients with head and neck cancer

Sera from 85 patients with head and neck cancer including laryngeal cancer, hypopharyngeal cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer, and maxillary cancer were assayed for immune complexes (IC) by solid-phase anti-C3 enzyme immunoassay and for squamous cell carcinoma-related (SCC) antigen by radioimmunoassay. The positive rates of IC and SCC antigen in head and neck cancer patients were 29.4% and 34.1%, respectively. Their serum levels and positive rates were found to be elevated according to the degree of advancement of the disease stage, showing their good clinical correlations. With individual patients there was no significant relationship between IC and SCC antigen.

Quantum Control of a Chiral Molecular Motor Driven by Laser Pulses

"Molecular motors or machines" are one of the hot subjects in chemistry because they play an important role in molecular devices. We have theoretically demonstrated that unidirectional rotations of a chiral molecular motor can be driven by using tailored linearly polarized laser pulses. The findings obtained here serve as a theoretical basis for control of functions such as gearing or acceleration of molecular motors.