Monte Carlo simulation is an essential tool in emission tomography that can assist in the design of new medical imaging devices, the optimization of acquisition protocols and the development or assessment of image reconstruction algorithms and correction techniques. GATE, the Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission, encapsulates the Geant4 libraries to achieve a modular, versatile, scripted simulation toolkit adapted to the field of nuclear medicine. In particular, GATE allows the description of time-dependent phenomena such as source or detector movement, and source decay kinetics. This feature makes it possible to simulate time curves under realistic acquisition conditions and to test dynamic reconstruction algorithms. This paper gives a detailed description of the design and development of GATE by the OpenGATE collaboration, whose continuing objective is to improve, document and validate GATE by simulating commercially available imaging systems for PET and SPECT. Large effort is also invested in the ability and the flexibility to model novel detection systems or systems still under design. A public release of GATE licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License can be downloaded at http:/www-lphe.epfl.ch/GATE/. Two benchmarks developed for PET and SPECT to test the installation of GATE and to serve as a tutorial for the users are presented. Extensive validation of the GATE simulation platform has been started, comparing simulations and measurements on commercially available acquisition systems. References to those results are listed. The future prospects towards the gridification of GATE and its extension to other domains such as dosimetry are also discussed.

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These results demonstrate that the simultaneous acquisition of PET and MR images is feasible using the MR insertable PET developed in this study.

Vinylene carbonate (VC) has been the best performing solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) additive for the current lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, it is also true that the current LIB technology is being stagnated by the limit set by VC. This study introduces 3-fluoro-1,3-propane sultone (FPS) as a novel SEI additive to replace VC and another popular SEI additive, 1,3-propane sultone (PS). Both density functional calculations and electrochemical experiments confirm that the presence of an electron withdrawing fluorine group is favourable in terms of anodic stability and SEI forming ability. In the cyclability of LiCoO 2 /graphite cells over a wide temperature range (25-60 C), FPS exhibits remarkable enhancement compared with PS, and is even superior to VC. During elevated temperature (90 C) storage of the cells, VC suffers from severe swelling, whereas FPS causes little thermal degradation.Considering the high anodic stability, the excellent cyclability, and the good thermal stability, FPS is an outstanding SEI additive that can expand the performance boundary of the current LIBs.

Background:CD151 is a member of the tetraspanin family, which interacts with laminin-binding integrins and other tetraspanins. This protein is implicated in motility, invasion, and metastasis of cancer cells, but the prevalence of CD151 expression in subtypes of breast cancers and its influence on clinical outcome remains to be evaluated.Methods and results:The immunohistochemistry-based tissue microarray analysis showed that 127 (14.3%) cases overexpressed CD151 among 886 breast cancer patients. CD151 overexpression was found to be significantly associated with larger tumour size, higher nodal stage, advanced stage, absence of oestrogen receptor and progesterone receptor, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 overexpression. CD151 overexpression resulted in poorer overall survival (OS) (P<0.001) and disease-free survival (P=0.02), and stage II and III patients with CD151 overexpression demonstrated substantially poorer OS (P=0.0474 and 0.0169). In the five subtypes analyses, CD151 overexpression retained its adverse impact on OS in the Luminal A (P=0.0105) and quintuple-negative breast cancer (QNBC) subtypes, one subgroup of triple-negative breast cancer (P=0.0170). Multivariate analysis that included stage, subtype, and adjuvant chemotherapy showed that CD151 overexpression was independently associated with poor OS in invasive breast cancer.Conclusion:CD151 overexpression may be a potential molecular therapeutic target for breast cancer, especially in QNBC subtype and more advanced stages of breast cancer.

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate the role of human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER3) and PTEN expression in patients with HER2-overexpressing metastatic breast cancer (MBC).

Experimental results indicate that a compact and lightweight PET insert for hybrid PET/MRI can be developed using GAPD arrays and charge signal transmission method proposed in this study without significant interference.