Background A comprehensive assessment of cannabis use by patients with cancer has not previously been reported.

In TeV-scale gravity scenarios with large extra dimensions, black holes may be produced at future colliders. Good arguments have been made for why general relativistic black holes may be just out of reach of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). However, in weakly-coupled string theory, highly excited string states -string balls -could be produced at the LHC with high rates and decay thermally, not unlike general relativistic black holes. In this paper, we simulate and study string ball production and decay at the LHC. We specifically emphasize the experimentally-detectable similarities and differences between string balls and general relativistic black holes at a TeV scale.

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The purpose of this study was to establish a simulation-based education program for radiation oncology learners in permanent seed implant brachytherapy. The first step in formalizing any education program is a validation process that builds evidence-based verification that the learning environment is appropriate. METHODS AND MATERIALS: The primary education task allowed practitioners to use an anthropomorphic breast phantom to simulate a permanent seed implant brachytherapy delivery. Validation evidence is built by generating data to assess learner and expert cohorts according to their proficiency. Each practitioner's performance during the simulation was evaluated by seed placement accuracy, procedural time-to-complete, and two qualitative evaluation toolsda global rating scale and procedural checklist. RESULTS: The average seed placement accuracy (AESD) was 8.1 AE 3.5 mm compared to 6.1 AE 2.6 mm for the learner and expert cohort, respectively. The median (range) procedural time-to-complete was 64 (60e77) minutes and 43 (41e50) minutes for the learner and expert cohort, respectively. Seed placement accuracy (student t-test, p ! 0.05) and procedural time-tocomplete (ManneWhitney U-test, p ! 0.05) were statistically different between the cohorts. In both the global rating scale and procedural checklist, the expert cohort demonstrated improved proficiency compared to the learner cohort. CONCLUSIONS: This validation evidence supports the utilization of this simulation environment toward appropriately capturing the delivery experience of practitioners. The results demonstrate that, in all areas of evaluation, expert cohort proficiency was superior to learner cohort proficiency. This methodology will be used to establish a simulation-based education program for radiation oncology learners in permanent seed implant brachytherapy.