Abstract: Purpose: There are perineal templates for interstitial implants such as MUPIT and Syed applicators. Their limitations are the intracavitary component deficit and the necessity to use computed tomography (CT) for treatment planning since both applicators are non-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatibles. To overcome these problems, a new template named Template Benidorm (TB) has been recently developed. Titanium needles are usually reconstructed based on their own artifacts, mainly in T1-weighted sequence, using the void on the tip as the needle tip position. Nevertheless, patient tissues surrounding the needles present heterogeneities that complicate the accurate identification of these artifact patterns. The purpose of this work is to improve the titanium needle reconstruction uncertainty for the TB case using a simple method based on the free needle lengths and typical MRI pellets markers. Material and methods: The proposed procedure consists on the inclusion of three small A-vitamin pellets (hyper-intense on MRI images) compressed by both applicator plates defining the central plane of the plate's arrangement. The needles used are typically 20 cm in length. For each needle, two points are selected defining the straight line. From such line and the plane equations, the intersection can be obtained, and using the free length (knowing the offset distance), the coordinates of the needle tip can be obtained. The method is applied in both T1W and T2W acquisition sequences. To evaluate the inter-observer variation of the method, three implants of T1W and another three of T2W have been reconstructed by two different medical physicists with experience on these reconstructions. Results and conclusions: The differences observed in the positioning were significantly smaller than 1 mm in all cases. The presented algorithm also allows the use of only T2W sequence either for contouring or reconstruction purposes. The proposed method is robust and independent of the visibility of the artifact at the tip of the needle.

Abstract: A search for pair production of vector-like quarks, both up-type (T) and down-type (B), as well as for four-top-quark production, is presented. The search is based on pp collisions at TeV recorded in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb(-1). Data are analysed in the lepton-plus-jets final state, characterised by an isolated electron or muon with high transverse momentum, large missing transverse momentum and multiple jets. Dedicated analyses are performed targeting three cases: a T quark with significant branching ratio to a W boson and a b-quark , and both a T quark and a B quark with significant branching ratio to a Higgs boson and a third-generation quark ( respectively). No significant excess of events above the Standard Model expectation is observed, and 95% CL lower limits are derived on the masses of the vector-like T and B quarks under several branching ratio hypotheses assuming contributions from T -> Wb, Zt, Ht and B -> Wt, Zb, Hb decays. The 95% CL observed lower limits on the T quark mass range between 715 GeV and 950 GeV for all possible values of the branching ratios into the three decay modes, and are the most stringent constraints to date. Additionally, the most restrictive upper bounds on four-top-quark production are set in a number of new physics scenarios.

Abstract: A generic search for anomalous production of events with at least three charged leptons is presented. The data sample consists of pp collisions at TeV collected in 2012 by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb(-1). Events are required to have at least three selected lepton candidates, at least two of which must be electrons or muons, while the third may be a hadronically decaying tau. Selected events are categorized based on their lepton flavour content and signal regions are constructed using several kinematic variables of interest. No significant deviations from Standard Model predictions are observed. Model-independent upper limits on contributions from beyond the Standard Model phenomena are provided for each signal region, along with prescription to re-interpret the limits for any model. Constraints are also placed on models predicting doubly charged Higgs bosons and excited leptons. For doubly charged Higgs bosons decaying to e tau or μtau, lower limits on the mass are set at 400 GeV at 95% confidence level. For excited leptons, constraints are provided as functions of both the mass of the excited state and the compositeness scale I >, with the strongest mass constraints arising in regions where the mass equals I >. In such scenarios, lower mass limits are set at 3.0 TeV for excited electrons and muons, 2.5 TeV for excited taus, and 1.6 TeV for every excited-neutrino flavour.