Abstract: A method for needle position optimization for prostate brachytherapy for use with a radiation delivery device configured to use a plurality of needles inserted into a prostate of a patient includes obtaining imagery of the prostate of the patient, generating a needle pool for prostate brachytherapy treatment of the patient based on the imagery of the prostate of the patient, and determining at a computing device an optimum prostate brachytherapy treatment plan for the patient by iteratively removing needles from the needle pool by forming and computationally solving a convex optimization problem wherein the convex optimization problem uses a quadratic dosimetric penalty function, dwell time regularization by total variation, and block sparsity regularization term.

Abstract: A method for pooled sample testing for a target substance using compressed sensing includes receiving a plurality of individual samples, determining a mixing matrix for a plurality of pooled sample mixtures to create by mixing portions of selected ones of the plurality of individual samples, and determining an allocation matrix for the plurality of pooled samples, wherein the allocation matrix allocations portions of each of the plurality of pooled samples for each test, performing mixing to create the plurality of pooled sample mixtures based on the mixing matrix and the allocation matrix, performing quantitative tests on the plurality of pooled sample mixtures so as to estimate an amount of the target substance contained within each of the plurality of pooled sample mixtures, and decoding results of the quantitative tests to determine quantitative estimates of amount of the target substance in each of the plurality of individual samples.