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In recent years, the incidence of prostate cancer in China has shown a trend of continuous growth. Prostate cancer has become a urinary malignant tumor that seriously affects the health of men in China. Radical surgery and precision radiotherapy are the main methods of radical treatment for prostate cancer. Standardized diagnosis and treatment via a multidisciplinary team should be the standard practice to improve cure rate. Rapid development in imaging, pathology and molecular gene diagnosis has significantly changed the management of prostate cancer. In radiation oncology, image‐guided intensity modulated radiotherapy has been widely adopted in the treatment of prostate cancer. The comprehensive approach centered with radiotherapy has achieved excellent curative effect while continuously reducing treatment‐related side effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity of climate system dynamics calls for more elaborate drought evaluation and trend projection under different future climate scenarios. In this study, the meteorological drought stress over the Yellow River basin (YRB) of China for the next forty years (2021–2060) is comprehensively evaluated based on meteorological simulations of eight climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) with three representative concentration pathway scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) is used as a metric of drought magnitude at multiple temporal scales, while the multi‐threshold run analysis is conducted for the definition of drought events and derivation of drought characteristics (e.g., frequency, duration and severity). The Mann–Kendall test is adopted as a universal tool to analyse the trends in climate variables (precipitation and temperature), multi‐temporal SPEI drought indices and drought characteristics (duration and severity). Our preliminary conclusions include that partially increasing precipitation and generally rising temperature are likely to be seen in the YRB from 2021 to 2060. More importantly, a warmer YRB may undergo either a nearly regular atmospheric regime (e.g., comparable to the baseline period of 1961–2000) with RCP2.6 scenario or significantly drying processes with RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. Meanwhile, the enhanced spatiotemporal variability/heterogeneity of meteorological forcing (e.g., precipitation and temperature) and drought characteristics (e.g., magnitude, frequency, duration and severity) would also increase future uncertainty of meteorological drought stress over the YRB, such as the encounter of drought with long duration and/or high severity and relevant increasing trends. Understanding the spatiotemporal influences of specific climate and emission scenarios on projected drought vulnerability might help improving our knowledge of climate‐human interactions and selecting rational development strategy (like the low emission scenario of RCP2.6 or so) for regional adaptation to future climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the changing properties of drought events in Weihe River basin, China, by modeling the multivariate joint distribution of drought duration, severity and peak using trivariate Gaussian and Student t copulas. Monthly precipitations of Xi'an gauge are used to illustrate the meta-elliptical copula-based methodology for a single-station application. Gaussian and Student t copulas are found to produce a better fit comparing with other six symmetrical and asymmetrical Archimedean copulas, and, checked by the goodness-of-fit tests based on a modified bootstrap version of Rosenblatt's transformation, both of them are acceptable to model the multivariate joint distribution of drought variables. Gaussian copula, the best fitting, is employed to construct the dependence structures of positively associated drought variables so as to obtain the multivariate joint and conditional probabilities of droughts. A Kendall's return period (KRP) introduced by Salvadori and De Michele (2010) is then adopted to assess the multivariate recurrent properties of drought events, and its spatial distributions indicate that prolonged droughts are likely to break out with rather short recurrence intervals in the whole region, while drought status in the southeast seems to be severer than the northwest. The study is of some merits in terms of multivariate drought modeling using a preferable copula-based method, the results of which could serve as a reference for regional drought defense and water resources management. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]