Dissociation of somatic growth from segmentation drives gigantism in snakes.

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation with United Snakes

Snakes have become a standard image analysis technique with several variants now in common use. We have developed a software package called “United Snakes”. It unifies the most important snake variants, including finite difference, B-spline, and Hermite polynomial snakes, within the framework of a general finite element formulation with a choice of shape functions. Furthermore, we have incorpor...

SNAP: A Software Package for User-Guided Geodesic Snake Segmentation

We present a new software package for interactive segmentation of 3D images by geodesic snakes, with manual editing. Several variants of level set snakes are incorporated, including both gradientmagnitude based snakes as well as region-competition snakes. A complete segmentation pipeline, including image preprocessing, bubble initialization and parameter control, is provided in an intuitive use...

Macroglossia, abnormal umbilicus and hypoglycaemia (Beckwith's syndrome).

The syndrome of exomphalos, macroglossia, postnatal somatic gigantism and severe hypoglycaemia in various combinations was first described in seven infants by Beckwith (1963) and Beckwith et al. (1964). At necropsy the main features were cytomegaly of the foetal adrenal cortex, renal medullary dysplasia, and hyperplasia of the pancreas and kidneys. Wiedemann (1964) reported three siblings of a ...

Acromegaly and Gigantism

Human growth hormone (GH), a single-chain peptide of 191 amino acids, was isolated from somatotroph cells of the anterior pituitary gland in 1956 and first used therapeutically for treatment of pituitary dwarfism in 1958 (Raben, 1958). Pituitary dwarfism is the classic form of growth hormone deficiency during childhood. Gigantism refers to any standing height more than 2 standard deviations abo...

Variation in yield and lethality of venoms from Iranian snakes