The reduction of Fe during bacterial anaerobic respiration in sediments and soils not only causes the degradation of organic matter but also results in changes in mineralogy and the redistribution of many nutrients and trace metals. Understanding trace metal patterns in sedimentary rocks and predicting the fate of contaminants in the environment requires a detailed understanding of the mechanis...

UNLABELLED Endemic Pemphigus Foliaceus (EPF) is a bullous autoimmune skin disease whose incidence used to be high in the State of São Paulo (SP), Brazil, during the forties, but has declined thereafter. OBJECTIVES to report a series of EPF patients from the northeastern region of SP. METHODS a retrospective study concerning demographic and epidemiological data of patients seen from 1973 to ...

BACKGROUND Understanding the irradiated area and dose correctly is important for the reirradiation of organs that deform after irradiation, such as the liver. We investigated the spatial registration error using the deformable image registration (DIR) software products MIM Maestro (MIM) and Velocity AI (Velocity). METHODS Image registration of pretreatment computed tomography (CT) and posttre...

The concept of Differentiated Reliability (DiR) was recently introduced by the authors to provide multiple reliability degrees (or classes) at the same network layer using a common protection mechanism, e.g., path switching. According to the DiR concept, each connection at the layer under consideration is guaranteed a minimum reliability degree, defined as the Maximum Failure Probability allowe...

BACKGROUND The extent and clinical relevance of grey matter (GM) pathology in multiple sclerosis (MS) are increasingly recognised. GM pathology may present as focal lesions, which can be visualised using double inversion recovery (DIR) MRI, or as diffuse pathology, which can manifest as atrophy. It is, however, unclear whether the diffuse atrophy centres on focal lesions. This study aimed to de...

Cortical lesions are prevalent in multiple sclerosis but are poorly detected using MRI. The double inversion recovery (DIR) sequence is increasingly used to explore the clinical relevance of cortical demyelination. Here we evaluate the agreement between imaging sequences at 3 Tesla (T) and 7T for the presence and appearance of individual multiple sclerosis cortical lesions. Eleven patients with...

This paper presents a greedy heuristic-based double iteration and rectification (DIR) approach to intraoperative planning for permanent prostate brachytherapy. The DIR approach adopts a greedy seed selection (GSS) procedure to obtain a preliminary plan. In this process, the potential seeds are evaluated according to their ability to irradiate target while spare organs at risk (OARs), and their ...

Among infectious diseases the Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality. The present study was carried out in district Dir (Lower) Khyber Pukhtoon Khwa Pakistan. The aim of the study was to find out the prevalence of TB among the local population in district Dir (L). A descriptive study was design. The data were collected from different hospitals located in differe...

In adaptive radiotherapy, deformable image registration is often conducted between the planning CT and treatment CT (or cone beam CT) to generate a deformation vector field (DVF) for dose accumulation and contour propagation. The auto-propagated contours on the treatment CT may contain relatively large errors, especially in low-contrast regions. A clinician's inspection and editing of the propa...

Tissue perfusion measurement using C-arm angiography systems is a novel technique with potential high benefit for catheter-guided treatment of stroke in the interventional suite. However, perfusion C-arm CT (PCCT) is challenging: the slow C-arm rotation speed only allows measuring samples of contrast time attenuation curves (TACs) every 5 – 6 s if reconstruction algorithms for static data are u...