background: this study assessed the clinical usefulness of the solid phantom, which may compensate for the disadvantages of the water phantom, by comparing the radiological doses between the two depending on their depths. materials and methods: the experimental equipment used was a linear accelerator for medical use, water phantom, solid phantom, farmer type ion chamber and electrometer. the di...

BACKGROUND Evidence suggests that asthma is rooted in the intrauterine environment and that intake of marine n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFAs) in pregnancy may have immunomodulatory effects on the child. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to examine whether increasing maternal intake of n-3 PUFAs in pregnancy may affect offspring risk of asthma. DESIGN In 1990, a population-based sample of 533...

This paper describes the use of Au nanocages covered with smart, thermally-responsive polymers for controlled release with high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). HIFU is a highly precise medical procedure that uses focused ultrasound to heat and destroy pathogenic tissue rapidly and locally in a non-invasive or minimally invasive manner. The released dosage could be remotely controlled by ma...

As a part of an ongoing effort to develop computerized planning tools for cryosurgery, an experimental study has been conducted to verify a recently developed numerical technique for bioheat transfer simulations. Experiments were performed on gelatin solution as a phantom material, using proprietary liquid-nitrogen cryoprobes. Urethral warming was simulated with the application of a cryoheater,...

The sparse estimation methods that utilize the ℓp-norm, with p being between 0 and 1, have shown better utility in providing optimal solutions to the inverse problem in diffuse optical tomography. These ℓp-norm-based regularizations make the optimization function nonconvex, and algorithms that implement ℓp-norm minimization utilize approximations to the original ℓp-norm function. In this work, ...

We present cross-sectional conductivity images of two biological tissue phantoms. Each of the cylindrical phantoms with both diameter and height of 140 mm contained chunks of biological tissues such as bovine tongue and liver, porcine muscle and chicken breast within a conductive agar gelatin as the background medium. We attached four recessed electrodes on the sides of the phantom with equal s...

To test the feasibility of applying ultrasonic elastography on small animal oncology models, experiments were performed in vitro and in situ on murine mammary lesions induced exogenously by tumor cell line 66.3. In vitro studies involved three 1-week-old excised tumors embedded in a phantom block with ultrasonic properties similar to those of soft biologic tissues. In situ studies involved five...