BACKGROUND Disturbed breathing during sleep, with episodic upper airway obstruction, is frequent after major surgery. Ventilatory responses to hypercapnia and hypoxia during episodes of airway obstruction are difficult to investigate because the usual measure, that of ventilation, has been attenuated by the obstruction. We simulated the blood gas stimulus associated with obstruction to allow in...

OBJECTIVE The purposes of this study were to evaluate the feasibility of a free-breathing 3D gradient-recalled echo sequence with radial data sampling (radial 3D GRE) in abdominal MRI compared with a standard 3D GRE volumetric interpolated breath-hold examination (VIBE) sequence for imaging of cooperative patients and to perform a preliminary assessment in imaging of noncooperative patients. ...

BACKGROUND Respiration-correlated CT (4D CT) is the basis of radiotherapy treatment planning of thoracic and abdominal tumors. Current clinical 4D CT images suffer, however, from artifacts due to unfulfilled assumptions concerning breathing pattern regularity. We propose and evaluate modifications to existing low-pitch spiral 4D CT reconstruction protocols to counteract respective artifacts. ...

There was practically no constitutional disturbance whatever. There was 110 swelling of the feet or legs, the urine contained no albumen. The heart was pushed slightly upwards and outwards, its sounds were normal. There was nothing abnormal about the lungs except slight difficulty in breathing. She ate and slept well, and used to use the tumour as a table to eat her curry and rice 011. The abdo...

In a repeated radiotherapy owing to a local recurrence close to the previous irradiation, the dose distribution of next irradiation is required to avoid overlap with previous one. Therefore, a system for displaying dose-distribution image of previous irradiation on a present anatomical image would be helpful in designing new radiotherapy. However, registration of two abdominal CT images acquire...

PURPOSE To quantify the type, frequency, and magnitude of artifacts in four-dimensional (4D) CT images acquired using a multislice cine method. METHODS AND MATERIALS Fifty consecutive patients who underwent 4D-CT scanning and radiotherapy for thoracic or abdominal cancers were included in this study. All the 4D-CT scans were performed on the GE multislice PET/CT scanner with the Varian Real-t...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have demonstrated that protocol-directed weaning is better than physician-directed weaning in terms of shorter duration of mechanical ventilation in general critically ill patients. In this prospective, randomized controlled trial, the authors compared duration of mechanical ventilation between protocol based nurse-directed weaning and physician-directed weaning in p...