BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Administration of contrast material before proton MR spectroscopy may allow more accurate placement of the volume of interest, particularly in tumors; yet, some data have suggested that contrast material may alter the results of MR spectroscopy. To determine the validity of this contention, we performed pre- and postcontrast MR spectroscopy in patients with brain tumors a...

Objectives The aim of this in vitro study was to evaluate how a deviation from the horizontal plane, affects the image quality in two different CBCT-devices. Methods A phantom head SK150 (RANDO, The Phantom Laboratory, Salem, NY, USA) was examined in two CBCT-units: Accuitomo 80 and Veraviewepocs 3D R100 (J. Morita Mfg. Corp. Kyoto, Japan). The phantom head was placed with the hard palate par...

Interest has been growing in recent years in the development of radiation treatment planning (RTP) techniques based solely on Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. However, it is recognized that MR images suffer from scanner-related and object-induced distortions that may lead to an incorrect placement of anatomical structures. This subsequently may result in a reduced accuracy in delivering treatmen...

A shape-based genetic algorithm template-matching (GATM) method is proposed for the detection of nodules with spherical elements. A spherical-oriented convolution-based filtering scheme is used as a pre-processing step for enhancement. To define the fitness function for GATM, a 3D geometric shape feature is calculated at each voxel and then combined into a global nodule intensity distribution. ...

We present a method for supervised volumetric segmentation based on a dictionary of small cubes composed of pairs of intensity and label cubes. Intensity cubes are small image volumes where each voxel contains an image intensity. Label cubes are volumes with voxelwise probabilities for a given label. An unknown volume is segmented by cube-wise finding the most similar dictionary intensity cube....

A new grid-based Boltzmann equation solver, Acuros, was developed specifically for performing accurate and rapid radiotherapy dose calculations. In this study we benchmarked its performance against Monte Carlo for 6 and 18 MV photon beams in heterogeneous media. Acuros solves the coupled Boltzmann transport equations for neutral and charged particles on a locally adaptive Cartesian grid. The Ac...

INTRODUCTION In vivo P MRS is unique and can be used to assess the high energy phosphate (HEP) metabolites for studying the ATP metabolism and bioenergetics. However, its utility relies on the accuracy for quantifying the absolute metabolite concentrations, which has been a long-standing challenge in the in vivo MRS research field. Although different strategies have been applied for determining...

Introduction To study the cortical/subcortical diffusivity quantified by the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) in neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, brain tissue segmentation methods for diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) data have been proposed, which utilize registration between segmented structural MRI and DT-MRI [1-3]. Recently, another method has been propose...

(Abstract) Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT-MRI), also known as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), is a unique medical imaging modality that provides non-invasive estimates of White Matter (WM) connectivity based on local principal directions of anisotropic water diffusion. DTI tractography estimates are a macroscopically sampled description of underlying microscopic structure, and ...

Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) is a radiotherapy that has mainly been used to treat malignant brain tumours, melanomas, and head and neck cancer. In BNCT, the patient receives an intravenous infusion of a B carrier, which accumulates in the tumour area. The tumour is irradiated with epithermal or thermal neutrons, which result in a boron neutron capture reaction B(n,α)Li. This generates h...