BACKGROUND Impact of non-pharmacological innovations on cancer cure rates is difficult to assess. It remains unclear, whether outcome improves with 2- [18-F]-fluoro-2-deoxyglucose-positron emission tomography and integrated computer tomography (PET/CT) and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for curative treatment of advanced pharyngeal carcinoma. PATIENTS AND METHODS Forty five patients ...

Craniospinal irradiation remains an important technique in the management of malignancies of the central nervous system. It is technically demanding, with potential for treatment field overlap or gaps to yield unacceptable dosimetric heterogeneity. A method to accurately simulate and verify the three-field junction is described. We use a comfortable supine position to minimize patient movement....

Electronic Health Records (EHR) form a valuable resource in the healthcare enterprise because clinical evidence can be provided to identify potential complications and support decisions on early intervention. Simple string matching, the common search algorithm, is not able to map a query to the similar health records in the database with respect to the medical concepts. A novel ontological vect...

This paper describes a universal approach to automatic segmentation of different internal organ and tissue regions in three-dimensional (3D) computerized tomography (CT) scans. The proposed approach combines object localization, a probabilistic atlas, and 3D GrabCut techniques to achieve automatic and quick segmentation. The proposed method first detects a tight 3D bounding box that contains th...

Accurate image registration for CT-CT, CT-MRI for brain is necessary to obtain clinical information from diagnostic images and translate the information to radiotherapy treatment planning CT images. Mostly in cases of Post-Surgery cases that have been operated outside hospitals and are being referred for Post-Operative adjuvant Radiotherapy to our Centre, where the pre-operative volume is very ...

PURPOSE To determine the feasibility of registration of MRI and CT datasets post permanent prostate implant by the use of mutual information. METHODS AND MATERIALS Five patients who underwent permanent (125)I implant for prostate carcinoma were studied. Two weeks postimplant an axial CT, T2-weighted-axial, sagittal and coronal MRI, and T1-fat-saturation MRI scans were obtained. Registrations ...

We propose an optimization approach ~o the estimation a simple closed curve describing the boundary of an object represented in an image. This problem arises in a variety of applications, such as template matching schemes for medical image registration. A regularized optimization formulation with an objective function that measures the normalized image contrast between the inside and outside of...

BACKGROUND Self-obtained penile-meatal swabs and urine specimens have been used for Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) and Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) for outreach screening in men. OBJECTIVE To compare the sensitivity of self-collected male penile-meatal swabs and urine for the detection of CT, NG and TV. METHODS Matching penile-meatal swabs and urines were collected at ...

The combination of functional and anatomical imaging technologies such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed Tomography (CT) has shown its value in the preclinical and clinical fields. In PET/CT hybrid acquisition systems, CT-derived attenuation maps enable a more accurate PET reconstruction. However, CT provides only very limited soft-tissue contrast and exposes the patient to an ...