Deformable image registration (DIR) has potential to enable novel approaches in radiotherapy (RT) such as dose accumulation, online adaptive planning, and response monitoring. Although DIR is predominantly formulated as a single-objective optimization problem, its inherent nature is multi-objective, i.e., there are multiple, conflicting objectives that need to be optimized simultaneously. A maj...

Caching is an e ective technique for improving performance in Databases and Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Traditional IR systems access the collection indices to perform searches. Such searches on large corpora for queries oft repeated can be computationally redundant. In addition, querying remote sources can be expensive because of large communication overheads and frequent inavailabilit...

PURPOSE We assessed the improved motion-sensitized driven equilibrium (iMSDE) technique for multiple contrast 3-dimensional vessel wall imaging at 3T. METHODS Carotid images were obtained using iMSDE combined with turbo field echo (iMSDE-TFE) and conventional double inversion-recovery turbo spin-echo (DIR-TSE) in 5 healthy adult subjects. The tissue signal-to-noise efficiency (SNReff), SNR di...

This work developed a three-dimensional (3D) diffusion-prepared segmented steady-steady free precession (DP-SSFP) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) sequence for black-blood (BB) thoracic aortic and carotid wall visualization. In 14 healthy volunteers, BB CMR of the thoracic aorta (n = 7) and carotid arteries (n = 7) was performed over 12 cm and 3 cm of transversal coverage, respectively, ...

BACKGROUND Pakistan has a high incidence of cancer. The most severely affected province is the North West Frontier Province, which has districts of low socioeconomic status such as those in Dir. The purpose of this study was to analyze the cancer registry record of patients from the districts in Dir in order to obtain a net cancer incidence for use in proposing future health plans. METHODS Th...

Putative dopaminergic (pDAergic) ventral tegmental area neurons play an important role in brain pathways related to addiction. Extended exposure of pDAergic neurons to moderate concentrations of dopamine (DA) results in a time-dependent decrease in sensitivity of pDAergic neurons to DA inhibition, a process called dopamine inhibition reversal (DIR). We have shown that DIR is mediated by phospho...

The automatic segmentation of brain tissues in magnetic resonance (MR) is usually performed on T1-weighted images, due to their high spatial resolution. T1w sequence, however, has some major downsides when brain lesions are present: the altered appearance of diseased tissues causes errors in tissues classification. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we employed two different MR sequences: fl...

Cloud computing has attracted a great deal of attention in both academia and industry. We envision the provisioning of differentiated services as being one of the key components to the success of cloud computing. Unfortunately, this issue has not been fully addressed in the past. Realizing that different users might have different requirements regarding availability, reliability, durability, re...

Introduction Black-blood coronary vessel wall imaging is a powerful non-invasive tool for the quantitative assessment of positive arterial remodeling. Although dual-inversionrecovery (DIR) is the current standard for non-invasive coronary vessel wall imaging, optimal lumen-vessel wall contrast is sometimes difficult to obtain and the time-window available for imaging is limited due to the compe...

Reliability of data exchange is becoming increasingly important. In addition, applications may require multiple degrees of reliability. The concept of Differentiated Reliability (DiR) was recently introduced in [1] to provide multiple degrees of reliability in protection schemes that provision spare resources. With this paper, the authors extend the DiR concept to restoration schemes in which n...