Putting Research Into Practice Page 10 The National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT) has just completed a National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project: NCHRP 9-11, “Segregation in Hot Mix Asphalt Pavements.” Dr. Mary Stroup-Gardiner was the principal investigator on this project. Segregation has historically been defined to mean localized areas of coarse materials in some a...

A new automated method for quantification of left ventricular function from gated-single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images has been developed. The method for quantification of cardiac function (CAFU) is based on a heart shaped model and the active shape algorithm. The model contains statistical information of the variability of left ventricular shape. CAFU was adjusted based on...

While information about anatomy is available in CT images, information about physiology and metabolism is available in PET images. To integrate both information, the two images are fused. Image fusion methods include simple methods like pixel averaging and sophisticated methods like wavelet transformation. An advantage of using wavelet transformation is that it preserves significant parts of ea...

(18)F-fluoro-deoxy-glucose ((18)F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) is one of the most sensitive and specific imaging modalities for the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer. A drawback of PET is that it requires several minutes of acquisition per bed position, which results in images being affected by respiratory blur. Respiratory gating techniques have been developed to deal with res...

Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) refers to an efficient and personalized test mode in online education, aiming accurately measure student proficiency level on the required subject/domain. The key component of CAT is "adaptive" question selection algorithm, which automatically selects best suited for based his/her current estimated proficiency, reducing length. Existing algorithms rely some m...

AbstractObjective: To investigate the impact of respiratory motion on localization, and quantification lung lesions for the Gross Tumour Volume utilizing an in-house developed Auto3Dreg programme and dynamic NURBS-based cardiac-torso digitised phantom (NCAT). Methods: Respiratory motion may result in more than 30% underestimation of the SUV values of lung, liver and kidney tumour lesions. The m...

The non-canonical amino acid labeling techniques BONCAT (bioorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging) and FUNCAT (fluorescent non-canonical amino acid tagging) enable the specific identification and visualization of newly synthesized proteins. Recently, these techniques have been applied to neuronal systems to elucidate protein synthesis dynamics during plasticity, identify stimulation-induc...

The x-ray imaging dose from serial cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans raises a clinical concern in most image-guided radiation therapy procedures. It is the goal of this paper to develop a fast graphic processing unit (GPU)-based algorithm to reconstruct high-quality CBCT images from undersampled and noisy projection data so as to lower the imaging dose. For this purpose, we have develo...

Quantitative description of cardiac motion is desirable to assist in detecting myocardial abnormalities from gated myocardial perfusion (GMP) emission computed tomography (ECT) images. While "optical flow" type of cardiac motion estimation (ME) techniques have been developed in the past, there has been no quantitative evaluation of their performance. Moreover, no investigation has been performe...

Introduction: It is a common protocol to use 201Tl for the rest and 99mTc for the stress cardiac SPECT imaging. Theoretically, both types of imaging may be performed simultaneously using different energy windows for each radionuclide. However, a potential limitation is the cross-contamination of scattered photons from 99mTc and collimator X-rays into the 201Tl energy window. We used a middle en...