BACKGROUND Nanostructures fabricated by different methods have become increasingly important for various applications in biology and medicine, such as agents for medical imaging or cancer therapy. In order to understand their interaction with living cells and their internalization kinetics, several attempts have been made in tagging them. Although methods have been developed to measure the numb...

BACKGROUND The beating heart is the generator of blood flow through the cardiovascular system. Within the heart's own chambers, normal complex blood flow patterns can be disturbed by diseases. Methods for the quantification of intra-cardiac blood flow, with its 4D (3D+time) nature, are lacking. We sought to develop and validate a novel semi-automatic analysis approach that integrates flow and m...

Background Mid-wall striae pattern late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) has been shown to independently predict future outcomes in patients with dilated non-ischemic cardiomyopathy (NICM). Standardized quantification tools are of particular interest for clinical translation of this novel imaging marker. However, signal intensity (SI) based threshold techniques, such as Signal Threshold versus Refe...

Blooms of microcystin-producing cyanobacteria are a problem worldwide. Microcystin is a liver hepatotoxin commonly found in bodies of water and is produced mainly by the genus Microcystis. The aim of the present study was to develop and assess a competitive PCR method for the quantification of toxic and non-toxic Microcystis cells using the cpcBA and mcyB genes, which are respectively involved ...

Fluorescent dyes that bind DNA have been demonstrated as a useful alternative to radionucleotides for the quantification of DNA and the in vitro measurement of the activity of DNA polymerases and nucleases. However, this approach is generally used in a semi-quantitative way to determine relative rates of reaction. In this report, we demonstrate a method for the simultaneous quantification of DN...

In this work we present a technique to automatically or semi-automatically quantify the epicardial fat in noncontrasted Computed Tomography (CT) images. In CT images, the epicardial fat is very close to the pericardial fat, distincted only by the pericardium. The pericardium appears in the image as a very thin line, very hard to discriminate. To enhance the pericardium line and to remove noise ...

Background The degree of aortic insufficiency (AI) after transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) has been identified as a predictor of increased mortality. Since even mild AI is associated with increased mortality in some studies, accurate quantification of post-TAVR AI is critical. Assessment of AI by echocardiography is typically performed by visual inspection and semi-quantitative meth...

Accurate quantification of total body and the distribution of regional adipose tissue using manual segmentation is a challenging problem due to the high variation between manual delineations. Manual segmentation also requires highly trained experts with knowledge of anatomy. We present a hybrid segmentation method that provides robust delineation results for adipose tissue from whole body MRI s...

Recent research on fuzzy quantification for information retrieval has proposed the application of semi-fuzzy quantifiers for improving query languages. Fuzzy quantified sentences are useful as they allow additional restrictions to be imposed on the retrieval process unlike more popular retrieval approaches, which lack the facility to accurately express information needs. For instance, fuzzy qua...

Aim The purpose of the current paper is to present a computational solution to accurately quantify a specific to a non-specific uptake ratio in [ 123 I]FP-CIT single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images and simultaneously measure the spatial dimensions of the basal ganglia, commonly known as basal nuclei. A statistical analysis based on a reference dataset selected by the user is ...