INTRODUCTION Echocardiography is commonly used in clinical practice for the real-time assessment of cardiac morphology and function. Nevertheless, due to the nature of the data acquisition, cardiac ultrasound images are often corrupted by a range of acoustic artefacts, including acoustic noise, speckle and shadowing. Spatial compounding techniques have long been recognised for their ability to ...

INTRODUCTION Pharmacies that compound specific drugs for individual patients are an essential part of our health care system. Compounding pharmacies formulate therapeutic and diagnostic products for physicians in practice and those engaged in research. They make individualized chemotherapeutic agents, diagnostic agents, noncommercial formulations (e.g., a liquid rather than a tablet), doses tha...

In ultrasonic medical imaging, spatial compounding of images is a technique where ultrasonic beam is steered to examine patient tissues in multiple angles. In the conventional ultrasonic diagnostic imaging, the steering of the ultrasonic beam is achieved electronically using the phased array transducer elements. In this paper, a spatial compounding approach is presented where the ultrasonic pro...

JCPH – Vol. 66, n 6 – novembre–décembre 2013 400 It was soon realized that the underdosing incident could be replicated in other provinces if proper safety measures were not put into place. A quick review of the regulatory framework for hospital pharmacists and hospital pharmacies across the country indicated that they differ from one province to another. Furthermore, few provinces have regulat...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of a product-analysis laboratory exercise in teaching students the importance of quality in pharmaceutical compounding. DESIGN Second-year pharmacy students (N=77) participated in a pharmaceutical compounding laboratory exercise and subsequently analyzed their final product using ultraviolet (UV) spectrometry. ASSESSMENT Reflection, survey instruments, ...

Spatial-angular compounding is a new technique that enables the reduction of noise artifacts in ultrasound elastography. Under this method, compounded elastograms are obtained from a spatially weighted average of local strain estimated from radio frequency (rf) echo signals acquired at different insonification angles. In previous work, the acquisition of the rf signals was performed through the...

1 Follow protocols when using medications from compounding pharmacies C ompounding pharmacies have long been valued for their ability to tailor prescription drugs for specific patients. More recently, they have helped conserve scarce drugs by redistributing them from larger to smaller single-use vials. For an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) that is not associated with a hospital and therefore h...

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is an emerging medical imaging modality that relies on the absorption of optical energy and the subsequent emission of acoustic waves that are detected with a conventional ultrasound probe. PA images are susceptible to background noise artifacts that reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). We investigated spatial-angular compounding o...

The objective of this study was to identify drugs that received dose adjustments (DA) and pharmaceutical alternatives (PA) that avoid DA, and calculate the economic percentage of this replacement. A descriptive, observational and cross-sectional study was performed in a second level hospital. The pharmacy and nursing services was accompanied to identify the drugs that received DA and the compou...

Many quantitative ultrasound (QUS) techniques are based on estimates of the radio-frequency (RF) echo signal power spectrum. Historically, reliable spectral estimates required spatial averaging over large regions-of-interest (ROIs). Spatial compounding techniques have been used to obtain robust spectral estimates for data acquired over small regions of interest. A new technique referred to as "...