5,528 research outputs found
Can high-frequency ultrasound predict metastatic lymph nodes in patients with invasive breast cancer?
Aim
To determine whether high-frequency ultrasound can predict the presence of metastatic axillary lymph nodes, with a high specificity and positive predictive value, in patients with invasive breast cancer. The clinical aim is to identify patients with axillary disease requiring surgery who would not normally, on clinical grounds, have an axillary dissection, so potentially improving outcome and survival rates.
Materials and methods
The ipsilateral and contralateral axillae of 42 consecutive patients with invasive breast cancer were scanned prior to treatment using a B-mode frequency of 13 MHz and a Power Doppler frequency of 7 MHz. The presence or absence of an echogenic centre for each lymph node detected was recorded, and measurements were also taken to determine the L/S ratio and the widest and narrowest part of the cortex. Power Doppler was also used to determine vascularity. The contralateral axilla was used as a control for each patient.
Results
In this study of patients with invasive breast cancer, ipsilateral lymph nodes with a cortical bulge âĽ3 mm and/or at least two lymph nodes with absent echogenic centres indicated the presence of metastatic axillary lymph nodes (10 patients). The sensitivity and specificity were 52.6% and 100%, respectively, positive and negative predictive values were 100% and 71.9%, respectively, the P value was 0.001 and the Kappa score was 0.55.\ud
Conclusion
This would indicate that high-frequency ultrasound can be used to accurately predict metastatic lymph nodes in a proportion of patients with invasive breast cancer, which may alter patient management
PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports
We present a labeled large-scale, high resolution chest x-ray dataset for the
automated exploration of medical images along with their associated reports.
This dataset includes more than 160,000 images obtained from 67,000 patients
that were interpreted and reported by radiologists at Hospital San Juan
Hospital (Spain) from 2009 to 2017, covering six different position views and
additional information on image acquisition and patient demography. The reports
were labeled with 174 different radiographic findings, 19 differential
diagnoses and 104 anatomic locations organized as a hierarchical taxonomy and
mapped onto standard Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) terminology. Of
these reports, 27% were manually annotated by trained physicians and the
remaining set was labeled using a supervised method based on a recurrent neural
network with attention mechanisms. The labels generated were then validated in
an independent test set achieving a 0.93 Micro-F1 score. To the best of our
knowledge, this is one of the largest public chest x-ray database suitable for
training supervised models concerning radiographs, and the first to contain
radiographic reports in Spanish. The PadChest dataset can be downloaded from
http://bimcv.cipf.es/bimcv-projects/padchest/
Recall Rates in Screening Mammography: Variability in Performance and Decisions
Having a high recall rate may increase the probability of cancer being detected earlier, however it also has been related to increased false positive decisions, causing significant psychological and economical costs for both screened women and the mammography screening service. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the impact of various recall rates on breast radiologistsâ performance in a laboratory setting. Methods This study was designed to encompass two aspects 1) the effect of setting varying recall rates on the performance of breast radiologists in screening mammography 2) types of mammographic appearances of breast cancer are more likely to be missed at different recall rates. Five Australian breast radiologists were recruited to read one single test set of 200 mammographic cases (180 normal and 20 abnormal cases) over three different recall rate conditions: free recall, 15% and 10%. These radiologists were tasked with marking the location of suspicious lesions and providing a confidence. Results A significant decrease in radiologistsâ performance was observed when reading at lower recall rates, with lower sensitivity (P=0.002), case location sensitivity (P=0.002) and ROC AUC (P=0.003). Reading at a lower recall rate had a significant increase in specificity (P=0.002). The second study of this thesis showed that breast radiologists demonstrated lower sensitivity and receiver ROC AUC for non-specific density (NSD) (P=0.04 and P=0.03 respectively) and mixed features (P=0.01 and P=0.04 respectively) when reading at 15% and 10% recall rates. No significant change was observed on cancer characterized with stellate masses (P=0.18 and P=0.54 respectively) and architectural distortion (P=1.00 and P=0.37 respectively). Conclusion Reducing the number of recalled cases to 10% significantly reduced breast radiologistsâ performance. Stellate masses were likely to be recalled (90.0%) while NSDs were likely to be missed (45.6%) at reduced recall rates
Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution
Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a process are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the other hand, largely remains a process theory of such abstraction that it has generated few empirical studies. This paper discusses the similarities between the two theories, develops an argument for why a fusion of the two would enable institutional theory to significantly advance, develops a model of institutionalization as a structuration process, and proposes methodological guidelines for investigating the process empirically
The organizational implications of medical imaging in the context of Malaysian hospitals
This research investigated the implementation and use of medical imaging in the
context of Malaysian hospitals. In this report medical imaging refers to PACS,
RIS/HIS and imaging modalities which are linked through a computer network. The
study examined how the internal context of a hospital and its external context
together influenced the implementation of medical imaging, and how this in turn
shaped organizational roles and relationships within the hospital itself. It further
investigated how the implementation of the technology in one hospital affected its
implementation in another hospital. The research used systems theory as the
theoretical framework for the study. Methodologically, the study used a case-based
approach and multiple methods to obtain data. The case studies included two
hospital-based radiology departments in Malaysia.
The outcomes of the research suggest that the implementation of medical imaging in
community hospitals is shaped by the external context particularly the role played by
the Ministry of Health. Furthermore, influences from both the internal and external
contexts have a substantial impact on the process of implementing medical imaging
and the extent of the benefits that the organization can gain. In the context of roles
and social relationships, the findings revealed that the routine use of medical
imaging has substantially affected radiographersâ roles, and the social relationships
between non clinical personnel and clinicians. This study found no change in the
relationship between radiographers and radiologists. Finally, the approaches to
implementation taken in the hospitals studied were found to influence those taken by
other hospitals.
Overall, this study makes three important contributions. Firstly, it extends Barleyâs
(1986, 1990) research by explicitly demonstrating that the organizationâs internal and
external contexts together shape the implementation and use of technology, that the
processes of implementing and using technology impact upon roles, relationships
and networks and that a role-based approach alone is inadequate to examine the
outcomes of deploying an advanced technology. Secondly, this study contends that
scalability of technology in the context of developing countries is not necessarily
linear. Finally, this study offers practical contributions that can benefit healthcare
organizations in Malaysia
Qualitative Evaluation of Data Compression in Real-time Ultrasound Imaging
The purpose of this project was to evaluate qualitatively real-time ultrasound imaging using objective and subjective techniques to determine the minimum bandwidth required for clinical diagnosis of various anatomical and pathological states. In the experimental setup live ultrasound video samples representing the most common clinical examinations were compressed at 128, 256, 384, 768, 1152 and 1536 kbps using a compressor-decompressor (CODEC) adhering to International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) recommendation H.261. A protocol for qualitative evaluation was developed and subjective and objective testing were performed based on this protocol. Subjective methods comprised of inter-rater reliability tests using kappa statistics and three way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) using General Linear Models (GLM). Objective testing were performed using histogram analysis and estimation of peak signal to noise ratios.
The kappa scores for all bandwidths greater than 256 kbps indicated good inter-rater reliablity and minimum variation in confidence levels. Using the results from GLM and ANOVA we could not establish a trend in degradation of observer confidence with increasing compression ratios. The histogram analysis showed a linear increase in standard deviation values, indicating a linear scatter in pixel intensity, with increasing compression ratios. Although higher compression levels were evaluated, only video clips with bandwidths greater than 256 kbps displayed satisfactory temporal and spatial resolution, good enough to make clinical diagnosis of various anatomical and pathological states. The evaluations also indicate that compressed real-time ultrasound imagery using H.261 can be transmitted over a T1 or ADSL networks
Quality assurance and training procedures for computerâ aided detection and diagnosis systems in clinical usea)
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134756/1/mp7642.pd
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