Rapid Development of Medical Imaging Tools with Open-Source Libraries

Rapid prototyping is an important element in researching new imaging analysis techniques and developing custom medical applications. In the last ten years, the open source community and the number of open source libraries and freely available frameworks for biomedical research have grown significantly. What they offer are now considered standards in medical image analysis, computer-aided diagnosis, and medical visualization. A cursory review of the peer-reviewed literature in imaging informatics (indeed, in almost any information technology-dependent scientific discipline) indicates the current reliance on open source libraries to accelerate development and validation of processes and techniques. In this survey paper, we review and compare a few of the most successful open source libraries and frameworks for medical application development. Our dual intentions are to provide evidence that these approaches already constitute a vital and essential part of medical image analysis, diagnosis, and visualization and to motivate the reader to use open source libraries and software for rapid prototyping of medical applications and tools

Urinary bladder diverticulum as an unusual content of the inguinal canal

The inguinal urinary bladder hernia is a rare pathology observed mostly in males. A new case of asymptomatic reducible acquired inguinal hernia was revealed in a 54-year-old male during computed tomography (CT) undertaken for oncological follow-up. The right nephrectomy was previously performed due to clear cell carcinoma. The hernia was not visible on the CT 6 months before and on ultrasound performed after voiding. Slight herniation with a wide invagination of transversalis fascia but with empty bladder was seen on CT 4 months after the initial detection of hernia

Step-edge-induced resistance anisotropy in quasi-free-standing bilayer chemical vapor deposition graphene on SiC

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The transport properties of quasi-free-standing (QFS) bilayer graphene on SiC depend on a range of scattering mechanisms. Most of them are isotropic in nature. However, the SiC substrate morphology marked by a distinctive pattern of the terraces gives rise to an anisotropy in graphene's sheet resistance, which may be considered an additional scattering mechanism. At a technological level, the growth-preceding in situ etching of the SiC surface promotes step bunching which results in macro steps similar to 10 nm in height. In this report, we study the qualitative and quantitative effects of SiC steps edges on the resistance of epitaxial graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition. We experimentally determine the value of step edge resistivity in hydrogen-intercalated QFS-bilayer graphene to be similar to 190 Omega mu m for step height h(S) = 10 nm and provide proof that it cannot originate from mechanical deformation of graphene but is likely to arise from lowered carrier concentration in the step area. Our results are confronted with the previously reported values of the step edge resistivity in monolayer graphene over SiC atomic steps. In our analysis, we focus on large-scale, statistical properties to foster the scalable technology of industrial graphene for electronics and sensor applications. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC

Wigner's little group and Berry's phase for massless particles

The ``little group'' for massless particles (namely, the Lorentz transformations $\Lambda$ that leave a null vector invariant) is isomorphic to the Euclidean group E2: translations and rotations in a plane. We show how to obtain explicitly the rotation angle of E2 as a function of $\Lambda$ and we relate that angle to Berry's topological phase. Some particles admit both signs of helicity, and it is then possible to define a reduced density matrix for their polarization. However, that density matrix is physically meaningless, because it has no transformation law under the Lorentz group, even under ordinary rotations.Comment: 4 pages revte

Quantum correlations in Newtonian space and time: arbitrarily fast communication or nonlocality

We investigate possible explanations of quantum correlations that satisfy the principle of continuity, which states that everything propagates gradually and continuously through space and time. In particular, following [J.D. Bancal et al, Nature Physics 2012], we show that any combination of local common causes and direct causes satisfying this principle, i.e. propagating at any finite speed, leads to signalling. This is true even if the common and direct causes are allowed to propagate at a supraluminal-but-finite speed defined in a Newtonian-like privileged universal reference frame. Consequently, either there is supraluminal communication or the conclusion that Nature is nonlocal (i.e. discontinuous) is unavoidable.Comment: It is an honor to dedicate this article to Yakir Aharonov, the master of quantum paradoxes. Version 2 contains some more references and a clarified conclusio

Quantum Communication in Rindler Spacetime

A state that an inertial observer in Minkowski space perceives to be the vacuum will appear to an accelerating observer to be a thermal bath of radiation. We study the impact of this Davies-Fulling-Unruh noise on communication, particularly quantum communication from an inertial sender to an accelerating observer and private communication between two inertial observers in the presence of an accelerating eavesdropper. In both cases, we establish compact, tractable formulas for the associated communication capacities assuming encodings that allow a single excitation in one of a fixed number of modes per use of the communications channel. Our contributions include a rigorous presentation of the general theory of the private quantum capacity as well as a detailed analysis of the structure of these channels, including their group-theoretic properties and a proof that they are conjugate degradable. Connections between the Unruh channel and optical amplifiers are also discussed.Comment: v3: 44 pages, accepted in Communications in Mathematical Physic

Systematic Parameterization, Storage, and Representation of Volumetric DICOM Data

Tomographic medical imaging systems produce hundreds to thousands of slices, enabling three-dimensional (3D) analysis. Radiologists process these images through various tools and techniques in order to generate 3D renderings for various applications, such as surgical planning, medical education, and volumetric measurements. To save and store these visualizations, current systems use snapshots or video exporting, which prevents further optimizations and requires the storage of significant additional data. The Grayscale Softcopy Presentation State extension of the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard resolves this issue for two-dimensional (2D) data by introducing an extensive set of parameters, namely 2D Presentation States (2DPR), that describe how an image should be displayed. 2DPR allows storing these parameters instead of storing parameter applied images, which cause unnecessary duplication of the image data. Since there is currently no corresponding extension for 3D data, in this study, a DICOM-compliant object called 3D presentation states (3DPR) is proposed for the parameterization and storage of 3D medical volumes. To accomplish this, the 3D medical visualization process is divided into four tasks, namely pre-processing, segmentation, post-processing, and rendering. The important parameters of each task are determined. Special focus is given to the compression of segmented data, parameterization of the rendering process, and DICOM-compliant implementation of the 3DPR object. The use of 3DPR was tested in a radiology department on three clinical cases, which require multiple segmentations and visualizations during the workflow of radiologists. The results show that 3DPR can effectively simplify the workload of physicians by directly regenerating 3D renderings without repeating intermediate tasks, increase efficiency by preserving all user interactions, and provide efficient storage as well as transfer of visualized data. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40846-015-0097-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Nonlinear Bogolyubov-Valatin transformations and quaternions

In introducing second quantization for fermions, Jordan and Wigner (1927/1928) observed that the algebra of a single pair of fermion creation and annihilation operators in quantum mechanics is closely related to the algebra of quaternions H. For the first time, here we exploit this fact to study nonlinear Bogolyubov-Valatin transformations (canonical transformations for fermions) for a single fermionic mode. By means of these transformations, a class of fermionic Hamiltonians in an external field is related to the standard Fermi oscillator.Comment: 6 pages REVTEX (v3: two paragraphs appended, minor stylistic changes, eq. (39) corrected, references [10]-[14], [36], [37], [41], [67]-[69] added; v4: few extensions, references [62], [63] added, final version to be published in J. Phys. A: Math. Gen.