Total Variation Wavelet-Based Medical Image Denoising

We propose a denoising algorithm for medical images based on a combination of the total variation minimization scheme and the wavelet scheme. We show that our scheme offers effective noise removal in real noisy medical images while maintaining sharpness of objects. More importantly, this scheme allows us to implement an effective automatic stopping time criterion

RENDERING CONNECTION: SYMBIOSIS THROUGH OVERLAPPING AND LAYERING

This thesis seeks to create a space that enables social energy in traditional senior apartments by overlapping with another program, the animal center. Animals, as spiritual beings, may help ease stress and loneliness in the elderly. Also, animals can be seen as catalysts for intergenerational activities between residents and adopters. Architecture has ability to integrate two categories social beings that have both been isolated and neglected. Spatial and temporal devices of overlapping and layering have the potential to relate or unite disparate elements in an interdependent and mutually reinforcing connection. Through rearranging, overlapping and layering programs that are often co-existent in contemporary society, architecture can keep the elderly and animals active and engaged. The site for this project is in China. China currently struggles with a series of issues relating to populations of both the aging and of animals. In China, as the population shifts from the country to the cities, senior citizens are increasingly socially isolated. At the same time, animal overpopulation, particularly dogs, becomes more of a problem each year. The final project offers a design that seeks to socially integrate seniors into the larger community, creating opportunities for residents to meet and mingle with other people from the surrounding communities

Panorama of diseases associated with breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Although the incidence of breast cancer has increased over time, so too has patient survival. Given these trends, the prevalence of breast cancer has steadily increased in recent decades, exposing these women to other associated diseases which can influence carcinogenesis, prognosis, and treatment. This thesis uses Swedish register data, combined with data from the Libro-1 and Karolinska Mammography Project for Risk Prediction of Breast Cancer (KARMA) cohorts, to study other diseases associated with breast cancer in women. Specifically, this thesis investigates how diseases in early adulthood influence the risk of breast cancer, and how overall health is affected by breast cancer treatment. In Study I, the risk of breast cancer in women with and without preeclampsia was studied using data from the Swedish Medical Birth Register and KARMA cohort. Women diagnosed with preeclampsia had a decreased risk of breast cancer and lower mammographic density. In addition, sisters of breast cancer patients and women with a high genetic predisposition to breast cancer had a lower risk of preeclampsia. This suggests that inherited factors may contribute to the inverse association between preeclampsia and breast cancer. In Study II and Study III, the risk of mental disorders and psoriasis were compared between a Swedish nationwide cohort of breast cancer patients and the general population. Women with invasive breast cancer had an increased risk of depression, anxiety, stress-related disorders, and psoriasis. This increased risk was greatest shortly after cancer diagnosis and remained over the subsequent five years. Patients with in-situ breast cancer only experienced an increased risk of stress-related disorders during the first six months after cancer diagnosis. With regard to risk predictors, the Libro-1 cohort of Stockholm-Gotland breast cancer patients showed that younger age at diagnosis, higher tumor grade, lymph node positive tumors, comorbidity, and chemotherapy were independently associated with an increased risk of depression and anxiety. The effect of tumor grade and chemotherapy was mainly limited to the first two years after diagnosis, while comorbidity contributed to long term risk. Younger age at diagnosis was the only risk factor identified for stress-related disorders; while for psoriasis, radiotherapy and mastectomy were associated with increased disease risk. Aside from these treatment-specific predictors, genetic predisposition, obesity and smoking were also risk factors for psoriasis in breast cancer patients. Study IV used a matched cohort design to describe a wide spectrum of diseases after breast cancer diagnosis. In a Swedish nationwide breast cancer cohort, breast cancer patients had an increased risk of infection and several non-communicable diseases, compared to matched healthy individuals. Diseases with the highest hazard ratios - lymphedema, radiodermatitis, and neutropenia - correspond to the side effects of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. Despite an increased incidence of many diseases, increased mortality risk among breast cancer patients was only due to other solid cancers. A higher risk of other solid cancers could be predicted by menopausal disorders, indicating the need for gynecological surveillance of breast cancer patients. In conclusion, our results suggest that inherited factors contribute to an inverse association between preeclampsia and breast cancer, given that the inverse association was also found between preeclampsia and women with a high genetic predisposition to breast cancer. This thesis identifies an increased risk of several diseases after breast cancer diagnosis, including menopausal disorders, mental disorders, and psoriasis. Such diseases are related to cancer treatment, and suggest that a multidisciplinary perspective on post-cancer care is required for breast cancer patients

A Comparison of Image Denoising Methods

The advancement of imaging devices and countless images generated everyday pose an increasingly high demand on image denoising, which still remains a challenging task in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. To improve denoising quality, numerous denoising techniques and approaches have been proposed in the past decades, including different transforms, regularization terms, algebraic representations and especially advanced deep neural network (DNN) architectures. Despite their sophistication, many methods may fail to achieve desirable results for simultaneous noise removal and fine detail preservation. In this paper, to investigate the applicability of existing denoising techniques, we compare a variety of denoising methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets for different applications. We also introduce a new dataset for benchmarking, and the evaluations are performed from four different perspectives including quantitative metrics, visual effects, human ratings and computational cost. Our experiments demonstrate: (i) the effectiveness and efficiency of representative traditional denoisers for various denoising tasks, (ii) a simple matrix-based algorithm may be able to produce similar results compared with its tensor counterparts, and (iii) the notable achievements of DNN models, which exhibit impressive generalization ability and show state-of-the-art performance on various datasets. In spite of the progress in recent years, we discuss shortcomings and possible extensions of existing techniques. Datasets, code and results are made publicly available and will be continuously updated at https://github.com/ZhaomingKong/Denoising-Comparison.Comment: In this paper, we intend to collect and compare various denoising methods to investigate their effectiveness, efficiency, applicability and generalization ability with both synthetic and real-world experiment

Mammographic features are associated with cardiometabolic disease risk and mortality

Open Access via the OUP Open Access Agreement Acknowledgements: The authors thank all the participants in the KARMA study and personnel for their devoted work during data collection. They also would like to acknowledge Jose ́ Tapia for helping in data management. Funding: This work was supported by “Ma ̈rit and Hans Rausing’s Initiative Against Breast Cancer” and was financed by the Swedish Research Council (Grant 2018-02547 to K.C.), the Swedish Cancer Society (Grant 19 0266 and 19 0267 to K.C.), FORTE (Grant 2016-00081 to K.C.), and the Karolinska Institutet’s Research Foundation (Grant 2018-02146 to F.G.). F.G. was a Leopoldina Postdoctoral Fellow (Grant No. LPDS 2018-06) funded by the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. H.Y. was supported by Start-up Fund for high-level talents of Fujian Medical University (Grant .No. XRCZX2020007) and Start-up Fund for Scientific Research, Fujian Medical University (Grant No. 2019QH1002). The funding agency had no role in the study design, data collection, analyses, and data interoperation, in writing the manuscript, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Time-dependent risk of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders in patients with invasive and in situ breast cancer

Despite concerns about the mental health of breast cancer patients, little is known regarding the temporal risk pattern and risk factors of common mental disorders among these patients. We estimated standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) of depression, anxiety and stress-related disorders in a Swedish nationwide cohort of 40,849 women with invasive and 4,402 women with in-situ breast cancer (2001- 2010, median follow-up = 4.5 years). The impact of patient, tumor and treatment characteristics was analyzed using flexible parametric survival models in a regional cohort of 7,940 invasive breast cancer patients (2001-2013, median follow-up = 7.5 years). Women with invasive breast cancer showed increased rates of depression, anxiety and stress-related disorders [overall SIR (95% CI) = 1.57 (1.46- 1.69), 1.55 (1.43-1.68) and 1.77 (1.60-1.95), respectively]. SIRs were highest shortly after diagnosis, but remained increased up to 5 years. Younger age at diagnosis, comorbidity, higher-grade disease, lymph node involvement and chemotherapy were independently associated with the risk of depression and anxiety in invasive cancer patients, with chemotherapy and higher-grade disease conferring short-term risk only, while comorbidities were mainly associated with late-onset events. No clinical risk factors were identified for stress-related disorders except for a greater risk associated with younger age. Patients with in-situ cancer only showed an increased incidence of stress-related disorders during the first six months after diagnosis [SIR (95% CI) = 2.76 (1.31-5.79)]. The time-dependent risk profile of invasive cancer patients may guide health care professionals for timely and targeted psycho-oncologic interventions.Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Cancer SocietyFORTEAccepte

Factors Influencing Optical Coherence Tomography Peripapillary Choroidal Thickness: A Multicenter Study.

Purpose:To quantify peripapillary choroidal thickness (PCT) and the factors that influence it in healthy participants who represent the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. population. Methods:A total of 362 healthy participants underwent optical coherence tomography (OCT) enhanced depth imaging of the optic nerve head with a 24 radial B-scan pattern aligned to the fovea to Bruch's membrane opening axis. Bruch's membrane, anterior scleral canal opening (ASCO), and the anterior scleral surface were manually segmented. PCT was measured at 100, 300, 500, 700, 900, and 1100 μm from the ASCO globally and within 12 clock-hour sectors. The effects of age, axial length, intraocular pressure, ethnicity, sex, sector, and ASCO area on PCT were assessed by ANOVA and univariable and multivariable regressions. Results:Globally, PCT was thicker further from the ASCO border and thinner with older age, longer axial length, larger ASCO area, European descent, and female sex. Among these effectors, age and axial length explained the greatest proportion of variance. The rate of age-related decline increased further from the ASCO border. Sectorally, the inferior-temporal sectors were thinnest (10.7%-20.0% thinner than the thickest sector) and demonstrated a higher rate of age-related loss (from 15.6% to 20.7% faster) at each ASCO distance. Conclusions:In healthy eyes, PCT was thinnest in the inferior temporal sectors and thinner PCT was associated with older age, European descent, longer axial length, larger ASCO area, and female sex. Among these associations, age had the strongest influence, and its effect was greatest within the inferior temporal sectors

Colonization of extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae does not affect subsequent infection and liver transplant outcomes: a retrospective observational cohort study

ObjectiveTo investigate the colonization rate of extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (ESBL-E), subsequent infections by ESBL-E and ESBL-producing gram-negative bacilli (ESBL-GNB), and the effect of ESBL-E colonization on clinical outcomes in liver transplantation (LT) recipients.MethodsThis is a retrospective cohort study that included patients who underwent LT at Shanghai Renji Hospital between July 2016 and December 2017. Rectal swabs from LT patients at the postoperative ICU enrollment were screened anonymously for ESBL-E carriage. Demographics data, laboratory indexes, operative complications, and clinical course information were also obtained. The extent of ESBL-E colonization, the subsequent infection rates of ESBL-E and ESBL-GNB, and the clinical outcomes were compared between ESBL-E colonized and non-colonized patients.ResultsIn total, 496 liver transplant recipients (387 males) were included in this study. ESBL-E colonization was detected in 240 patients (48.4%). There was no significant difference between the rates of ESBL-E infection (5.8 vs. 3.1%, p = 0.143), Ischemia-reperfusion ≥ 3 (27.9 vs. 24.6%, p = 0.403), acute kidney injury (39.6 vs. 38.7%, p = 0.835), acute rejection (2.1 vs. 1.6%, p = 0.664), graft versus host reaction (1.3 vs. 1.2%, p = 0.937), duration of hospitalization (22 vs. 23 days, p = 0.568), 90-day mortality (7.1 vs. 4.7%, p = 0.262) and 1-year mortality (12.9 vs. 9.3%, p = 0.265) in patients with and without ESBL-E colonization. Though the ESBL-GNB infection rate was higher in ESBL-E colonized patients (12.1 vs. 6.6%, p = 0.037), multivariate analysis showed that ESBL-E colonization did not increase the risk of ESBL-GNB infection (Model 1: aOR 1.755, 95% CI: 0.911–3.380, p = 0.093; Model 2: aOR 1.556, 95% CI: 0.761–3.181, p = 0.226). The ESBL-producing bacteria spectrum of colonization was significantly different from that of infections occurring after LT, with only three colonization events leading to infection by the same pathogen identified.ConclusionESBL-E colonization in liver transplant patients is not associated with ESBL-E infection, nor is it a risk factor for post-transplant ESBL-GNB infection. Additionally, ESBL-E colonization does not lead to worse prognoses when compared with non-colonized patients.Clinical trial registrationChinese Clinical Trial Registry, Identifier [ChiCTR2100043034]

Artificial intelligence breast ultrasound and handheld ultrasound in the BI-RADS categorization of breast lesions: A pilot head to head comparison study in screening program

BackgroundArtificial intelligence breast ultrasound diagnostic system (AIBUS) has been introduced as an alternative approach for handheld ultrasound (HHUS), while their results in BI-RADS categorization has not been compared.MethodsThis pilot study was based on a screening program conducted from May 2020 to October 2020 in southeast China. All the participants who received both HHUS and AIBUS were included in the study (N = 344). The ultrasound videos after AIBUS scanning were independently watched by a senior radiologist and a junior radiologist. Agreement rate and weighted Kappa value were used to compare their results in BI-RADS categorization with HHUS.ResultsThe detection rate of breast nodules by HHUS was 14.83%, while the detection rates were 34.01% for AIBUS videos watched by a senior radiologist and 35.76% when watched by a junior radiologist. After AIBUS scanning, the weighted Kappa value for BI-RADS categorization between videos watched by senior radiologists and HHUS was 0.497 (p < 0.001) with an agreement rate of 78.8%, indicating its potential use in breast cancer screening. However, the Kappa value of AIBUS videos watched by junior radiologist was 0.39, when comparing to HHUS.ConclusionAIBUS breast scan can obtain relatively clear images and detect more breast nodules. The results of AIBUS scanning watched by senior radiologists are moderately consistent with HHUS and might be used in screening practice, especially in primary health care with limited numbers of radiologists

East Frederick Monocacy Boulevard City-owned Property Development

Joint final project for ARCH407: Graduate Architecture Design Studio and RDEV6881: Real Estate Development Capstone (Spring 2015). School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland, College Park.This course is part of the PALS program at UMD. PALS (Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability) is a campus-wide action learning initiative that blends customized coursework, faculty expertise and student ingenuity to tackle challenges facing Maryland communities. ARCH 407 is a collaboration studio – that is, a studio that joins graduate students from Architecture with graduate students from Real Estate Development to work collaboratively on a design project. The project for the Spring 2015 semester worked with community stakeholders and practitioners to come up with a plan for development of the Monocacy Boulevard site in Frederick, Maryland. This studio concentrated on the problems and theories of urbanism and urban design techniques in the context of The City of Frederick and the State of Maryland. Applied theories ranged from Landscape Urbanism, Neo-Traditional Design, Transit- Oriented Development, ecological systems and infrastructure, building typology, and street design. Through early semester research exercises and community workshops, ARCH 407 explored the relationships between cultural, social, and ecological systems in the built environment. The course introduced issues of field (architecture that reaches past its building envelope to shape landscape, ecology, culture, economy, and social behavior), environment, theory, tectonics, and assemblage. By applying fundamental urban design theories and sustainability principles, students proposed three schematic designs illustrated with graphic data conveying the variety of possible development opportunities.The City of Frederic