MR imaging of the gallbladder: a pictorial essay

The gallbladder serves as the repository for bile produced in the liver. However, bile within the gallbladder may become supersaturated with cholesterol, leading to crystal precipitation and subsequent gallstone formation. The most common disorders of the gallbladder are related to gallstones and include symptomatic cholelithiasis, acute and chronic cholecystitis, and carcinoma of the gallbladder. Other conditions that can affect the gallbladder include biliary dyskinesia (functional), adenomyomatosis (hyperplastic), and postoperative changes or complications (iatrogenic). Ultrasonography (US) has been the traditional modality for evaluating gallbladder disease, primarily owing to its high sensitivity and specificity for both stone disease and gallbladder inflammation. US performed before and after ingestion of a fatty meal may also be useful for functional evaluation of the gallbladder. However, US is limited by patient body habitus, with degradation of image quality and anatomic detail in obese individuals. With the advent of faster and more efficient imaging techniques, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging has assumed an increasing role as an adjunct modality for gallbladder imaging, primarily in patients who are incompletely assessed with US. MR imaging allows simultaneous anatomic and physiologic assessment of the gallbladder and biliary tract in both initial evaluation of disease and examination of the postoperative patient. This assessment is accomplished chiefly through the use of MR imaging contrast agents excreted preferentially via the biliary system

Are nonisothermal kinetics fearing historical Newton's cooling law, or are just afraid of inbuilt complications due to undesirable thermal inertia?

Relations between the magnitude of the change of the ratios of crystallization and melting temperature with glass transition temperature, that is Tc/Tg and Tm/Tg, determine the order of the values of relative change of glass stability (GS) parameters dKH/KH, dKW/KW and dKLL/KLL. The linear correlation of new GS parameters FK and FKA which include fragility and reduced glass transition temperature with logRc is a better correlation of KLL. The stretching exponent increases as a linear function of T/Tg in the interval 1≤T/Tg<1•1 for given values of the dynamic fragility parameter m. As result, it follows that the kinetic term in fragility can be neglected. The thermodynamic term, which has a dominant role in fragility can be determined by the expressions for configurational entropy and configurational heat capacity. We compared Sc(T) a function of temperature dependence of configurational entropy which was obtained by Sipp et al and ScVFT (T) a function proposed by Yue. Both Sc(T) and ScVFT (T) have the same temperature dependence and almost overlap. Therefore, using either Sc(T) or ScVFT (T) we will get the same value of fragility index. From the dependence of lnSc(T) versus lnT it is possible to successfully predict the relations between the values of m for different glass formers