The relationship of ovarian endometrioma and its size to the preoperative serum anti-Mullerian hormone level

Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of ovarian endometrioma according to its size on the serumanti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) levels compared to that of other benign ovarian cysts.Material and methods: The current study retrospectively evaluated preoperative serum AMH level and its association to presentingovarian cyst size which were measured in clinical setting. Women with surgically diagnosed endometrioma or other benignovarian cysts were included. All patients underwent transvaginal or transrectal ultrasonography to determine the size of theovarian cysts. Preoperative serum AMH level was checked and evaluated according to histologic type of the cyst, which wereendometrioma or other benign ovarian cysts, respectively. Both groups were classified into ≤ 4 cm, > 4 cm and ≤ 8 cm, > 8 cmand ≤ 12 cm, > 12 cm according to the diameter of cyst and analyzed the difference of mean AMH levels in both groups.Results: There was no significant difference in preoperative serum AMH level between the two groups (3.36 ± 2.3 versus3.76 ± 2.64, p = 0.331). The difference of preoperative AMH levels according to categorized cyst size also was not statisticallysignificant in both groups.Conclusions: Preoperative serum AMH levels were not statistically different between endometrioma and other benignovarian cyst groups and were not related to the size of endometrioma

Observation of trapped-modes excited in double-layered symmetric electric ring resonators

We report on experimental observations of trapped-mode resonances in double-layered symmetric electric ring resonators separated by dielectric inserts. The resulting metamaterial introduces trapped-mode resonances that were thought to be produced only by asymmetric metamaterial unit cells. Experimental verification of the newly observed trapped modes, along with the analysis of the stacked metamaterial geometry reported in this paper, opens an alternative way of forming sharp resonances in a symmetric metamaterial structure extended in all three dimensions.open9

The Practice of Korean Medicine: An Overview of Clinical Trials in Acupuncture

Acupuncture, one of the Oriental medical therapeutic techniques that can be traced back at least 2500 years, is growing in popularity all over the world. Korea has continued to develop its own unique tradition of medicine throughout its long history, and has formed different types of acupuncture methods. The purpose of this review is to summarize clinical case studies in acupuncture and related therapies, such as acupressure, electric acupuncture, auricular acupuncture and moxibustion in Korea. A survey of Korean journals revealed that a total of 124 studies were published from 1983 to 2001. Results obtained from the survey showed that most clinical studies using acupuncture, electric acupuncture, moxibustion and other traditional therapies could alleviate a relatively broad range of medical problems. However, it should be emphasized that almost all clinical case studies published in various local journals did not follow the ‘good clinical practice’ with respect to regulatory aspects. Since they were not conducted using the randomized double-blinded controls with a large sample size, all the results should be considered as therapeutic indications. This review is an attempt to show the scope of acupuncture in our country and the kind of diseases, after many years of clinical experience, that were deemed valid targets for clinical trials

Improved laminar specificity and sensitivity by combining SE and GE BOLD signals

The most widely used gradient-echo (GE) blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast has high sensitivity, but low specificity due to draining vein contributions, while spin-echo (SE) BOLD approach at ultra-high magnetic fields is highly specific to neural active sites but has lower sensitivity. To obtain high specificity and sensitivity, we propose to utilize a vessel-size-sensitive filter to the GE-BOLD signal, which suppresses macrovascular contributions and to combine selectively retained microvascular GE-BOLD signals with the SE-BOLD signals. To investigate our proposed idea, fMRI with 0.8 mm isotropic resolution was performed on the primary motor and sensory cortices in humans at 7 T by implementing spin- and gradient-echo (SAGE) echo planar imaging (EPI) acquisition. Microvascular-passed sigmoidal filters were designed based upon the vessel-size-sensitive ??R2*/??R2 value for retaining GE-BOLD signals originating from venous vessels with ??? 45 ??m and ??? 65 ??m diameter. Unlike GE-BOLD fMRI, the laminar profile of SAGE-BOLD fMRI with the vessel-size-sensitive filter peaked at ??? 1.0 mm from the surface of the primary motor and sensory cortices, demonstrating an improvement of laminar specificity over GE-BOLD fMRI. Also, the functional sensitivity of SAGE BOLD at middle layers (0.75???1.5 mm) was improved by ??? 80% to ???100% when compared with SE BOLD. In summary, we showed that combined GE- and SE-BOLD fMRI with the vessel-size-sensitive filter indeed yielded improved laminar specificity and sensitivity and is therefore an excellent tool for high spatial resolution ultra-high filed (UHF)-fMRI studies for resolving mesoscopic functional units

Influence of B1 Inhomogeneity on Pharmacokinetic Modeling of Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI: A Simulation Study

Objective: To simulate the B1-inhomogeneity-induced variation of pharmacokinetic parameters on DCE-MRI. Materials and Methods: B1-inhomogeneity-induced flip angle (FA) variation was estimated in a phantom study. Monte Carlo simulation was performed to assess the FA-deviation-induced measurement error of the pre-contrast R1, contrast-enhancement ratio, Gd concentration, and two-compartment pharmacokinetic parameters (Ktrans, ve and vp). Results: B1-inhomogeneity resulted in -23% ~ 5% fluctuations (95% confidence interval (CI) of % error) of FA. The 95% CIs of FA-dependent % errors in the gray matter and blood were as follows: -16.7% - 61.8% and -16.7% - 61.8% for the pre-contrast R1, -1.0% - 0.3% and -5.2% - 1.3% for the contrast-enhancement ratio, and -14.2% - 58.1% and -14.1% - 57.8% for the Gd concentration, respectively. These resulted in -43.1% - 48.4% error for Ktrans, -32.3% - 48.6% error for the ve, and -43.2% - 48.6% error for vp. The pre-contrast R1 was more vulnerable to FA error than the contrast-enhancement ratio, and was therefore a significant cause of the Gd-concentration error. For example, a -10% FA error led to a 23.6% deviation in the pre-contrast R1, -0.4% in the contrast-enhancement ratio, and 23.6% in the Gd concentration. In a simulated condition with a 3% FA error in a target lesion and a -10% FA error in a feeding vessel, the % errors of the pharmacokinetic parameters were -23.7% for Ktrans, -23.7% for ve, and -23.7% for vp. Conclusion: Even a small degree of B1-inhomogeneity can cause a significant error in the measurement of pharmacokinetic parameters on DCE-MRI, while the vulnerability of the pre-contrast R1 calculations to FA deviations is a significant cause of the miscalculation.ope

Response of the primary auditory and non-auditory cortices to acoustic stimulation: A manganese-enhanced MRI study

Structural and functional features of various cerebral cortices have been extensively explored in neuroscience research. We used manganese-enhanced MRI, a non-invasive method for examining stimulus-dependent activity in the whole brain, to investigate the activity in the layers of primary cortices and sensory, such as auditory and olfactory, pathways under acoustic stimulation. Male Sprague-Dawley rats, either with or without exposure to auditory stimulation, were scanned before and 24-29 hour after systemic MnCl2 injection. Cortex linearization and layer-dependent signal extraction were subsequently performed for detecting layer-specific cortical activity. We found stimulus-dependent activity in the deep layers of the primary auditory cortex and the auditory pathways. The primary sensory and visual cortices also showed the enhanced activity, whereas the olfactory pathways did not. Further, we performed correlation analysis of the signal intensity ratios among different layers of each cortex, and compared the strength of correlations between with and without the auditory stimulation. In the primary auditory cortex, the correlation strength between left and right hemisphere showed a slight but not significant increase with the acoustic simulation, whereas, in the primary sensory and visual cortex, the correlation coefficients were significantly smaller. These results suggest the possibility that even though the primary auditory, sensory, and visual cortices showed enhanced activity to the auditory stimulation, these cortices had different associations for auditory processing in the brain network.open0

PAIP 2019: Liver cancer segmentation challenge

Pathology Artificial Intelligence Platform (PAIP) is a free research platform in support of pathological artificial intelligence (AI). The main goal of the platform is to construct a high-quality pathology learning data set that will allow greater accessibility. The PAIP Liver Cancer Segmentation Challenge, organized in conjunction with the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI 2019), is the first image analysis challenge to apply PAIP datasets. The goal of the challenge was to evaluate new and existing algorithms for automated detection of liver cancer in whole-slide images (WSIs). Additionally, the PAIP of this year attempted to address potential future problems of AI applicability in clinical settings. In the challenge, participants were asked to use analytical data and statistical metrics to evaluate the performance of automated algorithms in two different tasks. The participants were given the two different tasks: Task 1 involved investigating Liver Cancer Segmentation and Task 2 involved investigating Viable Tumor Burden Estimation. There was a strong correlation between high performance of teams on both tasks, in which teams that performed well on Task 1 also performed well on Task 2. After evaluation, we summarized the top 11 team's algorithms. We then gave pathological implications on the easily predicted images for cancer segmentation and the challenging images for viable tumor burden estimation. Out of the 231 participants of the PAIP challenge datasets, a total of 64 were submitted from 28 team participants. The submitted algorithms predicted the automatic segmentation on the liver cancer with WSIs to an accuracy of a score estimation of 0.78. The PAIP challenge was created in an effort to combat the lack of research that has been done to address Liver cancer using digital pathology. It remains unclear of how the applicability of AI algorithms created during the challenge can affect clinical diagnoses. However, the results of this dataset and evaluation metric provided has the potential to aid the development and benchmarking of cancer diagnosis and segmentation. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V