Patrick Cosgrove, Terence Dooley, and Karol Mullaney-Dignam (eds), Aspects of Irish Aristocratic Life: Essays on the Fitzgeralds and Carton House, Dublin

The story of the Fitzgerald dynasty is, in many ways, the story of colonial Ireland: for almost 800 years, this family – whose spectacular estate at Maynooth stood literally and symbolically at the edge of Dublin’s “Pale” – rose and fell with revolutions and reforms of their country. It is the Fitzgeralds’ central role in Irish history that Aspects of Irish Aristocratic Life: Essays on the Fitzgeralds and Carton House aims to capture. While the preface to ..

Deformable organisms for automatic medical image analysis

We introduce a new approach to medical image analysis that combines deformable model methodologies with concepts from the field of artificial life. In particular, we propose ‘deformable organisms’, autonomous agents whose task is the automatic segmentation, labeling, and quantitative analysis of anatomical structures in medical images. Analogous to natural organisms capable of voluntary movement, our artificial organisms possess deformable bodies with distributed sensors, as well as (rudimentary) brains with motor, perception, behavior, and cognition centers. Deformable organisms are perceptually aware of the image analysis process. Their behaviors, which manifest themselves in voluntary movement and alteration of body shape, are based upon sensed image features, pre-stored anatomical knowledge, and a deliberate cognitive plan. We demonstrate several prototype deformable organisms based on a multiscale axisymmetric body morphology, including a ‘corpus callosum worm’ that can overcome noise, incomplete edges, considerable anatomical variation, and interference from collateral structures to segment and label the corpus callosum in 2D mid-sagittal MR brain images

Noroviruses subvert the core stress granule component G3BP1 to promote viral VPg-dependent translation.

Knowledge of the host factors required for norovirus replication has been hindered by the challenges associated with culturing human noroviruses. We have combined proteomic analysis of the viral translation and replication complexes with a CRISPR screen, to identify host factors required for norovirus infection. The core stress granule component G3BP1 was identified as a host factor essential for efficient human and murine norovirus infection, demonstrating a conserved function across the Norovirus genus. Furthermore, we show that G3BP1 functions in the novel paradigm of viral VPg-dependent translation initiation, contributing to the assembly of translation complexes on the VPg-linked viral positive sense RNA genome by facilitating ribosome recruitment. Our data uncovers a novel function for G3BP1 in the life cycle of positive sense RNA viruses and identifies the first host factor with pan-norovirus pro-viral activity

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

A Dynamic Finite Element Surface Model for Segmentation and Tracking in Multidimensional Medical Images with Application to Cardiac 4D Image Analysis

This paper presents a physics-based approach to anatomical surface segmentation, reconstruction, and tracking in multidimensional medical images. The approach makes use of a dynamic "balloon" model---a spherical thin-plate under tension surface spline which deforms elastically to fit the image data. The fitting process is mediated by internal forces stemming from the elastic properties of the spline and external forces which are produced from the data. The forces interact in accordance with Lagrangian equations of motion that adjust the model's deformational degrees of freedom to fit the data. We employ the finite element method to represent the continuous surface in the form of weighted sums of local polynomial basis functions. We use a quintic triangular finite element whose nodal variables include positions as well as the first and second partial derivatives of the surface. We describe a system, implemented on a high performance graphics workstation, which applies the model fitting ..

Medical Image Segmentation Using Topologically Adaptable Surfaces

Efficient and powerful topologically adaptable deformable surfaces can be created by embedding and defining discrete deformable surface models in terms of an Affine Cell Decomposition (ACD) framework. The ACD framework, combined with a novel and original reparameterization algorithm, creates a simple but elegant mechanism for multiresolution deformable curve, surface, and solid models to "flow" or "grow" into objects with complex geometries and topologies, and adapt their shape to recover the object boundaries. ACD-based models maintain the traditional parametric physics-based formulation of deformable models, allowing them to incorporate a priori knowledge in the form of energy and force-based constraints, and provide intuitive interactive capabilities. This paper describes ACD-based deformable surfaces and demonstrates their potential for extracting and reconstructing some of the most complex biological structures from medical image volumes

MaRRS: A Software System for Generating Multimedia Radiology Reports using Adobe Acrobat

Despite the proliferation of mature multimedia software technologies, radiology reports continue to lack image content and structure that would improve the ability of referring clinicians to fully interpret and analyze radiological findings. This paper introduces an intuitive and interactive radiology report authoring system that provides enhanced visual multimedia capabilities, structured content, and reduced report production time, using a well-known PDF program, Adobe Acrobat. The system, which we call the Multimedia Radiology Report System, or MaRRS, allows radiologists to quickly and simply create and deliver effective interactive multimedia medical reports. This paper will introduce MaRRS, outline some related radiology report systems, and describe the unique structure and functionality of MaRRS in order to demonstrate its advantages for both radiologists and referring clinicians