Knowledge and attitude of ICU nurses, students and patients towards the Austrian organ donation law

BACKGROUND: A survey on the knowledge and attitudes towards the Austrian organ donation legislation (an opt-out solution) of selected groups of the Austrian population taking into account factors such as age, gender, level of education, affiliation to healthcare professions and health related studies was conducted. METHODS: An online survey among 3 target groups (ICU nurses, health science students and non health science students) was performed and results were compared to the answers from transplantation patients to a paper questionnaire. A total of 8415 persons were asked to participate in the survey and 2025 (24%) persons correctly completed the questionnaire. 1945 online responses (ICU nurses n = 185; students of health sciences n = 1277; students of non-health science related courses n = 483) were analysed and data were compared to 80 manually filled-in responses from patients from a previous study. RESULTS: 84% of participants state that they know the Austrian organ donation legislation; this percentage varies significantly (p < 0.05) within the target groups and is influenced by demographic variables of the participants. 74% think that the law is good and 79% do not favour a change. Opinions and attitudes towards the legal situation are positively influenced by the affiliation to healthcare professions and health-related fields of study. Interviewed persons who were aware of the legislation before the survey had a more positive attitude towards the existing legislation (77% versus 74%, p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The information level on Austrian organ donation legislation is high. ICU nurses and those who did not know the law before were most critical towards the existing legislation. Therefore education to increase knowledge in the general population and goal-oriented efforts to increase awareness in the target groups should be emphasized

High-resolution contrast enhanced multi-phase hepatic computed tomography data fromaporcine Radio-Frequency Ablation study

Data below 1 mm voxel size is getting more and more common in the clinical practice but it is still hard to obtain a consistent collection of such datasets for medical image processing research. With this paper we provide a large collection of Contrast Enhanced (CE) Computed Tomography (CT) data from porcine animal experiments and describe their acquisition procedure and peculiarities. We have acquired three CE-CT phases at the highest available scanner resolution of 57 porcine livers during induced respiratory arrest. These phases capture contrast enhanced hepatic arteries, portal venous veins and hepatic veins. Therefore, we provide scan data that allows for a highly accurate reconstruction of hepatic vessel trees. Several datasets have been acquired during Radio-Frequency Ablation (RFA) experiments. Hence, many datasets show also artificially induced hepatic lesions, which can be used for the evaluation of structure detection methods