Tumour progression or pseudoprogression?:A review of post-treatment radiological appearances of glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a common brain tumour in adults, which, despite multimodality treatment, has a poor median survival. Efficacy of therapy is assessed by clinical examination and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features. There is now a recognised subset of treated patients with imaging features that indicate "progressive disease" according to Macdonald's criteria, but subsequently, show stabilisation or resolution without a change in treatment. In these cases of "pseudoprogression", it is believed that non-tumoural causes lead to increased contrast enhancement and conventional MRI is inadequate in distinguishing this from true tumour progression. Incorrect diagnosis is important, as failure to identify pseudoprogression could lead to an inappropriate change of effective therapy. The purpose of this review is to outline the current research into radiological assessment with MRI and molecular imaging of post-treatment GBMs, specifically the differentiation between pseudoprogression and tumour progression

Glioma imaging in Europe: A survey of 220 centres and recommendations for best clinical practice

Objectives: At a European Society of Neuroradiology (ESNR) Annual Meeting 2015 workshop, commonalities in practice, current controversies and technical hurdles in glioma MRI were discussed. We aimed to formulate guidance on MRI of glioma and determine its feasibility, by seeking information on glioma imaging practices from the European Neuroradiology community. Methods: Invitations to a structured survey were emailed to ESNR members (n=1,662) and associates (n=6,400), European national radiologists’ societies and distributed via social media. Results: Responses were received from 220 institutions (59% academic). Conventional imaging protocols generally include T2w, T2-FLAIR, DWI, and pre- and post-contrast T1w. Perfusion MRI is used widely (85.5%), while spectroscopy seems reserved for specific indications. Reasons for omitting advanced imaging modalities include lack of facility/software, time constraints and no requests. Early postoperative MRI is routinely carried out by 74% within 24–72 h, but only 17% report a percent measure of resection. For follow-up, most sites (60%) issue qualitative reports, while 27% report an assessment according to the RANO criteria. A minori

Stress responses in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) XIX. Transcriptional activation of oxidative pentose phosphate pathway genes at the onset of the isoflavonoid phytoalexin response

Article on stress responses in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) XIX and transcriptional activation of oxidative pentose phosphate pathway genes at the onset of the isoflavonoid phytoalexin response

Mixed stress-displacement isogeometric collocation for nearly incompressible elasticity and elastoplasticity

We propose a mixed stress-displacement isogeometric collocation method for nearly incompressible elastic materials and for materials exhibiting von Mises plasticity. The discretization is based on isogeometric analysis (IGA) with non-uniform rational B-Splines (NURBS) as basis functions. As compared to conventional IGA Galerkin formulations, isogeometric collocation methods offer a high potential of computational cost reduction for higher-order discretizations as they eliminate the need for quadrature. In the proposed mixed formulation, both stress and displacement fields are approximated as primary variables with the aim of treating volumetric locking and instability issues, which occur in displacement-based isogeometric collocation for nearly incompressible elasticity and von Mises plasticity. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated by several numerical examples

Isogeometric collocation: A mixed displacement-pressure method for nearly incompressible elasticity

We investigate primal and mixed u − p isogeometric collocation methods for application to nearly-incompressible isotropic elasticity. The primal method employs Navier's equations in terms of the displacement unknowns, and the mixed method employs both displacement and pressure unknowns. As benchmarks for what might be considered acceptable accuracy, we employ constant-pressure Abaqus finite elements that are widely used in engineering applications. As a basis of comparisons, we present results for compressible elasticity. All the methods were completely satisfactory for the compressible case. However, results for low-degree primal methods exhibited displacement locking and in general deteriorated in the nearly-incompressible case. The results for the mixed methods behaved very well for two of the problems we studied, achieving levels of accuracy very similar to those for the compressible case. The third problem, which we consider a “torture test” presented a more complex story for the mixed methods in the nearly-incompressible case