Neuroblastoma and nephroblastoma: a radiological review.

Neuroblastoma (NBL) is the most common extra-cranial tumour in childhood. It can present as an abdominal mass, but is usually metastatic at diagnosis so the symptomatology can be varied. Nephroblastoma, also more commonly known as a Wilms tumour, is the commonest renal tumour in childhood and more typically presents as abdominal pathology with few constitutional symptoms, although rarely haematuria can be a presenting feature. The pathophysiology and clinical aspects of both tumours including associated risk factors and pathologies are discussed. Oncogenetics and chromosomal abnormalities are increasingly recognised as important prognostic indicators and their impact on initial management is considered. Imaging plays a pivotal role in terms of diagnosis and recent imaging advances mean that radiology has an increasingly crucial role in the management pathway. The use of image defined risk factors in neuroblastoma has begun to dramatically change how this tumour is characterised pre-operatively. The National Wilms Tumour Study Group have comprehensively staged Wilms tumours and this is reviewed as it impacts significantly on management. The use of contrast-enhanced MRI and diffusion-weighted sequences have further served to augment the information available to the clinical team during initial assessment of both neuroblastomas and Wilms tumours. The differences in management strategies are outlined. This paper therefore aims to provide a comprehensive update on these two common paediatric tumours with a particular emphasis on the current crucial role played by imaging

Motivating Agile Teams: A Case Study of Teams in Ireland and Sweden

This research is an exploratory study, which investigates how the use of three agile practices - the daily stand-up, iteration planning and iteration retrospective - may contribute to motivation or de-motivation in an agile team in two different European countries; namely Ireland and Sweden. Several studies recognize that motivation is an important issue in software development and have identified factors that motivate software developers. However, relatively little is known about motivation in an agile context or how agile practices may impact on team motivation. Seventeen individuals across two teams were interviewed. The results indicate that in both countries agile practices can contribute to team motivation and de-motivation. This study hopes to make an important contribution towards research efforts in the area of motivation and agile software development by identifying factors that can contribute to and inhibit motivation in agile software development teams

A Study of the Use and Effectiveness of Controls in Agile Information Systems Development Projects: A Research-in-Progress (RIP) Paper

This study uses control theory as a lens to examine the use of control in agile information systems development (ISD) projects, specifically within software project teams that use agile methodologies. Traditionally, requirements for ISD projects have been defined at the outset and it has been the role of the project manager to control the project and help the team to achieve their goals. However, the goals of agile ISD projects are flexible and can change frequently, with the consequence that it can be difficult for a project manager to determine the most appropriate and effective type of control to use at each stage of a project. The aim of this research is to: develop a research instrument that will identify the control modes used by project teams in agile ISD projects; conduct a survey to collect data; and develop a framework for assessing the effectiveness of each control mode

ARCONS: a highly multiplexed superconducting UV to near-IR camera

ARCONS, the Array Camera for Optical to Near-infrared Spectrophotometry, was recently commissioned at the Coude focus of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. At the heart of this unique instrument is a 1024-pixel Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID), exploiting the Kinetic Inductance effect to measure the energy of the incoming photon to better than several percent. The ground-breaking instrument is lens-coupled with a pixel scale of 0.23"/pixel, with each pixel recording the arrival time (<2 microsec) and energy of a photon (~10%) in the optical to near-IR (0.4-1.1 microns) range. The scientific objectives of the instrument include the rapid follow-up and classification of the transient phenomena.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of IAU symposium number 285; New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy, eds. R.E.M Griffin, R. J. Hanisch & R. Seama

TRECVID 2004 experiments in Dublin City University

In this paper, we describe our experiments for TRECVID 2004 for the Search task. In the interactive search task, we developed two versions of a video search/browse system based on the Físchlár Digital Video System: one with text- and image-based searching (System A); the other with only image (System B). These two systems produced eight interactive runs. In addition we submitted ten fully automatic supplemental runs and two manual runs. A.1, Submitted Runs: • DCUTREC13a_{1,3,5,7} for System A, four interactive runs based on text and image evidence. • DCUTREC13b_{2,4,6,8} for System B, also four interactive runs based on image evidence alone. • DCUTV2004_9, a manual run based on filtering faces from an underlying text search engine for certain queries. • DCUTV2004_10, a manual run based on manually generated queries processed automatically. • DCU_AUTOLM{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, seven fully automatic runs based on language models operating over ASR text transcripts and visual features. • DCUauto_{01,02,03}, three fully automatic runs based on exploring the benefits of multiple sources of text evidence and automatic query expansion. A.2, In the interactive experiment it was confirmed that text and image based retrieval outperforms an image-only system. In the fully automatic runs, DCUauto_{01,02,03}, it was found that integrating ASR, CC and OCR text into the text ranking outperforms using ASR text alone. Furthermore, applying automatic query expansion to the initial results of ASR, CC, OCR text further increases performance (MAP), though not at high rank positions. For the language model-based fully automatic runs, DCU_AUTOLM{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, we found that interpolated language models perform marginally better than other tested language models and that combining image and textual (ASR) evidence was found to marginally increase performance (MAP) over textual models alone. For our two manual runs we found that employing a face filter disimproved MAP when compared to employing textual evidence alone and that manually generated textual queries improved MAP over fully automatic runs, though the improvement was marginal. A.3, Our conclusions from our fully automatic text based runs suggest that integrating ASR, CC and OCR text into the retrieval mechanism boost retrieval performance over ASR alone. In addition, a text-only Language Modelling approach such as DCU_AUTOLM1 will outperform our best conventional text search system. From our interactive runs we conclude that textual evidence is an important lever for locating relevant content quickly, but that image evidence, if used by experienced users can aid retrieval performance. A.4, We learned that incorporating multiple text sources improves over ASR alone and that an LM approach which integrates shot text, neighbouring shots and entire video contents provides even better retrieval performance. These findings will influence how we integrate textual evidence into future Video IR systems. It was also found that a system based on image evidence alone can perform reasonably and given good query images can aid retrieval performance

Cancer incidence among children and young adults who have undergone x-ray guided cardiac catheterization procedures

Children and young adults with heart disease appear to be at increased risk of developing cancer, although the reasons for this are unclear. A cohort of 11,270 individuals, who underwent cardiac catheterizations while aged B 22 years in the UK, was established from hospital records. Radiation doses from cardiac catheterizations and CT scans were estimated. The cohort was matched with the NHS Central Register and NHS Transplant Registry to determine cancer incidence and transplantation status. Standardized incidence ratios (SIR) with associated confidence intervals (CI) were calculated. The excess relative risk (ERR) of lymphohaematopoietic neoplasia was also calculated using Poisson regression. The SIR was raised for all malignancies (2.32, 95% CI 1.65, 3.17), lymphoma (8.34, 95% CI 5.22, 12.61) and leukaemia (2.11, 95% CI 0.82, 4.42). After censoring transplant recipients, post-transplant, the SIR was reduced to 0.90 (95% CI 0.49, 1.49) for all malignancies. All lymphomas developed post-transplant. The SIR for all malignancies developing 5 years from the first cardiac catheterization (2 years for leukaemia/lymphoma) remained raised (3.01, 95% CI 2.09, 4.19) but was again reduced after censoring transplant recipients (0.98, 95% CI 0.48, 1.77). The ERR per mGy bone marrow dose for lympho-haematopoietic neoplasia was reduced from 0.541 (95% CI 0.104, 1.807) to 0.018 (95% CI - 0.002, 0.096) where transplantation status was accounted for as a time-dependent background risk factor. In conclusion, transplantation appears to be a large contributor to elevated cancer rates in this patient group. This is likely to be mainly due to associated immunosuppression, however, radiation exposure may also be a contributing factor

Paediatric radiology seen from Africa. Part I: providing diagnostic imaging to a young population

Article approval pendingPaediatric radiology requires dedicated equipment, specific precautions related to ionising radiation, and specialist knowledge. Developing countries face difficulties in providing adequate imaging services for children. In many African countries, children represent an increasing proportion of the population, and additional challenges follow from extreme living conditions, poverty, lack of parental care, and exposure to tuberculosis, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhoea and violent trauma. Imaging plays a critical role in the treatment of these children, but is expensive and difficult to provide. The World Health Organisation initiatives, of which the World Health Imaging System for Radiography (WHIS-RAD) unit is one result, needs to expand into other areas such as the provision of maintenance servicing. New initiatives by groups such as Rotary and the World Health Imaging Alliance to install WHIS-RAD units in developing countries and provide digital solutions, need support. Paediatric radiologists are needed to offer their services for reporting, consultation and quality assurance for free by way of teleradiology. Societies for paediatric radiology are needed to focus on providing a volunteer teleradiology reporting group, information on child safety for basic imaging, guidelines for investigations specific to the disease spectrum, and solutions for optimising imaging in children

2005 PRETEXT: a revised staging system for primary malignant liver tumours of childhood developed by the SIOPEL group

Over the last 15 years, various oncology groups throughout the world have used the PRETEXT system for staging malignant primary liver tumours of childhood. This paper, written by members of the radiology and surgery committees of the International Childhood Liver Tumor Strategy Group (SIOPEL), presents various clarifications and revisions to the original PRETEXT system

Indeterminate Pulmonary Nodules at Diagnosis in Rhabdomyosarcoma: Are They Clinically Significant? A Report From the European Paediatric Soft Tissue Sarcoma Study Group

PURPOSE: To evaluate the clinical significance of indeterminate pulmonary nodules at diagnosis (defined as ≤ 4 pulmonary nodules < 5 mm or 1 nodule measuring ≥ 5 and < 10 mm) in patients with pediatric rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS). PATIENTS AND METHODS: We selected patients with supposed nonmetastatic RMS treated in large pediatric oncology centers in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, who were enrolled in the European Soft Tissue Sarcoma Study Group (E pSSG) RMS 2005 study. Patients included in the current study received a diagnosis between September 2005 and December 2013, and had chest computed tomography scans available for review that were done at time of diagnosis. Local radiologists were asked to review the chest computed tomography scans for the presence of pulmonary nodules and to record their findings on a standardized case report form. In the E pSSG RMS 2005 Study, patients with indeterminate pulmonary nodules were treated identically to patients without pulmonary nodules, enabling us to compare event-free survival and overall survival between groups by log-rank test. RESULTS: In total, 316 patients were included; 67 patients (21.2%) had indeterminate pulmonary nodules on imaging and 249 patients (78.8%) had no pulmonary nodules evident at diagnosis. Median follow-up for survivors (n = 258) was 75.1 months; respective 5-year event-free survival and overall survival rates (95% CI) were 77.0% (64.8% to 85.5%) and 82.0% (69.7% to 89.6%) for patients with indeterminate nodules and 73.2% (67.1% to 78.3%) and 80.8% (75.1% to 85.3%) for patients without nodules at diagnosis ( P = .68 and .76, respectively). CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrated that indeterminate pulmonary nodules at diagnosis do not affect outcome in patients with otherwise localized RMS. There is no need to biopsy or upstage patients with RMS who have indeterminate pulmonary nodules at diagnosis

Imaging findings in noncraniofacial childhood rhabdomyosarcoma

Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common soft-tissue sarcoma of childhood. This paper is focuses on imaging for diagnosis, staging, and follow-up of noncraniofacial RMS