Outcomes of Surgically Treated Pneumothorax in Patients with Interstitial Pneumonia

Article信州医学雑誌 65(3): 163-170(2017)journal articl

Synthesizing the degree of polarization uniformity from non-polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography signals using a neural network

Degree of polarization uniformity (DOPU) imaging obtained by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) has the potential to provide biomarkers for retinal diseases. It highlights abnormalities in the retinal pigment epithelium that are not always clear in the OCT intensity images. However, a PS-OCT system is more complicated than conventional OCT. We present a neural-network-based approach to estimate the DOPU from standard OCT images. DOPU images were used to train a neural network to synthesize the DOPU from single-polarization-component OCT intensity images. DOPU images were then synthesized by the neural network, and the clinical findings from ground truth DOPU and synthesized DOPU were compared. There is a good agreement in the findings for RPE abnormalities: recall was 0.869 and precision was 0.920 for 20 cases with retinal diseases. In five cases of healthy volunteers, no abnormalities were found in either the synthesized or ground truth DOPU images. The proposed neural-network-based DOPU synthesis method demonstrates the potential of extending the features of retinal non-PS OCT

Comprehensive in vivo micro-vascular imaging of the human eye by dual-beam-scan Doppler optical coherence angiography

Comprehensive angiography provides insight into the diagnosis of vascular-related diseases. However, complex microvascular networks of unstable in vivo organs such as the eye require micron-scale resolution in three dimensions and a high sampling rate to access a wide area as maintaining the high resolution. Here, we introduce dual-beam-scan Doppler optical coherence angiography (OCA) as a label-free comprehensive ophthalmic angiography that satisfies theses requirements. In addition to high resolution and high imaging speed, high sensitivity to motion for detecting tiny blood flow of microvessels is achieved by detecting two time-delayed signals with scanning of two probing beams separated on a sample. We present in vivo three-dimensional imaging of the microvasculature of the posterior part of the human eye. The demonstrated results show that this technique may be used for comprehensive ophthalmic angiography to evaluate the vasculature of the posterior human eye and to diagnose variety of vascular diseases.This paper was published in Optics Express and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA. The paper can be found at the following URL on the OSA website: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-19-2-1271. Systematic or multiple reproduction or distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law

Salivary Levels of Hemoglobin for Screening Periodontal Disease: A Systematic Review

Periodontal disease is a common inflammatory disease. It affects about 20–50% of global population in both developed and developing countries. Early detection of slight changes of periodontal tissue plays an important role in prevention of onset and progression of periodontal disease. Hence, there is a need of a screening test to assess periodontal tissue for health check-ups. Salivary levels hemoglobin (Hb) has been proposed to assess the conditions of the inflammation of gingiva. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate and summarize critically the current evidences for Hb as periodontal screening test. We performed a literature search of report published using PubMed databases. A total of 55 articles were retrieved and 16 were selected. Our review focuses on corelation coefficient with periodontal clinical parameters or sensitivity and specificity. As a result, fourteen studies calculated sensitivity and specificity of Hb. Six studies measured salivary levels hemoglobin at laboratory: three studies used polyclonal antibody reactions and other studies used colorimetric tests. Eight studies used paper strip method: 4 studies used monoclonal antibody reaction and 4 studies used colorimetric tests. Youden’s indexes by antibody reaction were better than those of colorimetric methods. Evidences are described above and further studies are necessary to set the cut off values stratified by gender, age and number of remaining teeth