Search results for "Computer-assisted"
showing 10 items of 1186 documents
Imaging synaptic zinc release in living nervous tissue
2001
Zinc enriched neurons have a pool of synaptic vesicles which contain free or loosely-bound zinc ions. The movement of the vesicular zinc ions into the synaptic clefts has been previously studied by microdialysis, fluorescence postmortem staining for zinc and radioactive zinc isotope. In this study the zinc fluorescence probe N-6-metoxy-p-toluensulfonamide quinoline (TSQ) has been applied as a tracer of synaptic release of zinc ions. This fluorochrome permeates cell membranes and when exposed to living brain slices gives rise to a staining pattern similar to that seen with autometallography. In the living brain slices, fluorescence emission persists after exposure to calcium saturated ethyle…
A solution to the stochastic point location problem in metalevel nonstationary environments.
2008
This paper reports the first known solution to the stochastic point location (SPL) problem when the environment is nonstationary. The SPL problem involves a general learning problem in which the learning mechanism (which could be a robot, a learning automaton, or, in general, an algorithm) attempts to learn a "parameter," for example, lambda*, within a closed interval. However, unlike the earlier reported results, we consider the scenario when the learning is to be done in a nonstationary setting. For each guess, the environment essentially informs the mechanism, possibly erroneously (i.e., with probability p), which way it should move to reach the unknown point. Unlike the results availabl…
Therapy response evaluation of malignant lymphoma in a multicenter study: comparison of manual and semiautomatic measurements in CT.
2014
Purpose: Comparison of manual one-/bi-dimensional measurements versus semi-automatically derived one-/bi-dimensional and volumetric measurements for therapy response evaluation of malignant lymphoma during CT follow-up examinations in a multicenter setting. Materials and Methods: MSCT data sets of patients with malignant lymphoma were evaluated before (baseline) and after two cycles of chemotherapy (follow-up) at radiological centers of five university hospitals. The long axis diameter (LAD), the short axis diameter (SAD) and the bi-dimensional WHO of 307 target lymph nodes were measured manually and semi-automatically using dedicated software. Lymph node volumetry was performed semi-automa…
Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of solitary thyroid nodules with contrast-enhanced ultrasound: initial results
2005
To assess the feasibility of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) of the thyroid gland and to evaluate the potential of this method for characterising solitary thyroid nodules.18 patients affected by solitary thyroid nodules (size range: 0.6 to 3.6 cm; mean: 1.8 cm) confirmed by surgery (nine papillary carcinomas, four follicular carcinomas, three hyperplasias, one follicular adenoma and one Plummer’s adenoma) underwent pulse inversion US at low M.I. (0.06 to 0.08) after i.v. injection of a 2.4-mL bolus of SonoVue. Baseline echogenicity and the dynamic enhancement pattern of each nodule, in comparison with adjacent thyroid parenchyma, were assessed. Signal intensity values on grey-scale imag…
Functional Brain Segmentation Using Inter-Subject Correlation in fMRI
2016
The human brain continuously processes massive amounts of rich sensory information. To better understand such highly complex brain processes, modern neuroimaging studies are increasingly utilizing experimental setups that better mimic daily‐life situations. A new exploratory data‐analysis approach, functional segmentation inter‐subject correlation analysis (FuSeISC), was proposed to facilitate the analysis of functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) data sets collected in these experiments. The method provides a new type of functional segmentation of brain areas, not only characterizing areas that display similar processing across subjects but also areas in which processing across subjects is h…
A method for the time-varying nonlinear prediction of complex nonstationary biomedical signals
2009
A method to perform time-varying (TV) nonlinear prediction of biomedical signals in the presence of nonstationarity is presented in this paper. The method is based on identification of TV autoregressive models through expansion of the TV coefficients onto a set of basis functions and on k -nearest neighbor local linear approximation to perform nonlinear prediction. The approach provides reasonable nonlinear prediction even for TV deterministic chaotic signals, which has been a daunting task to date. Moreover, the method is used in conjunction with a TV surrogate method to provide statistical validation that the presence of nonlinearity is not due to nonstationarity itself. The approach is t…
Visual data mining with self-organising maps for ventricular fibrillation analysis
2012
Detection of ventricular fibrillation (VF) at an early stage is being deeply studied in order to lower the risk of sudden death and allows the specialist to have greater reaction time to give the patient a good recovering therapy. Some works are focusing on detecting VF based on numerical analysis of time-frequency distributions, but in general the methods used do not provide insight into the problem. However, this study proposes a new methodology in order to obtain information about this problem. This work uses a supervised self-organising map (SOM) to obtain visually information among four important groups of patients: VF (ventricular fibrillation), VT (ventricular tachycardia), HP (healt…
Introduction to coronary imaging with 64-slice computed tomography
2005
The aim of this article is to illustrate the main technical improvements in the last generation of 64-row CT scanners and the possible applications in coronary angiography. In particular, we describe the new physical components (X-ray tube-detectors system) and the general scan and reconstruction parameters. We then define the scan protocols for coronary angiography with the new generation of 64-row CT scanners to enable radiologists to perform a CT study on the basis of the diagnostic possibilities.
Acoustic methods for measuring the porosities of porous materials incorporating dead-end pores
2013
International audience; The acoustic properties of porous materials containing dead-end (DE) pores have been proposed by Dupont et al. [J. Appl. Phys. 110, 094903 (2011)]. In the theoretical description, two physical parameters were defined (the dead-end porosity and the average length of the dead-end pores). With the knowledge of the open porosity (measured with non-acoustic methods), and the measurement of kinematic porosity (also called the Biot porosity in this article), it is possible to deduce the dead-end porosity. Two acoustic methods for measuring the Biot porosity for a wide range of porosities are proposed. These methods are based on acoustic transmission and on the low and high …
Biologically inspired information processing and synchronization in ensembles of non-identical threshold-potential nanostructures.
2013
Nanotechnology produces basic structures that show a significant variability in their individual physical properties. This experimental fact may constitute a serious limitation for most applications requiring nominally identical building blocks. On the other hand, biological diversity is found in most natural systems. We show that reliable information processing can be achieved with heterogeneous groups of non-identical nanostructures by using some conceptual schemes characteristic of biological networks (diversity, frequency-based signal processing, rate and rank order coding, and synchronization). To this end, we simulate the integrated response of an ensemble of single-electron transisto…