: Thyroid nodules are a very common finding, mostly benign but sometimes malignant, and thus require accurate diagnosis. Ultrasound and fine needle biopsy are the most widely used and reliable diagnostic methods to date, but they are sometimes limited in addressing benign from malignant nodules, mainly with regard to ultrasound, by the operator's experience. Radiomics, quantitative feature extraction from medical images and machine learning offer promising avenues to improve diagnosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, medicine has undergone profound changes, strongly entering a new phase defined as the "era of precision medicine". In this context, patient clinical management involves various scientific approaches that allow for a comprehensive pathology evaluation: from preventive processes (where applicable) to genetic and diagnostic studies. In this scenario, biobanks play an important role and, over the years, have gained increasing prestige, moving from small deposits to large collections of samples of various natures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecurrent computed tomography (CT) examination has become a common diagnostic procedure for several diseases and injuries. Though each singular CT scan exposes individuals at low doses of low linear energy transfer (LET) radiation, the cumulative dose received from recurrent CT scans poses an increasing concern for potential health risks. Here, we evaluated the biological effects of recurrent CT scans on the DNA damage response (DDR) in human fibroblasts and retinal pigment epithelial cells maintained in culture for five months and subjected to four CT scans, one every four weeks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis systematic review aims to evaluate the role of ultrasound (US) radiomics in assessing lymphadenopathy in patients with cancer and the ability of radiomics to predict metastatic lymph node involvement. A systematic literature search was performed in the PubMed (MEDLINE), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), and EMBASE (Ovid) databases up to June 13, 2023. 42 articles were included in which the lymph node mass was assessed with a US exam, and the analysis was performed using radiomics methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrecision medicine has driven a major change in the treatment of many forms of cancer. The discovery that each patient is different and each tumor mass has its own characteristics has shifted the focus of basic and clinical research to the singular individual. Liquid biopsy (LB), in this sense, presents new scenarios in personalized medicine through the study of molecules, factors, and tumor biomarkers in blood such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), exosomes and circulating tumor microRNAs (ct-miRNAs).
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