Evaluation of five methods for the interpolation of bad leads in the solution of the inverse electrocardiography problem.

This study aims to assess the sensitivity of epicardial potential-based electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) to the removal or interpolation of bad leads.We utilized experimental data from two distinct centers. Langendorff-perfused pig (= 2) and dog (= 2) hearts were suspended in a human torso-shaped tank and paced from the ventricles.

Phenylalanine Tolerance over Time in Phenylketonuria: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

In phenylketonuria (PKU), natural protein tolerance is defined as the maximum natural protein intake maintaining a blood phenylalanine (Phe) concentration within a target therapeutic range. Tolerance is affected by several factors, and it may differ throughout a person's lifespan. Data on lifelong Phe/natural protein tolerance are limited and mostly reported in studies with low subject numbers.

Disentangling rodent behaviors to improve automated behavior recognition.

Automated observation and analysis of behavior is important to facilitate progress in many fields of science. Recent developments in deep learning have enabled progress in object detection and tracking, but rodent behavior recognition struggles to exceed 75-80% accuracy for ethologically relevant behaviors. We investigate the main reasons why and distinguish three aspects of behavior dynamics that are difficult to automate.

Towards Automatic Cartilage Quantification in Clinical Trials - Continuing from the 2019 IWOAI Knee Segmentation Challenge.

Objective: To evaluate whether the deep learning (DL) segmentation methods from the six teams that participated in the IWOAI 2019 Knee Cartilage Segmentation Challenge are appropriate for quantifying cartilage loss in longitudinal clinical trials.

Design: We included 556 subjects from the Osteoarthritis Initiative study with manually read cartilage volume scores for the baseline and 1-year visits. The teams used their methods originally trained for the IWOAI 2019 challenge to segment the 1130 knee MRIs.

Prospective evaluation of multidimensional health-related quality of life after endoscopic endonasal surgery for pituitary adenomas using the endoscopic endonasal sinus and skull base surgery questionnaire.

Objective: Social functioning is an important factor in the evaluation of postoperative health-related quality of life (HRQoL) for pituitary adenoma patients. In a prospective cohort study multidimensional HRQoL of non-functioning (NFA) and functioning (FA) pituitary adenoma patients were evaluated following endoscopic endonasal surgery using the endoscopic endonasal sinus and skull base surgery questionnaire (EES-Q).

Methods: Prospectively, 101 patients were included.

The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS).

In this work, we report the set-up and results of the Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS), which was organized in conjunction with the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2017 and the International Conferences on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2017 and 2018. The image dataset is diverse and contains primary and secondary tumors with varied sizes and appearances with various lesion-to-background levels (hyper-/hypo-dense), created in collaboration with seven hospitals and research institutions. Seventy-five submitted liver and liver tumor segmentation algorithms were trained on a set of 131 computed tomography (CT) volumes and were tested on 70 unseen test images acquired from different patients.

Observation of dissipating solvated protons upon hydrogel formation.

Aqueous hyaluronan solutions form an elastic hydrogel within a narrow pH range, around pH 2.4, making this a model system to study the conformational changes of the hydrogen bond network upon gelation. This pH-dependent behavior allows us to probe water surrounding a biologically relevant molecule in different environments (liquid elastic state) which change due to an environmental stimulus.

The KNee OsteoArthritis Prediction (KNOAP2020) challenge: An image analysis challenge to predict incident symptomatic radiographic knee osteoarthritis from MRI and X-ray images.

Objectives: The KNee OsteoArthritis Prediction (KNOAP2020) challenge was organized to objectively compare methods for the prediction of incident symptomatic radiographic knee osteoarthritis within 78 months on a test set with blinded ground truth.

Design: The challenge participants were free to use any available data sources to train their models. A test set of 423 knees from the Prevention of Knee Osteoarthritis in Overweight Females (PROOF) study consisting of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and X-ray image data along with clinical risk factors at baseline was made available to all challenge participants.

Copper-67-Labeled Bombesin Peptide for Targeted Radionuclide Therapy of Prostate Cancer.

The gastrin-releasing peptide receptor (GRPR) is a promising molecular target for imaging and therapy of prostate cancer using bombesin peptides that bind to the receptor with high affinity. Targeted copper theranostics (TCTs) using copper radionuclides, Cu for imaging and Cu for therapy, offer significant advantages in the development of next-generation theranostics. [Cu]Cu-SAR-BBN is in clinical development for PET imaging of GRPR-expressing cancers.

Health-related quality of life following FDG-PET/CT for cytological indeterminate thyroid nodules.

Objective: This study assessed the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients undergoing 2-[18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG)-PET/CT for an indeterminate (Bethesda III/IV) thyroid nodule. FDG-PET/CT accurately rules out malignancy and prevents 40% of futile diagnostic surgeries in these nodules.

Design: Secondary analyses of HRQoL data from a randomised controlled multicentre trial (NCT02208544) in 126 patients from 15 hospitals in the Netherlands were done.

Spectroscopic Fingerprints of Cavity Formation and Solute Insertion as a Measure of Hydration Entropic Loss and Enthalpic Gain.

Hydration free energies are dictated by a subtle balance of hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions. We present here a spectroscopic approach, which gives direct access to the two main contributions: Using THz-spectroscopy to probe the frequency range of the intermolecular stretch (150-200 cm ) and the hindered rotations (450-600 cm ), the local contributions due to cavity formation and hydrophilic interactions can be traced back. We show that via THz calorimetry these fingerprints can be correlated 1 : 1 with the group specific solvation entropy and enthalpy.

Conventional MRI-derived subchondral trabecular biomarkers and their association with knee cartilage volume loss as early as 1 year: a longitudinal analysis from Osteoarthritis Initiative.

Objective: To study associations between MRI-derived subchondral trabecular biomarkers obtained from conventional MRI sequences and knee cartilage loss over 12 and 24 months, using the FNIH osteoarthritis (OA) biomarkers consortium.

Materials And Methods: Data of the 600 subjects in the FNIH OA biomarkers consortium (a nested case-control study within Osteoarthritis Initiative [OAI]) were extracted from the online database. Baseline knee MRI (intermediate-weighted (IW) sequences) were evaluated to determine conventional MRI-derived trabecular thickness (cTbTh) and bone-to-total ratio (cBV/TV).

Thyroid function and IVF outcome for different indications of subfertility.

Abstract: Studies evaluating pregnancy outcomes after assisted reproductive treatment (ART) in women with high-normal (2.5-4.5 mIU/L) thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels are conflicting, possibly due to different patient charactistics and subfertility indications.

[F]FDG-PET/CT to prevent futile surgery in indeterminate thyroid nodules: a blinded, randomised controlled multicentre trial.

Purpose: To assess the impact of an [F]FDG-PET/CT-driven diagnostic workup to rule out malignancy, avoid futile diagnostic surgeries, and improve patient outcomes in thyroid nodules with indeterminate cytology.

Methods: In this double-blinded, randomised controlled multicentre trial, 132 adult euthyroid patients with scheduled diagnostic surgery for a Bethesda III or IV thyroid nodule underwent [F]FDG-PET/CT and were randomised to an [F]FDG-PET/CT-driven or diagnostic surgery group. In the [F]FDG-PET/CT-driven group, management was based on the [F]FDG-PET/CT result: when the index nodule was visually [F]FDG-positive, diagnostic surgery was advised; when [F]FDG-negative, active surveillance was recommended.

Cross-Cohort Automatic Knee MRI Segmentation With Multi-Planar U-Nets.

Background: Segmentation of medical image volumes is a time-consuming manual task. Automatic tools are often tailored toward specific patient cohorts, and it is unclear how they behave in other clinical settings.

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of the open-source Multi-Planar U-Net (MPUnet), the validated Knee Imaging Quantification (KIQ) framework, and a state-of-the-art two-dimensional (2D) U-Net architecture on three clinical cohorts without extensive adaptation of the algorithms.

Water reorientation dynamics in colloidal water-oil emulsions.

We study the molecular-scale properties of colloidal water-oil emulsions consisting of 120-290 nm oil droplets embedded in water. This type of emulsion can be prepared with low concentrations of surfactants and is usually kinetically stable. Even though colloidal water-oil emulsions are used ubiquitously, their molecular properties are still poorly understood.

Fully automated quality control of rigid and affine registrations of T1w and T2w MRI in big data using machine learning.

Background: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based morphometry and relaxometry are proven methods for the structural assessment of the human brain in several neurological disorders. These procedures are generally based on T1-weighted (T1w) and/or T2-weighted (T2w) MRI scans, and rigid and affine registrations to a standard template(s) are essential steps in such studies. Therefore, a fully automatic quality control (QC) of these registrations is necessary in big data scenarios to ensure that they are suitable for subsequent processing.

Measuring Behavior in the Home Cage: Study Design, Applications, Challenges, and Perspectives.

The reproducibility crisis (or replication crisis) in biomedical research is a particularly existential and under-addressed issue in the field of behavioral neuroscience, where, in spite of efforts to standardize testing and assay protocols, several known and unknown sources of confounding environmental factors add to variance. Human interference is a major contributor to variability both within and across laboratories, as well as novelty-induced anxiety. Attempts to reduce human interference and to measure more "natural" behaviors in subjects has led to the development of automated home-cage monitoring systems.

More Live Births in Primary Subfertile Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection-Treated Women with High Normal TSH Levels.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to analyze the fertility outcome in intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)-treated women across normal range thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels. Published results are inconclusive about optimal TSH levels and fertility.

Design: This is a retrospective cohort study in 752 ICSI-treated women with predominantly severe male factor subfertility, starting treatment between the first of January 2008 and the first of March 2012 with a follow-up until 2014.

Shaping Tin Nanocomposites through Transient Local Conversion Reactions.

Shape-preserving conversion offers a promising strategy to transform self-assembled structures into advanced functional components with customizable composition and shape. Specifically, the assembly of barium carbonate nanocrystals and amorphous silica nanocomposites (BaCO/SiO) offers a plethora of programmable three-dimensional (3D) microscopic geometries, and the nanocrystals can subsequently be converted into functional chemical compositions, while preserving the original 3D geometry. Despite this progress, the scope of these conversion reactions has been limited by the requirement to form carbonate salts.

Structure and Dynamics of a Temperature-Sensitive Hydrogel.

Polyisocyanotripeptides (TriPIC) are biomimetic polymers which consist of a β-helical backbone stabilized by hydrogen bonds between amide groups. Their oligoethylene glycol side chains give aqueous TriPIC solutions a thermoresponsive behavior: at 50 °C the solution becomes a hydrogel. In this paper we study the molecular structure and water dynamics of TriPIC aqueous solutions while undergoing gelation using FT-IR spectroscopy and polarization-resolved femtosecond infrared spectroscopy (fs-IR).