Novel ensemble feature selection techniques applied to high-grade gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms for the prediction of survival.

Background And Objective: Determining the most informative features for predicting the overall survival of patients diagnosed with high-grade gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms is crucial to improve individual treatment plans for patients, as well as the biological understanding of the disease. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the use of modern ensemble feature selection techniques for this purpose with respect to (a) quantitative performance measures such as predictive performance, (b) clinical interpretability, and (c) the effect of integrating prior expert knowledge.

Methods: The Repeated Elastic Net Technique for Feature Selection (RENT) and the User-Guided Bayesian Framework for Feature Selection (UBayFS) are recently developed ensemble feature selectors investigated in this work.

Volumetric parameters from [ F]FDG PET/CT predicts survival in patients with high-grade gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms.

A positive fluorine-18 labelled 2-deoxy-2-fluoroglucose ([ F]FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) has been associated with more aggressive disease and less differentiated neuroendocrine neoplasms (NEN). Although a high maximum standardized uptake value (SUV ) predicts poor outcome in NEN, volumetric parameters from [ F]FDG PET have not been evaluated for prognostication in a pure high-grade gastroenteropancreatic (GEP) NEN cohort. In this retrospective observational study, we evaluated the volumetric PET parameters total metabolic tumour volume (tMTV) and total total lesion glycolysis (tTLG) for independent prognostication of overall survival (OS).

Evaluation of semi-quantitative measures of F-flutemetamol PET for the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Background: F-flutemetamol positron emission tomography (PET) is used to assess cortical amyloid-β burden in patients with cognitive impairment to support a clinical diagnosis. Visual classification is the most widely used method in clinical practice although semi-quantification is beneficial to obtain an objective and continuous measure of the Aβ burden. The aims were: first to evaluate the correspondence between standardized uptake value ratios (SUVRs) from three different software, Centiloids and visual classification, second to estimate thresholds for supporting visual classification and last to assess differences in semi-quantitative measures between clinical diagnoses.

Introduction of positron emission tomography into the Western Norwegian Health Region: Regional balance in resource utilization from 2009 to 2014.

Background: The aim was to compare resource utilization across the four health trusts within the Western Norway Regional Health Authority since the establishment of positron emission tomography (PET) at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen in 2009.

Methods: Metadata from all PET examinations from 2009 to 2014 were automatically imported from the PET centre's central production database into a custom-developed database system, MDCake. A PET examination was defined as a procedure based on a single injection of radioactive tracer.