Phase-change ultrasound contrast agents for proton range verification: towards anapplication.

In proton therapy, range uncertainties prevent optimal benefit from the superior depth-dose characteristics of proton beams over conventional photon-based radiotherapy. To reduce these uncertainties we recently proposed the use of phase-change ultrasound contrast agents as an affordable and effective range verification tool. In particular, superheated nanodroplets can convert into echogenic microbubbles upon proton irradiation, whereby the resulting ultrasound contrast relates to the proton range with high reproducibility.

Evolution of Natural Myocardial Shear Wave Behavior in Young Hearts: Determinant Factors and Reproducibility Analysis.

Background: Myocardial diastolic function assessment in children by conventional echocardiography is challenging. High-frame rate echocardiography facilitates the assessment of myocardial stiffness, a key factor in diastolic function, by measuring the propagation velocities of myocardial shear waves (SWs). However, normal values of natural SWs in children are currently lacking.

Latent Diffusion Models with Image-Derived Annotations for Enhanced AI-Assisted Cancer Diagnosis in Histopathology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based image analysis has immense potential to support diagnostic histopathology, including cancer diagnostics. However, developing supervised AI methods requires large-scale annotated datasets. A potentially powerful solution is to augment training data with synthetic data.

BEAS-Net: a Shape-Prior-Based Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Robust Left Ventricular Segmentation in 2D Echocardiography.

Left ventricle (LV) segmentation of 2D echocardiography images is an essential step in the analysis of cardiac morphology and function and - more generally - diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Several deep learning (DL) algorithms have recently been proposed for the automatic segmentation of the LV, showing significant performance improvement over the traditional segmentation algorithms. However, unlike the traditional methods, prior information about the segmentation problem, e.