Global Mortality From Firearms, 1990-2016.

Importance: Understanding global variation in firearm mortality rates could guide prevention policies and interventions.

Objective: To estimate mortality due to firearm injury deaths from 1990 to 2016 in 195 countries and territories.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This study used deidentified aggregated data including 13 812 location-years of vital registration data to generate estimates of levels and rates of death by age-sex-year-location.

Global, Regional, and National Cancer Incidence, Mortality, Years of Life Lost, Years Lived With Disability, and Disability-Adjusted Life-Years for 29 Cancer Groups, 1990 to 2016: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study.

Importance: The increasing burden due to cancer and other noncommunicable diseases poses a threat to human development, which has resulted in global political commitments reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Action Plan on Non-Communicable Diseases. To determine if these commitments have resulted in improved cancer control, quantitative assessments of the cancer burden are required.

Objective: To assess the burden for 29 cancer groups over time to provide a framework for policy discussion, resource allocation, and research focus.

Simultaneous CT-MRI Reconstruction for Constrained Imaging Geometries Using Structural Coupling and Compressive Sensing.

Objective: A unified reconstruction framework is presented for simultaneous CT-MRI reconstruction.

Methods: In an ideal CT-MRI scanner, CT and MRI acquisitions would occur simultaneously, and would be inherently registered in space and time. Alternatively, separately acquired CT and MRI scans can be fused to simulate an instantaneous acquisition.

Study of scan protocol for exposure reduction in hybrid spectral micro-CT.

The hybrid spectral micro-computed tomography (CT) architecture integrates a conventional imaging chain and an interior spectral imaging chain, and has been proven to be an important development in spectral CT. The motivation for this study is to minimize X-ray exposure for hybrid spectral micro-CT using both simulated and experimental scan data while maintaining the spectral fidelity of the reconstruction. Three elements of the hybrid scan protocol are investigated: truncation of the interior spectral chain and the numbers of projections for each of the global and interior imaging chains.

Hybrid spectral micro-CT: system design, implementation, and preliminary results.

Spectral CT has proven an important development in biomedical imaging, and there have been several publications in the past years demonstrating its merits in pre-clinical and clinical applications. In 2012, Xu reported that near-term implementation of spectral micro-CT could be enhanced by a hybrid architecture: a narrow-beam spectral “interior” imaging chain integrated with a traditional wide-beam “global” imaging chain. This hybrid integration coupled with compressive sensing (CS)-based interior tomography demonstrated promising results for improved contrast resolution, and decreased system cost and radiation dose.

Characterizing property distributions of polymeric nanogels by size-exclusion chromatography.

Nanogels are highly branched, swellable polymer structures with average diameters between 1 and 100nm. Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) fractionates materials in this size range, and it is commonly used to measure nanogel molar mass distributions. For many nanogel applications, it may be more important to calculate the particle size distribution from the SEC data than it is to calculate the molar mass distribution.

Study of an adaptive bolus chasing CT angiography.

To improve imaging quality and to reduce contrast dose and radiation exposure, an adaptive bolus chasing CT angiography was proposed so that the bolus peak position and the imaging aperture can be synchronized. The performance of the proposed adaptive bolus chasing CT angiography was experimentally evaluated based on the actual bolus dynamics. The experimental results show that the controlled table position and the bolus peak position were highly consistent.