Simultaneous dose and dose rate optimization (SDDRO) of the FLASH effect for pencil-beam-scanning proton therapy.

Purpose: Compared to CONV-RT (with conventional dose rate), FLASH-RT (with ultra-high dose rate) can provide biological dose sparing for organs-at-risk (OARs) via the so-called FLASH effect, in addition to physical dose sparing. However, the FLASH effect only occurs, when both dose and dose rate meet certain minimum thresholds. This work will develop a simultaneous dose and dose rate optimization (SDDRO) method accounting for both FLASH dose and dose rate constraints during treatment planning for pencil-beam-scanning proton therapy.

Rethinking medical image reconstruction via shape prior, going deeper and faster: Deep joint indirect registration and reconstruction.

Indirect image registration is a promising technique to improve image reconstruction quality by providing a shape prior for the reconstruction task. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid method that seeks to reconstruct high quality images from few measurements whilst requiring low computational cost. With this purpose, our framework intertwines indirect registration and reconstruction tasks is a single functional.

Is hemoglobin A1c and perioperative hyperglycemia predictive of periprosthetic joint infection following total joint arthroplasty?: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: This meta-analysis aims to determine whether hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) and perioperative hyperglycemia are associated with the increased risk of periprosthetic joint infection following total knee and hip arthroplasty.

Methods: A systematic search is performed in Medline (1966-October 2017), PubMed (1966-October 2017), Embase (1980-October 2017), ScienceDirect (1985-October 2017), and the Cochrane Library. Only high-quality studies are selected.

TICMR: Total Image Constrained Material Reconstruction via Nonlocal Total Variation Regularization for Spectral CT.

This work develops a material reconstruction method for spectral CT, namely Total Image Constrained Material Reconstruction (TICMR), to maximize the utility of projection data in terms of both spectral information and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is motivated by the following fact: when viewed as a spectrally-integrated measurement, the projection data can be used to reconstruct a total image without spectral information, which however has a relatively high SNR; when viewed as a spectrally-resolved measurement, the projection data can be utilized to reconstruct the material composition, which however has a relatively low SNR. The material reconstruction synergizes material decomposition and image reconstruction, i.