Ultrasound-Guided Musculoskeletal Injections.

Musculoskeletal injections serve a variety of diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, with ultrasonography (US) guidance having many advantages: no ionizing radiation, real-time guidance, high spatial resolution, excellent soft tissue contrast, and the ability to identify and avoid critical structures. Sonography can be cost effective and afford flexibility in resource-constrained settings. This article describes US-guided musculoskeletal injections relevant to many radiology practices and provides experience-based suggestions.

Spatial Distance Correlates With Genetic Distance in Diffuse Glioma.

Treatment effectiveness and overall prognosis for glioma patients depend heavily on the genetic and epigenetic factors in each individual tumor. However, intra-tumoral genetic heterogeneity is known to exist and needs to be managed. Currently, evidence for genetic changes varying spatially within the tumor is qualitative, and quantitative data is lacking.

Automated Volumetric Assessment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Response to Sorafenib: A Pilot Study.

Purpose: This pilot study evaluates the feasibility of automated volumetric quantification of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as an imaging biomarker to assess treatment response for sorafenib.

Methods: In this institutional review board-approved, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant retrospective study, a training database of manually labeled background liver, enhancing and nonenhancing tumor tissue was established using pretherapy and first posttherapy multiphasic computed tomography images from a registry of 13 HCC patients. For each patient, Hounsfield density and geometry-based feature images were generated from registered multiphasic computed tomography data sets and used as the input for a random forest-based classifier of enhancing and nonenhancing tumor tissue.

Guiding the first biopsy in glioma patients using estimated Ki-67 maps derived from MRI: conventional versus advanced imaging.

Background: Undersampling of gliomas at first biopsy is a major clinical problem, as accurate grading determines all subsequent treatment. We submit a technological solution to reduce the problem of undersampling by estimating a marker of tumor proliferation (Ki-67) using MR imaging data as inputs, against a stereotactic histopathology gold standard.

Methods: MR imaging was performed with anatomic, diffusion, permeability, and perfusion sequences, in untreated glioma patients in a prospective clinical trial.

Rectus femoris knee muscle moment arms measured in vivo during dynamic motion with real-time magnetic resonance imaging.

Moment arms represent a muscle's ability to generate a moment about a joint for a given muscle force. The goal of this study was to develop a method to measure muscle moment arms in vivo over a large range of motion using real-time magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Rectus femoris muscle-tendon lengths and knee joint angles of healthy subjects (N = 4) were measured during dynamic knee joint flexion and extension in a large-bore magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner.

Multiparametric fat-water separation method for fast chemical-shift imaging guidance of thermal therapies.

Purpose: A k-means-based classification algorithm is investigated to assess suitability for rapidly separating and classifying fat/water spectral peaks from a fast chemical shift imaging technique for magnetic resonance temperature imaging. Algorithm testing is performed in simulated mathematical phantoms and agar gel phantoms containing mixed fat/water regions.

Methods: Proton resonance frequencies (PRFs), apparent spin-spin relaxation (T2*) times, and T1-weighted (T1-W) amplitude values were calculated for each voxel using a single-peak autoregressive moving average (ARMA) signal model.

Effects of hemoglobin glutamer-250 (bovine) (HBOC-201, Hemopure) on coagulation testing.

Polymerized bovine hemoglobin is currently under investigation as an alternative to blood-banked human red blood cells. Because of the dark red hemolyzed appearance of hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier (HBOC)-201, we sought to describe the effects of HBOC-201 on coagulation analyzers that perform prothrombin times, activated partial thromboplastin times, fibrinogen, and antithrombin. Pooled normal plasma was combined with HBOC-201 to achieve plasma hemoglobin levels of 1.