Management of malignant pleural effusion: challenges and solutions.

Malignant pleural effusion (MPE) is a sign of advanced cancer and is associated with significant symptom burden and mortality. To date, management has been palliative in nature with a focus on draining the pleural space, with therapies aimed at preventing recurrence or providing intermittent drainage through indwelling catheters. Given that patients with MPEs are heterogeneous with respect to their cancer type and response to systemic therapy, functional status, and pleural milieu, response to MPE therapy is also heterogeneous and difficult to predict.

Clinical apparatus for the reduction of dose area product for patients undergoing x-ray catheterization.

Purpose: The authors describe a design for prepatient region of interest attenuators (ROIAs) to reduce dose area product (DAP) for clinical use. The authors describe a model to predict DAP values from x-ray technique parameters recorded during a clinical procedure for image sequences obtained in the presence or absence of ROIAs. The model was developed primarily to determine what the DAP to a patient undergoing cardiac catheterization with a ROIA would have been if no ROIA had been used allowing a determination of DAP reduction.

The geometric calibration of cone-beam systems with arbitrary geometry.

A method is proposed to determine the cone-beam x-ray acquisition geometry of an imaging system using a phantom consisting of discrete x-ray opaque markers defining two parallel rings sharing a common axis. The phantom generates an image of two ellipses which are fitted to an ellipse model. A phantom-centric coordinate system is used to simplify the equations describing the ellipse coefficients such that a solution describing the acquisition geometry can be obtained via numerical optimization of only three of the nine unknown variables.

The physics of computed radiography: measurements of pulse height spectra of photostimulable phosphor screens using prompt luminescence.

Computed radiography (CR) is a digital technology that employs reusable photostimulable phosphor (PSP) imaging plates (IP) to acquire radiographic images. In CR, the x-ray attenuation pattern of the imaged object is temporarily stored as a latent charge image within the PSP. The latent image is optically readout as photostimulated luminescence (PSL) when the phosphor is subsequently stimulated using a scanning laser.