Normative brain volumetry derived from different reference populations: impact on single-subject diagnostic assessment in dementia.

Brain imaging data are increasingly made publicly accessible, and volumetric imaging measures derived from population-based cohorts may serve as normative data for individual patient diagnostic assessment. Yet, these normative cohorts are usually not a perfect reflection of a patient's base population, nor are imaging parameters such as field strength or scanner type similar. In this proof of principle study, we assessed differences between reference curves of subcortical structure volumes of normal controls derived from two population-based studies and a case-control study.

Machine-learned epidemiology: real-time detection of foodborne illness at scale.

Machine learning has become an increasingly powerful tool for solving complex problems, and its application in public health has been underutilized. The objective of this study is to test the efficacy of a machine-learned model of foodborne illness detection in a real-world setting. To this end, we built FINDER, a machine-learned model for real-time detection of foodborne illness using anonymous and aggregated web search and location data.

A radial structure tensor and its use for shape-encoding medical visualization of tubular and nodular structures.

The concept of curvature and shape-based rendering is beneficial for medical visualization of CT and MRI image volumes. Color-coding of local shape properties derived from the analysis of the local Hessian can implicitly highlight tubular structures such as vessels and airways, and guide the attention to potentially malignant nodular structures such as tumors, enlarged lymph nodes, or aneurysms. For some clinical applications, however, the evaluation of the Hessian matrix does not yield satisfactory renderings, in particular for hollow structures such as airways, and densely embedded low contrast structures such as lymph nodes.

Eight years of Legionnaires' disease transmission in travellers to a condominium complex in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Travel is a risk factor for Legionnaires' disease. In 2008, two cases were reported in condominium guests where we investigated a 2001 outbreak. We reinvestigated to identify additional cases and determine whether ongoing transmission resulted from persistent colonization of potable water.

2D/3D registration for X-ray guided bronchoscopy using distance map classification.

In X-ray guided bronchoscopy of peripheral pulmonary lesions, airways and nodules are hardly visible in X-ray images. Transbronchial biopsy of peripheral lesions is often carried out blindly, resulting in degraded diagnostic yield. One solution of this problem is to superimpose the lesions and airways segmented from preoperative 3D CT images onto 2D X-ray images.