Black Bone MRI vs. CT in temporal bone assessment in craniosynostosis: a radiation-free alternative.

Background And Purpose: Craniosynostoses are rare congenital craniofacial malformations, variably affected by hearing loss, often requiring repeated CT examinations to assess skull or temporal bone (TB) abnormalities. In order to avoid radiation exposure in these young patients, efforts are made to assess the skull abnormalities on MR bone imaging sequences, such as Black Bone (BB). Our aim is to compare BB, a radiation-free imaging technique, with CT for the assessment of the TB.

Clinical outcomes and end-of-life treatment in 596 patients with isolated traumatic brain injury: a retrospective comparison of two Dutch level-I trauma centers.

Purpose: With an increasingly older population and rise in incidence of traumatic brain injury (TBI), end-of-life decisions have become frequent. This study investigated the rate of withdrawal of life sustaining treatment (WLST) and compared treatment outcomes in patients with isolated TBI in two Dutch level-I trauma centers.

Methods: From 2011 to 2016, a retrospective cohort study of patients aged ≥ 18 years with isolated moderate-to-severe TBI (Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) head ≥ 3) was conducted at the University Medical Center Rotterdam (UMC-R) and the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMC-U).

A Fully-Automatic Method to Segment the Carotid Artery Layers in Ultrasound Imaging: Application to Quantify the Compression-Decompression Pattern of the Intima-Media Complex During the Cardiac Cycle.

The aim of this study was to introduce and evaluate a contour segmentation method to extract the interfaces of the intima-media complex in carotid B-mode ultrasound images. The method was applied to assess the temporal variation of intima-media thickness during the cardiac cycle. The main methodological contribution of the proposed approach is the introduction of an augmented dimension to process 2-D images in a 3-D space.