Publications by authors named "Murray Loew"

Early virus identification is a key component of both patient treatment and epidemiological monitoring. In the case of influenza A virus infections, where the detection of subtypes associated with bird flu in humans could lead to a pandemic, rapid subtype-level identification is important. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy coupled with machine learning can be used to rapidly detect and identify viruses in a label-free manner.

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Purpose: Previous studies have demonstrated that three-dimensional (3D) volumetric renderings of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain data can be used to identify patients using facial recognition. We have shown that facial features can be identified on simulation-computed tomography (CT) images for radiation oncology and mapped to face images from a database. We aim to determine whether CT images can be anonymized using anonymization software that was designed for T1-weighted MRI data.

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Purpose: In this work, we endeavor to investigate how texture information may contribute to the response of a blur measure (BM) with motivation rooted in mammography. This is vital as the interpretation of the BM is typically not evaluated with respect to texture present in an image. We are particularly concerned with lower scales of blur () as this blur is least likely to be detected but can still have a detrimental effect on detectability of microcalcifications.

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Purpose: Segmenting medical images accurately and reliably is important for disease diagnosis and treatment. It is a challenging task because of the wide variety of objects' sizes, shapes, and scanning modalities. Recently, many convolutional neural networks have been designed for segmentation tasks and have achieved great success.

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-Deep learning techniques are proving instrumental in identifying, classifying, and quantifying patterns in medical images. Segmentation is one of the important applications in medical image analysis. The U-Net has become the predominant deep-learning approach to medical image segmentation tasks.

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Automatic segmentation of infected regions in computed tomography (CT) images is necessary for the initial diagnosis of COVID-19. Deep-learning-based methods have the potential to automate this task but require a large amount of data with pixel-level annotations. Training a deep network with annotated lung cancer CT images, which are easier to obtain, can alleviate this problem to some extent.

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Image processing has contributed greatly to the clinical applications of medical imaging. Many of the major developments have been stimulated by and reported at the Image Processing (IP) conference held annually as part of the SPIE Medical Imaging meeting. The evolution, focus, and impact of the IP conference is reviewed.

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Article Synopsis
  • A study evaluated the impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the adherence to guideline-based chemoradiation therapy (GA-CRT) for patients with locally advanced cervical cancer from 2004 to 2016.
  • The research included 37,772 patients and found that the percentage receiving GA-CRT increased from 28% before the ACA to 34% after its implementation, and this adherence led to a significant rise in 2-year survival rates.
  • Key factors influencing GA-CRT receipt included insurance type, cancer histology, and tumor stage, highlighting disparities in treatment access and outcomes.
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Objective: This study was undertaken to identify shared functional network characteristics among focal epilepsies of different etiologies, to distinguish epilepsy patients from controls, and to lateralize seizure focus using functional connectivity (FC) measures derived from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Methods: Data were taken from 103 adult and 65 pediatric focal epilepsy patients (with or without lesion on MRI) and 109 controls across four epilepsy centers. We used three whole-brain FC measures: parcelwise connectivity matrix, mean FC, and degree of FC.

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Automatic segmentation of infection areas in computed tomography (CT) images has proven to be an effective diagnostic approach for COVID-19. However, due to the limited number of pixel-level annotated medical images, accurate segmentation remains a major challenge. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation based segmentation network to improve the segmentation performance of the infection areas in COVID-19 CT images.

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Previous studies have demonstrated that patients can be identified from 3-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging data of the brain or head and neck. This presents a privacy and security concern for scan data released to public data sets. It is unknown whether thermoplastic immobilization masks used for treatment planning in radiation therapy are sufficient to prevent facial recognition.

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Purpose: To provide an assessment of safety regarding high-dose-rate after-loading brachytherapy (HDR-BT) based on adverse events reported to the OpenFDA, an open access database maintained by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Methods: OpenFDA was queried for HDR-BT events between 1993 and 2019. A brachytherapist categorized adverse events (AEs) based on disease site, applicator, manufacturer, event type, dosimetry impact, and outcomes.

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Objective: To predict the histologic grade and type of small papillary renal cell carcinomas (pRCCs) using texture analysis and machine learning algorithms.

Methods: This was a retrospective HIPAA-compliant study. 24 noncontrast (NC), 22 corticomedullary (CM) phase, and 24 nephrographic (NG) phase CTs of small (< 4 cm) surgically resected pRCCs were identified.

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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing global pandemic that has spread rapidly since December 2019. Real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) and chest computed tomography (CT) imaging both play an important role in COVID-19 diagnosis. Chest CT imaging offers the benefits of quick reporting, a low cost, and high sensitivity for the detection of pulmonary infection.

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Background: Gulf War Illness (GWI) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) are two debilitating disorders that share similar symptoms of chronic pain, fatigue, and exertional exhaustion after exercise. Many physicians continue to believe that both are psychosomatic disorders and to date no underlying etiology has been discovered. As such, uncovering objective biomarkers is important to lend credibility to criteria for diagnosis and to help differentiate the two disorders.

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Gulf War Illness (GWI) is a debilitating condition characterized by dysfunction of cognition, pain, fatigue, sleep, and diverse somatic symptoms with no known underlying pathology. As such, uncovering objective biomarkers such as differential regions of activity within a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scan is important to enhance validity of the criteria for diagnosis. Symptoms are exacerbated by mild activity, and exertional exhaustion is a key complaint amongst sufferers.

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Purpose: To use machine-learning algorithms and blur measure (BM) operators to automatically detect motion blur in mammograms. Motion blur has been reported to reduce lesion detection performance and mask small abnormalities, resulting in failure to detect them until they reach more advanced stages. Automatic detection of blur could support the clinical decision-making process during the mammography exam by allowing for an immediate retake, thereby preventing unnecessary expense, time, and patient anxiety.

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Background: Brain stimulation is utilized to treat a variety of neurological disorders. Clinical brain stimulation technologies currently utilize charge-balanced pulse stimulation. The brain may better respond to other stimulation waveforms.

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Purpose: To predict the histologic grade of small clear cell renal cell carcinomas (ccRCCs) using texture analysis and machine learning algorithms.

Methods: Fifty-two noncontrast (NC), 26 corticomedullary (CM) phase, and 35 nephrographic (NG) phase CTs of small (< 4 cm) surgically resected ccRCCs were retrospectively identified. Surgical pathology classified the tumors as low- or high-Fuhrman histologic grade.

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The convolutional neural network (CNN) is a promising technique to detect breast cancer based on mammograms. Training the CNN from scratch, however, requires a large amount of labeled data. Such a requirement usually is infeasible for some kinds of medical image data such as mammographic tumor images.

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Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia. It is being effectively treated using the radiofrequency ablation (RFA) procedure, which destroys culprit tissue and creates scars that prevent the spread of abnormal electrical activity. Long-term success of RFA could be improved further if ablation lesions can be directly visualized during the surgery.

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In vivo autofluorescence hyperspectral imaging of moving objects can be challenging due to motion artifacts and to the limited amount of acquired photons. To address both limitations, we selectively reduced the number of spectral bands while maintaining accurate target identification. Several downsampling approaches were applied to data obtained from the atrial tissue of adult pigs with sites of radiofrequency ablation lesions.

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Objectives: Active dynamic thermography (ADT) is a non-contact imaging technique that characterizes non-homogeneities in thermal conductance through objects as a response to applied energy stimulus. The aim of this study was to (i) develop a heat transfer model to define the relationship between thermal stimulation and resolution and (ii) empirically quantify the resolution an ADT imaging system can detect through a range of depths of human skin.

Materials And Methods: A heat transfer model was developed to describe a thermally non-conductive object below a sheet of skin.

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In situ chemical imaging techniques are being developed to provide information on the spatial distribution of artists' pigments used in polychrome works of art such as paintings. The new methods include reflectance imaging spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence mapping. Results from these new methods have extended the knowledge obtained from site-specific chemical analyses widely in use.

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