The global risk of infectious disease emergence from giant land snail invasion and pet trade.

Background: Pathogen outbreaks mostly originate from animals, but some species are more likely to trigger epidemics. The giant land snail (Lissachatina fulica) is a widespread invader, a popular exotic pet, and a notorious vector of the rat lungworm, causing eosinophilic meningitis in humans. However, a comprehensive assessment of the risks of disease outbreak associated with this species is lacking.

Dual-Probe Transcranial Full-Waveform Inversion: A Brain Phantom Feasibility Study.

Objective: Despite being a low-cost, portable and safe medical imaging technique, transcranial ultrasound imaging is not used widely in adults because of the severe degradation and distortion of signals caused by the skull. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has recently been found to have potential as an effective method for transcranial ultrasound tomography to obtain high-quality, subwavelength-resolution acoustic models of the brain using low-frequency ultrasound data. In this study is the first demonstration of this method in recovering a high-resolution 2-D reconstruction of a brain and skull ultrasound imaging phantom using experimentally acquired data.

Benchmark problems for transcranial ultrasound simulation: Intercomparison of compressional wave models.

Computational models of acoustic wave propagation are frequently used in transcranial ultrasound therapy, for example, to calculate the intracranial pressure field or to calculate phase delays to correct for skull distortions. To allow intercomparison between the different modeling tools and techniques used by the community, an international working group was convened to formulate a set of numerical benchmarks. Here, these benchmarks are presented, along with intercomparison results.

Design and Construction of a Low-Frequency Ultrasound Acquisition Device for 2-D Brain Imaging Using Full-Waveform Inversion.

The main techniques used to image the brain and obtain structural data are magnetic resonance imaging and X-ray computed tomography. These techniques produce images with high spatial resolution, but with the disadvantage of requiring very large equipment with special installation needs. In addition, X-ray tomography uses ionizing radiation, which limits their use.