Leveraging Phase Information of 3D Isotropic Ultrashort Echo Time Pulmonary MRI for the Detection of Thoracic Lymphadenopathy: Toward an All-in-One Scan Solution.

Background: Ultrashort echo time (UTE) allows imaging of tissues with short relaxation times, but it comes with the expense of long scan times. Magnitude images of UTE magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are widely used in pulmonary imaging due to excellent parenchymal signal, but have insufficient contrast for other anatomical regions of the thorax. Our work investigates the value of UTE phase images (UTE-Ps)-generated simultaneously from the acquired UTE signal used for the magnitude images-for the detection of thoracic lymph nodes based on water-fat contrast.

Frailty integration in medical specialties: Current evidence and suggested strategies from the Clin-STAR frailty interest group.

Frailty is a syndrome that can inform clinical treatments and interventions for older adults. Although implementation of frailty across medical subspecialties has the potential to improve care for the aging population, its uptake has been heterogenous. While frailty assessment is highly integrated into certain medical subspecialties, other subspecialties have only recently begun to consider frailty in the context of patient care.

High-quality FLORET UTE imaging for clinical translation.

Purpose: To develop a robust 3D ultrashort-TE (UTE) protocol that can reproducibly provide high-quality images, assessed by the ability to yield clinically diagnostic images, and is suitable for clinical translation.

Theory And Methods: Building on previous work, a UTE sampled with Fermat looped orthogonally encoded trajectories (FLORET) was chosen as a starting point due to its shorter, clinically reasonable scan times. Modifications to previous FLORET implementations included gradient waveform frequency limitations, a new trajectory ordering scheme, a balanced SSFP implementation, fast gradient spoiling, and full inline reconstruction.

Accuracy of Dysphagia Screening by Non-clinical Research Staff in the Emergency Department.

Although the emergency department (ED) is the initial care setting for the majority of older adults requiring hospital admission, there is a paucity of ED-based dysphagia research in this at-risk population. This is driven by barriers to dysphagia evaluation in this complex care environment. Therefore, we assessed the reliability of trained, non-clinical ED research staff in administering dysphagia screening tools compared to trained speech pathologists (SLPs).