Publications by authors named "Reader A"

Multiplexed positron emission tomography (mPET) imaging allows simultaneous observation of physiological and pathological information from multiple tracers in a single PET scan. Although supervised deep learning has demonstrated superior performance in mPET image separation compared to purely model-based methods, acquiring large amounts of paired single-tracer data and multi-tracer data for training poses a practical challenge and needs extended scan durations for patients. In addition, the generalisation ability of the supervised learning framework is a concern, as the patient being scanned and their tracer kinetics may potentially fall outside the training distribution.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the effectiveness of 4% articaine with epinephrine in providing palatal anesthesia after a buccal infiltration, comparing two volumes (1.8 mL and 3.6 mL) in 118 adults.
  • - Results revealed low success rates for effective palatal anesthesia: 20% for 1.8 mL and 32% for 3.6 mL, with some significant differences noted at various time intervals.
  • - The conclusion suggests that the overall clinical effectiveness of articaine for palatal anesthesia is questionable due to the low success rates and high variability in areas of numbness achieved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Pretraining deep convolutional networks using natural images can enhance medical imaging analysis, particularly given the scarcity of annotated medical data.
  • The study compared 18 different pretrained backbone networks for evaluating the quality of PET brain scans, using data from multiple patients and testing against clinical quality metrics.
  • Results indicated that using residual units in backbone architectures improved performance, with many networks achieving a mean-absolute-error below 0.5, highlighting the potential of over-parameterization for automated image quality assessments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: In multiplexed positron emission tomography (mPET) imaging, physiological and pathological information from different radiotracers can be observed simultaneously in a single dynamic PET scan. The separation of mPET signals within a single PET scan is challenging due to the fact that the PET scanner measures the sum of the PET signals of all the tracers. The conventional multi-tracer compartment modeling (MTCM) method requires staggered injections and assumes that the arterial input functions (AIFs) of each tracer are known.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Multiplexed positron emission tomography (mPET) imaging can measure physiological and pathological information from different tracers simultaneously in a single scan. Separation of the multiplexed PET signals within a single PET scan is challenging due to the fact that each tracer gives rise to indistinguishable 511 keV photon pairs, and thus no unique energy information for differentiating the source of each photon pair.

Methods: Recently, many applications of deep learning for mPET image separation have been concentrated on pure data-driven methods, e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Most pain studies have been based on a postsurgical, third molar model using ibuprofen (IBU)/acetaminophen (APAP). Studies have found quicker onset of pain relief with a newer formulation of IBU - ibuprofen sodium dihydrate (ISD). The purpose of this study was to compare pain reduction of ISD/APAP to ISD in an acute endodontic pain model of untreated patients experiencing moderate to severe pain with symptomatic apical periodontitis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The review discusses the evolution of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging algorithms, starting from traditional methods to cutting-edge innovations.
  • It covers three main categories of deep learning methods for PET data: post-processing for image denoising, direct image reconstruction from sinograms, and iterative methods that enhance conventional techniques with neural networks.
  • The authors also outline future prospects for integrating deep learning technology into PET imaging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Resolution recovery (RR) techniques in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging aim to mitigate spatial resolution losses and related inaccuracies in quantification by using a model of the system's point spread function (PSF) during reconstruction or post-processing. However, including PSF modeling in fully 3-D image reconstruction is far from trivial as access to the scanner-specific forward and back-projectors is required, along with access to the 3-D sinogram data. Hence, post-reconstruction RR methods, such as the Richardson-Lucy (RL) algorithm, can be more practical.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Previous studies on intraosseous (IO) anesthesia as a primary injection have shown high success rates. The TuttleNumbNow (TNN; Orem, UT) is a new primary IO injection technique that has not been scientifically evaluated. Therefore, the purpose of this prospective randomized, crossover study was to evaluate the anesthetic efficacy of the TNN IO technique using the Septoject Evolution needle (Septodont, Saint-Maur-des-Fosses, France) compared with buccal infiltration for pulpal anesthesia in mandibular first molars.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Based on human motor cortex, the effective spatial resolution of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is often described as 5-20 mm, because small changes in TMS coil position can have large effects on motor-evoked potentials (MEPs). MEPs are often studied at rest, with muscles relaxed. During muscle contraction and movement, corticospinal excitability is higher, thresholds for effective stimulation are lower, and MEPs can be evoked from larger regions of scalp, so the effective spatial resolution of TMS is larger.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Simultaneous PET-MRI improves inflammatory cardiac disease diagnosis. However, challenges persist in respiratory motion and mis-registration between free-breathing 3D PET and 2D breath-held MR images. We propose a free-breathing non-rigid motion-compensated 3D T -mapping sequence enabling whole-heart myocardial tissue characterization in a hybrid 3T PET-MR system and provides non-rigid respiratory motion fields to correct also simultaneously acquired PET data.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that causes joint pain, stiffness, and erosion. Power Doppler ultrasound and MRI are imaging modalities used in detecting and monitoring the disease, but they have limitations. ⁹⁹Tc-maraciclatide gamma camera imaging is a novel technique that can detect joint inflammation at all sites in a single examination and has been shown to correlate with power Doppler ultrasound.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Risky behavior is linked to visceral experiences like increased heart rate, and past studies mainly focused on monetary rewards, limiting our understanding of general risk-taking.
  • The research used two surveys with 471 participants, primarily young adults, to explore how different self-reported engagements with interoceptive signals (body awareness) relate to overall risk propensity.
  • Findings suggest that individuals who can disregard or remain calm about uncomfortable bodily sensations tend to take more risks, with indications that this might be influenced by gender differences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: The purpose of this prospective, randomized crossover study was to compare the peak incidence of success, onset, and incidence over time of pulpal anesthesia in maxillary first molars following a buccal infiltration of 1.8 mL or 3.6 mL of 4% articaine with 1:100 000 epinephrine.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The sense of body ownership (i.e. the feeling that our body or its parts belong to us) plays a key role in bodily self-consciousness and is believed to stem from multisensory integration.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: A combination labial infiltration (1.8 mL) plus lingual infiltration (1.8 mL) of 4% articaine with 1:100,000 epinephrine in the mandibular lateral incisor was found superior to a labial infiltration of 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: In the rubber hand illusion (RHI), touches are applied to a fake hand at the same time as touches are applied to a participant's real hand that is hidden in a congruent position. Synchronous (but not asynchronous) tactile stimulation of the two hands may induce the sensation that the fake hand is the participant's own. As such, the illusion is commonly used to examine the sense of body ownership.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Image reconstruction for positron emission tomography (PET) has been developed over many decades, with advances coming from improved modelling of the data statistics and improved modelling of the imaging physics. However, high noise and limited spatial resolution have remained issues in PET imaging, and state-of-the-art PET reconstruction has started to exploit other medical imaging modalities (such as MRI) to assist in noise reduction and enhancement of PET's spatial resolution. Nonetheless, there is an ongoing drive towards not only improving image quality, but also reducing the injected radiation dose and reducing scanning times.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

During social interaction, humans prefer to keep a certain distance between themselves and other individuals. This preferred 'interpersonal distance' (IPD) is known to be sensitive to social context, and in the present study we aimed to further investigate the extent to which IPD is affected by the specific type of social interaction. In particular, we focused on the contrast between joint actions, where two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to achieve a shared goal, and parallel actions, where individuals act alongside each other but individually.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Positron emission tomography (PET) using a fraction of the usual injected dose would reduce the amount of radioligand needed, as well as the radiation dose to patients and staff, but would compromise reconstructed image quality. For performing the same clinical tasks with such images, a clinical (rather than numerical) image quality assessment is essential. This process can be automated with convolutional neural networks (CNNs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

SIGNAL is a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 study (no. NCT02481674) established to evaluate pepinemab, a semaphorin 4D (SEMA4D)-blocking antibody, for treatment of Huntington's disease (HD). The trial enrolled a total of 265 HD gene expansion carriers with either early manifest (EM, n = 179) or late prodromal (LP, n = 86) HD, randomized (1:1) to receive 18 monthly infusions of pepinemab (n = 91 EM, 41 LP) or placebo (n = 88 EM, 45 LP).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We propose a new version of the forward-backward splitting expectation-maximisation network (FBSEM-Net) along with a new memory-efficient training method enabling the training of fully unrolled implementations of 3D FBSEM-Net. FBSEM-Net unfolds the maximum expectation-maximisation algorithm and replaces the regularisation step by a residual convolutional neural network. Both the gradient of the prior and the regularisation strength are learned from training data.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF