Production and regulatory issues for theranostics.

Theranostics has become a major area of innovation and progress in cancer care over the last decade. In view of the introduction of approved therapeutics in neuroendocrine tumours and prostate cancer in the last 10 years, the ability to provide access to these treatments has emerged as a key factor in ensuring global benefits from this cancer therapy approach. In this Series paper we explore the issues that affect access to and availability of theranostic radiopharmaceuticals, including supply and regulatory issues that might affect the availability of theranostic treatments for patients with cancer.

[Local administration of amphotericin B by VAC instillation: Therapeutic aid in the treatment of mucormycosis].

Mucormycosis is a rare and serious fungal infection, occurring mainly in immunocompromised, diabetic, polytrauma or burn patients. Current standard treatments include iterative carcinological surgical trimming, systemic treatment with liposomal amphotericin B and second-line Posaconazole or Isavuconazole. We report the case of a 37-year-old female patient with no previous medical history who developed a disseminated mucormycosis, with an estimated 25 % loss of skin substance and major decay of the chest wall.

A First Suspected Case of Fibrosing Mediastinitis After Anti-PD-1 Therapy.

We describe a first suspected case of fibrosing mediastinitis following anti-programmed death (PD)-1 therapy, pembrolizumab. Multimodality imaging, including cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, and a multidisciplinary team approach were integral to the diagnosis. If further substantiated, systematic surveillance after anti-PD-1 therapy for fibrosing mediastinitis may be warranted.

Clinical characteristics associated with idiopathic rapid gastric emptying in patients referred for gastric emptying studies.

Objectives: Rapid gastric emptying (RGE) is diagnosed using nuclear medicine gastric emptying scintigraphy (GES). The clinical symptoms are non-specific and its pathophysiology in the absence of gastric surgery is poorly understood. We aimed to evaluate the clinical characteristics associated with idiopathic RGE.

Ethical Considerations for Movement Mapping to Identify Disease Transmission Hotspots.

Traditional public health methods for detecting infectious disease transmission, such as contact tracing and molecular epidemiology, are time-consuming and costly. Information and communication technologies, such as global positioning systems, smartphones, and mobile phones, offer opportunities for novel approaches to identifying transmission hotspots. However, mapping the movements of potentially infected persons comes with ethical challenges.

Mining heart disease risk factors in clinical text with named entity recognition and distributional semantic models.

We present the design, and analyze the performance of a multi-stage natural language processing system employing named entity recognition, Bayesian statistics, and rule logic to identify and characterize heart disease risk factor events in diabetic patients over time. The system was originally developed for the 2014 i2b2 Challenges in Natural Language in Clinical Data. The system's strengths included a high level of accuracy for identifying named entities associated with heart disease risk factor events.

Very high coronary artery calcium score with normal myocardial perfusion SPECT imaging is associated with a moderate incidence of severe coronary artery disease.

Purpose: Myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) has limitations in the presence of balanced multivessel disease (MVD) and left main (LM) coronary artery disease, occasionally resulting in false-normal results despite the high cardiovascular risk associated with this condition. The purpose of this study was to assess the incidence of severe coronary artery disease (CAD) in the presence of a very high Agatston coronary artery calcium (CAC) score (>1,000) in stable symptomatic patients without known CAD but with normal MPI results.

Methods: A total of 2,659 prospectively acquired consecutive patients were referred for MPI and evaluation of CAC score by CT.

Gelotophobia and the challenges of implementing laughter into virtual agents interactions.

This study investigated which features of AVATAR laughter are perceived threatening for individuals with a fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia), and individuals with no gelotophobia. Laughter samples were systematically varied (e.g.

Objective study of sensor relevance for automatic cough detection.

The development of a system for the automatic, objective, and reliable detection of cough events is a need underlined by the medical literature for years. The benefit of such a tool is clear as it would allow the assessment of pathology severity in chronic cough diseases. Even though some approaches have recently reported solutions achieving this task with a relative success, there is still no standardization about the method to adopt or the sensors to use.

Clinical utility of 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography in the staging of patients with potentially resectable esophageal cancer.

Introduction: (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) may play an important role in staging patients with potentially resectable esophageal cancer but its impact on clinical management remains unclear.

Methods: In a multicenter prospective cohort study of patients with potentially resectable esophageal cancer, we compared stage of disease based on PET/CT with the stage based on conventional staging performed before PET/CT (American Joint Committee on Cancer, 6th edition). The primary outcome was the proportion of patients with a clinically important change in stage, based on PET/CT findings.

Added-value of SPECT/CT to lymphatic mapping and sentinel lymphadenectomy in gynaecological cancers.

Lymphatic mapping and sentinel lymphadenectomy (LM/SL) have been successfully used in pre-treatment nodal staging of gynaecological cancers. We hypothesised the added-value of LM/SL plus SPECT/CT in patients with early stage of cervical cancer and vulvar cancer. A prospective, single-center, diagnostic, open label, active control, non-randomized clinical trial has been conducted in 7 patients with FIGO IA-IB1 cervical cancer and 7 patients with FIGO stage I-II-IIIcN0 vulvar cancer.

SPECT/CT imaging of the lumbar spine in chronic low back pain: a case report.

Mechanical low back pain is a common indication for Nuclear Medicine imaging. Whole-body bone scan is a very sensitive but poorly specific study for the detection of metabolic bone abnormalities. The accurate localisation of metabolically active bone disease is often difficult in 2D imaging but single photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (SPECT/CT) allows accurate diagnosis and anatomic localisation of osteoblastic and osteolytic lesions in 3D imaging.

Intensity modulated radiotherapy of non-small-cell lung cancer incorporating SPECT ventilation imaging.

Purpose: The authors performed this retrospective study to investigate the impact of using ventilation scans obtained from single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) in selecting beam directions in intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) planning in lung cancer radiotherapy to spare dosimetrically well ventilated lung.

Methods: For ten consecutive stage III non-small-cell lung cancer patients, the authors obtained both ventilation/perfusion SPECT scans and four-dimensional CT scans for treatment planning purposes. Each ventilation scan was registered with the corresponding planning CT and ventilation volumes corresponding to either > or = 50% (vv50) or > or = 70% (vv70) of the maximum SPECT count were automatically segmented.

[Teenagers and age of first drinking: A disturbing precocity?].

Age of first drink in France and Western countries is early. National and international surveys confirm this early onset. Drunkenness, which is the most obvious drinking outcome, seems to rise amongst young adolescents.

Passage relevance models for genomics search.

We present a passage relevance model for integrating syntactic and semantic evidence of biomedical concepts and topics using a probabilistic graphical model. Component models of topics, concepts, terms, and document are represented as potential functions within a Markov Random Field. The probability of a passage being relevant to a biologist's information need is represented as the joint distribution across all potential functions.