Background: Intravenous (IV) iodine-based contrast agents are administered during computed tomography (CT) examination to enhance the density differences between lesions and surrounding parenchyma, which is important for lesion characterization, and to demonstrate vascular anatomy and vessel patency. Quality of contrast enhancement has a significant influence on diagnostic interpretation and subsequent management. In this study, we assessed the quality of portal venous phase abdominal CT scans performed with a manual injection of a fixed dose of contrast, which is the routine practice at Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital (TASH). The effect of age and sex was also assessed.
Method: A hospital-based retrospective review was performed to identify patients who have had a precontrast and postcontrast abdominal CT scan from November 4, 2020, to September 30, 2022. All patients with abdominal CT scans having precontrast and portal venous phase scans were included in the study. All CT scans were reviewed by the principal investigator and the quality of contrast enhancement was assessed.
Results: In this study, there were a total of 379 patients. The mean hepatic attenuations in precontrast and portal venous phase scans were 59.05 ± 6.69 HU and 103.73 ± 12.84 HU. The proportion of scans with less than 50 HU enhancement was 68% ( = 258). There was a significant association between age and sex with contrast enhancement.
Conclusion: The hepatic contrast enhancement pattern of abdominal CT scan at the study institution reveals a concerning degree of image quality. This is evidenced by the high number of suboptimal contrast enhancement indices and the highly variable enhancement patterns across different patients. This can have a negative impact on the diagnostic performance of CT imaging and can adversely affect the management. Furthermore, both sex and age affect the pattern of enhancement.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2023/9563310 | DOI Listing |
Arch Gynecol Obstet
January 2025
Department of Radiology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, No. 6 Shuangyong Road, Nanning, 530021, Guangxi, China.
Purpose: This case report aims to present a rare case of endometrial carcinosarcoma, a highly malignant tumor with a poor prognosis. The primary objective is to describe this unique case's clinical presentation, multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features, typical histopathological characteristics and surgical treatment.
Methods: A detailed analysis of the patient's medical history, preoperative imaging evaluation, and treatment approach was conducted.
J Comput Chem
January 2025
Instituto de Química, Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, Brazil.
This study aims to shed light on the mechanism and kinetics of 1,4-dioxane degradation by hydroxyl radical (OH) across various solvation conditions to evaluate electronic and structural properties at the MP2/aug-cc-pVTZ level. Transition states (TS) structures determined in the gas phase and SMD solvation model reveal similar hydrogen abstraction patterns. In contrast, the explicit solvation model (ES) introduces significant changes, suggesting a kinetic preference for axial pathways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Clin Med
January 2025
Department of Radiology, Bursa Yuksek Ihtisas Training and Research Hospital, 16310 Bursa, Turkey.
: This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the Kaiser score (KS) on the modified abbreviated breast magnetic resonance imaging (AB-MRI) protocol for characterizing breast lesions by comparing it with full-protocol MRI (FP-MRI), using the histological data as the reference standard. : Breast MRIs detecting histologically verified contrast-enhancing breast lesions were evaluated retrospectively. A modified AB-MRI protocol was created from the standard FP-MRI, which comprised axial fat-suppressed T2-weighted imaging (T2WI), pre-contrast T1-weighted imaging (T1WI), and first, second, and fourth post-contrast phases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSensors (Basel)
January 2025
Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Yokohama 223-8522, Japan.
Person identification is a critical task in applications such as security and surveillance, requiring reliable systems that perform robustly under diverse conditions. This study evaluates the Vision Transformer (ViT) and ResNet34 models across three modalities-RGB, thermal, and depth-using datasets collected with infrared array sensors and LiDAR sensors in controlled scenarios and varying resolutions (16 × 12 to 640 × 480) to explore their effectiveness in person identification. Preprocessing techniques, including YOLO-based cropping, were employed to improve subject isolation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSensors (Basel)
January 2025
School of Computer Science, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan 430068, China.
Large visual language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), despite their excellent performance, are highly vulnerable to the influence of adversarial examples. This work investigates the accuracy and robustness of visual language models (VLMs) from a novel multi-modal perspective. We propose a multi-modal fine-tuning method called Multi-modal Depth Adversarial Prompt Tuning (MDAPT), which guides the generation of visual prompts through text prompts to improve the accuracy and performance of visual language models.
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