Dear Advanced Visualization Insider,
In the Netherlands, clinicians pave the way for head and neck cancer treatment by heating tumors up to 40° or 45° C, which provides a synergistic benefit in combination with radiotherapy. But the heating must be precise and carefully mapped, and that's where segmentation of CT images takes center stage.
Now Dutch researchers have shaved hours off the manual segmentation process with an automated scheme that makes hyperthermia treatment planning practical for everyday use. How does it work? Learn more here.
Computer-aided detection (CAD) for lung cancer has been around a long time, showing consistent improvements in sensitivity over that of radiologists reading alone, but often at a cost of generating a high false-positive rate that some radiologists find disconcerting. But researchers are fine-tuning a new CAD algorithm that, under optimal image-quality conditions, is reducing the rate of false positives to new lows. Find out more about this promising technology by clicking here.
In mammography, standard image-processing algorithms using full contrast enhancement beat out both low-contrast exams with intermediate enhancement and pseudo film-screen algorithms with no enhancement, according to the results of a hospital study in the U.K. And that's not the only benefit of standard algorithms that the study authors found. Get the rest of the story here.
Finally, another U.K. group is using 3D printing to develop patient-specific molecular imaging phantoms made of polymer for use with both with technetium-99m SPECT and FDG-PET/CT. CT images were used to get the anatomy right. As the technology for 3D-printed phantoms evolves, the authors are hopeful that they will be cheaper to make and more helpful to treatment planning than conventional phantoms. You'll find the details here.
Be sure to scroll through the links below for the rest of the news in the Advanced Visualization Digital Community. If you have an idea for a topic you'd like to see covered here, please feel free to drop me a line.
