STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of substituting noninvasive diagnostic studies for Swan-Ganz catheter (SGC) placement in the evaluation of acutely ill patients. DESIGN Modified decision analysis. METHODS Using published studies that define effectiveness of clinical examination, echocardiography, and SGC placement to diagnose pulmonary edema, an analysis of the impact of substituting th...

We propose a feature extraction method for noninvasive diagnosis of melanoma based on tensor decomposition of the clinical color image of skin lesion. Extracted features are elements of the core tensor in the corresponding Tucker3 model, and represent spatial-spectral profile of the lesion. In contrast to majority of methods that exploit either texture or spectral diversity of the tumor only, t...

Noninvasive positive pressure ventilation is an alternative to intubation in critically ill patients with respiratory insufficiency or poor gas exchange who may require flexible bronchoscopy for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes. This ventilatory technique might help decrease the risk of bronchoscopy-related complications in patients with refractory hypoxemia, postoperative respiratory distres...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the integration and accuracy of A (amplitude)-mode ultrasound-based surface matching for noninvasive registration of the head into a frameless computer-aided surgery system for otorhinology and skull base surgery. DESIGN Experimental study and case series. SETTING Academic medical center. PATIENTS Twelve patients underwent anterior and paranasal skull base surgery wi...

An accurate diagnosis, nowadays, supposes sophisticated procedures to corroborate outstanding medical techniques, in the patient interest. This is due to the fact that different physical phenomena are giving different anatomical or physiological relevant details. Nuclear medicine, nuclear magnetic resonance or noninvasive microwave procedures are giving different aspects that are completing eac...

In recent years, a number of modalities have become available for the noninvasive reduction of adipose tissue, including cryolipolysis, radiofrequency, low-level laser, and high-intensity focused ultrasound. Each technology employs a different mechanism of action to cause apoptosis or necrosis of the targeted adipocytes. Among these technologies, cryolipolysis has not only been commercially ava...