BACKGROUND Ascites remains the most common cause of hospitalization among patients with decompensated cirrhosis. Paracentesis is a relatively safe procedure with low complication rates. Computerized tomography (CT)-guided therapeutic paracentesis could be a safe and effective alternative to unaided or aided (ultrasonogram-guided) bedside paracentesis. In this retrospective study, we aimed to co...

In this paper, we propose a framework using local models for multi-objective optimization to guide the search heuristic in both the decision and objective spaces. The localization is built using a limited number of adaptive spheres in the decision space. These spheres are usually guided, using some direction information, in the decision space towards the areas with non-dominated solutions. We u...

Propagation loss can occur in photonic crystal waveguides without complete optical confinement. We employ a highly efficient transfer-matrix method which allows for accurate and reliable extraction of the propagation loss even at an extremely low level. The results for a two-dimensional photonic crystal waveguide shows that the loss exponentially decays via the waveguide wall thickness. An anom...

With prostate and colorectal malignancies being the most common cancers in men, elevated prostate specific antigen (PSA) in patients without rectal access due to prior surgery poses a diagnostic dilemma. We report the first use of CT-guided biopsy in combination with prebiopsy MRI in 2 patients with a clinical suspicion of prostate cancer and no rectal access. In both cases, a diagnostic multip...

AIM The purpose of this study is to describe our experience with needle localization technique in diagnosing small breast cancers. MATERIAL AND METHODS This retrospective study included a hundred and twenty patients' with impalpable breast lesions and they underwent wire localization. All patients had mammography, ultrasound exam and pathohystological results. We use Mammomat Inspiration Siem...

Diagnosis of breast cancer at its earliest stage affords women the best prognosis. The role of the breast imager has evolved from cancer screening and detection to now include diagnosis and management with the widespread adoption of image-guided core biopsy. This article will briefly discuss the current imageguided biopsy techniques for the diagnosis of suspicious breast findings, specifically,...

Background: The identification of small lung nodules is challenging during mini-invasive thoracic surgery. Unable to palpate them directly, surgeons have developed several methods preoperatively localize pulmonary nodules, including the computed tomography-guided positioning coils or metallic landmarks (hook wire) bronchoscopic marking. Methods: We present a series patients scheduled for video-...

Saccadic eye movements are an integral part of many visually guided behaviors. Recent research in humans has shown that processes which control saccades are also involved in establishing perceptual space: A shift in object localization during fixation occurred after saccade amplitudes had been shortened or lengthened by saccadic adaptation. We tested whether similar effects can be established i...

Identification and localization of bone surfaces in ultrasound (US) images is an essential step in US-based image guided orthopedic procedures. However, US images often depict bones poorly compared to other medical imaging modalities, such as computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MR), because of speckle, reverberation, shadowing and other artifacts. As a result, accurate, robust and a...