BACKGROUND There are a variety of surgical choices for women with early-stage breast cancer, including breast-conserving surgery, mastectomy, or mastectomy plus reconstructive surgery. This report examines some of the factors that affect these choices and the costs of the various treatment options. METHODS Data from the Virginia Cancer Registry were linked to insurance claims from the Trigon ...

This study documents the cost of immediate and delayed DIEP flap breast reconstruction. Immediate reconstruction is more attractive from an economic perspective since it only requires one operation, one anaesthetic procedure and one recovery period in hospital. From the perspective of healthcare budget management, assessing the possible cost savings from immediate reconstruction yields interest...

We present a new fast reconstruction algorithm for parallel beam tomography. The new algorithm is an accelerated version of the standard filtered backprojection (FBP) reconstruction, and uses a hierarchical decomposition of the backprojection operation to reduce the computational cost from O(N(3)) to O(N(2)log(2 )N). We discuss the choice of the various parameters that affect the behavior of th...

BACKGROUND A consensus is lacking on a uniform reconstructive algorithm for patients with locally advanced breast cancer who require postmastectomy radiotherapy. Both delayed autologous and immediate prosthetic techniques have inherent advantages and complications. The study hypothesis is that implants are more cost effective than autologous reconstruction in the setting of postmastectomy radio...

In this paper, a new nonlinear technique based on genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed for reconstruction of penumbral images. In GA, the reconstruction problem is modeled as an optimization problem, whose cost function is to be minimized. The technique allows distortion-free reconstruction over a large field of view. Furthermore, because in GA the complicated a priori constraints can be easily i...

We propose a systematic method for constructing a sparse data reconstruction algorithm in compressed sensing at a relatively low computational cost for general observation matrix. It is known that the cost of l1-norm minimization using a standard linear programming algorithm is O(N). We show that this cost can be reduced to O(N) by applying the approach of posterior maximization. Furthermore, i...

The prime motivation of this work is to devise techniques that make the Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (ART) and related methods more efficient for routine clinical use, while not compromising their accuracy. In particular, we strive to push the overall cost for a ART reconstruction as close as possible to the theoretical cost for a reconstruction obtained with Filtered Backprojection (FBP)...

With the population growth and consequently the requirement for development of civil constructions, it is necessary to design appropriate foundations for resisting structural loads. Soil weakness in bearing capacity of geotechnical elements has forced the researchers to continuously follow a solution to compensate for this deficiency. Within the past two decades, many studies have been carried ...

In this paper, we propose a clustering approach for solving the problem of reconstructing cross-cut shredded documents. This problem is important in the field of forensic science. Unlike other clustering approaches which are applied as a preprocessing step before the actual reconstruction algorithms, our clustering approach is part of the reconstruction process itself. We define a new cost func...