An effective workforce performing within the context of a positive cultural environment is central to a healthcare organization's ability to achieve quality outcomes. The Nursing Culture Assessment Tool (NCAT) provides nurses with a valid and reliable tool that captures the general aspects of nursing culture. This study extends earlier work confirming the tool's construct validity and dimension...

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the influences of reconstruction and attenuation correction on the differences in the radioactivity distributions in 123I brain SPECT obtained by the hybrid SPECT/CT device. Methods: We used the 3-dimensional (3D) brain phantom, which imitates the precise structure of gray mater, white matter and bone regions. It was filled with 123I solution (20...

Introduction: The main goal of SPECT imaging is to determine activity distribution inside the organs of the body. However, due to photon attenuation, it is almost impossible to do a quantitative study. In this paper, we suggest a mathematical relationship between activity distribution and its corresponding projections using a transfer matrix. Monte Carlo simulation was used to find a precise tr...

We have developed a general-purpose Monte Carlo simulation code, called penMesh, that combines the accuracy of the radiation transport physics subroutines from PENELOPE and the flexibility of a geometry based on triangle meshes. While the geometric models implemented in most general-purpose codes--such as PENELOPE's quadric geometry--impose some limitations in the shape of the objects that can ...

We investigated the appropriateness of four different mammography phantoms for image quality evaluation in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT). We tested the CIRS BR3D phantom, the ACR Prototype FFDM Accreditation Phantom, the Penn anthropomorphic breast phantom and the Quart mam/digi EPQC phantom. This work discusses the advantages and shortcomings of each phantom and concludes that none of the...

introduction: one of the major problems in the development of nuclear medicine images is the presence of noise. the noise level in nuclear medicine images is usually reduced by the analysis of imaging data in a fourier transform environment. the main drawback of this environment belongs to low signal to noise ratio in high frequencies because removing noise frequencies may remove data and times...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES To examine the effectiveness and suitability of a quality control (QC) phantom for a routine QC program in digital radiography. MATERIALS AND METHODS The chest phantom consists of copper and aluminum cutouts arranged to resemble the appearance of a chest. Performance of the digital radiography (DR) system is evaluated using high and low contrast resolution objects pla...

abstractobjective: to investigate the impact of respiratory motion on localization, and quantification lung lesions for the gross tumour volume utilizing an in-house developed auto3dreg programme and dynamic nurbs-based cardiac-torso digitised phantom (ncat). methods: respiratory motion may result in more than 30% underestimation of the suv values of lung, liver and kidney tumour lesions. the m...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the impact of respiratory motion on localization, and quantification of lung lesions for the Gross Tumor Volume utilizing a fully automated Auto3Dreg program and dynamic NURBS-based cardiac-torso digitized phantom (NCAT). METHODS Respiratory motion may result in more than 30% underestimation of the SUV values of lung, liver and kidney tumor lesions. The motion correc...

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus trastuzumab (NCT) increases the rate of pathological complete response (pCR) and event-free survival (EFS) compared to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NC) alone in women with HER2 positive breast cancer (BC). pCR in this setting is associated with improved EFS. Whether NCT preferentially improves EFS in comparison to NC followed by adjuvant trastuzumab initiated postoper...