PURPOSE Treatment for urethral stricture disease often requires a choice between readily available direct vision internal urethrotomy (DVIU) and highly efficacious but more technically complex open urethral reconstruction. Using the short segment bulbous urethral stricture as a model, we determined which strategy is less costly. MATERIALS AND METHODS The costs of DVIU and open urethral recons...

BACKGROUND Current cost data on tissue expansion followed by exchange for permanent implant (TE/I) reconstruction lack a necessary assessment of the experience of a heterogenous breast cancer patient population and their multiple outcome pathways. We extend our previous analysis to that of direct hospital cost as bundling of payments is likely to follow the changing centralization of cancer car...

In this paper the use of compactly-supported radial basis functions for surface reconstruction is described. To solve the problem of reconstruction or volume data generation specially designed software is employed. Time performance of the algorithm and numerical error estimation of the reconstruction are also investigated. Thanks to the efficient octree algorithm used in this study, the resulti...

In this paper we investigate a mesh-modeling approach for multi-modality image reconstruction. In the proposed approach a mesh model uses information obtained from an anatomical MR image to aid in reconstruction of PET images. The aim is to improve spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy of the PET image by using anatomical boundary information from the MR image. The mesh approach accompli...

In positron emission tomography (PET), photon scattering inside the body causes significant blurring and quantification error in the reconstructed images. To solve this problem we have developed Monte Carlo (MC) based 3D PET reconstruction algorithms implemented on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Our implementation takes multiple Compton scattering into account without any significant addit...

Consider a piecewise smooth function for which the (pseudo-)spectral coefficients are given. It is well known that while spectral partial sums yield exponentially convergent approximations for smooth functions, the results for piecewise smooth functions are poor, with spurious oscillations developing near the discontinuities and a much reduced overall convergence rate. This behavior, known as t...

Statistical computed tomography (CT) image reconstruction usually requires solving a very large-scale convex optimization problem. The iterative solver for CT reconstruction suffers from slow converging speed and high computational cost in projections and backprojections. The goal for this project is to accelerate the iterative solver using the Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier (ADMM) ...

This paper examines the use of the Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (ART) and related techniques to reconstruct 3D objects from a relatively sparse set of cone-beam projections. Although ART has been widely used for cone-beam reconstruction of high-contrast objects, e.g. in computed angiography, the work presented here explores the more challenging low-contrast case which represents a little ...

As is well known that sensing and measuring the weld pool surface is very important to design intelligent welding machines which is able to imitate a skilled human welder who can choose suitable welding parameters. Therefore, in this paper, we concentrate the problem of weld pool surface 3D reconstruction, which is a key issue in intelligent welding machines development. Firstly, the framework ...