BACKGROUND Magnetic resonance-guided high intensity focused ultrasound (MR-HIFU) ablation is in development for minimally invasive treatment of breast cancer. Cost-effectiveness has not been assessed yet. An early health technology assessment was performed to estimate costs of MR-HIFU ablation, compared to breast conserving treatment (BCT). METHODS An MR-HIFU treatment model using the dedicat...

functional mitral regurgitation (mr) results from left ventricular remodeling, leaflet tethering or tenting. coronary artery disease is one of the important causes of functional mr due to tethering. detection of functional mr and its severity are important factors in patient prognosis. there are different methods for detection of functional mr and its severity, including anterior mitral leaflet...

background: in cases of moderate(2 or 3+ on a scale of 0 to 4+) nonorganic mitral regurgitation (mr) and coronary artery disease, operative strategy continues to be debated between coronary artery bypass grafting alone (cabg) or concomitant valve repair. to clarify the optimal management of these patients, we evaluated the mid-term results of isolated cabg in the study group. methods: from marc...

In an attempt to determine the RF shielding artifacts produced by conducting stents during MRI scanning of patients, a Transmission Line Matrix (TLM) model was developed based on the symmetrical condensed node. This approach allows considerable flexibility including freedom from stability issues and the ability to reconstruct digital signals in the time or frequency domain. To validate the resu...

Accurate characterization of white-matter lesions from magnetic resonance (MR) images has increasing importance for diagnosis and management of treatment of certain neurological diseases, and can be performed in an objective and effective way by automated lesion segmentation. This usually involves modeling the whole-brain MR intensity distribution, however, capturing various sources of MR inten...

Atherosclerotic plaque composition is central to the pathogenesis of plaque disruption and acute thrombosis. Thus, there is a need for accurate imaging and characterization of atherosclerotic lesions. Even though there is no ideal animal model of atherosclerosis, the porcine model is considered to most closely resemble human atherosclerosis. We report the feasibility of MR imaging and character...

In this paper the performance of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Adaptive NeuroFuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS) in simulating the inverse dynamic behavior of MagnetoRheological (MR) dampers is investigated. MR dampers are one of the most applicable methods in semi active control of seismic response of structures. Various mathematical models are introduced to simulate the dynamic behavior o...

abstract background: a computer aided diagnosis system was established using the wavelet transform and neural network to differentiate malignant from benign in a   group of patients with histo-pathologically proved breast lesions based on the data derived independ­ently from time-intensity profile.   materials and methods: the per­formance of the artificial neural network (ann) was evaluated us...