PURPOSE To evaluate the agreement between clinical examination, spectral-domain ocular coherence tomography (SD OCT), and fluorescein angiography (FA) in diagnosing intraretinal microvascular abnormality (IRMA) and neovascularization elsewhere (NVE) and define the SD OCT features that differentiate NVEs from IRMAs. DESIGN Retrospective study. METHODS Data were collected from 23 lesions from...

In the present study, we analysed and compared the relative in-vitro biological activity of the various intrapituitary human follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) isoforms employing two different bioassay systems. FSH was fractionated by chromatofocusing (pH range 7.10 to < 3.80) and the several isoforms isolated were quantified at multiple dose levels by three highly specific immunoassay systems:...

Norm-enforcement models applied in human societies may serve as an inspiration for the design of multi-agent systems. Models for normenforcement in multi-agent systems often focus either on the intraor interagent level. We propose a combined approach to identify objectives for an architecture for self-regulating agents. In this paper we assess how changes on the inter-agent level affect the int...

The evaluation of growth hormone (GH) secretion continues to be important in acromegaly and the nadir GH (n-GH) level in the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) is the gold standard for the demonstration of secretory autonomy of this hormone. n-GH levels < 1 microg/L are defined as normal suppression but, using current assays, n-GH < 1 microg/L is detected in patients with untreated acromegaly a...

An immunoradiometric assay (IRMA) involving a monoclonal antibody (MAb OC125) to an ovarian carcinoma-associated antigenic determinant (CA 125) has been tested as one component in a strategy for early detection of epithelial ovarian cancer. We characterized one confirmed "false-positive" sample by murine antibody blocking studies, Western blotting, immunoaffinity, size-exclusion chromatography,...

Recent research has suggested that there is no general similarity measure, which can be applied on arbitrary databases without any parameterization. Hence, the optimal combination of similarity measures and parameters must be identified for each new image repository. This optimization loop is time consuming and depends on the experience of the designer as well as the knowledge of the medical ex...

An in-house OC 125 monoclonal antibody-based "sandwich" immunofluorometric assay (IFMA) described previously (Clin Chem 1987; 33:2191-4) gave higher results for CA 125 in 37 of 123 serum samples than did a commercially available immunoradiometric assay (IRMA). Discordant results between the two assays became concordant when measurements of the samples were repeated with normal mouse serum (100 ...

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) provides novel options to access large repositories of medical images, in particular for storing, querying and reporting. This requires a revisit of nomenclatures for image classification such as DICOM, SNOMED, and RadLex. For instance, DICOM defines only about 20 concept terms for body regions, which partly overlap. This is insufficient to access the visual...

BACKGROUND Calcitonin (CT) is a sensitive marker for evaluation of medullary thyroid cancer (MTC). However, CT measurement can vary with assay- and nonassay-dependent factors, and procalcitonin (PCT) measurement has been proposed for evaluating questionable increases in CT. METHODS We tested 2 fully automated CT assays (Immulite [IL] and Liaison [LIA]) and 1 nonautomated CT assay (IRMA, Medip...

BACKGROUND Thyroglobulin (Tg) measurements are important in the follow-up of patients with differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC). We evaluated the analytical and clinical performance of a new automated immunochemiluminometric assay for Tg (Tg-ICMA; Nichols Advantage Tg; Nichols Institute Diagnostics). METHODS We used the Tg-ICMA to measure Tg concentrations in serum samples from 110 Tg antib...