Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Clinical implementation of kVCT-guided tomotherapy with ClearRT
This study aims to share the initial experience of kVCT in clinical workflow, compare its performance with that of the existing megavoltage computed tomography (MVCT), and explore its potential in adaptive planning. We retrospectively enrolled 23 patients who underwent both MVCT and kVCT scans. The clinical performance data regarding image acquisition time, nominal dose length product (DLP), registration time and registration corrections were extracted and compared. Image quality was scored by six experienced radiation therapists and quantified based on phantom measurements. CT number stability and the implementation of ad...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - August 4, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Use of a PLA sleeve to remove electron enhancement in superficial X-ray therapy
In this study, a 3D PLA sleeve was produced and used as an alternative to the nail varnish for energies between 55 and 100  kV. Further, plastic wrap was also investigated as an alternative method to reduce dose. It was found that a 1 mm printed sleeve, inserted into the treatment cone sufficiently reduced the enhanced dose as measured with a thin-window Exradin chamber to within 3.3% of the dose measured with a Farme r-type ionisation chamber. The use of plastic wrap also reduced the enhanced dose, but impracticalities in its use make it non-viable for routine clinical use. (Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - August 3, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Comparative analysis of patient scatter to phantom scatter for computed tomography systems
This report considers the difference in scattered air kerma or dose from phantom models, to actual patient scatter under a variety of clinical scan conditions. Empirical patient scatter measurements recorded at different positions around the gantry, for 3 different CT scanners, resulted in average patient scatter fractions per unit Dose Length Product (DLP: mGy  cm) at 1 m from the isocentre of 0.09 ± 0.03 and 0.17 ± 0.04 µGy (mGy cm)−1 for head and body scans respectively. For the purposes of shielding design and scattered dose estimates to staff it is recommended that a single standard deviation be applie...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - August 3, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Pulmonary nodule segmentation based on REMU-Net
AbstractIn recent years, U-Net has shown excellent performance in medical image segmentation, but it cannot accurately segment nodules of smaller size when segmenting pulmonary nodules. To make it more accurate to segment pulmonary nodules in CT images, U-Net is improved to REMU-Net. First, ResNeSt, which is the state-of-the-art ResNet variant, is used as the backbone of the U-Net, and a spatial attention module is introduced into the Split-Attention block of ResNeSt to enable the network to extract more diverse and efficient features. Secondly, a feature enhancement module based on the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 25, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Determination and validation of the initial beam parameters of Elekta Agility collimator head by Monte Carlo simulations
This study presents strategies to independently determine the geometrical and physical properties of the components and initial beam parameters of the Agility collimator head for full beam simulations and postulates a benchmarking process using the EGSnrc MC toolkit. Target material of W (90%) and Re (10%) of 0.09  cm thickness, flattening filter of 1.77 cm thick stainless steel placed on 0.5 cm Al disc, and primary and secondary collimators of Tungsten alloy have been found to best fit the Agility head. The initial beam energy of 6.0 MeV with a radial distribution given as full-width half maxima (FWHM) o f 0.301 cm (...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 18, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

A strategy of model space search for dynamic causal modeling in task fMRI data exploratory analysis
AbstractDynamic causal modeling (DCM) is a tool used for effective connectivity (EC) estimation in neuroimage analysis. But it is a model-driven analysis method, and the structure of the EC network needs to be determined in advance based on a large amount of prior knowledge. This characteristic makes it difficult to apply DCM to the exploratory brain network analysis. The exploratory analysis of DCM can be realized from two perspectives: one is to reduce the computational cost of the model; the other is to reduce the model space. From the perspective of model space reduction, a model space exploration strategy is proposed,...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 18, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Webinar and survey on quality management principles within the Australian and New Zealand ACPSEM Workforce
AbstractHealthcare relies upon the accurate and safe delivery of patient care. This is only achievable when systems are developed to ensure high quality, robust outcomes, for instance quality management systems. The concept of quality management can take on a different meaning depending on the context in which it is found. To add complication, the amount of education required for quality management will vary depending on one ’s exposure to the implementation of quality systems. In part to address these issues, the Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine (ACPSEM) Queensland Branch held a qual...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 14, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

A direct comparison of the optically stimulated luminescent properties of BeO and Al2O3 for clinical in-vivo dosimetry
In conclusion, BeO does show large variance in sensitivity between individual OSLD and a considerable initial variance and decline in dose –response, however after pre-conditioning and individual normalisation to offset OSLD specific sensitivity BeO provides not only a viable alternative to Al2O3:C, but potentially provide higher accuracy, precision and reproducibility for in-vivo dosimetry. (Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine)
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 11, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Detection of stage of lung changes in COVID-19 disease based on CT images: a radiomics approach
AbstractThe aim of this study is to classify patients suspected from COVID-19 to five stages as normal, early, progressive, peak, and absorption stages using radiomics approach based on lung computed tomography images. Lung CT scans of 683 people were evaluated. A set of statistical texture features was extracted from each CT image. The people were classified using the random forest algorithm as an ensemble method based on the decision trees outputs to five stages of COVID-19 disease. Proposed method attains the highest result with an accuracy of 93.55% (96.25% in normal, 74.39% in early, 100% in progressive, 82.19% in pea...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 7, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Toward automatic reformation at the orbitomeatal line in head computed tomography using object detection algorithm
AbstractConsistent cross-sectional imaging is desirable to accurately detect lesions and facilitate follow-up in head computed tomography (CT). However, manual reformation causes image variations among technologists and requires additional time. We therefore developed a system that reformats head CT images at the orbitomeatal (OM) line and evaluated the system performance using real-world clinical data. Retrospective data were obtained for 681 consecutive patients who underwent non-contrast head CT. The datasets were randomly divided into one of three sets for training, validation, or testing. Four landmarks (bilateral eye...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 6, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Developing a robust model to predict depth of anesthesia from single channel EEG signal
In this study, we propose an intelligence model that predicts the DoA from a single channel electroencephalograph (EEG) signal. A segmentation technique based on a sliding window is employed to partition EEG signals. Hierarchical dispersion entropy (HDE) is applied to each EEG segment. A set of features is extracted from each EEG segment. The extracted features are investigated using a community graph detection approach (CGDA), and the most relevant features are selected to trace the DoA. The proposed model, based on HDE coupled with CGDA, is evaluated in term of BIS index using several statistical metrics such Q-Q plot, r...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - July 5, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Ada-GridRF: A Fast and Automated Adaptive Boost Based Grid Search Optimized Random Forest Ensemble model for Lung Cancer Detection
AbstractLung cancer is considered one of the leading causes of death all across the world. Various radiology-related fields increasingly have used Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. It just has already become a part of clinical work for lung cancer detection. In this article, we proposed an Adaptive Boost-based Grid Search Optimized Random Forest (Ada-GridRF) classifier that best optimized the hyperparameters of the base random forest model to identify the malignant and non-malignant nodules from the trained CT images. Improved performance speed and reduced computational complexity were the advantages of the proposed ...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - June 30, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Basis pursuit sparse decomposition using tunable-Q wavelet transform (BPSD-TQWT) for denoising of electrocardiograms
AbstractThe electrocardiogram (ECG) is an essential diagnostic tool to identify cardiac abnormalities. So, the primary issue in an ECG acquisition unit is noise interference. Essentially, the prominent ECG noise sources are power line interference (PLI) and Baseline drift (BD). Therefore, in the study, a new technique called the basis pursuit sparse decomposition (BPSD) using tunable-Q wavelet transform (TQWT) is proposed to remove the PLI and BD present in the ECG recordings. Chiefly, the TQWT method is a wavelet transform with distinct Quality factors (Q) which can adjust the signal to the natural non-stationary behaviou...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - June 30, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

An automatic method to generate voxel-based absorbed doses from radioactivity distributions for nuclear medicine using generative adversarial networks: a feasibility study
AbstractAn approach to autogenerate voxel-based absorbed dose for nuclear medicine is proposed using generative adversarial networks. The method is based on image-to-image transformation and promises to achieve real-time visualization of the absorbed dose and optimization of therapeutic strategies. The activity-density superimposed image is input to generator (G) as a reference image to generate a pseudoabsorbed dose image (DI), which is then mixed with ground truth (GT) DI and recognized by discriminator (D). If the pseudoimage is recognized, the information is fed back, and G regenerates a pseudodose image until D drops ...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - June 28, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Graph deep network for optic disc and optic cup segmentation for glaucoma disease using retinal imaging
AbstractThe fundus imaging method of eye screening detects eye diseases by segmenting the optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC). OD and OC are still challenging to segment accurately. This work proposes three-layer graph-based deep architecture with an enhanced fusion method for OD and OC segmentation. CNN encoder-decoder architecture, extended graph network, and approximation via fusion-based rule are explored for connecting local and global information. A graph-based model is developed for combining local and overall knowledge. By extending feature masking, regularization of repetitive features with fusion for combining cha...
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - June 23, 2022 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research