AIM: To investigate the chest radiographic and high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) chest manifestations in glucocorticoid-na?ve allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) patients. METHODS: This is a prospe...AIM: To investigate the chest radiographic and high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) chest manifestations in glucocorticoid-na?ve allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) patients. METHODS: This is a prospective observational study and includes 60 consecutive glucocorticoid-na?ve patients with ABPA who underwent chest radiography and HRCT of the chest (1.25 mm every 10 mm) in the routine diagnostic workup for ABPA. RESULTS: Chest radiographs were normal in 50% of cases. Of the remainder, most patients demonstrated permanent findings in the form of parallel line and ring shadows suggesting bronchiectasis. Consolidation was detected in 17 cases but in the majority, the corresponding HRCT chest scan showed mucus-filled bronchiectatic cavities. Chest HRCT was normal in 22 patients, while central bronchiectasis (CB) was demonstrated in the remaining 38 patients. Bronchiectasis extended to the periphery in 33%-43% depending on the criteria used for defining CB. The other findings observed on HRCT were mucoid impaction, centrilobular nodules and high-attenuation mucus in decreasing order of frequency. CONCLUSION: Patients with ABPA can present with normal HRCT chest scans. Central bronchiectasis cannot be considered a characteristic feature of ABPA as peripheral bronchiectasis is commonly observed. Consolidation is an uncommon finding in ABPA.展开更多
Lung cancer is a major health burden and early detection only bears the possibility of curative treatment. Screening with computed tomography(CT) recently demonstrated a mortality reduction in selected patients and ha...Lung cancer is a major health burden and early detection only bears the possibility of curative treatment. Screening with computed tomography(CT) recently demonstrated a mortality reduction in selected patients and has been incorporated in clinical guidelines. Problems of screening with CT are the excessive number of false positive findings, costs, radiation burden and from a global point of view shortage of CT capacity. In contrast, chest radiography could be an ideal screening tool in the early detection of lung cancer. It is widely available, easy to perform, cheap, the radiation burden is negligible and there is only a low rate of false positive findings. Large randomized controlled trials could not show a mortality reduction, but different large population-based cohort studies have shown a lung cancer mortality reduction. It has been argued that community-based cohort studies are more closely reflecting the "real world" of everyday medicine. Radiologists should be aware of the found mortality reduction and realize that early detection of lung cancer is possible when reading their daily chest radiographs. Offering a chest radiograph in selected scenarios for the early detection of lung cancer is therefore still justified.展开更多
Worldwide, lung cancer is the leading cause of mortalitydue to malignancy. The vast majority of cases of lung cancer are smoking related and the most effective way of reducing lung cancer incidence and mortality is by...Worldwide, lung cancer is the leading cause of mortalitydue to malignancy. The vast majority of cases of lung cancer are smoking related and the most effective way of reducing lung cancer incidence and mortality is by smoking cessation. In the Western world, smoking cessation policies have met with limited success. The other major means of reducing lung cancer deaths is to diagnose cases at an earlier more treatable stage employing screening programmes using chest radiographs or low dose computed tomography. In many countries smoking is still on the increase, and the sheer scale of the problem limits the affordability of such screening programmes. This short review article will evaluate the current evidence and potential areas of research which may benefit policy making across the world.展开更多
Objective To assess the diagnostic value of chest radiographs in patients presenting to a busy inner-city Emergency Department with subsequently proven acute aortic dissection. Methods A retrospective review of initia...Objective To assess the diagnostic value of chest radiographs in patients presenting to a busy inner-city Emergency Department with subsequently proven acute aortic dissection. Methods A retrospective review of initial chest radiographs and charts of patients with the confirmed diagnosis of acute aortic dissection was done for a period of 5 years from 1998 to 2003. A comparison was made between the initial readings of chest radiographs prior to confirmation of the aortic dissection, and a retrospective review of the same radiographs by two board-certified radiologists with special attention to the classic findings of acute aortic dissection identifiable on plain films. Results The charts of nine patients (four men, five women) with proven acute aortic dissection were reviewed. All nine patients were suspected of having acute aortic dissection based on presenting history and symptoms of chest pain (66% ), migratory pain (89% ), back pain (89% ), and the abruptness of onset of pain (89% ). Initial plain portable chest X-rays were obtained in the Emergency Department in all nine patients. Six of nine (67%) radiographs were read as normal, while three (33%) demonstrated a widened mediastinum (> 8.0cm), two (22%) showed an abnormal aortic contour, with one ( 11% ) displaying an apical cap. Confirmation of the diagnosis was obtained with either a spiral CT angiogram or transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). All nine plain radiographs were retrospectively reviewed by two board-certified radiologists aware of the diagnosis of acute dissection without a change in the readings. Conclusions Plain portable chest radiographs are of limited usefulness for the screening of acute aortic dissection. Further radiologic evaluation should be dictated by the clinical presentation and an awareness of the low sensitivity of portable chest X- rays.展开更多
Accurate registration of chest radiographs plays an increasingly important role in medical applications.However, most current intensity-based registration methods rely on the assumption of intensity conservation that ...Accurate registration of chest radiographs plays an increasingly important role in medical applications.However, most current intensity-based registration methods rely on the assumption of intensity conservation that is not suitable for alignment of chest radiographs. In this study, we propose a novel algorithm to match chest radiographs, for which the conventional residual complexity(RC) is modified as the similarity measure and the cubic B-spline transformation is adopted for displacement estimation. The modified similarity measure is allowed to incorporate the neighborhood influence into variation of intensity in a justified manner of the weight, while the transformation is implemented with a registration framework of pyramid structure. The results show that the proposed algorithm is more accurate in registration of chest radiographs, compared with some widely used methods such as the sum-of-squared-differences(SSD), correlation coefficient(CC) and mutual information(MI)algorithms, as well as the conventional RC approaches.展开更多
Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to show an efficient method for the detection of signs of early lung cancer.Various image processing algorithms are presented for different types of lesions,and a scheme is propose...Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to show an efficient method for the detection of signs of early lung cancer.Various image processing algorithms are presented for different types of lesions,and a scheme is proposed for the combination of results.Design/methodology/approach-A computer aided detection(CAD)scheme was developed for detection of lung cancer.It enables different lesion enhancer algorithms,sensitive to specific lesion subtypes,to be used simultaneously.Three image processing algorithms are presented for the detection of small nodules,large ones,and infiltrated areas.The outputs are merged,the false detection rate is reduced with four separated support vector machine(SVM)classifiers.The classifier input comes from a feature selection algorithm selecting from various textural and geometric features.A total of 761 images were used for testing,including the database of the Japanese Society of Radiological Technology(JSRT).Findings-The fusion of algorithms reduced false positives on average by 0.6 per image,while the sensitivity remained 80 per cent.On the JSRT database the system managed to find 60.2 per cent of lesions at an average of 2.0 false positives per image.The effect of using different result evaluation criteria was tested and a difference as high as 4 percentage points in sensitivity was measured.The system was compared to other published methods.Originality/value-The study described in the paper proves the usefulness of lesion enhancement decomposition,while proposing a scheme for the fusion of algorithms.Furthermore,a new algorithm is introduced for the detection of infiltrated areas,possible signs of lung cancer,neglected by previous solutions.展开更多
AIM To evaluate the association between C-reactive protein(CRP) and radiological evidence of lower respiratory tract infection(LRTI) in infants.METHODS All patients aged less than 4 years who presented with suspected ...AIM To evaluate the association between C-reactive protein(CRP) and radiological evidence of lower respiratory tract infection(LRTI) in infants.METHODS All patients aged less than 4 years who presented with suspected lower respiratory tract infection,who received a peri-presentation chest radiograph and CRP blood measurement over an 18-mo period were included in the study.Age,gender,source of referral,CRP,white cell count,neutrophil count along with the patients' symptoms and radiologist's report were recorded.RESULTS Three hundred and eleven patients met the inclusioncriteria.Abnormal chest radiographs were more common in patients with elevated CRP levels(P < 0.01).Radiologic signs of LRTI were identified in 73.7% of chest radiographs when a patient had a CRP level between 50-99 mg/L.CRP levels were a better predictor of positive chest radiograph findings for those aged greater than I year compared to those 1 year or less.CONCLUSION CRP may be used in patients with suspected LRTI diagnosis to select those who are likely to have positive findings on chest radiograph,thus reducing unnecessary chest radiographs.展开更多
Objective To assess inter-observer variations of pulmonary nodule marking in routine clinical chest digital radiograph (DR) softcopy reading by using a lung nodule computer toolkit.Methods A total of 601 chest posteri...Objective To assess inter-observer variations of pulmonary nodule marking in routine clinical chest digital radiograph (DR) softcopy reading by using a lung nodule computer toolkit.Methods A total of 601 chest posterior-anterior DR images were randomly selected from routine outpatient screening in Peking Union Medical College Hospital. Two chest radiologists with experience more than ten years were first asked to read the images and mark all suspicious nodules independently by using computer toolkit IQQA-Chest, and to indicate the likelihood for each nodule detected. They were also asked to draw the boundary of the identified nodule manually on an enlarged region of interest, which was instantly analyzed by IQQA-Chest. Two sets of diagnostic reports, including the marked nodules, likelihood, manually drawn boundaries, quantitative measurements, and radiologists’ names, were automatically generated and stored by the computer system. One week later, the two radiologists read the same images together by using the same computer toolkit without referring to their previous reading results. Marking procedure was the same except that consensus was reached for each suspicious region. Statistical analysis tools provided in the IQQA-Chest were used to compare all the three sets of reading results.Results In the independent readings, Reader 1 detected 409 nodules with a mean diameter of 12.4 mm in 241 patients, and Reader 2 detected 401 nodules with a mean diameter of 12.6 mm in 253 patients. In the consensus reading, a total of 352 nodules with a mean diameter of 12.4 mm were detected in 220 patients. Totally, 42.3% of Reader 1’s and 45.1% of Reader 2’s marks were confirmed by the consensus reading. About 40% of each reader’s marks agreed with the other. There were only 130 (14.4%) out of the total 904 unique nodules were confirmed by both readers and the consensus reading. Moreover, 5.6% (51/904) of the marked regions were rated identical likelihood in all three readings. Statistical analysis showed significant differences between Readers 1 and 2, and between consensus and Reader 2 in determining the likelihood of the marks (P<0.01), but not between consensus and Reader 1. No significant difference in terms of size was observed in nodule segmentation between either two of the three readings. Conclusion Large variations in nodule marking and nodule-likelihood determination but not in nodule size were observed between experts as well as between single-person reading and consensus reading.展开更多
文摘AIM: To investigate the chest radiographic and high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) chest manifestations in glucocorticoid-na?ve allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) patients. METHODS: This is a prospective observational study and includes 60 consecutive glucocorticoid-na?ve patients with ABPA who underwent chest radiography and HRCT of the chest (1.25 mm every 10 mm) in the routine diagnostic workup for ABPA. RESULTS: Chest radiographs were normal in 50% of cases. Of the remainder, most patients demonstrated permanent findings in the form of parallel line and ring shadows suggesting bronchiectasis. Consolidation was detected in 17 cases but in the majority, the corresponding HRCT chest scan showed mucus-filled bronchiectatic cavities. Chest HRCT was normal in 22 patients, while central bronchiectasis (CB) was demonstrated in the remaining 38 patients. Bronchiectasis extended to the periphery in 33%-43% depending on the criteria used for defining CB. The other findings observed on HRCT were mucoid impaction, centrilobular nodules and high-attenuation mucus in decreasing order of frequency. CONCLUSION: Patients with ABPA can present with normal HRCT chest scans. Central bronchiectasis cannot be considered a characteristic feature of ABPA as peripheral bronchiectasis is commonly observed. Consolidation is an uncommon finding in ABPA.
文摘Lung cancer is a major health burden and early detection only bears the possibility of curative treatment. Screening with computed tomography(CT) recently demonstrated a mortality reduction in selected patients and has been incorporated in clinical guidelines. Problems of screening with CT are the excessive number of false positive findings, costs, radiation burden and from a global point of view shortage of CT capacity. In contrast, chest radiography could be an ideal screening tool in the early detection of lung cancer. It is widely available, easy to perform, cheap, the radiation burden is negligible and there is only a low rate of false positive findings. Large randomized controlled trials could not show a mortality reduction, but different large population-based cohort studies have shown a lung cancer mortality reduction. It has been argued that community-based cohort studies are more closely reflecting the "real world" of everyday medicine. Radiologists should be aware of the found mortality reduction and realize that early detection of lung cancer is possible when reading their daily chest radiographs. Offering a chest radiograph in selected scenarios for the early detection of lung cancer is therefore still justified.
文摘Worldwide, lung cancer is the leading cause of mortalitydue to malignancy. The vast majority of cases of lung cancer are smoking related and the most effective way of reducing lung cancer incidence and mortality is by smoking cessation. In the Western world, smoking cessation policies have met with limited success. The other major means of reducing lung cancer deaths is to diagnose cases at an earlier more treatable stage employing screening programmes using chest radiographs or low dose computed tomography. In many countries smoking is still on the increase, and the sheer scale of the problem limits the affordability of such screening programmes. This short review article will evaluate the current evidence and potential areas of research which may benefit policy making across the world.
文摘Objective To assess the diagnostic value of chest radiographs in patients presenting to a busy inner-city Emergency Department with subsequently proven acute aortic dissection. Methods A retrospective review of initial chest radiographs and charts of patients with the confirmed diagnosis of acute aortic dissection was done for a period of 5 years from 1998 to 2003. A comparison was made between the initial readings of chest radiographs prior to confirmation of the aortic dissection, and a retrospective review of the same radiographs by two board-certified radiologists with special attention to the classic findings of acute aortic dissection identifiable on plain films. Results The charts of nine patients (four men, five women) with proven acute aortic dissection were reviewed. All nine patients were suspected of having acute aortic dissection based on presenting history and symptoms of chest pain (66% ), migratory pain (89% ), back pain (89% ), and the abruptness of onset of pain (89% ). Initial plain portable chest X-rays were obtained in the Emergency Department in all nine patients. Six of nine (67%) radiographs were read as normal, while three (33%) demonstrated a widened mediastinum (> 8.0cm), two (22%) showed an abnormal aortic contour, with one ( 11% ) displaying an apical cap. Confirmation of the diagnosis was obtained with either a spiral CT angiogram or transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). All nine plain radiographs were retrospectively reviewed by two board-certified radiologists aware of the diagnosis of acute dissection without a change in the readings. Conclusions Plain portable chest radiographs are of limited usefulness for the screening of acute aortic dissection. Further radiologic evaluation should be dictated by the clinical presentation and an awareness of the low sensitivity of portable chest X- rays.
基金the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China(No.30918011104)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.61501241 and 61571230)+3 种基金the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(No.BK20150792)the Foundation of Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Digital Medicine and Computer assisted Surgery(No.SDKL-DMCAS-2018-04)the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(No.2015M570450)the Visiting Scholar Foundation of Key Laboratory of Biorheological Science and Technology(Chongqing University)of Ministry of Education(No.CQKLBST-2018-011)
文摘Accurate registration of chest radiographs plays an increasingly important role in medical applications.However, most current intensity-based registration methods rely on the assumption of intensity conservation that is not suitable for alignment of chest radiographs. In this study, we propose a novel algorithm to match chest radiographs, for which the conventional residual complexity(RC) is modified as the similarity measure and the cubic B-spline transformation is adopted for displacement estimation. The modified similarity measure is allowed to incorporate the neighborhood influence into variation of intensity in a justified manner of the weight, while the transformation is implemented with a registration framework of pyramid structure. The results show that the proposed algorithm is more accurate in registration of chest radiographs, compared with some widely used methods such as the sum-of-squared-differences(SSD), correlation coefficient(CC) and mutual information(MI)algorithms, as well as the conventional RC approaches.
基金This work was partly supported by the National Development Agency under contract KMOP-1.1.1-07/1-2008-0035.
文摘Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to show an efficient method for the detection of signs of early lung cancer.Various image processing algorithms are presented for different types of lesions,and a scheme is proposed for the combination of results.Design/methodology/approach-A computer aided detection(CAD)scheme was developed for detection of lung cancer.It enables different lesion enhancer algorithms,sensitive to specific lesion subtypes,to be used simultaneously.Three image processing algorithms are presented for the detection of small nodules,large ones,and infiltrated areas.The outputs are merged,the false detection rate is reduced with four separated support vector machine(SVM)classifiers.The classifier input comes from a feature selection algorithm selecting from various textural and geometric features.A total of 761 images were used for testing,including the database of the Japanese Society of Radiological Technology(JSRT).Findings-The fusion of algorithms reduced false positives on average by 0.6 per image,while the sensitivity remained 80 per cent.On the JSRT database the system managed to find 60.2 per cent of lesions at an average of 2.0 false positives per image.The effect of using different result evaluation criteria was tested and a difference as high as 4 percentage points in sensitivity was measured.The system was compared to other published methods.Originality/value-The study described in the paper proves the usefulness of lesion enhancement decomposition,while proposing a scheme for the fusion of algorithms.Furthermore,a new algorithm is introduced for the detection of infiltrated areas,possible signs of lung cancer,neglected by previous solutions.
文摘AIM To evaluate the association between C-reactive protein(CRP) and radiological evidence of lower respiratory tract infection(LRTI) in infants.METHODS All patients aged less than 4 years who presented with suspected lower respiratory tract infection,who received a peri-presentation chest radiograph and CRP blood measurement over an 18-mo period were included in the study.Age,gender,source of referral,CRP,white cell count,neutrophil count along with the patients' symptoms and radiologist's report were recorded.RESULTS Three hundred and eleven patients met the inclusioncriteria.Abnormal chest radiographs were more common in patients with elevated CRP levels(P < 0.01).Radiologic signs of LRTI were identified in 73.7% of chest radiographs when a patient had a CRP level between 50-99 mg/L.CRP levels were a better predictor of positive chest radiograph findings for those aged greater than I year compared to those 1 year or less.CONCLUSION CRP may be used in patients with suspected LRTI diagnosis to select those who are likely to have positive findings on chest radiograph,thus reducing unnecessary chest radiographs.
文摘Objective To assess inter-observer variations of pulmonary nodule marking in routine clinical chest digital radiograph (DR) softcopy reading by using a lung nodule computer toolkit.Methods A total of 601 chest posterior-anterior DR images were randomly selected from routine outpatient screening in Peking Union Medical College Hospital. Two chest radiologists with experience more than ten years were first asked to read the images and mark all suspicious nodules independently by using computer toolkit IQQA-Chest, and to indicate the likelihood for each nodule detected. They were also asked to draw the boundary of the identified nodule manually on an enlarged region of interest, which was instantly analyzed by IQQA-Chest. Two sets of diagnostic reports, including the marked nodules, likelihood, manually drawn boundaries, quantitative measurements, and radiologists’ names, were automatically generated and stored by the computer system. One week later, the two radiologists read the same images together by using the same computer toolkit without referring to their previous reading results. Marking procedure was the same except that consensus was reached for each suspicious region. Statistical analysis tools provided in the IQQA-Chest were used to compare all the three sets of reading results.Results In the independent readings, Reader 1 detected 409 nodules with a mean diameter of 12.4 mm in 241 patients, and Reader 2 detected 401 nodules with a mean diameter of 12.6 mm in 253 patients. In the consensus reading, a total of 352 nodules with a mean diameter of 12.4 mm were detected in 220 patients. Totally, 42.3% of Reader 1’s and 45.1% of Reader 2’s marks were confirmed by the consensus reading. About 40% of each reader’s marks agreed with the other. There were only 130 (14.4%) out of the total 904 unique nodules were confirmed by both readers and the consensus reading. Moreover, 5.6% (51/904) of the marked regions were rated identical likelihood in all three readings. Statistical analysis showed significant differences between Readers 1 and 2, and between consensus and Reader 2 in determining the likelihood of the marks (P<0.01), but not between consensus and Reader 1. No significant difference in terms of size was observed in nodule segmentation between either two of the three readings. Conclusion Large variations in nodule marking and nodule-likelihood determination but not in nodule size were observed between experts as well as between single-person reading and consensus reading.