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Designing implants for large and complex cranial defects is a challenging task, even for professional designers. Current efforts on automating the design process focused mainly on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which have produced state-of-the-art results on reconstructing synthetic defects. However, existing CNN-based methods have been difficult to translate to clinical practice in cranioplasty, as their performance on large and complex cranial defects remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we present a statistical shape model (SSM) built directly on the segmentation masks of the skulls represented as binary voxel occupancy grids and evaluate it on several cranial implant design datasets. Results show that, while CNN-based approaches outperform the SSM on synthetic defects, they are inferior to SSM when it comes to large, complex and real-world defects. Experienced neurosurgeons evaluate the implants generated by the SSM to be feasible for clinical use after minor manual corrections. Datasets and the SSM model are publicly available at https://github.com/Jianningli/ssm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaging techniques widely use Computed Tomography (CT) scans for various purposes, such as screening, diagnosis, and decision-making. Of all, it holds true for bone injuries. To build fully automated Computer-Aided Detection (CADe) and Diagnosis (CADx) tools and techniques, it requires fairly large amount of data (with gold standard). Therefore, in this paper, since state-of-the-art works relied on small dataset, we introduced a CT image dataset on limbs that is designed to understand bone injuries. Our dataset is a collection of 24 patient-specific CT cases having fractures at upper and lower limbs. From upper limbs, 8 cases were collected from bones in/around the shoulder (left and right). Similarly, from lower limbs, 16 cases were collected from knees (left and right). Altogether, 5684 CT images (upper limbs: 2057 and lower limbs: 3627) were collected. Each patient-specific CT case is composed of maximum 257 scans/slices in average. Of all, clinically approved annotations were made on every 10th slices, resulting in 1787 images. Importantly, no fractured limbs were missed in our annotation. Besides, to avoid privacy and confidential issues, patient-related information were deleted. The proposed dataset could be a promising resource for the medical imaging research community, where imaging techniques are employed for various purposes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time 5K+ CT images on fractured limbs are provided for research and educational purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to implement the secretion mechanism of the Thyroid Hormone (TH) based on bio-mathematical differential eqs. (DE) on an FPGA chip. Hardware Descriptive Language (HDL) is used to develop a behavioral model of the mechanism derived from the DE. The Thyroid Hormone secretion mechanism is simulated with the interaction of the related stimulating and inhibiting hormones. Synthesis of the simulation is done with the aid of CAD tools and downloaded on a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) Chip. The chip output shows identical behavior to that of the designed algorithm through simulation. It is concluded that the chip mimics the Thyroid Hormone secretion mechanism. The chip, operating in real-time, is computer-independent stand-alone system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a Computer Aided Detection (CAD) system based on three-dimensional (3D) feature extraction is introduced to detect lung nodules. First, eight directional search was applied in order to extract regions of interests (ROIs). Then, 3D feature extraction was performed which includes 3D connected component labeling, straightness calculation, thickness calculation, determining the middle slice, vertical and horizontal widths calculation, regularity calculation, and calculation of vertical and horizontal black pixel ratios. To make a decision for each ROI, feed forward neural networks (NN), support vector machines (SVM), naïve Bayes (NB) and logistic regression (LR) methods were used. These methods were trained and tested via k-fold cross validation, and results were compared. To test the performance of the proposed system, 11 cases, which were taken from Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) dataset, were used. ROC curves were given for all methods and 100% detection sensitivity was reached except naïve Bayes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduced a computer aided detection (CAD) system to facilitate colonic polyp detection in computer tomography (CT) data using cellular neural network, genetic algorithm and three dimensional (3D) template matching with fuzzy rule based tresholding. The CAD system extracts colon region from CT images using cellular neural network (CNN) having A, B and I templates that are optimized by genetic algorithm in order to improve the segmentation performance. Then, the system performs a 3D template matching within four layers with three different cell of 8 × 8, 12 × 12 and 20 × 20 to detect polyps. The CAD system is evaluated with 1043 CT colonography images from 16 patients containing 15 marked polyps. All colon regions are segmented properly. The overall sensitivity of proposed CAD system is 100% with the level of 0.53 false positives (FPs) per slice and 11.75 FPs per patient for the 8 × 8 cell template. For the 12 × 12 cell templates, detection sensitivity is 100% at 0.494 FPs per slice and 8.75 FPs per patient and for the 20 × 20 cell templates, detection sensitivity is 86.66% with the level of 0.452 FPs per slice and 6.25 FPs per patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodological procedure, based on the anatomical reconstruction and constrained deformation, to design custom-made implants for forehead augmentation in people affected by Apert syndrome, experiencing a frontal bone deficiency. According to the anthropometric theory, a cranial landmarks identification procedure was applied to retrieve, from a repository, a healthy skull, used as reference geometry for implant modelling. Then, using constrained deformation and free-form modelling techniques, it was possible to design a patient-specific implant. At last, the implant was realised using a custom mould, specially designed according to the patient's needs to provide an accurate fit of the defect site. The design procedure was tested on a patient suffering from Apert syndrome. Three implants were virtually modelled and 3D-printed for pre-surgical evaluation. Their shapes were 3D compared with a reference one (handcrafted by a surgeon) to test the accuracy. Deviations are negligible, and the customised implant fulfilled the surgeon's requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring drug-drug similarity is important but challenging. Significant progresses have been made in drugs whose labeled training data is sufficient and available. However, handling data skewness and incompleteness with domain-specific knowledge graph, is still a relatively new territory and an under-explored prospect. In this paper, we present a system KGDDS for node-link-based bio-medical Knowledge Graph curation and visualization, aiding Drug-Drug Similarity measure. Specifically, we reuse existing knowledge bases to alleviate the difficulties in building a high-quality knowledge graph, ranging in size up to 7 million edges. Then we design a prediction model to explore the pharmacology features and knowledge graph features. Finally, we propose a user interaction model to allow the user to better understand the drug properties from a drug similarity perspective and gain insights that are not easily observable in individual drugs. Visual result demonstration and experimental results indicate that KGDDS can bridge the user/caregiver gap by facilitating antibiotics prescription knowledge, and has remarkable applicability, outperforming existing state-of-the-art drug similarity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In AES, the total time taken by the architecture while implementing in low power and high-speed circuit is the most important thing that to be considered. Also in AES, implementing S-Boxes consumes the major part of the total time consumed by the entire architecture. In this research paper, we propose a very low-power and high efficient S-Box circuit architecture: a multi-stage modified version of PPRM architecture over composite fields. In this modified S box design, only AND and Hazard transparent XOR gates are used. Because of this architecture dynamic hazards which form the main aspect of power consumption in S box gets eliminated. A low propagation delay of 4.58 ns and occupies 120 slices in the xilinx FPGA device xc6vlx75t-3ff784, while the low propagation delay and slice area is 5.552 ns and 120 respectively for the conventional PPRM architecture. This new proposed architecture is used to protect the mammographic images from being unauthorized access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]