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Reducing radiation dose in cardiac catheter-based X-ray procedures increases safety but also image noise and artifacts. Excessive noise and artifacts can compromise vital image information, which can affect clinical decision-making. Developing more effective X-ray denoising methodologies will be beneficial to both patients and healthcare professionals by allowing imaging at lower radiation dose without compromising image information. This paper proposes a framework based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), namely Ultra-Dense Denoising Network (UDDN), for low-dose X-ray image denoising. To promote feature extraction, we designed a novel residual block which establishes a solid correlation among multiple-path neural units via abundant cross connections in its representation enhancement section. Experiments on synthetic additive noise X-ray data show that the UDDN achieves statistically significant higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) than other comparative methods. We enhanced the clinical adaptability of our framework by training using normally-distributed noise and tested on clinical data taken from procedures at St. Thomas’ hospital in London. The performance was assessed by using local SNR and by clinical voting using ten cardiologists. The results show that the UDDN outperforms the other comparative methods and is a promising solution to this challenging but clinically impactful task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dermatological manifestations have shown to be associated with COVID-19 infections. The numbers of papers have quadrupled within May 2020 alone. One particular cutaneous manifestation named pseudo chilblains (COVID toe), expressed mostly in otherwise asymptomatic younger patients, has had particular media attention. Public health bodies, on the other hand, have been slow to recognize it as a symptom. This article will be discussing two case studies to demonstrate the lack of public knowledge and of public health guidance associated with this symptom. We will further explore the use of COVID toe in the epidemiology of COVID-19 and its utility as a sign for total cases and contact tracing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]