Survivors of torture may have long-term physical, psychiatric and psychological sequelae. The aim of this study was to determine whether survivors of torture exhibit any psychopathology, whether they demonstrate abnormal findings on Brain Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) imaging, and whether correlations exist between Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), perfusion changes on Brain SPECT and Initial Self Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ8) scores. Thirty-six volunteers were recruited in a non randomised manner. Participants were assessed by a psychiatrist. The SRQ8, Impact of Event Scale – Revised (IES-R) and Montgomery Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) were administered. Participants underwent Brain SPECT imaging to assess cerebral perfusion changes. Data was analysed using Statistica 9.1. The primary psychiatric diagnoses made were PTSD, MDD or both. Participants with psychopathology had higher SRQ8, MADRS and IES-R scores. Although qualitatively, participants with psychopathology showed increased abnormal cerebral perfusion on Brain SPECT imaging, as compared to those participants without psychopathology, this could not be proven statistically. Perfusion changes were noted in the temporal cortices, parietal cortices, orbitofrontal cortices, thalami and basal ganglia. Higher SRQ8 scores were associated with higher scores on the MADRS and IES-R, and hence correlated with diagnoses of MDD and PTSD, but no direct association was noted with the visualised abnormal Brain SPECT imaging findings.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology. / Department of Computer and Information Science

Human calf muscle injuries are relatively common among individuals from various backgrounds. Miniscule tears in the muscles of the calf such as the medial gastrocnemius, lateral gastrocnemius, and soleus, may be difficult to identify using traditional imaging modalities. Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI), is one type of diffusion imaging that has presented with some strengths over diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI). Though DTI studies in the human calf have been published, no DKI studies in the human calf exist to our knowledge. The objective of this study is to determine whether or not DKI is applicable in identifying quantitative changes between states of dorsiflexion and relaxation in the human calf. One female participant underwent DKI. Data from the scanning was quantitatively analyzed via the use of FSLView and the NODDI MATLAB toolbox. A change in mean voxel intensity in the calf and mean orientation dispersion index was identified in each of the five slices analyzed, in each muscle group (medial gastrocnemius, lateral gastrocnemius, and soleus). Most of the changes, whether an increase or decrease in mean value—between the states of dorsiflexion and relaxation—were statistically significant. We conclude that DKI may have a future in identifying physical/quantitative changes in calf muscles between the tense/relaxed states. Further studies using DKI on the human calf should be conducted in the future and address the limitations of the current study. Further investigation could possibly benefit individuals with miniscule calf muscle injuries.

The liver is an important organ in the body. It is located under the rib cage on the right side. The liver performs many important functions, it processes food for nutrients that the body requires and also helps in the detoxification of harmful materials. Like any organ in the body, the liver is susceptible to diseases such as liver cancer. Liver cancer is the growth and spread of unhealthy cells of the liver. There are several risk factor for liver cancer, these are: Cirrhosis (scarring of the liver), long term hepatitis B and hepatitis C infection and diabetes patients with long term drinking problem. Hepatocellular Carcinoma is the most common form of liver cancer in adult population which begins in the main type of liver cell (hepatocyte). Because Hepatocellular carcinoma starts from the primary liver cell itself (hepatocytes), as such it is a primary liver cancer. About 30,000 Americans are diagnosed with primary liver cancer yearly, making it an important disease that plaques our society and therefore needs proper diagnosis. In clinical evaluation of primary liver cancer such as HCC, the use of medical imaging technology has been commonplace. Most medical facilities across the country and globally typically use Computed Tomography (CT) and/or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in the diagnosis and treatment follow up of Hepatocellular carcinoma. The medical imaging devices are used to determine the extent and volume of the tumor of the cancerous liver cells. In clinical trials involving the imaging of HCC tumors, the typical protocol used in the CT imaging of HCC involves the use of contrast enhanced dual phase acquisition. This approach is based on the physiology of the blood flow through the liver. Since HCC tumors are hypervascular in nature, it would thus be more apparent in the arterial phase of an acquired CT image. The aforementioned characteristic was tested with a volume paradigm which measure and compare the volume of both the arterial phase and portal venous phase acquired images in the experiment. Overall this study helps in furthering goals to reduce the patient dose from the x-ray tubes during clinical trials. The results of the experiments (n = 19, t = 0.67, p = 0.26), indicates no significant difference between the volume of the HCC tumor images acquired both in the AP and PVP.

Scientists have come a long way in understanding prostate cancer as a disease and how its progression affects the men who develop it. Prostate adenocarcinoma may be present without causing clinical symptoms. Prostate cancer may metastasize, which increases the likelihood of fatality. The cause of the disease is still not completely clear, but genetics, race, tissue damage, history of previous infections, diet, and environmental influences appear to play a role in its development. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an excellent clinical tool to characterize prostate cancer without the use of ionizing radiation or surgery. It is concluded that MRI is the optimal imaging modality to achieve detection, characterization, and staging of intracapsular and extracapsular prostate disease. The advances in MRI technology, particularly 3 Tesla, allows for reduced surgical intervention thus improving quality of life for patients with the disease.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the efficacy of MRI as a diagnostic tool by comparing it to OCT in patients with suspected optic nerve atrophy. Currently, MRI is an established noninvasive imaging modality for tumors and inflammatory tissues; however their use in optic nerve atrophy is limited to advanced cases. Our study investigates the use of OCT, a more sensitive imaging modality, compared to MRI as a potential adjunct to the clinical diagnosis of optic nerve atrophy. METHODS: This retrospective study analyzed 27 medical records (40 eyes) of patients with suspected optic nerve atrophy referred to the Neuro-ophthalmology Clinic of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (2009-2016) who had both MR imaging of the orbits and SD-OCT scans. Based on the RNFL thickness obtained from OCT scans, optic atrophy was defined as border, mild, moderate, or severe. MRIs were used to measure the optic nerve area, optic nerve diameter and sheath area of all eyes. From there, the ratio of optic nerve area to sheath area, percent difference in optic nerve diameters in a patient and percent difference in optic nerve areas in a patient were determined. RESULTS: As atrophy worsens, the optic nerve area and sheath area seem to steadily decline. The ratio between the two seems to remain constant (0.27) regardless of degree of atrophy. Focusing on unilateral patients, the percent difference in optic nerve area with mild optic atrophy seemed minimal (14%). It becomes more significant in moderate and severe atrophy cases (56.06% and 26.18% respectively). Overall, there does not seem to be a strong correlation between MRI measurements and OCT RNFL values. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, a strong correlation was not found between MRI measurements and OCT RNFL thickness values. While a general trend existed, there was too much variation to determine cut off points for atrophy based solely on the measurement of a single eye. MRI may be useful in identifying severe and moderate optic nerve atrophy especially in unilateral patients. Once the RNFL thins to about 70 μm, the difference in size is detectable on MRI. For all cases of mild optic atrophy and bilateral moderate atrophy, OCT remains a more reliable imaging diagnostic. Changes in nerve size appear minimal compared to a healthy human. The optic nerve sheath was also shown to decrease in size in cases of atrophy. Future studies with a larger sample size are needed to produce more conclusive results.

Recent advancements in techniques of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging provide extended quantitative measurements of myocardial T1. Important tissue characteristics can be tracked noninvasively to allow practitioners to quantify important properties of regional and global myocardium function. Quantification of these T1 measures involves the compilation of multiple images to create a T1 recovery curve, providing a map that estimates the T1 value as an encoded pixel value. After contrast injection, the data is compared with native (no applied contrast agent) T1 to examine myocardial disease involving the interstitium as well as the extracellular volume fraction. Myocardial T1 mapping is an emerging biomarker for quantification of myocardial disease (since an important indicator of heart disease is the expansion of myocardial interstitial space, as is fibrosis). This paper explores the detection and quantification of cardiac involvement using delayed gadolinium enhancement combined with T1 mapping and myocardial extracellular volume fraction. It extends the research being conducted on Cardiac sarcoidosis, an important cardiomyopathy. Cardiac sarcoidosis is a multisystem granulomatous disease of unknown etiology. Cardiac MR is able to detect the active, inflammatory phase of the disease as well as the chronic phase where scarring and fibrosis are dominant. The use of gadolinium-based contrast agents improves the ability to discriminate ischemic from nonischemic etiologies, owing to different patterns among the various nonischemic cardiomyopathies. Since gadolinium shortens T1 relaxation time, the result is a brighter signal intensity in areas with increased interstitial space on inversion recovery T1-weighted sequences. The 1.5 Tesla Philips Achieva XR Scanner was used to collect the pre- and post- contrast images from five anonymous patients (subjects), following the MOLLI protocol. These images were stacked and run through MRMap, which creates parametric image maps of the MOLLI data. Data was graphed employing the Gado Partition Coefficient.

In the field of medical imaging, one of the most important concepts consists of the creation of the image from an obtained signal. The creation of the image is broken down into a subset of tasks. The first is the basic concept of isolating the element crucial to creating an image. One example is the isolation of different atoms in different modalities, for example PET or SPECT. Second, is using the intrinsic properties of these atoms to create a signal that can be recorded, this is done by magnets, gradients, coils, and other technological advances specific to other imaging modalities. Third, is the method used to record the signal. This can be done in many different ways, including but not limited to, radon space and k-space. Last but not least is the transform of the data in their respective spaces into images that are read by technologists. What is described here is, a very simple explanation for the process that different modalities go through in order to create an image. This review paper will be focused mainly on k-space acquisition and the different ways that the acquisition of k-space and image creation can be accelerated to improve patient time spent in the machine.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has emerged as one of the most widespread and devastating forms of dementia. Over the past few decades, AD has consistently increased in prevalence worldwide due to the rising proportion of elderly individuals and lack of effective screening and treatment modalities. To date, few economically viable and widely applicable tools exist to make definitive, early diagnoses of the disease. Therefore, there is a clear need for interventions that facilitate accurate diagnoses, monitoring, and therapeutic treatment of AD. In the course of AD, cognitive impairment is preceded by physiological changes to the central nervous system (CNS). This includes neuronal atrophy, synaptic dysfunction, and the abnormal post-translational modification of the proteins tau and beta-amyloid (A), which contributes to the deposition of intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) and extracellular neuritic plaques (NPs). The pathological cellular changes in AD occur long before the clinical course of the disease, and biomarkers for these changes can be detected prior to measurable cognitive decline. Because the biochemical changes associated with AD are irreversible, effective tools for diagnosis must detect the presence and severity of molecular pathology during the preliminary stages of the disease’s insidious onset. Biomarkers of AD can be detected by neuroimaging technologies, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and blood or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analyses. However, these methods are not currently suited to diagnose and monitor the unique pathogenesis of AD prior to cognitive decline. An ideal instrument for widespread AD screening, diagnosis, and monitoring must be noninvasive, inexpensive, portable, and accommodating to the cognitive sensitivities of patients on a spectrum from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to full-blown dementia. Recently, several spectroscopic methods of assessing AD pathology have met these criteria and may be better suited for widespread clinical application. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the use of near-infrared optical spectroscopy (NIRS) to detect pathological severity in human AD. Near-infrared (NIR) light is poorly absorbed by biological tissue, and can safely penetrate bone, skin, vasculature, and neuronal tissue. NIRS has traditionally been used in biomedical contexts to evaluate cerebral oxygenation changes, however the dense protein aggregates NFTs and NPs in AD tissue have recently been shown to characteristically affect several optical parameters of a NIR signal, including fluorescence and particle path (scattering). To date, applications of NIRS have been used to differentiate AD brains from non-AD controls in vitro, and further identify MCI patients in vivo, suggesting the NIR signal can identify molecular changes in AD. Severe AD cases are characterized by increased involvement of NFTs and NPs in the cerebral cortex, which would be expected to further affect the extent of NIR scatter. The current study aims to quantify AD-related pathology for investigation into whether the extent of optical scattering is correlated with the severity of amyloid plaque load and NFT density in the temporal cortex. Quantification of these lesions was accomplished using immunohistochemistry (IHC) and stereological analyses. Preliminary results show that the severity of AD pathology detected via IHC can be correlated with measured parameters of an in vitro near-infrared signal. Future studies aim to further characterize the relationship between scattering intensity and pathological severity, as well as evaluate the in vivo potential of this technology in predicting the clinical outcome and cognitive status of individuals in different stages of AD.

Biomedical imaging is a key tool for the study of host-pathogen interactions. New techniques are enhancing the quality and flexibility of imaging systems, particularly as a result of developments in laser technologies. This work applies the combination of two advanced laser imaging methods to study the interactions between a virus and the host cells it infects. The first part of this work describes the theory and experimental implementation of coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy. This technique-first demonstrated in its current form in 1999-permits the imaging of microscopic samples without the need for fluorescent labelling. Chemical contrast in images arises from the excitation of specific vibrations in the sample molecules themselves. A laser scanning microscope system was set up, based on an excitation source consisting of two titanium-sapphire lasers synchronized with a commercial phase-locked loop system. A custom-built microscope was constructed to provide optimal imaging performance, high detection sensitivity and straightforward adaptation to the specific requirements of biomedical experiments. The system was fully characterized to determine its performance. The second part of this work demonstrates the application of this microscope platform in virology. The microscope was configured to combine two nonlinear imaging modalities: coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering and two-photon excitation. Mouse fibroblast cells were infected with a genetically modified cytomegalovirus. The modification causes the host cell to express the green fluorescent protein upon infection. The host cell morphology and lipid droplet distribution were recorded by imaging with coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering, whilst the infection was monitored by imaging the viral protein expression with two-photon excitation. The cytopathic effects typical of cytomegalovirus infection were observed, including expansion of the nucleus, rounding of the cell shape, and the appearance of intracellular viral inclusions. In some cases these effects were accompanied by dense accumulations of lipid droplets at the nuclear periphery. Imaging was performed both with fixed cells and living. It was demonstrated that the lipid droplets in a single live cell could be imaged over a period of 7 hours without causing noticeable laser-induced damage. The system is shown to be a flexible and powerful tool for the investigation of virus replication and its effects on the host cell.