Haptical minimally invasive surgery sim

Interesting to us?

clipped from www.haptica.com clipped from www.haptica.com The world-leading ProMIS Surgical Simulator

CUDA by these guys

Wondering why we are still fooling around with it -seems you can just buy it

clipped from www.digisens.fr is the beginning of a new era of snap reconstruction SnapCT is the new Digisens acceleration plugin using graphic card power SnapCT is the beginning of a new era of snap reconstruction

Just found this link, looking for something else (as always), nice teaser for future work with CT angiography velocimetry, color Doppler ultrasound, the standard technique, seems to be fraught with problems.

..now how do I feed this clip into MS Project, MS Outlook and Toodledo?

clipped from www.quickcamteam.net Can I use L Useful links Microsoft DirectShow documentation Microsoft Windows SDK download

NovaRay

Down at NovaRay last week to give a talk about my new research, possibilities begin to take shape.

In support of CAC scoring

From the theheart.org:
Coronary
artery calcium screening predicts mortality in the elderly
Investigators showed that CAC scoring
discriminates mortality risk in older patients, despite their advanced age and
reduced life expectancy, allowing a reclassification of patient risk based on
the calcium score. (Raggi P et al. J Am Coll Cardiol 2008; 52:17-23.)
[23 Jun]

Lynn Marshall from OHSU Portland brought this article by Birnbaum BA et al. on CT scanner comparability for quantitative analysis of soft-tissue and bone attenuation values to my attention. With MrOS and MrOS Hong Kong, we are conducting large multi-center studies where such variations would definitely be an issue. However, there is a rub:

I believe there is a huge issue with this particular article - a calibration standard was not simultaneously scanned. The reported intra- and inter-scanner variability is likely much increased because of this omission. In QCT study (with calibration standards), inter-scanner variation normally stems from differences between how well the calibration at the location of the standard (which is perfect by definition) reflects the calibration at the region of interest. The discrepancy between these two locations is mainly driven by beam hardening, and not by kernel choice (although there is a small effect). So, while kernel choice does have a large effect, this effect is quite similar for the calibration standard and the region of interest and therefore by accounted for in a QCT study and should not add a lot of intra-scanner variation.

Re inter-scanner variation, different manufacturers use different tube-side filters and projection data preparation steps that influence beam hardening and thus spatial homogeneity of attenuation measurements. Both QCT companies, Mindways and Image Analysis, try to account for these scanner differences by QCT-scanning a torso-shaped QA phantom that has an insert of known bone density at the approximate location of the spine. The discrepancy of the calibrated measurement to the true value is captured by the "field uniformity correction (FUC) factor" that is subsequently applied to all human studies. It is typically in the order of 0.95-1.05, meaning that 5-10% differences between scanners can be expected if such correction is not applied.

It is timely that Lynn brings this article to my attention. While we are upgrading our QCT scanner at UCSF, we will run a comprehensive set of QCT phantom scans, and will look at this in detail too. It might be educational to report our findings with an without calibration.

It's been a while since I last posted ot my science blog. It's not that no science has happened; I guess I created the blog and then immediately did not take it serious. I am determined to change this. As you can see on my personal blog, there's a lot of activity, so I will try to apply the same zeal to this blog. Let's, shall we?