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Colorectal Cancers Screening in the General Population: Focusing
Get PDFColorectal cancers are common throughout the world, although their incidence varies across continents and countries. 28% of these cancers are rectal, and two-thirds of the remaining 72% are of left colonic location. Screening and prevention have proven effective in reducing the incidence of these cancers and their mortality. The best screening results in the so-called average-risk general population have been obtained in the USA, where the first-line endoscopy is the gold standard when in other countries, especially European ones; screening was done by the search for occult blood in the stool. This group, however, became heterogeneous due to the intervention of environmental factors and co-morbidities; a colonoscopy is then proposed to those subjects considered at average risk. Virtual colonoscopy has excellent sensitivity and specificity for one-centimeter polyps. The serrated polyps, pre-cancerous lesions predominating on the right, are more difficult to detect
A Compact Sift-Based Strategy for Visual Information Retrieval in Large Image Databases
Get PDFThis paper applies the Standard Scale Invariant Feature Transform (S-SIFT) algorithm to accomplish the image descriptors of an eye region for a set of human eyes images from the UBIRIS database despite photometric transformations. The core assumption is that textured regions are locally planar and stationary. A descriptor with this type of invariance is sufficient to discern and describe a textured area regardless of the viewpoint and lighting in a perspective image, and it permits the identification of similar types of texture in a figure, such as an iris texture on an eye. It also enables to establish the correspondence between texture regions from distinct images acquired from different viewpoints (as, for example, two views of the front of a house), scales and/or subjected to linear transformations such as translation. Experiments have confirmed that the S-SIFT algorithm is a potent tool for a variety of problems in image identification
Access to Opioids in Palliative Care in Low-and Middle-Income Countries : The Case of Burkina-Faso -How Can Blockchain and Internet of Things Assist? –
Get PDFBackground: People requesting palliative care or suffering from pain are subjected to adhere to opioid-based treatment in order to alleviate their pain. Commonly, access to opioids is strictly controlled.
Access to Healthcare delivery services remains challenging in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC). In Burkina-Faso (BF), a Sub-Saharan African (SSA) country, patients requiring palliative care (PC) are especially facing poor access to pain drugs such as morphine. Facing poor access to pain-alleviating medicine can severely impact the daily quality of life (QoL). On one hand, patients are experiencing poor opioids access. On another hand opioids abuse, leading to drug addiction is noticed. The question arising here is how can they face poor access and at the same time abuse the given drug? One plausible answer is the counterfeit chain, which provides illegal drugs. Beyond the counterfeit issues faced, the public health care system is also facing, amongst others, prescription falsification, fraud in the distribution, and stock shortage.
Method & Design: Mixed-Method-Design was applied to this study. National stipulations, regulations, and the state-of-the-art in the field of palliative care in BF were investigated and analyzed. Based on the investigation‘s outcomes and following the paradigm of design science research, and information system based improvement solution is proposed to tackle the poor access to opioids, improve the supply and distribution chain as well as to efficiently monitor the consumption of opioids in BF, and prevent patients from any health issues, drug addiction, and death.
Objectives: The main objectives are to fight against opioid addiction, counterfeits, a stock shortage, and prevent related health safety issues. The main aim is to enable the traceability of any opioids prescription, secure the supply and distribution, and thus early detect any fraud in the system.
This editorial paper would, therefore, focus on investigating the reasons underlying the poor access to opioids in palliative care in BF and make suggestions for improvement. A blockchain (BC) and the Internet of Things (IoT) based system to secure and improve opioids supply, distribution, and prescription will be proposed.
Results: The contribution analysis reveals the potential of the proposed model to assist in many ways to improve access to opioids and to secure this access. The model could contribute to preventing drug abuse, overprescription, supporting off-label-use of opioids and thus providing a knowledge database for off-label use of opioids. This model shows promise to deliver accurate data and information about the exact opioid’s needs and consumption atlas. This will assist to better distribute the product in the entire country.
A proof-of-concept of the proposed model is required. This is ongoing and will be presented in a forthcoming paper.
Conclusion: This editorial paper investigates access to opioids in Burkina Faso. It pointed out by analyzing out the computer science perspectives the different causes of the crisis. A contextualized model is provided. A test in situ needs to be performed
The Assessment of Long-Term-Care, its Quality Assurance and Results -The German Perspective-
Get PDFThe consequences of demographic aging caused an impulse for German politics to establish an independent Social Long-Term-Care Insurance in 1995. Since then the assessment for long-term-care became stepwise more comprehensive to cover the bio-psycho-social needs of an increasing part of the population. Nowadays, about 3.3 Million persons receive benefits from this social insurance which help to cover a great part (but not in full) of financial and material support to overcome the impacts of long-term-care. About 2.5 Million persons are assessed every year with continuously increasing tendency by nursing experts working for the Statutory Medical Service mostly performing home visits. They assess the appropriate scores for mobility, cognitive and communicative abilities, behavior, attitudes, habits and psychic problems, self-sufficiency, coping and handling of requirements due to disease and therapy, management of everyday life and maintaining social contacts, adding up to one of 5 grades, the need for technical aids, flat conversion, therapeutic procedures, rehabilitation and educative support. The assessment guidelines and the monitoring of the quality of their realization are presented as well as the outcome for the Long-Term-Care Insurance on the federal level. Twenty-five years of Long-Term-Care Insurance have led to a well established and steadfast insurance but with increasing expenses as well as rising social security contributions to face the challenges of a human and dignified evening of life for an increasing part of the population
A review on methods to estimate a CT from MRI data in the context of MRI-alone RT
Get PDFBackground: In recent years, Radiation Therapy (RT) has undergone many developments and provided progress in the field of cancer treatment. However, dose optimisation each treatment session puts the patient at risk of successive X-Ray exposure from Computed Tomography CT scans since this imaging modality is the reference for dose planning. Add to this difficulties related to contour propagation. Thus, approaches are focusing on the use of MRI as the only modality in RT. In this paper, we review methods for creating pseudo-CT images from MRI data for MRI-alone RT. Each class of methods is explained and underlying works are presented in detail with performance results. We discuss the advantages and limitations of each class.
Methods: We classified recent works in deriving a pseudo-CT from MR images into four classes: segmentation-based, intensity-based, atlas-based and hybrid methods and the classification was based on considering the general technique applied.
Results: Most research focused on the brain and the pelvic regions. The mean absolute error ranged from 80 to 137 HU and from 36.4 to 74 HU for the brain and pelvis, respectively. In addition, an interest in the Dixon MR sequence is increasing since it has the advantage of producing multiple contrast images with a single acquisition.
Conclusion: Radiation therapy is emerging towards the generalisation of MRI-only RT thanks to the advances in techniques for generation of pseudo-CT images and the development of specialised MR sequences favouring bone visualisation. However, a benchmark needs to be established to set in common performance metrics to assess the quality of the generated pseudo-CT and judge on the efficiency of a certain method
New approach in the improvement of antiscorpionic immunotherapy: Input of TMG use as adjuvant for irradiated venom.
Get PDFBackground: Severe envenomation is a major public health problem in certain parts of the world such as North Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, and South Asia. The toxic effects of scorpion envenomation are due to massive release of sympathetic and parasympathetic neurotransmitters; the severity is related to cardiac and hemodynamic changes, with cardiogenic shock and pulmonary edema contributing to the main causes of death. Due to this severity, intra-venous immunotherapy should be given to patients stung by scorpions as soon as possible. The production of specific antibodies of immunotherapy requires the use of highly immunogenic preparation to immunize sera producing animals, thus this preparation has to meet strict bioethics rules. The aim of this study was to determine the immunostimulating effect of TiterMax Gold adjuvant (TMG) associated to irradiated Androctonus australis hector venom in comparison to commonly used Freund’s complete adjuvant preparation
Methods: Two groups of mice were immunized twice at one month intervals with TMG of FCA adjuvants associated to irradiated venom. The induced inflammatory and adaptive immune responses were evaluated. One month after the last booster, animals were challenged to ascending doses of native venom to evaluate their immunoprotectivness.
Results: TMG preparation use induced inflammation characterized by low activation of polynuclear cell levels and MPO and EPO seric activities compared to FCA group. Evaluation of the titers of specific antibodies showed that TMG preparation was more effective in inducing higher titers of neutralizing antibodies. Results also showed that animals immunized with TMG preparation were highly protected up to 6 LD50 of native venom.
Conclusion: These results allow to suggest the irradiated venom-TMG preparation as a more effective and secure preparation that could replace the FCA preparation in immunizing animal producers of antiscorpionic immune sera
A Segmentation Method of Skin MRI 3D High Resolution in vivo
No full textBackground: In recent years, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is used in clinical application as non-invasive medical modality, it is rarely used to study the anatomy physiological, and biochemical of the skin, in spite of its very attractive modality for skin imaging. It makes an ideal imaging modality of unique soft tissue contrast to study the skin water content and to differentiate between the different skin layers. However MRI provides a big data with high quality. The analysis of these data require computerized methods to help clinicians and to improve disease of diagnosis. Several image processing method have been extensively used to assist doctors in qualitative diagnosis, segmentation is one of the most methods used in medical image processing for many applications in order to understand medical data and extract useful information.
The purpose of this study is to use the segmentation method to measure the hydration of skin using MRI modality.
Methods: We will classify segmentation approaches for MRI data into three basics classes: Edge based segmentation, Region based segmentation, and Thresholding segmentation. Then we will briefly describe Fuzzy C-means Clustering method. Furthermore, we will give some related works used FCM algorithm with MRI images.
Results: We have measured the hydration of the feet as a result of the FCM segmentation method, where the sample of the study was conducted on 35 healthy volunteers, who were scanned by MRI machine before applying moisturizer and one hour after.
Conclusion: MRI is an attractive modality to study the skin water content, it makes an ideal observation of the different skin layers in vivo with three dimensions. However, the segmentation of MRI data by FCM clustering is a computerized method to help clinicians in order to measure skin hydration.
 
Report on the Second International Conference on Health Sciences and Medical Technologies
Get PDFICHSMT\u2717: the second edition of International Conference on Health Sciences and Medical Technologies 2017 held from 10 to 12 October 2017 at Tlemcen, Algeria. With the cooperation of Knowledge Kingdom Publishing and Mehr Publishing Group the conference was established at Renaissance hotel. Regrouping contributors from fifteen countries, an interdisciplinary program was established aiming to contribute the scientific progress on health sciences and medical technologies
An Efficient Algorithm for Multimodal Medical Image Fusion based on Feature Selection and PCA Using DTCWT (FSPCA-DTCWT)
Get PDFBackground: During the two past decades, medical image fusion has become an essential part ofmodern medicine due to the availability of numerous imaging modalities (e.g., MRI, CT, SPECT,etc.). This paper presents a new medical image fusion algorithm based on PCA and DTCWT,which uses different fusion rules to obtain a new image containing more information than any ofthe input images.Methods: A new image fusion algorithm improves the visual quality of the fused image, based onfeature selection and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in the Dual-Tree Complex WaveletTransform (DTCWT) domain. It is called Feature Selection with Principal Component Analysisand Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (FSPCA-DTCWT). Using different fusion rules in asingle algorithm result in correctly reconstructed image (fused image), this combination willproduce a new technique, which employs the advantages of each method separately. The DTCWTpresents good directionality since it considers the edge information in six directions and providesapproximate shift invariant. The main goal of PCA is to extract the most significant characteristics(represented by the wavelet coefficients) in order to improve the spatial resolution. The proposedalgorithm fuses the detailed wavelet coefficients of input images using features selection rule.Results: Several experiments have been conducted over different sets of multimodal medicalimages such as CT/MRI, MRA/T1-MRI. However, due to pages-limit on a paper, only results ofthree sets have been presented. The FSPCA-DTCWT algorithm is compared to recent fusionmethods presented in the literature (eight methods) in terms of visual quality and quantitativelyusing well-known fusion performance metrics (five metrics). Results showed that the proposedalgorithm outperforms the existing ones regarding visual and quantitative evaluations.Conclusion: This paper focuses on medical image fusion of different modalities. A novel imagefusion algorithm based on DTCWT to merge multimodal medical images has been proposed.Experiments have been performed using two different sets of multimodal medical images. Theresults show that the proposed fusion method significantly outperforms the recent fusiontechniques reported in the literature
Exploration of the antithrombotic effect of a C type lectin purified from Cerastes cerastes venom by protein-protein docking
Get PDFBackground: Thromboembolic diseases are a major clinical problem due to their high prevalence and their often fatal consequences. In the present study, an anticoagulant galactoside binding C type lectin “Cc-Lec” was purified and characterized.
Methods: Cc-Lec was purified by affinity chromatography on a column of Sepharose 4B coupled with D-lactose. Its homogeneity was verified by SDS-PAGE and ESI-MS. Cc-Lec 3D structure modelization was achieved by homology to Convulxin a snake venom C type lectin. Cc-Lec anticoagulant effect was explored in vivo by i.p. administration to mice, in vitro by native PAGE analysis and in silico by protein-protein docking approach.
Results: Cc-Lec is a 34 271,59 Da protein, composed of 160 residues of amino acids for each subunit. Its 3D structure is organized into a homodimer cross-linked with a disulfide bridge and composed of three alpha helices and seven beta strands for each monomer. Cc-Lec functional characterization revealed a durable anticoagulant effect in vivo after 6 and 48h of i.p. administration to mice. This anticoagulant effect is mediated by interaction with FXa and FIXa as showed by native PAGE analysis. Moreover, protein-protein docking results reinforced this data and showed that Cc-Lec interacts with coagulation factors X and IX through their -carboxyglutamic domains. The interaction with factors X and IX requires calcium or calcium and magnesium ions respectively.
Conclusion: The anticoagulant effect of Cc-Lec makes it a promising pharmacological target for the diagnosis and/or the therapy of the thromboembolic diseases