So, what are people doing about this?  I see a lot of presentations on this topic but without a clear description of how they solved these impediments to importing and verifying studies from outside CDs.

Three developers have programmed five roombas to play the old Pac-Man game.  Four of the roombas are the ghosts who “know” if they’re chasing or fleeing Pac-Man depending on how many pills Pac-Man eats.  Pac-Man appears to be controlled by a simple joy-stick with some rules built in, for example, Pac-Man won’t leave the game grid.  All five roombas communicate with each other so the ghosts don’t collide with each other and they know if they can “see” Pac-Man and if they are the hunters or hunted.  To see more about this project go to:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/09/autonomous-roombas-do-pac-man-right-video/

This is just for fun !!  I had the pleasure of spending Halloween in the Chicago Hyde Park area with friends where we served up 2,800 trick-or-treaters until we ran out of candy.  They really know how to throw a party.  Our host’s pumpkins were the hit of the house with kids forgetting to get candy because they were mesmerized by the pumpkins.  A picture of two of them are at the top of this post.

I happened to be at a FedEx office where the item below was being shipped.  This remarkable sculpture is a skull of medusa with the snakes still attached.  The sculpture is made entirely from Red Bull cans and was being shipped to the Red Bull company by the artist. 

The long-awaited SIIM sponsered Textbook on Practical Imaging Informatics is finally here, ready to ship to you.  To get your copy, go to the SIIM webside, www.siimweb.org and follow the links from Publications ->SIIM Imaging Info Pro Publications and click on it to order the book.  As a member, you will get the best price by going though the SIIM website to Springer.  You’ll find that the book will be your constant reference as you do your job.  Maybe I can get Oprah to make it her “book”

It’s October 1^st and the beginning of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  I am reminded that both my mother and grandmother had breast cancer, two close friends have died from breast cancer, and my daughter’s best friend was diagnosed at the age of 34.   When my sister and I investigated BRCA genetic testing, we were discouraged because if we had a genetic risk of getting cancer ourselves, and our health insurance companies found out, they may drop our coverage. 

We have five  JDI online-first articles with Breast Imaging topics I want to draw to your attention.  The first one is entitled “Effect of Dose Reduction on the Ability of Digital Mammography to Detect Simulated Microcalcifications”  by Yakabe, Sakai, Yabuuchi, Matsuo, Kamitani, Setoguchi, Cho, Masuda and Sasaki.  In their article, their research suggests that a certain level of dose reduction in digital mammography may be an option.  The second article is entitled “A Statistical Approach for Breast Density Segmentation” by Oliver,  Llado, Perez, Pont, Denton, Freixenet, and Marti.   Their research centers around evaluating the density of a breast by segmenting its internal parenchyma in either fatty or dense  surrounding tissue.  The third article is entitled “A New Fast Fractal Modeling Approach for the Detection of Microcalcifications in Mammograms” by Sankar and Thomas.  As the title suggests, they describe their fast method for modeling mammograms by using deterministic fractal coding to enhance microcalcifications.    The fourth article is entitled “Effect of Pixel Resolution on Texture Features of Breast Masses in Mammograms” by Rangayyan, Nguyen, ayres, and Nandi.  This group analyzed breast masses at various pixel sizes to discriminate mammographic breast lesions as benign masses or malignant tumors.   And last but not least, the fifth article is entitled “Validation of Results from Knowledge Discovery: Mass Density as a Predictor of Breast Cancer” by Woods, Oliphant, Shinki, Page, Shavlik, and Burnside.   The purpose of the study was to identify and quantify the association between high breast mass density and breast malignancy using inductive logic programming and conditional probabilities.  Their results show that both measures indicate that mass density is an important adjunct predictor of malignancy.  This article is also open access, provided by SIIM for articles deemed to be of high interest to the SIIM community.

All women readers should consider joining the Army of Women, www.armyofwomen.org.  This organization has one research goal – to prevent breast cancer.  They need women without breast cancer as well as those who are newly diagnosed or who are survivers.

From time to time, I’ll write about a new article that catches my eye.  Today’s is from Steve Langer, a pioneer and leader in our field, who writes about “DCMTB: A Virtual Appliance DICOM Toolbox”.   His group uses many of the free and/or open source tools developed recently for toolkits to help in imaging informatics such as DCM4CHEE, MIRTH, XNAT, PostGres SQL, programming environments and a group of Diagnostic Medical Physics tools.  The problem was that multiple team members could not use the same instance of a toolkit for fear of overwriting another’s work and the installation of these toolkits is not a trivial task.  Their solution is using virtual machines to build a configurable setting that gives each team member the “ownership” of a set of tools as needed and supports their multi-project environment.  This is interesting reading, don’t miss it.

Please see Dr. Erickson’s JDI post for more on the definition of ”meaningful use.” Additional SIIM information and resources on the ARRA can be found at www.siimweb.org/StIIMulus.

Technorati Tags: ARRA

If your figures come from medical images and you want to enhance the entire image using window / level, magnification, edge enhancement, unsharp masking and other common tools, this is usually OK.  When you select a region of interest and only manipulate that section and you do not describe what you did to the image accurately, then that is usually not OK.  So what I believe should be our rule of thumb for manipulation of medical images for publication is this.  If you can perform the action using a typical PACS workstation, then that action is permissible and probably desirable.  Please do window / level to make the best possible figure.  Do crop the figure so we can focus on the important parts.  If edge enhancement or unsharp masking help make the region of interest more clearly defined, then use it, but apply these filters to the entire image.  I recommend you make the image look as good as possible on the PACS workstation prior to capturing it and resizing it using the tools described in Tony Siebert’s e-tutorials.  See www.siimweb.org/e-tutorials for Tony’s work.