I just returned from an Editor’s Forum where editors of Radiology journals meet to discuss issues, ideas, problems and other things related to publication.  It’s always educational, exciting, and stimulating.  This year we worked on “figures”.  How do we get figures in the correct resolution and size for publication from PACS?  It turns out that Tony Seibert has agreed to do five online tutorials on this issue and more.  The first three tutorials are published on the SIIM web site at www.siimweb.org/e-tutorials.  You will find a tutorial on image characteristics – that tricky question of how the size of a pixel in the PACS world translates to dots per inch for publishing.  The next two tutorials are demonstrations of capturing images and then manipulating them for publication using open-source or free software.  We are all aware that Photoshop, the “gold standard” of image manipulation is expensive and complex and Tony has made the process of preparing figures simple, affordable, accessible for all authors.  Check it out and watch for his next installments on graphs, line drawings and powerpoint.  Next time we’ll talk about how much manipulation is ethically allowed.

September 11 (a day that will live in infamy) is this year’s deadline date for the submission of abstracts for SIIM 2010!!!  Help shape the SIIM 2010 program by submitting your scientific abstracts before September 11, 2009.  Go to www.siimweb.org/siim2010 for all the details.  Don’t forget abstracts submitted are eligible for best student paper, poster and demonstration awards and cash prizes.  Students with the most highly evaluated abstracts can win the New Investigator Travel Award.  See www.siimweb.org/awards for details.

SIIM 2010 will be held in Beautiful Minneapolis.  Minneapolis is wonderful in the spring and you can’t miss the Mall of America, truly a memorable experience (this from a confirmed shopper – not always a buyer, but certainly a shopper)

Three new articles have been added to the JDI SpringerLink Online-First site in addition to one of the articles described in my last post. They will be of interest to researchers who are working on methods of improving interpretation for radiologists.

PET/CT Fusion Viewing Software for Use with Picture Archiving and Communication Systems by Ki Chun Im, Ik Soo Choi, Jin-Sook Ryu, Gi Seoung Eo, Jae Seung Kim and Dae Hyuk Moon.

This is a description of PET-viewer, software developed by the authors to display co-registered PET and CT images.  Reconstructed datasets can be archived in the PACS. 

Assessing the Accuracy Factors in the Determination of Postoperative Acetabular Cup Orientation Using Hybrid 2D–3D Registration by Guoyan Zheng

The program developed by this author, called HipMatch, has been described previously.  This article describes the process of assessing accuracy of the program using a cadaver pelvis which was imaged in different positions.  Since it is sometimes difficult to precisely position a patient, this tool promises to be valuable in routine clinical use.

A New Fast Fractal Modeling Approach for the Detection of Microcalcifications in Mammograms by Deepa Sankar and Tessamma Thomas.

This article investigates a new way to use fractal modeling to help detect microcalcifications in mammograms.  Because modeling using fractal encoding takes a tremendous amount of time, the authors used mean and variance, the dynamic range of the image blocks, and mass center features to reduce the amount of time needed for encoding.  The authors demonstrate significant reduction in time and may provide insight to others performing this type of modeling.

If you are interested in compression, and who isn’t in these days of huge data acquisition, we have many JDI compression articles ready to be read on Springerlink online-first. These have been officially published, but not yet in the print copy – we have a huge backlog of articles to get to print. I’ll report on two of the compression studies today. To get to Springerlink, I always start at the SIIM website: www.siimweb.org and then follow the links to publications and JDI. It’s a good idea to check out Springerlink every week or two for new publications, but I’ll suggest a couple each week to get everyone interested.

My first article is titled: “A Multicenter Observer Performance Study of 3D JPEG2000 Compression of Thin-Slice CT” by Bradley J. Erickson, Elizabeth Krupinski and Katherine P. Andriole
The goal of this multi-center study was to determine the compression level at which 3D JPEG 2000 compression if thin slice CTs of the chest and abdomen-pelvis becomes visually perceptible. The results show that even mild compression is perceptible with current technology but does not evaluate the changes in diagnostic accuracy.This article is online first and open access on Springer.

The second article has similar goals and is titled: “Pan-Canadian Evaluation of Irreversible Compression Ratios (“Lossy” Compression) for Development of National Guidelines” by David Koff, Peter Bak, Paul Brownrigg, Danoush Hosseinzadeh, April Khademi, Alex Kiss, Luigi Lepanto, Tracy Michalak, Harry Shulman and Andrew Volkening
This study from Canada evaluates lossy compression and recommends the level at which lossy compression can be confidently used in diagnostic imaging applications. The authors tested JPEG and JPEG-2000 DICOM supported compression algorithms. Their results showed that at low levels of compression, there was no significant difference between the performance of lossy JPEG and lossy JPEG 2000 and that both could be used without effecting diagnostic accuracy. At higher levels of compression, lossy JPEG proved to be more effective than JPEG 2000 in some cases. They provide a table of recommended compression ratios for each modality and anatomical area investigated.
This article is online first on Springer.