Purpose Positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) has established values for imaging of head and neck cancers, including the nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), utilizing both morphologic and functional information. In this paper, we introduce a computerized system for automatic detection of NPC, targeting both the primary tumor and regional nodal metastasis, on PET/CT. Methods Candidate lesions were extracted based on the features from both PET and CT images and a priori knowledge of anatomical features and subsequently classified by a support vector machine algorithm. The system was validated with 25 PET/CT examinations from 10 patients suffering from NPC. Lesions manually contoured by experienced radiologists were used as the gold standard. Results Results showed that the system successfully identified all 53 hypermetabolic lesions larger than 1 cm in size and excluded normal physiological uptake in brown fat, muscles, bone marrow, brain, and salivary glands. Conclusion The system combined both imaging features and a priori clinical knowledge for classification between pathological and physiological uptake. Preliminary results showed that the system was highly accurate and promising for adoption in clinical use.

The kurtosis parameters (K⊥ , K// , and MK) reflect different microstructural information in the IGE children with GTCS, and this support the value of DKI in studying children GTCS.

Infrared images of the skull surface were obtained in urethane-anesthetized rats and gerbils before, during and after mechanical stimulation of the face and mystacial vibrissae on one side. Areas of increased temperature on the skull, localized mainly over the face area of the primary somatosensory cortex contralateral to the side of stimulation, appeared within 4-5 s after the onset of stimulation. Rarely, such temperature change was recorded bilaterally. Temperatures did not remain high on the intact skull in rats, but fell to baseline within minutes after stimulus onset regardless of stimulus duration. In rats in which the skull had been thinned and in gerbils with intact skull, temperatures remained elevated during the course of stimulation. We were unable to resolve the activation of individual vibrissae.

It is feasible to measure AIF in PET-CT images without blood sampling. The PET-CT AIF is very different from the PET AIF calculated by PET images only without PVE correction. The PET-CT AIF may be a better choice because the Ki by PET AIF can be overestimated.