Detection of cancerous lesions in skeletal remains using visual methods and radiographs

Abstract

The recognition and diagnosis of pathological conditions can provide identifying characteristics that lead to the identification of unknown remains. While pathological lesions on dry bone are usually detected by gross visual examination, potentially individuating lesions may not be detected without radiographic analysis. Radiography may be especially important to diagnose metastatic cancer, where lesions may begin on the inner surface of the bone. The objective of this study was to determine if and on what skeletal elements metastatic cancerous lesions are detected more frequently when using radiographs compared to dry bone examination. Multiple skeletal elements from 30 individuals with reported soft tissue cancers were examined for the presence of visible lesions on dry bone and on radiographs. Results show that 63% of the sample with reported soft tissue cancers exhibited visible lesions. Of these, 42% of the lesions were identified solely on radiographs and 58% exhibited distinct lesions using both dry bone and radiographic analyses. A comparison of the two methods of lesion detection indicates that macroscopic analysis alone cannot capture the range of cancerous lesion manifestations. Here, I suggest a method for practitioners that minimizes time and expense in radiographing to prioritize skeletal elements that best exhibit cancerous lesions that would have otherwise been hidden on dry bone.

Understanding multi-scale spatiotemporal energy consumption data: A visual analysis approach

“…Visual analysis has been used in bioinformatics and finance. For example, visual analysis is used to analyze genome structure [7,8] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2022.125939 Received 11 February 2022; Received in revised form 19 September 2022; Accepted 29 October 2022 and investigate lesions [9], and in finance, it is used to detect financial risks [10], financial fraud [11], etc. Due to its intuitive nature and its ability to incorporate human cognitive ability into data analysis, visual analysis can be used to solve problems that are difficult or time-consuming to analyze.…”