Change of vertebral orientation, between the supine position and the prone position.

PURPOSE: Our aim was to assess the change of vertebral orientation, expressed in the sagittal plane, in the transversal plane and in the frontal plane, at each level from T1 to S1 between the supine position (like in in a CT scan) and the prone position lying on bolsters like in an OR. METHODS: Thirty-six patients were selected and included for a total number of one hundred and forty-eight vertebral levels. There were 30 females and 6 males. The mean age was 15 years and 9 months. A semi-automatic image processing technique and software (3D slicer), with a custom-made python script add-on, was used for each patient: paired preoperative CT scan and intraoperative cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scan were processed to acquire complete spinal reconstructions in a consistent 3D coordinate system. The aim was to automatically compute a set of sagittal, transversal, and frontal rotations of each vertebral level of the same patient describing the 3D vertebral rotation between the supine position and the prone position lying on bolsters. RESULTS: For sagittal analysis, the results showed a behavior in the evolution of rotation depending on the level. Between T01 and T10, the rotation was between - 14° and - 8°. Between T10 and L05, the sagittal rotation increased from - 10° up to + 10°. For frontal and transversal analysis, the rotations were under 6.5°. CONCLUSION: These results could be valuable to perform a safe virtual templating: the information given by the virtual templating seems to be more accurate in the transversal plane than in the sagittal plane.

Catastrophic antiphospholipid syndrome presented as ruptured papillary muscle during puerperium in a patient with systemic lupus erythematosus.

INTRODUCTION: Catastrophic antiphospholipid syndrome (CAPS) is a rare and serious phenomenon that requires prompt recognition and treatment. CASE PRESENTATION: The authors present the case of a puerperal woman with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) admitted to the emergency room with headache, blurred vision, thoracic pain, and purpuric lesions on both ears. Echocardiogram revealed global decrease in left ventricular function while cardiac and inflammatory markers were elevated. Three days after admission she developed cardiogenic shock due to rupture of mitral papillary muscle which required emergent cardiac surgery, with replacement of the mitral valve; treatment with anticoagulation, high-dose glucocorticoids, and intravenous immunoglobulins were initiated. Cardiac and brain MRI revealed signs of ischemic lesions in both organs. Histopathology analysis of the placenta and papillary muscle showed signs of ischemia secondary to microvascular thrombosis. Based on the clinical demonstration of thrombosis in three organs, and the presence of lupus anticoagulant antibodies, a diagnosis of probable CAPS was established. CONCLUSION: This case highlights the importance of a high level of suspicion of CAPS, particularly in patients with risk factors, and the value of immediate adequate treatment. Moreover, the rupture of a papillary muscle with histologically consistent signs of antiphospholipid syndrome expands the spectrum of involvement of this disease and should be considered as a rare but life-threatening possibility in patients with myocardial injury.

Osteochondrosis of the medial malleolar epiphysis: A case report and review of the literature.

INTRODUCTION: Osteochondrosis is characterized by a disturbance of enchondral ossification in skeletally immature patients and should be investigated in children having a history of persistent foot and ankle pain. Involvement of the medial malleolar epiphysis is rarely reported. PRESENTATION OF CASE: We describe the case of a sporty 12-year-old male with osteochondrosis of the left medial malleolar epiphysis treated with a conservative management. DISCUSSION: Calcanear, navicular and metatarsal apophysis are the most common locations for osteochondrosis in ankle and foot. Anyway other osteochondrosis should be excluded. Medial malleolar osteochondrosis is occasionally described. We performed a review of the relevant literature and we summarized clinical aspects, radiological characteristics and reported management of this painful and probably underestimated condition. CONCLUSION: Medial malleolar osteochondrosis is a rare but well recognized condition. Only seven cases are described in literature.

Osteochondral alteration in a child treated with levetiracetam: a rare case of juvenile osteochondritis dissecans of the talar head.

Levetiracetam is a relatively novel antiepileptic drug used for the treatment of partial and generalized seizures in adult and children. Several animal studies describe a possible drug adverse effect on skeletal growth and metabolism. We present a case report of a 10-year-old female child who underwent a prolonged 7-year treatment with levetiracetam for sporadic secondary convulsions secondary to enterovirus encephalitis at the age of 15 months. This patient developed an osteochondritis dissecans lesion (OCD) of the talar head well treated conservatively. Only a few cases have been described of this rare type of OCD. We hypothesize a possible association between levetiracetam therapy and OCD development, suggesting the importance of long-term control of bone growth in levetiracetam-treated pediatric populations.

An ultrasonographic risk score for detecting symptomatic carotid atherosclerotic plaques.

this paper proposes a risk score computed from ultrasound data that correlates to plaque activity. It has the twofold purpose of detecting symptomatic plaques and estimating the likelihood of the asymptomatic lesion to become symptomatic. The proposed ultrasonographic activity index (UAI) relies on the plaque active profile, which is a combination of the most discriminate ultrasound parameter associated with symptoms. These features are extracted by the automatic algorithm and also by the physician from the ultrasound images and from some transformations on it, such as monogenic decomposition, which is a novelty in this clinical problem. This information is used to compute a risk score from the conditional probabilities of either symptomatic or asymptomatic groups. Symptom detection performance is evaluated on a transversal dataset of 146 plaques, where UAI obtained 83.5% accuracy, 84.1% sensitivity, and 83.7% specificity. Performance is also assessed on a longitudinal study of 112 plaques, where UAI shows a significant improvement over the gold standard degree of stenosis, demonstrating higher power at predicting which asymptomatic plaques developed symptoms in an average follow-up of ten months. Results suggest that this score could have a positive impact on early stroke prevention and treatment planning.

Bilateral osteochondrosis of the distal tibial epiphysis: a case report.

Osteochondrosis is a developmental disease characterized by an alteration of endochondral ossification. Genetic causes, repetitive mechanical stresses, vascular abnormalities, hormonal imbalances, and interruption of the blood supply to the epiphyseal cartilage are all described causes of osteochondrosis and the etiology is probably multifactorial. Osteochondrosis can occur in different apophysis and epiphysis in all immature skeletons. Distal tibial epiphysis is rarely involved and most of the time unilaterally. We report on an 11-year-old female with bilateral osteochondrosis on distal tibial epiphysis. Only one other similar case has been described in the literature to date.

Atherosclerotic plaque tissue characterization in 2D ultrasound longitudinal carotid scans for automated classification: a paradigm for stroke risk assessment.

In the case of carotid atherosclerosis, to avoid unnecessary surgeries in asymptomatic patients, it is necessary to develop a technique to effectively differentiate symptomatic and asymptomatic plaques. In this paper, we have presented a data mining framework that characterizes the textural differences in these two classes using several grayscale features based on a novel combination of trace transform and fuzzy texture. The features extracted from the delineated plaque regions in B-mode ultrasound images were used to train several classifiers in order to prepare them for classification of new test plaques. Our CAD system was evaluated using two different databases consisting of 146 (44 symptomatic to 102 asymptomatic) and 346 (196 symptomatic and 150 asymptomatic) images. Both these databases differ in the way the ground truth was determined. We obtained classification accuracies of 93.1 and 85.3 %, respectively. The techniques are low cost, easily implementable, objective, and non-invasive. For more objective analysis, we have also developed novel integrated indices using a combination of significant features.

A CAD system for atherosclerotic plaque assessment.

Recently, several atherosclerotic plaque characterization methods were proposed based on plaque morphology assessed through 2D ultrasound. It is of extreme importance to establish an objective quantification measure which allows the physicians to determine the risk of plaque rupture, and thus, of brain stroke. Having these, sometimes complex, measures easily and quickly assessed might prove invaluable for the physician an patient alike. This paper is a first attempt to incorporate such scores in a user-friendly software platform for Computer-aided Diagnosis. This tool provides a way to objectively and interactively characterize the atherosclerotic plaque, to store relevant patient data and to use several processing tools to outline the plaque and compute different echogenicity measures. Combinations of these features are used to provide two objective measure with clinical significance, known as activity index and enhanced activity index.

Neural physiological modeling towards a hemodynamic response function for fMRI.

The BOLD signal provided by the functional MRI medical modality measures the ratio of oxy- to deoxyhaemoglobin at each location inside the brain. The detection of activated regions upon the application of an external stimulus, e.g., visual or auditive, is based on the comparison of the mentioned ratios of a rest condition (pre-stimulus) and of a stimulated condition (post-stimulus). Therefore, an accurate knowledge of the impulse response of the BOLD signal to neural stimulus in a given region is needed to design robust detectors that discriminate, with a high level of confidence activated from non activated regions. Usually, in the literature, the hemodynamic response has been modeled by known functions, e.g., gamma functions, fitting them, or not, to the experimental data. In this paper we present a different approach based on the physiologic behavior of the vascular and neural tissues. Here, a linear model based on reasonable physiological assumptions about oxygen consumption and vasodilatation processes are used to design a linear model from which a transfer function is derived. The estimation of the model parameters is performed by using the minimum square error (MSE) by forcing the adjustment of the stimulus response to the observations. Experimental results using real data have shown that the proposed model successfully explains the observations allowing to achieve small values for the fitting error.