Automated segmentation of liver and liver cysts from bounded abdominal MR images in patients with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease.

Liver and liver cyst volume measurements are important quantitative imaging biomarkers for assessment of disease progression in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) and polycystic liver disease (PLD). To date, no study has presented automated segmentation and volumetric computation of liver and liver cysts in these populations. In this paper, we proposed an automated segmentation framework for liver and liver cysts from bounded abdominal MR images in patients with ADPKD. To model the shape and variations in ADPKD livers, the spatial prior probability map (SPPM) of liver location and the tissue prior probability maps (TPPMs) of liver parenchymal tissue intensity and cyst morphology were generated. Formulated within a three-dimensional level set framework, the TPPMs successfully captured liver parenchymal tissues and cysts, while the SPPM globally constrained the initial surfaces of the liver into the desired boundary. Liver cysts were extracted by combined operations of the TPPMs, thresholding, and false positive reduction based on spatial prior knowledge of kidney cysts and distance map. With cross-validation for the liver segmentation, the agreement between the radiology expert and the proposed method was 84% for shape congruence and 91% for volume measurement assessed by the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). For the liver cyst segmentation, the agreement between the reference method and the proposed method was ICC = 0.91 for cyst volumes and ICC = 0.94 for % cyst-to-liver volume.

An organizational model to improve the robotic system among general surgeons.

INTRODUCTION: Robotic surgery has gained wide acceptance in recent years. However its development is slower and the lack of high level experience with this technique is an important limitation. This manuscript discusses some of the reasons of it and aims to describe the organizational system we have progressively established in our center in order to improve the development of Robotic program in our surgical area. METHODS: Some points may be required to improve the robotic program development in a general surgical department, including: a broad availability of robotic system in a surgical area; an ideal setting area with mainly oncological and hepato-biliary-pancreatic disease; the need of a mainly young team; a broad application of the robotic system in more general surgical fields; a high motivation on robotic use; a departmental and institutional economical effort. We have tried to achieve these goals before starting the robotic program in our department at October 2010. RESULTS: From October 2010 until November 2013 a total of 170 procedures have been performed, 92% of them for malignant diseases. Conversion rate and overall morbidity was 5% and 19%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The organizational model defined in our center is facilitating the constant and progressive development of the robotic program. A broad and flexible availability of the robotic system, a progressive increase of young surgeons joining this technology as well as the institutional and departmental economical effort are the points with which the robotic system may increase its development in a surgical department.

Endosperm-preferred expression of maize genes as revealed by transcriptome-wide analysis of expressed sequence tags.

The transcriptome-wide endosperm-preferred expression of maize genes was addressed by analyzing a large database of expressed sequence tags (ESTs). We generated 30,531 high quality sequence-reads from the 5'-ends of cDNA libraries from maize endosperm harvested at 10, 15, and 20 days after pollination. A further 196,900 maize sequence-reads retrieved from public databases were added to this endosperm collection to generate MAIZEST, a database with tools for data storage and analysis. MAIZEST contains 227,431 ESTs, one third of which represents developing endosperm and the remaining two-thirds represent transcripts from 49 cDNA libraries constructed from different organs and tissues. Assembling the MAIZEST ESTs generated 29,206 putative transcripts, of which a set of 4032 assembled sequences was composed exclusively of sequences derived from endosperm cDNA libraries. After sequence analysis using overlapping parameters, a sub-set of 2403 assembled sequences was functionally annotated and revealed a wide variety of putative new genes involved in endosperm development and metabolism.