There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

MEDICAL LITERATURE has been deluged during the past few years with books and papers on penicillin; but a book which has been produced under the general editorship of Sir Alexander Fleming himself represents a complete and authoritative summary of penicillin therapy as it stands today.' The book contains a series of independent contributions by \"experienced and eminent men who have worked with penicillin in Great Britain\". Their opinions and practical methods differ slightly, and there is some overlapping; but these are not disadvantageous, comparison and contrast lending interest to the reading. In the first or general section of the book Fleming contributes two chapters, one on the history and development of penicillin, introducing some interesting sidelights in the romance of discovery, the other on the bacteriological control of penicillin therapy. In both chapters the information is set out in meticulous detail and with a clarity and simplicity which can be enjoyed by all readers. Fleming also gives the right perspective to the place of penicillin amongst the antibiotics and lays down the principles of treatment. Both chapters are well illustrated and are the most outstanding in the book. Included in this first section also are chapters on the chemistry and manufacture of penicillin and its pharmacy, pharmacology and methods of administration. The second section of the book is entirely clinical, giving each author's view on the use of penicillin therapy in a disease or an infection of some particular region of the body. The entire range of peniCillin-sensitive conditions is considered in twenty authoritative and clearly written chapters; these contain many references and illustrations. Dental and veterinary diseases are also given fairly full consideration. The final section is a condensed resume of much of the preceding chapters and is written for. the general practttioner. This chapter is superttuous: it does not contain enough detall to be of much practical value. The book as a Whole, however, will undoubtedly be considered a classical contribution to medical literature and is strongly recommended, not only because of the general interest of its topic, but as a reference book on penicillin therapy of hitherto unequalled excellence. The typography, although conforming to war economy standards, is clear and the paper is good. There is an excellent list of references and the index is satisfactory.

Gray's Anatomy

http://disciplinas.stoa.usp.br/pluginfile.php/166516/mod_resource/content/1/Radiomics.pdf

Radiomics: the process and the challenges

Several existing volume rendering algorithms operate by factoring the viewing transformation into a 3D shear parallel to the data slices, a projection to form an intermediate but distorted image, and a 2D warp to form an undistorted final image. We extend this class of algorithms in three ways. First, we describe a new object-order rendering algorithm based on the factorization that is significantly faster than published algorithms with minimal loss of image quality. Shear-warp factorizations have the property that rows of voxels in the volume are aligned with rows of pixels in the intermediate image. We use this fact to construct a scanline-based algorithm that traverses the volume and the intermediate image in synchrony, taking advantage of the spatial coherence present in both. We use spatial data structures based on run-length encoding for both the volume and the intermediate image. Our implementation running on an SGI Indigo workstation renders a 2563 voxel medical data set in one second. Our second extension is a shear-warp factorization for perspective viewing transformations, and we show how our rendering algorithm can support this extension. Third, we introduce a data structure for encoding spatial coherence in unclassified volumes (i.e. scalar fields with no precomputed opacity). When combined with our shear-warp rendering algorithm this data structure allows us to classify and render a 2563 voxel volume in three seconds. The method extends to support mixed volumes and geometry and is parallelizable.

/pdf/fast-volume-rendering-using-a-shear-warp-factorization-of-11o5tav1m5.pdf

Fast volume rendering using a shear-warp factorization of the viewing transformation

A review of 3D vessel lumen segmentation techniques: models, features and extraction schemes.

Scale-Based Fuzzy Connected Image Segmentation

Three-dimensional-VIEWNIX is a data-, machine-, and application-independent software system, developed and maintained on an ongoing basis by the Medical Imaging Processing Group. It is aimed at serving the needs of biomedical visualization researchers as well as biomedical end users. Three-dimensional-VIEWNIX is not designed around a fixed methodology or a set of methods packaged in a fixed fashion for a fixed application. Instead, we have identified and incorporated in 3DVIEWNIX a set of basic imaging transforms that are required in most visualization, manipulation, and analysis methods. In addition to visualization, it incorporates a variety of multidimensional structure manipulation and analysis methods. We have tried to make its design as much as possible image-dimensionality- independent to make it just as convenient to process 2D and 3D data as it is to process 4D data. It is distributed with source code in an open fashion. A single source code version is installed on a variety of computing platforms. It is currently in use worldwide.

3DVIEWNIX: an open, transportable, multidimensional, multimodality, multiparametric imaging software system

A structure model for volume rendering, called a shell, is introduced. Roughly, a shell consists of a set of voxels in the vicinity of the structure boundary together with a number of attributes associated with the voxels in this set. By carefully choosing the attributes and storing the shell in a special data structure that allows random access to the voxels and their attributes, storage and computational requirements can be reduced drastically. Only the voxels that potentially contribute to the rendition actually enter into major computation. Instead of the commonly used ray-casting paradigm, voxel projection is used. This eliminates the need for render-time interpolation and further enhances the speed. By having one of the attributes as a boundary likelihood function that determines the most likely location of voxels in the shell to be on the structure boundary, surface-based measurements can be made. The shell concept, the data structure, the rendering and measurement algorithms, and examples drawn from medical imaging that illustrate these concepts are described. >

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel1/38/6448/00252558.pdf

Shell rendering

A system for brain tumor volume estimation via MR imaging and fuzzy connectedness

Presents a near-automatic process for separating vessels from background and other clutter as well as for separating arteries and veins in contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiographic (CE-MRA) image data, and an optimal method for three-dimensional visualization of vascular structures. The separation process utilizes fuzzy connected object delineation principles and algorithms. The first step of this separation process is the segmentation of the entire vessel structure from the background and other clutter via absolute fuzzy connectedness. The second step is to separate artery from vein within this entire vessel structure via iterative relative fuzzy connectedness. After seed voxels are specified inside the artery and vein in the CE-MRA image, the small regions of the bigger aspects of artery and vein are separated in the initial iterations, and further detailed aspects of artery and vein are included in later iterations. At each iteration, the artery and vein compete among themselves to grab membership of each voxel in the vessel structure based on the relative strength of connectedness of the voxel in the artery and vein. This approach has been implemented in a software package for routine use in a clinical setting and tested on 133 CE-MRA studies of the pelvic region and two studies of the carotid system from 6 different hospitals. In all studies, unified parameter settings produced correct artery-vein separation. When compared with manual segmentation/separation, the authors' algorithms were able to separate higher order branches, and therefore produced vastly more details in the segmented vascular structure. The total operator and computer time taken per study is on the average about 4.5 min. To date, this technique seems to be the only image processing approach that can be routinely applied for artery and vein separation.

Dewey Odhner

Papers

Scale-Based Fuzzy Connected Image Segmentation

3DVIEWNIX: an open, transportable, multidimensional, multimodality, multiparametric imaging software system

Shell rendering

A system for brain tumor volume estimation via MR imaging and fuzzy connectedness

Artery-vein separation via MRA-An image processing approach