During the course of radiation therapy, patients may experience reactions to their treatments. Typically, the severity of reactions is assessed by a radiation oncologist and nurse using a formal grading scheme. Research conducted by North Shore-LIJ’s radiation oncologists evaluated the reliability of these grading systems by independent caregivers…
"Until now the only ways of obtaining similar data on the blood vessels in patients’ tumors were either taking a biopsy, which is a surgical procedure that can harm the patients and often cannot be repeated, or PET scanning, which provides limited information and exposes patients to a dose of radiation," says Kyrre Emblem, PhD, of the Martinos Center, lead and corresponding author of the report. "VAI can acquire all of this information in a single MR exam that takes less than two minutes and can be safely repeated many times." Previous studies in animals and in human patients have shown that the ability of anti-angiogenesis drugs to improve survival in cancer therapy stems from their ability to "normalize" the abnormal, leaky blood vessels that usually develop in a tumor, improving the perfusion of blood throughout a tumor and the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation. …
There are many routes to making snap judgments (not all of them particularly useful). One of these is our ability to get the "gist" of an entire image by analyzing the whole scene at once, based on interpretation of global properties and image statistics, not focusing on specific details.That seems to be what medical experts can do. They are not perfect in a fraction of a second but they do far better than random guessing when classifying medical images as normal or abnormal even though, in that blink of an eye, they cannot tell you where the problem might be located. …