adminMorning Health Talk:
New Delhi, July 22, 2018:
Can a tobacco company start a public health initiative?
Under World Health Organisation guidelines, tobacco companies are not allowed to be involved in any public health initiatives, due to the millions of people that their products have killed.
Imaging breakthrough:
NIH Clinical Center releases dataset of 32,000 CT images
The National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center has made a large-scale dataset of CT images publicly available to help the scientific community improve detection accuracy of lesions. While most publicly available medical image datasets have less than a thousand lesions, this dataset, named DeepLesion, has over 32,000 annotated lesions identified on CT images. The images, which have been thoroughly anonymized, represent 4,400 unique patients, who are partners in research at the NIH.
Similar to a physical bookmark, radiologists save their place and mark significant findings to be able to come back to at a later time. These bookmarks are complex – they provide arrows, lines, diameters, and text that can tell the exact location and size of a lesion so experts can identify growth or new disease.
With the release of the dataset, researchers hope the others will be able to:
- Develop a universal lesion detector that will help radiologists find all types of lesions. It may open the possibility to serve as an initial screening tool and send its detection results to other specialist systems trained on certain types of lesions.
- Mine and study the relationship between different types of lesions. In DeepLesion, multiple findings are often marked in one CT exam image. Researchers are able to analyze their relationship to make new discoveries.
- More accurately and automatically measure sizes of all lesions a patient has, enabling the whole body assessment of cancer burden.
Dr KK Aggarwal
Padma Shri Awardee
Vice President CMAAO
President HCFI
HealthySoch
