A COTS-Based Microwave Imaging System for Breast-Cancer Detection.

Microwave imaging is an emerging breast cancer diagnostic technique, which aims at complementing already established methods like mammography, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound. It offers two striking advantages: no-risk for the patient and potential low-cost for national health systems. So far, however, the prototypes developed for validation in labs and clinics used costly lab instruments such as a vector network analyzer (VNA). Moreover, the CPU time required by complex image reconstruction algorithms may not be compatible with the duration of a medical examination. In this paper, both these issues are tackled. Indeed, we present a prototype system based on low-cost and off-the-shelf microwave components, custom-made antennas, and a small form-factor processing system with an embedded field-programmable gate array for accelerating the execution of the imaging algorithm. We show that our low-cost system can compete with an expensive VNA in terms of accuracy, and it is more than 20x faster than a high-performance server at image reconstruction.

FREQUENCY OF SPLENOMEGALY IN DENGUE FEVER IN CHILDREN.

BACKGROUND: Dengue Fever is caused by arthropod born viruses. According to World Health Organization approximately 50-100 million infections of dengue fever occur yearly. Objective of this study was to determine the frequency of splenomegaly in dengue fever in children. METHODS: This cross sectional study was conducted at the Department of Paediatrics, Allied Hospital, Faisalabad, during a period from June 2012 to May 2013 by including 93 Children, aged 4-14 years presenting with fever of less than 14 days with thrombocytopenia and positive IM or IgM and IgG dengue antibodies by ELISA. Patients were thoroughly evaluated by detailed history and clinical examination. Ultrasonography of the patients was performed to confirm the splenomegaly. The data was analysed to determine the frequency and percentage of disease. RESULTS: Out of 93 children, 51 (54.8%) were male and 42 (45.2%) were female. The most common clinical presentation was noted is chills and rigors in 80 (86.02%). Unusual clinical features were encephalopathy in 3T (39.78%) followed by bleeding manifestations and upper respiratory tract infection (upper RTI). Splenomegaly was seen in 45 (48.4%) children. CONCLUSION: Dengue fever is increasingly presenting with atypical presentation like splenomegaly, encephalopathy, bleeding manifestations and upper RTI.