Early detection of extravasation of radiographic contrast medium. Work in progress.

Microwave radiometry is a passive and noninvasive technique that allows quick detection of subcutaneous temperature changes. The feasibility of this technique for differentiating normal intravenous infusions of radiographic contrast medium from extravasations of contrast medium was tested in anesthetized dogs. Room-temperature and heated ionic and nonionic contrast media were administered at flow rates ranging from 0.2 to 9.9 mL/sec by means of a power injector. On the basis of these experiments, an algorithm to adjust for extravasation detection thresholds as a function of injection flow rates was developed. With this algorithm, results showed a false-positive rate of 0% at all infusion rates and false-negative rates of 2%, 2%, and 4% at pump speeds of 0.2, 1.0, and 9.9 mL/sec, respectively. The times of these extravasation "alarms" corresponded to maximum extravasated volumes, respectively, of 4, 6.5, and 8 mL. Microwave radiometry has clinical potential for early detection of extravasation of contrast medium administered with power injectors.

Information preserving image compression for archiving NMR images.

This paper presents a result on information preserving compression of NMR images for the archiving purpose. Both Lynch-Davisson coding and linear predictive coding have been studied. For NMR images of 256 x 256 x 12 resolution, the Lynch-Davisson coding with a block size of 64 as applied to prediction error sequences in the Gray code bit planes of each image gave an average compression ratio of 2.3:1 for 14 testing images. The predictive coding with a third order linear predictor and the Huffman encoding of the prediction error gave an average compression ratio of 3.1:1 for 54 images under test, while the maximum compression ratio achieved was 3.8:1. This result is one step further toward the improvement, albeit small, of the information preserving image compression for medical applications.