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Lung cancer accounts for the largest amount of deaths worldwide with respect to the other oncological pathologies. To guarantee the most effective cure to patients for such aggressive tumours, radiomics is increasing as a novel and promising research field that aims at extracting knowledge from data in terms of quantitative measures that are computed from diagnostic images, with prognostic and predictive ends. This knowledge could be used to optimize current treatments and to maximize their efficacy. To this end, we hereby study the use of such quantitative biomarkers computed from CT images of patients affected by Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer to predict Overall Survival. The main contributions of this work are two: first, we consider different volumes of interest for the same patient to find out whether the volume surrounding the visible lesions can provide useful information; second, we introduce 3D Local Binary Patterns, which are texture measures scarcely explored in radiomics. As further validation, we show that the proposed signature outperforms not only the features automatically computed by a deep learning-based approach, but also another signature at the state-of-the-art using other handcrafted features.

The pharmacokinetic profile of caffeine was studied in 15 premature infants. Five infants received a single intravenous dose of 10 mg/kg of caffeine citrate 100% at birth and on the 15th day of life. Ten neonates were studied during daily therapy with caffeine for prophylaxis of idiopathic apnea. The time course of plasma and urinary concentrations of caffeine and theophylline shows that caffeine is transformed to theophylline at birth, while total urinary xanthines decrease significantly (p < 0.001) 72 h after the loading dose given on the 15th day of life. During the whole period of treatment, the decrease in total urinary xanthines and the constant urinary percentage elimination of theophylline are due to further metabolism of theophylline. We confirm that the intravenous loading dose of 10 mg/kg can rapidly obtain therapeutic blood levels of caffeine. We also confirm that the maintenance therapy can be carried out with a single daily dose.