Both nonparametric and parametric approaches for DCE-MRI analysis possess the ability to quantify tissue perfusion.

SummaryEstimates suggest that one third of United States health care spending results from overuse or misuse of tests, procedures, and therapies. The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, in partnership with Consumer Reports, initiated the "Choosing Wisely" campaign to identify areas in patient care and resource use most open to improvement. Nine subspecialty organizations joined the campaign; each organization identified five tests, procedures, or therapies that are overused, are misused, or could potentially lead to harm or unnecessary health care spending. Each of the American Society of Nephrology's (ASN's) 10 advisory groups submitted recommendations for inclusion. The ASN Quality and Patient Safety Task Force selected five recommendations based on relevance and importance to individuals with kidney disease.Recommendations selected were: (1) Do not perform routine cancer screening for dialysis patients with limited life expectancies without signs or symptoms; (2) do not administer erythropoiesis-stimulating agents to CKD patients with hemoglobin levels ‡10 g/dl without symptoms of anemia; (3) avoid nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in individuals with hypertension, heart failure, or CKD of all causes, including diabetes; (4) do not place peripherally inserted central catheters in stage 3-5 CKD patients without consulting nephrology; (5) do not initiate chronic dialysis without ensuring a shared decision-making process between patients, their families, and their physicians.These five recommendations and supporting evidence give providers information to facilitate prudent care decisions and empower patients to actively participate in critical, honest conversations about their care, potentially reducing unnecessary health care spending and preventing harm.

When compared with balloon angioplasty, a stent graft provided superior target lesion primary patency at 6 months for treatment of venous anastomotic stenoses of dysfunctional and thrombosed prosthetic hemodialysis grafts.

This paper introduces a deep-learning based computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system for the early detection of acute renal transplant rejection. For noninvasive detection of kidney rejection at an early stage, the proposed CAD system is based on the fusion of both imaging markers and clinical biomarkers. The former are derived from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) by estimating the apparent diffusion coefficients (ADC) representing the perfusion of the blood and the diffusion of the water inside the transplanted kidney. The clinical biomarkers, namely: creatinine clearance (CrCl) and serum plasma creatinine (SPCr), are integrated into the proposed CAD system as kidney functionality indexes to enhance its diagnostic performance. The ADC maps are estimated for a user-defined region of interest (ROI) that encompasses the whole kidney. The estimated ADCs are fused with the clinical biomarkers and the fused data is then used as an input to train and test a convolutional neural network (CNN) based classifier. The CAD system is tested on DW-MRI scans collected from 56 subjects from geographically diverse populations and different scanner types/image collection protocols. The overall accuracy of the proposed system is 92.9% with 93.3% sensitivity and 92.3% specificity in distinguishing non-rejected kidney transplants from rejected ones. These results demonstrate the potential of the proposed system for a reliable non-invasive diagnosis of renal transplant status for any DW-MRI scans, regardless of the geographical differences and/or imaging protocol.

The use of tunneled catheters (TDC) for chronic hemodialysis is frequent and often fails due to fibrin or thrombus and infection. We hypothesized that the presence of fibrin sheath in TDC increases the risk for subsequent catheter malfunction and infection. We did a retrospective review of TDC exchanges and de novo placements from January 2005 to September 2011. Demographic data, information about the catheter procedure, and radiological data were collected. Final outcome analysis included 168 procedure events. Three groups of catheter procedures were identified: catheter exchange without a fibrin sheath (CE), catheter exchange with a treated fibrin sheath (CEF), and de novo catheter placements (DCP). Fibrin sheath incidence was 47%. In the CEF group, there was no statistical difference in the incidence of subsequent infections or dysfunctions (7% and 60%, respectively), when compared with the CE group (9% and 43%, respectively), (p=0.3). Mean time to subsequent dysfunction or infection was similar for CEF and CE (135 vs. 136 days, p-value, 0.98). Fibrin sheaths are common and should be evaluated when performing TDC exchange. If the fibrin sheath is treated, there is no increased incidence in subsequent catheter dysfunction or infection compared with patients without a fibrin sheath.