Symptomatic men with prostatism are presenting with a greater prevalence of significant nocturia and daytime frequency than in the past with no change in urodynamic findings. In addition, patient level of satisfaction remains greater with surgical than medical therapy regardless of the urodynamic presence of bladder outlet obstruction.

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LWIR imaging arrays are often affected by nonresponsive pixels, or "dead pixels." These dead pixels can severely degrade the quality of imagery and often have to be replaced before subsequent image processing and display of the imagery data. For LWIR arrays that are integrated with arrays of micropolarizers, the problem of dead pixels is amplified. Conventional dead pixel replacement (DPR) strategies cannot be employed since neighboring pixels are of different polarizations. In this paper we present two DPR schemes. The first is a modified nearest-neighbor replacement method. The second is a method based on redundancy in the polarization measurements.We find that the redundancy-based DPR scheme provides an order-of-magnitude better performance for typical LWIR polarimetric data.

Long-wave infrared (LWIR) polarimetric signatures provide the potential for day-night detection and identification of objects in remotely sensed imagery. The source of optical energy in the LWIR is usually due to thermal emission from the object in question, which makes the signature dependent primarily on the target and not on the external environment. In this paper we explore the impact of thermal equilibrium and the temperature of (unseen) background objects on LWIR polarimetric signatures. We demonstrate that an object can completely lose its polarization signature when it is in thermal equilibrium with its optical background, even if it has thermal contrast with the objects that appear behind it in the image.

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