Purpose The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to significant disruptions in the healthcare system including surges of infected patients exceeding local capacity, closures of primary care offices, and delays of non-emergent medical care. Government-initiated measures to decrease healthcare utilization (i.e., "flattening the curve") have included shelterin-place mandates and social distancing, which have taken effect across most of the USA. We evaluate the immediate impact of the Public Health Messaging and shelter-in-place mandates on Emergency Department (ED) demand for radiology services. Methods We analyzed ED radiology volumes from the five University of California health systems during a 2-week time period following the shelter-in-place mandate and compared those volumes with March 2019 and early April 2019 volumes. Results ED radiology volumes declined from the 2019 baseline by 32 to 40% (p < 0.001) across the five health systems with a total decrease in volumes across all 5 systems by 35% (p < 0.001). Stratifying by subspecialty, the smallest declines were seen in non-trauma thoracic imaging, which decreased 18% (p value < 0.001), while all other non-trauma studies decreased by 48% (p < 0.001). Conclusion Total ED radiology demand may be a marker for public adherence to shelter-in-place mandates, though ED chest radiology demand may increase with an increase in COVID-19 cases.
To develop a deep learning model to delineate the transition zone (TZ) and peripheral zone (PZ) of the prostate on MR images.
Materials and Methods:This retrospective study was composed of patients who underwent a multiparametric prostate MRI and an MRI/ transrectal US fusion biopsy between January 2013 and May 2016. A board-certified abdominal radiologist manually segmented the prostate, TZ, and PZ on the entire data set. Included accessions were split into 60% training, 20% validation, and 20% test data sets for model development. Three convolutional neural networks with a U-Net architecture were trained for automatic recognition of the prostate organ, TZ, and PZ. Model performance for segmentation was assessed using Dice scores and Pearson correlation coefficients.Results: A total of 242 patients were included (242 MR images; 6292 total images). Models for prostate organ segmentation, TZ segmentation, and PZ segmentation were trained and validated. Using the test data set, for prostate organ segmentation, the mean Dice score was 0.940 (interquartile range, 0.930-0.961), and the Pearson correlation coefficient for volume was 0.981 (95% CI: 0.966, 0.989). For TZ segmentation, the mean Dice score was 0.910 (interquartile range, 0.894-0.938), and the Pearson correlation coefficient for volume was 0.992 (95% CI: 0.985, 0.995). For PZ segmentation, the mean Dice score was 0.774 (interquartile range, 0.727-0.832), and the Pearson correlation coefficient for volume was 0.927 (95% CI: 0.870, 0.957).
Conclusion:Deep learning with an architecture composed of three U-Nets can accurately segment the prostate, TZ, and PZ.
Intravesical Bacillus Calmette–Guerin (BCG) immunotherapy is a proven, effective treatment for intermediate- and high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Minor side effects are common and expected but systemic effects can occur in <5% of treated patients. We present a rare case of a 49-year-old male that presented with fever and chills after 3 weeks of intravesical BCG therapy post transurethral resection of bladder tumor. New renal lesions were present on contrast-enhanced computed tomography scan which was histologically proven to be necrotizing renal granulomatosis.
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