Background Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in females around the world representing 25.1% of all cancers. The high prevalence and need for early treatment of breast malignancy highlight the importance of early and accurate diagnosis. In order to achieve this target, it is necessary to select the most appropriate modality for investigation. Early detection of breast cancer by conventional mammography tends to reduce mortality; however, it has a low sensitivity and specificity in young females with dense breasts owing to reduced contrast between a possible tumor and the surrounding breast tissue with superimposition of the glandular tissue obscuring underlying lesions. Our study included 25 patients with dense breasts presented with different breast symptoms, yet the breast lump was the most common complaint. The aim of our study is to evaluate the supplementary value of contrast-enhanced spectral mammography in the assessment of symptomatic patients with dense breasts. Results In our study, the enrolled subjects underwent both contrast-enhanced spectral mammography (CESM) and conventional full-field digital mammography (FFDM). CESM was shown to be better than FFDM in terms of sensitivity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and accuracy, measuring 100%, 77.8%, 100%, and 84%, compared to 56%, 75%, 46%, and 60%, respectively, yet both modalities showed low specificity, measuring 63.6% and 66.6% for CESM and FFDM, respectively. The added value of CESM was assessed in terms of ability to detect and correctly characterize the lesions in correlation to histopathological results where CESM could detect 88% of the lesions included in our study and correctly characterized 84% of the lesions; on the other side, FFDM detected only 20% of the lesions and correctly characterized 60% of the lesions. CESM changed the treatment plan to a more extensive surgery +/− neoadjuvant chemotherapy in 57% out of fourteen cases diagnosed with breast cancer emphasizing the role of CESM in assessing the extent of the disease, multicentricity, and multifocality and consequently tailoring the most appropriate treatment plan suitable for each patient. Conclusion Contrast-enhanced spectral mammography is superior to full-field digital mammography in patients with dense breasts with a significant supplementary value in detection, characterization of lesions, and tailoring the appropriate treatment plan.

Two field experiments were соnduсtеd at the Experimental Farm, Faculty of Agriculture, Fayoum University at "Dar-El-Ramed" Fayoum Governorate, Egypt during the two successive seasons of 2019 and 2020. The study was conducted in order to investigate the effect of withholding one irrigation at two stages as growth and three rates of Calcium carbonate nanoparticles as nano-fertilizers on growth parameters of some yellow single cross hybrids of maize under the environmental conditions of the experimentation area. The experimental layout was a split-split plot arranged in randomized complete block design with three replications where water stress treatments (skipping of some irrigations) were considered as the main plot, three yellow single cross hybrids of maize arranged in the subplot and the sub-sub plot occupied by three concentrations calcium carbonate nanoparticles treatments.Results indicated that irrigation treatment reflected positive significant influences on growth parameters, normal irrigation resulted in the best mean values of plant height, maximum number of leaves plant -1 , largest leaf area plant -1 and heaviest dry weight plant -1 in both seasons 65 and 80 (DAS). Irrigation treatments had a significant effect on number of days from sowing to 50% tasseling in the two growing seasons. The maximum number of days from sowing to 50% tasseling due to irrigation were produced from the normal irrigation compared with the other irrigation treatments {(Withholding the 4 th irrigation (65 DAP) and Withholding the 5 th irrigation (80 DAP)}.While the minimum number of days from sowing to 50% tasseling were resulted from Withholding the 5 th irrigation (80 DAP). Results showed that yellow single cross hybrids of maize were significantly differed in almost mean values of maize growth, under study in the both seasons. Maize hybrid of S. C. 2088 was significantly surpassed S. C. 2055 and S. C. 2066 in mean values of all growth characters.Calcium carbonate nanoparticles concentrations had a significant effect on growth parameters i. e. plant height, number of leaves/plant -1 , dry weight plant -1 , and total dry weight of plant in both seasons at 65 and 80 DAS. Application of high rate of calcium carbonate nanoparticles produced the highest values.

This paper proposes a robust longitudinal registration method for Contrast Enhanced Spectral Mammography in monitoring neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Because breast texture intensity changes with the treatment, a non-rigid registration procedure with local intensity compensations is developed. The approach allows registering the low energy images of the exams acquired before and after the chemotherapy. The measured motion is then applied to the corresponding recombined images. The difference of registered images, called residual, makes vanishing the breast texture that did not changed between the two exams. Consequently, this registered residual allows identifying local density and iodine changes, especially in the lesion area. The method is validated with a synthetic NAC case where ground truths are available. Then the procedure is applied to 51 patients with 208 CESM image pairs acquired before and after the chemotherapy treatment. The proposed registration converged in all 208 cases. The intensity-compensated registration approach is evaluated with different mathematical metrics and through the repositioning of clinical landmarks (RMSE: 5.9 mm) and outperforms state-of-the-art registration techniques.