Manuscript reviewers and the accuracy of the review process are fundamental to the quality of a scientific journal and authors place tremendous confidence in peer reviewers' impartiality ....
Honorary authorship corresponds to the intentional misrepresentation of credit to an individual whose contributions to a biomedical article do not meet the criteria for authorship established by the ...International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) ....
Adrenal incidentalomas (AIs) are incidentally discovered adrenal neoplasms. Overt endocrine secretion (glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, and catecholamines) and malignancy (primary or metastatic ...disease) are assessed at baseline evaluation. Size, lipid content, and washout characterise benign AIs (respectively, <4 cm, <10 Hounsfield unit, and rapid release); nonetheless, 30% of adrenal lesions are not correctly indicated. Recently, image-based texture analysis from computed tomography (CT) may be useful to assess the behaviour of indeterminate adrenal lesions. We performed a systematic review to provide the state-of-the-art of texture analysis in patients with AI. We considered 9 papers (from 70 selected), with a median of 125 patients (range 20-356). Histological confirmation was the most used criteria to differentiate benign from the malignant adrenal mass. Unenhanced or contrast-enhanced data were available in all papers; TexRAD and PyRadiomics were the most used software. Four papers analysed the whole volume, and five considered a region of interest. Different texture features were reported, considering first- and second-order statistics. The pooled median area under the ROC curve in all studies was 0.85, depicting a high diagnostic accuracy, up to 93% in differentiating adrenal adenoma from adrenocortical carcinomas. Despite heterogeneous methodology, texture analysis is a promising diagnostic tool in the first assessment of patients with adrenal lesions.
Nowadays, there is a progressive increase in pressure to publish as well as greater emphasis on publishing in high impact journals, even sometimes with significant financial incentives attached ...
Contrast material-enhanced (CE) US is a recognized imaging tool in the characterization of focal liver lesions and uses microbubble contrast agents to increase signal backscattering from the blood. ...The European Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology and the World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology strongly recommend the use of CE US in the characterization of hepatocellular nodules in individuals with liver cirrhosis. CE US was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for liver indications in adult and pediatric patients. CE US Liver Imaging Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS) criteria were recently proposed by the American College of Radiology and include eight distinct diagnostic categories: LR-1 (definitely benign), LR-2 (probably benign), LR-3 (intermediate malignancy probability), LR-4 (probably hepatocellular carcinoma HCC), LR-5 (definitely HCC), LR-NC (cannot be categorized due to image degradation), LR-TIV (tumor in vein), and LR-M (probably or definitely malignant but not HCC specific). CE US LI-RADS criteria can be used to produce a structured report for HCC diagnosis. However, the variability of US equipment in terms of sensitivity to microbubble signal, interreader variability, large number of HCC nodules classified as LR-3, and wide washout temporal range for LR-M observations are limitations.
Microbubble contrast agents for ultrasound (US) have gained increasing interest in recent years, and contrast-enhanced US (CEUS) is a rapidly evolving field with applications now extending far beyond ...the initial improvements achieved in Doppler US. This has been achieved as a result of the safe profile and the increased stability of microbubbles persisting in the bloodstream for several minutes, and also by the availability of specialized contrast-specific US techniques, which allow a definite improvement in the contrast resolution and suppression of signal from stationary tissues. CEUS with low transmit power allows real-time scanning with the possibility of prolonged organ insonation. Several reports have described the effectiveness of microbubble contrast agents in many clinical applications and particularly in the liver, spleen, and kidneys. CEUS allows the assessment of the macrovasculature and microvasculature in different parenchymas, the identification and characterization of hepatic and splenic lesions, the depiction of septal enhancement in cystic renal masses, and the quantification of organ perfusion by the quantitative analysis of the echo-signal intensity. Other fields of application include the assessment of abdominal organs after traumas and the assessment of vesico-ureteral reflux in children. Finally, tumor-targeted microbubbles make possible the depiction of specific biologic processes.
PDF
