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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences

Understanding Water Diffusion In Experimental Spinal Cord Injury Remote From Injury Epicenter, Alice Motovylyak Oct 2018

Understanding Water Diffusion In Experimental Spinal Cord Injury Remote From Injury Epicenter, Alice Motovylyak

Dissertations (1934 -)

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has demonstrated success as a biomarker of spinal cord injury (SCI) severity as shown from numerous preclinical studies. However, artifacts from stabilization hardware at the lesion have precluded its use for longitudinal assessments. Previous research has documented ex vivo diffusion changes in the spinal cord both caudal and rostral to the injury epicenter. The aim of this dissertation was to quantify the structural changes that lead to different diffusion measures in the rat cervical spinal cord after a thoracic contusion injury in an attempt to find a biomarker of injury. Animals received a thoracic contusion injury …


Compressed Sensing For Few-View Multi-Pinhole Spect With Applications To Preclinical Imaging, Benjamin Michael Rizzo Apr 2018

Compressed Sensing For Few-View Multi-Pinhole Spect With Applications To Preclinical Imaging, Benjamin Michael Rizzo

Dissertations (1934 -)

Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) can be used to identify and quantify changes in molecular and cellular targets involved in disease. A radiopharmaceutical that targets a specific metabolic function is administered to a subject and planar projections are formed by imaging emissions at different view angles around the subject. The reconstruction task is to determine the distribution of radioactivity within the subject from the projections. We present a reconstruction approach that utilizes only a few view angles, resulting in a highly underdetermined system, which could be used for dynamic imaging applications designed to quantify physiologic processes altered with disease. …