Proton therapy offers incremental, if any advantage, over standard IMRT for non-pediatric cases. In the case of the prostate, recent evidence shows no benefit at all. It suffers from near hyperbolic marketing from debt-ridden therapy centers pushing dubious claims that are now being exposed by high quality phase III comparison trials.
HIFU for prostate also is a ripe area for grifters as it is advertised and marketed towards low risk cases that would probably benefit from active surveillance.
> HIFU for prostate also is a ripe area for grifters as it is advertised and marketed towards low risk cases that would probably benefit from active surveillance.
Unfortunately, I have extensive first hand experience with practices that do this, and you are 100% correct.
The grift is very insidious. If you scan people over a certain age with prostate MRI, you will find suspicious lesions in a large percentage. And using fusion MRI/US guided biopsies, you will inevitable get cancer cells in the sample.
Many (most?) of these people being treated will die WITH prostate cancer, not FROM prostate cancer.
I'm not sure what the point this article is trying to make. The image isn't the data for a lot of imaging modalities. The process of image reconstruction is translation from raw signal to image in any modality.
Gaining access to raw data is difficult. For example, if I want access to raw projection data on CT, it requires specific research keys and agreements with the vendor. A typical end user, like a hospital, cannot get to this raw data as part of a standard purchase.
For MRI access to the raw data alone is probably not that helpful, with the exception of some of the neural network based upsampling approaches. The real power from working with k-space comes from developing custom pulse sequences.
The Cartesian (rectilinear) approaches to sampling k-space are generally very inefficient acquisition time-wise, but very tractable for a cheap computer to reconstruct via inverse FFTs. Non-Cartesian readouts (such as radial, spiral, etc) can radically reduce acquisition time (read: time for patients to lie in the scanner) but radically increase the computational complexity of the reconstruction. Estimates range from 1000x to 10000x times as complex if you use all the fancy stuff to maximize image quality and reduce acquisition time as much as possible.
There are numerous (solvable) technical challenges to implementing these strategies, but the biggest is financial. If one MRI scanner can do the work of 3 or 4 MRI scanners by moving patients through faster, that's a lot of lost revenue for manufacturers, so there's not much of an incentive to change the current paradigm.
Non-Cartesian sampling of k-space is routinely used today in clinical practice and the reconstruction time or resources isn't a limiting factor. It is the reduced SNR among other effects that is limiting in these approaches.
If one MRI scanner can be more efficient, there is enough competition in the market for it to be wildly successful. The major vendors have enough technical parity for efficiency to be a key difference maker. Hospitals and health systems are the customer and they need throughput.
Shielding is not a crude term, it is indeed used as technical language in the world of radiation safety. You are also using the term attenuation incorrectly, as sibling comment points out.
Shielding in radiation safety means attenuation to a safe level. But for detection, that is irrelevant because radiation detectors can be very sensitive, such that even very minute quantities making it through a "shielding" are still sufficient. When in doubt, you just increase integration time to almost forever and you will still get a sufficient number of particles to get a measurement.
Really? What about the literal stalking by her legal team? Two people directly involved in the company were suicidal due to the environment she created, one of whom did end up committing suicide.
Apparently not a serious crime it would seem, since no prosecutor seems to care. It is very clear that in the current court system defrauding rich people is a much worse crime that 'accidentally' killing a few poor people. Had she gotten drunk and killed someone with her car, she would be looking at a much lighter sentence.
