OBJECTIVE. Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) represents one of the most prevalent peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies. The purpose of our study was to assess the potential correlation between intraneural hypervascularization, flexor retinaculum bowing, and median nerve cross-sectional area and the severity of CTS in cases confirmed by nerve conduction study. SUBJECTS AND METHODS. Sixty consecutive patients with classic or probable symptoms of CTS were enrolled in the study. A control group consisting of 27 healthy volunteers who were never diagnosed with CTS or had any symptoms of CTS was recruited among institution employees. All symptomatic patients were initially examined by a hand surgeon and subsequently referred for sonographic and electrophysiologic examinations. RESULTS. A total of 90 wrists (in 60 patients) were included in the study. Twenty-eight (31.1%) had mild CTS, 33 had moderate disease, and 29 had severe disease. We detected significant correlation between median nerve hypervascularization a...

Comparison of a new, modified lung ultrasonography technique with high-resolution CT in the diagnosis of the alveolo-interstitial syndrome of systemic scleroderma

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate a computer‐aided diagnostic system using texture analysis to improve radiologic accuracy for identification of thyroid nodules as malignant or benign.Methods: The database comprised 26 benign and 34 malignant thyroid nodules. Wavelet transform was applied to extract texture feature parameters as descriptors for each selected region of interest in 3 normalization schemes (default, μ ± 3σ, and 1%–9%). Linear discriminant analysis and nonlinear discriminant analysis were used for texture analysis of the thyroid nodules. The first–nearest neighbor classifier was applied to features resulting from linear discriminant analysis. Nonlinear discriminant analysis features were classified by using an artificial neural network. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to examine the performance of the texture analysis methods.Results: Wavelet features under default normalization schemes from nonlinear discriminant analysis indicated the best performance for classification of benign and malignant thyroid nodules and showed 100% sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy; the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 1.Conclusions: Wavelet features have a high potential for effective differentiation of benign from malignant thyroid nodules on sonography.