Spatial and temporal resolution effects on dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance mammography

We tested the hypothesis that partial volume effects due to poor in-plane resolution and/or low temporal resolution used in clinical dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging results in erroneous diagnostic information based on inaccurate estimates of tumor contrast agent extravasation and tested whether reduced encoding techniques can correct for dynamic data volume averaging. Image spatial resolution was reduced from 469 x 469 microm2 to those reported below by selecting a subset of k-space data. We then compared the top five K(trans)/V(T) "hot spots" obtained from the original data set, 469 x 469-microm in-plane spatial resolution and an 18-s temporal resolution processed by fast Fourier transform (FFT), with values obtained from data sets having in-plane spatial resolutions of 938 x 938, 1875 x 1875 and 2500 x 2500 microm2 and a temporal resolution of 18 s, or data sets with temporal resolutions of 36, 54 and 72 and a spatial resolution of 469 x 469 microm2, and found them to statistically differ from the parent data sets. We then tested four different post processing methods for improving the spatial resolution without sacrificing temporal resolution: zero-filled FFT, keyhole, reduced-encoding imaging by generalized-series reconstruction (RIGR) and two-reference RIGR (TRIGR). The top five values of K(trans)/V(T) obtained from data sets, the in-plane spatial resolutions of which were improved to 469 x 469 microm2 by zero-filling FFT, Keyhole and RIGR, statistically differed from those obtained from the original 469 x 469 microm2 FFT parent image data set. Only the 938 x 938 and 1875 x 1875 microm2 data sets reconstructed to 469 x 469 microm2 with TRIGR reconstruction method yielded values of the top five K(trans)/V(T) hot spots statistically the same as the original parent data set, 469 x 469 microm2 in-plane spatial and 18-s temporal-resolution FFT. That is, partial volume effects from data sets of different in-plane spatial resolution resulted in statistically different values of the top five K(trans)/V(T) hot spots relative to a high spatial and temporal resolution data set, and TRIGR reconstruction of these low resolution data sets to high resolution images provided statistically similar values with a savings in temporal resolution of 2 to 4 times.     

Comparison of tumor histology to dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging-based physiological estimates

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to compare histologically determined cellularity and extracellular space to dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE MRI)-based maps of a two-compartment model's parameters describing tumor contrast agent extravasation, specifically tumor extravascular extracellular space (EES) volume fraction (v_e), tumor plasma volume fraction (v_p) and volume-normalized contrast agent transfer rate between tumor plasma and interstitium (K_TRANS/V_T).

Materials and Methods

Obtained v_e, v_p and K_TRANS/V_T maps were estimated from gadolinium diethylenetriamine penta-acetic acid DCE T₁-weighted gradient-echo images at resolutions of 469, 938 and 2500 μm. These parameter maps were compared at each resolution to histologically determined tumor type, and the high-resolution 469-μm maps were compared with automated cell counting using Otsu's method and a color-thresholding method for estimated intracellular (V_{intracellular}) and extracellular (V_{extracellular}) space fractions.

Results

The top five K_TRANS/V_T values obtained from each tumor at 469 and 938 μm resolutions are significantly different from those obtained at 2500 μm (P<.0001) and from one another (P=.0014). Using these top five K_TRANS/V_T values and the corresponding tumor EES volume fractions v_e, we can statistically differentiate invasive ductal carcinomas from noninvasive papillary carcinomas for the 469- and 938-μm resolutions (P=.0017 and P=.0047, respectively), but not for the 2500-μm resolution (P=.9008). The color-thresholding method demonstrated that v_e measured by DCE MRI is statistically similar to histologically determined EES. The V_{extracellular} obtained from the color-thresholding method was statistically similar to the v_e measured with DCE MRI for the top 10 K_TRANS/V_T values (P>.05). DCE MRI-based K_TRANS/V_T estimates are not statistically correlated with histologically determined cellularity.

Conclusion

DCE MRI estimates of tumor physiology are a limited representation of tumor histological features. Extracellular spaces measured by both DCE MRI and microscopic analysis are statistically similar. Tumor typing by DCE MRI is spatial resolution dependent, as lower resolutions average out contributions to voxel-based estimates of K_TRANS/V_T. Thus, an appropriate resolution window is essential for DCE MRI tumor diagnosis. Within this resolution window, the top K_TRANS/V_T values with corresponding v_e are diagnostic for the tumor types analyzed in this study.     

Security and Privacy Analysis of Song–Mitchell RFID Authentication Protocol

Many applications, such as e-passport, e-health, credit cards, and personal devices that utilize Radio frequency Identification (RFID) devices for authentication require strict security and privacy. However, RFID tags suffer from some inherent weaknesses due to restricted hardware capabilities and are vulnerable to eavesdropping, interception, or modification. The synchronization and untraceability characteristics are the major determinants of RFID authentication protocols. They are strongly related to privacy of tags and availability, respectively. In this paper, we analyze a new lightweight RFID authentication protocol, Song and Mitchell, in terms of privacy and security. We prove that not only is the scheme vulnerable to desynchronization attack, but it suffers from traceability and backward traceability as well. Finally, our improved scheme is proposed which can prevent aforementioned attacks.     

Simulation-Based Traceability Analysis of RFID Authentication Protocols

Nowadays low-cost RFID systems have moved from obscurity into mainstream applications which cause growing security and privacy concerns. The lightweight cryptographic primitives and authentication protocols are indispensable requirements for these devices to grow pervasive. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in intuitive analysis of RFID protocols. This concept has recently been challenged by formal privacy models. This paper investigates how to analyse and solve privacy problems in formal model. First, we highlight some vague drawbacks especially in forward and backward traceability analysis and extend it in the simulation-based privacy model family. Then, the privacy weaknesses of three new-found RFID authentication protocols are analysed in formal privacy models and three improved protocols are proposed to prevent the aforementioned attacks.     

Improved impossible differential and biclique cryptanalysis of HIGHT

HIGHT is a lightweight block cipher introduced in CHES 2006 by Hong et al as a block cipher suitable for low‐resource applications. In this paper, we propose improved impossible differential and biclique attacks on HIGHT block cipher both exploiting the permutation‐based property of the cipher's key schedule algorithm as well as its low diffusion. For impossible differential attack, we found a new 17‐round impossible differential characteristic that enables us to propose a new 27‐round impossible differential attack. The total time complexity of the attack is 2^120.4 where an amount of 2^59.3 chosen plaintext‐ciphertext pairs and 2^107.4 memory are required. We also instantiate a new biclique cryptanalysis of HIGHT, which is based on the new idea of splitting each of the forward and backward keys into 2 parts where the computations associated to each one are performed independently. The time complexity and data complexity of this attack are 2^125.7 and 2⁴², respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the fastest biclique attack on full‐round HIGHT.     

Temperature dependent electrophysical characteristics of GaAs-polymer composite varistors

A composition of GaAs-polymer tiny particles was pressed at a temperature of 130 °C and a pressure of 60 MPa and its current–voltage characteristic was studied. The result shows that the prepared disk has varistor behavior and can therefore be used to protect circuits from low overvoltage transients higher than 62 V. Temperature dependence of current-voltage characteristic and the electrical conductivity of the sample were investigated in the temperature range of 25–100 °C. It has been found that increase in temperature results in lower breakdown voltage and nonlinearity coefficient. At high temperatures, nonlinearity in the I–V characteristic of sample disappears and the conductivity becomes Ohmic in nature. The sample has hysteresis which decreases through increase in temperature. Annealing effect on leakage current and breakdown voltage was both investigated and analyzed using SEM micrographs. Finally, the electrical bandgap of the sample was measured.     

Annihilation of positrons in hydrogen-saturated titanium

The effect of atomic hydrogen on the electronic structure of α-titanium samples is studied using the electron-positron annihilation methods. It is shown that different states of hydrogen atoms are manifested in different ways in the positron lifetime distribution spectrum. The results of theoretical calculations of the first component of the positron lifetime are in accord with the obtained experimental data.