No abstract available.
Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax*

No abstract available.
Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax*

No abstract available.
Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax*

No abstract available.
Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax*

We herein present a new surgical reconstruction technique for large chest wall defects after resection of advanced chest wall tumors.
Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax* ; Titanium*

No abstract available.
Axilla ; Fibroma ; Thoracic Wall ; Thorax

No abstract available.
Sarcoma, Ewing* ; Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax*

Between January 1979 and August 1996, resection of a primary chest wall tumor was done in 51 patients. The mean age of the patients was 36.1 years (2 to 69 years). A palpable mass was the most common symptom (32 patients, 62.7%). The tumor was malignant in 11 patients (21.6%) and benign in 40 patients (78.4%). The tumors in 32 patients (62.7%) had developed from the bony or the cartilaginous wall and in 19 patients (37.3%) from soft tissue. Thirty seven of the patients with benign tumors were treated by excision (three of the patients: wide resection and reconstruction) without recurrence or death, and they are currently free from disease. Most malignancies (8 patients) were treated by wide resection and chest wall reconstruction. Five of them are currently alive. The chest wall reconstruction with Marlex mesh, Prolene mesh, or Teflon felt was done in five of the patients with malignant tumors.
Humans ; Polypropylenes ; Polytetrafluoroethylene ; Recurrence ; Thoracic Wall* ; Thorax*

Mondor's disease is a superficial thrombophlebitis of anterolateral chest wall. The exact cause is unclear, but it is suggested that Mondor's disease is often associated with recent local trauma, muscular strain, or breast surgery. We report two cases with Mondor's disease who had malignant lymphoma. The coagulation profile was normal in both patients. The nodule involuted with analgesics within several months. The possibility of Mondor's disease associated with hypercoagulable state from malignancy may be suggested.
Analgesics ; Breast ; Humans ; Lymphoma* ; Thoracic Wall ; Thrombophlebitis

OBJECTIVES: Snake or active contours are extensively used in computer vision and medical image processing applications, and particularly to locate object boundaries. Yet problems associated with initialization and the poor convergence to boundary concavities have limited their utility. The new method of external force for active contours, which is called gradient vector flow (GVF), was recently introduced to address the problems. METHODS: This paper presents an automatic initialization value of the snake algorithm for the segmentation of the chest wall. Snake algorithms are required to have manually drawn initial contours, so this needs automatic initialization. In this paper, our proposed algorithm is the mean shape for automatic initialization in the GVF. RESULTS: The GVF is calculated as a diffusion of the gradient vectors of a gray-level or binary edge map derived from the medical images. Finally, the mean shape coordinates are used to automatic initialize thepoint of the snake. The proposed algorithm is composed of three phases: the landmark phase, the procrustes shape distance metric phase and aligning a set of shapes phase. The experiments showed the good performance of our algorithm in segmenting the chest wall by chest computed tomography. CONCLUSIONS: An error analysis for the active contours results on simulated test medical images is also presented. We showed that GVF has a large capture range and it is able to move a snake into boundary concavities. Therefore, the suggested algorithm is better than the traditional potential forces of image segmentation.
Diffusion ; Snakes ; Thoracic Wall ; Thorax ; Vision, Ocular