Vascular access in hemodialysis is one of the pillars of success of the program. Therefore, efforts should be directed firstly to achieve the greatest number of vascular accesses of the arteriovenous fistula type, and secondly to reduce complications related to access cannulation in order to functionally preserve the access. Several strategies have been described to improve this last aspect; this article describes the use of ultrasound to improve the probability of successful cannulation in cases considered difficult by the nursing team.

Amyloidosis is a systemic disorder produced by the deposition of insoluble protein fibrils that fold and deposit in the myocardium. Patients with amyloidosis and cardiac involvement have higher mortality than patients without cardiac involvement. The two most prevalent forms of amyloidosis associated with cardiac involvement are AL amyloidosis, due to the deposition of immunoglobulin light chains, and ATTR amyloidosis, due to the deposition of the transthyretin (TTR) protein in mutated or senile form. This article aims to review the different cardiac imaging modalities (echocardiography, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear medicine and tomography) that allow to determine the severity of cardiac involvement in patients with amyloidosis, the type of amyloidosis and its prognosis. Finally, we suggest a diagnostic algorithm to determine cardiac involvement in amyloidosis adapted to locally available diagnostic tools, with a practical and clinical approach.

With the increasing demand for sustainable energy, advanced characterization methods are becoming more and more important in the field of energy materials research. With the help of X-ray imaging technology, we can obtain the morphology, structure and stress change information of energy materials in real time from two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives. In addition, with the help of high penetration X-ray and high brightness synchrotron radiation source, in-situ experiments are designed to obtain the qualitative and quantitative change information of samples during the charge and discharge process. In this paper, X-ray imaging technology based on synchrotron and its related applications are reviewed. The applications of several main X-ray imaging technologies in the field of energy materials, including X-ray projection imaging, transmission X-ray microscopy, scanning transmission X-ray microscopy, X-ray fluorescence microscopy and coherent diffraction imaging, are discussed. The application prospects and development directions of X-ray imaging in the future are prospected.

Introduction: Periodontal disease affects more than half of the population in Colombia and is estimated to be one of the leading causes of oral morbidity. Diagnostic aids that allow the evaluation of its extension and severity are of importance since this will provide reliable tools to quantify the severity of the problem. Objective: To determine the inter-examiner agreement for the detection of radiographic findings in patients with localized chronic periodontitis using conventional periapical radiography. Methods: Study of diagnostic tests including patients with localized chronic periodontitis, the tooth with the worst clinical insertion level and a single conventional radiograph per dental organ using parallelism technique. The radiographic evaluations were performed by two independent and blinded evaluators for the findings: lamina dura, bone defects and type of defect. The agreement obtained was estimated through Cohen’s Kappa. Results: A total of 125 radiographs were taken. The mean age was 38.8 ± 9.9, and 61.6% were women. Concordance for lamina dura was 0.08 (95% CI: -0.04–0.21), bone defects 1.00 (95% CI: 1.00–1.00); type of defect present 0.31 (95% CI: 0.29–0.38). Conclusions: Concordance was evaluated as null, almost perfect and acceptable for the findings lamina dura, presence of bone defects and type of defect respectively. For some findings and given the importance of the diagnostic and therapeutic processes, more accurate evaluations are needed which would result in a higher degree of agreement.

The integration of medical images is the process of registering and fusing them to obtain a greater amount of diagnostic information. In this work an analysis is performed for the integration of images obtained through computed axial tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, for which a tool was developed in the Matlab program, where the registration is implemented through equivalent features; in addition, the pairs of images are compared by several fusion rules, with a view to identify the best algorithm in which the resulting fused image contains the most information from the original representations.

Currently there is a great acceptance in medicine and dentistry that clinical practice should be “evidence-based” as much as possible. That is why multiple works have been published aimed at decreasing radiation doses in the different types of imaging modalities used in dentistry, since the greater effect of radiation, especially in children, forces us to take necessary measures to rationalize its use, especially with Cone Beam computed tomography (CBCT), the method that provides the highest doses in dentistry. This review was written using such an approach with the purpose of rationalizing the radiation dose in our patients. In order to formulate recommendations that contribute to the optimization of the use of ionizing radiation in dentistry, the SEDENTEXCT project team compiled and analyzed relevant publications in the literature, guidelines that have demonstrated their efficiency in the past, thus helping to see with different perspectives the dose received by patients, and with this, it is recommended taking into account this document so as to prescribe more adequately the complementary examinations that we use on a daily basis.