Jornal article

Gebouský P., Kárný M., Křížová H., Wald M.

Computers in Biology Medicine

2009

1 (2009)

1-7

0010-4825

Ing. Miroslav Kárný, DrSc. (ÚTIA - Oddělení adaptivních systémů)

Quantitative lymphoscintigraphy, Secondary lymphedema of upp

Secondary lymphedema of upper limbs, a frequent complication after a breast cancer therapy, can be successfully treated only when diagnosed at an early, ideally latent, stage. Lymphoscintigraphy is a promising candidate to this purpose. A slow lymphatic dynamics of upper limbs allows, however, a routine collection at most three images reflecting it. This makes an exploitation of lymphoscintigraphy to early-stage diagnosis a complex task. Recently, a Bayesian methodology extracting diagnostic information from the available sparse data has been developed. It properly detects lymphedema occurrence but not a desirable disease staging. The present paper proposes Bayesian diagnostic processing of lymphoscintigraphic and routine clinical data. Its staging ability was tested on diagnostic data of 88 women at the age of 39–84 years (60.2±10.4) with a suspicion of unilateral secondary lymphedema of upper limbs caused by a breast cancer treatment.