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2003 True Stella Awards

The winners of the 2003 Stella Awards have just been announced! This is the real thing now, not the fake ones that have been making the rounds.

And the winner is…

The City of Madera, Calif. Madera police officer Marcy Noriega had the suspect from a minor disturbance handcuffed in the back of her patrol car. When the suspect started to kick at the car’s windows, Officer Noriega decided to subdue him with her Taser. Incredibly, instead of pulling her stun gun from her belt, she pulled her service sidearm and shot the man in the chest, killing him instantly. The city, however, says the killing is not the officer’s fault; it argues that “any reasonable police officer” could “mistakenly draw and fire a handgun instead of the Taser device” and has filed suit against Taser, arguing the company should pay for any award from the wrongful death lawsuit the man’s family has filed. What a slur against every professionally trained police officer who knows the difference between a real gun and a stun gun! And what a cowardly attempt to escape responsibility for the actions of its own under-trained officer.

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Am I Sad or What

Is it really sad when your Christmas tree has been sitting out until yesterday?

There it was, sitting on our dining room table (it’s not a very big tree) being neglected for the past month or so (shows you how much we use our dining room table). Finally got around to noticing it again and deciding it was probably time to take the darned thing down and put it away for another year. Now we can use our table again! Like any other flat surface in my apartment though, it ends up being used as storage space.

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Company Coming

Company is coming tomorrow. A friend of my wife has an interview for the MD/PhD program at MUSC on Friday. Must clean.

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Med school interview

Wooo, after much tooth gnashing and wailing and anguishing, my wife got a call from the MUSC Admissions people about scheduling an interview. It’s scheduled for next Friday (Jan 30), so if she does well (I know she will) she’ll be med school bound next fall!

Yay!

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Journal Club: Phase Contrast Imaging

This is an effort to get me to read more of the journal articles I find. More often than not, I run across an interesting article, skim through it, put it in my Read This Soon pile, and then it gets forgotten about.

So I think what I shall try to do is when I run across an interesting article (interesting to me, hopefully some others), I shall post it here along with the abstract and article reference. Then after I’ve read the article, I’ll try to write up a short blurb of my thoughts on it.

So the first journal club article is one from Medical Physics.

Wu X, Liu H, “Clinical implementation of x-ray phase-contrast imaging: Theoretical foundations and design considerations”, Med Phys 30, 2169-2179 (2003)

Abstract:

Theoretical foundation and design considerations of a clinical feasible x-ray phase contrast imaging technique were presented in this paper. Different from the analysis of imaging phase object with weak absorption in literature, we proposed a new formalism for in-line phase-contrast imaging to analyze the effects of four clinically important factors on the phase contrast. These are the body parts attenuation, the spatial coherence of spherical waves from a finite-size focal spot, and polychromatic x-ray and radiation doses to patients for clinical applications. The theory presented in this paper can be applied widely in diagnostic x-ray imaging procedures. As an example, computer simulations were conducted and optimal design parameters were derived for clinical mammography. The results of phantom experiments were also presented which validated the theoretical analysis and computer simulations.©2003 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.