Maastro Clinic

Construction of personal health knowledge graphs for clinical data harmonization in breast cancer

Integrating heterogeneous personal health data and maintaining clinical registries for breast cancer management is labor-intensive. This study presents an AI-powered virtual assistant transforming identifiable breast cancer patient data into interoperable personal health knowledg...

Practice variation in hospital care for pelvic organ prolapse and urinary incontinence: an analysis of specialists’ expectations, cross-sectional claims data, and the role of clinical guidelines

Abstract Background Pelvic floor disorders, specifically pelvic organ prolapse and urinary incontinence, are highly prevalent conditions that exhibit substantial practice variation. This study aims to examine the relationship between clinical practice guidelines and practice vari...

Exploring a DNA methylation field effect in renal cell carcinoma and its implications for biomarker research

A field effect, the phenomenon of molecular alterations, such as DNA methylation, in normally appearing tissue surrounding a malignant tumor, has been suggested to be associated with malignant transformation. Nevertheless, normally appearing tissue adjacent to the tumor is freque...

Five years of clinical application of independent Monte Carlo-based patient-specific quality assurance at Maastro Proton Therapy Center

Introduction At the Maastro Proton Therapy Center in Maastricht, patient-specific quality assurance (PSQA) based on independent GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculations fully replaces conventional measurements. Measurement-based PSQA is time- and resource-intensive and...

Multimodal prehabilitation versus no prehabilitation to improve functional capacity, reduce postoperative complications and improve quality of life in colorectal cancer surgery

OBJECTIVES: This is a protocol for a Cochrane review (intervention). The objectives are as follows: To evaluate the benefits and harms of a multimodal prehabilitation programme versus no prehabilitation with respect to functional capacity, postoperative outcomes, and health-relat...

Functional Characterization of Myelodysplastic Syndrome by Multiparameter Flow Cytometry: The Clinical Synergy Between Ki-67 and Bcl-2 and Their Potential Role in Diagnostics and Personalized Therapy

The diagnosis and clinical management of myelodysplastic neoplasms are increasingly challenged by the disease’s inherent heterogeneity, particularly with respect to the diagnosis of low-grade variants. While standardized flow cytometric protocols traditionally rely on static biom...

Technical note: reconstructing dose distributions from manually planned electron boosts in breast radiotherapy

Purpose In breast radiotherapy, delivery of manually-calculated electron boosts limits retrospective dose–response analyses as dose distribution is unavailable. This work evaluates the feasibility of reconstructing dose distributions from manually planned electron boosts in breas...

Multicentre performance and consistency of two deep learning models for malignancy probability estimation of incidental pulmonary nodules

Abstract Objectives A screening-trained deep learning (DL) model (DL1) for pulmonary nodule malignancy probability estimation on CT previously demonstrated good discrimination on a single-centre dataset of incidental nodules. An updated DL model (DL2) was trained on both screenin...