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Background: The increasing number of diagnosis of non-palpable breast cancers has led to a need of constant improvement of imaging techniques preoperative localization. The current scenario counts different techniques, including: wire localization, radio-guided occult localization (ROLL), non-radioactive radar localization and skin tattoo. The choice of which one to use depends on surgeon’s and radiologist’s different skills. The introduction of magnetic seed localization technique facilitates the theater scheduling in the absence of same day radiology presence. Objective: The objective of this restrospective study was to investigated the accuracy and feasibility of Magseed compared to skin tattoo in the preoperative localization of impalpable breast lesions in terms of accuracy of placement, re-excision and positive margin rates and breast/surgical specimen volume ratio.Methods: From November 2020 to November 2021 we retrospectively analysed 77 patients. Results: 37 magnetic seeds were placed in 36 patients (48.6%) and 40 skin tattoos were performed in the remained cases (51.4%). With both methods, 100% of the index lesions were completely removed and found in the surgical specimen. The re-excision rate reported was 0% for both groups. Magseed was used with greater frequency in patients with small lesions (p=0.017) and medium breasts (B cup 62.2%). A significant difference was also observed in the breast parenchyma removed between Magseed group and skin tattoo (p=0.003), especially in case of small lesions. Conclusions: Magseed placement is a save, nonradioactive localization technique, that improves scheduling efficiency, recommended in case of impalpable, smaller lesions and medium-large breasts.

The aim of this study was to apply density correction method to the quantitative image analysis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) computed tomography (CT) images, determining its influence on overall survival (OS) prediction of surgically treated patients. Clinicopathological (CP) data and preoperative CT scans, pre- and post-contrast medium (CM) administration, of 57 surgically treated NSCLC patients, were retrospectively collected. After CT volumetric density measurement of primary gross tumour volume (GTV), aorta and tracheal air, density correction was conducted on GTV (reference values: aortic blood and tracheal air). For each resulting data set (combining CM administration and normalization), first-order statistical and textural features were extracted. CP and imaging data were correlated with patients 1-, 3- and 5-year OS, alone and combined (uni-/multivariate logistic regression and Akaike information criterion). Predictive performance was evaluated using the ROC curves and AUC values and compared among non-normalized/normalized data sets (DeLong test). The best predictive values were obtained when combining CP and imaging parameters (AUC values: 1 year 0.72; 3 years 0.82; 5 years 0.78). After normalization resulted an improvement in predicting 1-year OS for some of the grey level size zonebased features (large zone low grey level emphasis) and for the combined CP-imaging model, a worse performance for grey level co-occurrence matrix (cluster prominence and shade) and first-order statistical (range) parameters for 1- and 5-year OS, respectively. The negative performance of cluster prominence in predicting 1-year OS was the only statistically significant result (p value 0.05). Density corrections of volumetric CT data showed an opposite influence on the performance of imaging quantitative features in predicting OS of surgically treated NSCLC patients, even if no statistically significant for almost all predictors.