El secreto de Vera Drake (2004) y Las Normas de la Casa de la Sidra (1999): el aborto en el cine y su utilización en la docencia

El Secreto de Vera Drake (2004) de Mike Leigh y de Las Normas de la Casa de la Sidra (1999) de Lasse Hallström presentan la interrupción voluntaria del embarazo y las circunstancias que la rodean en un total de diez abortos y un parto. El Secreto de Vera Drake nos muestra a una mujer de clase media-baja que"ayuda a chicas jóvenes" a poner fin a embarazos no deseados sin aceptar dinero a cambio. Su secreto se desvelará cuando una de las jóvenes a la que practicó un aborto sufre complicaciones y es condenada. Las Normas de la Casa de la Sidra presenta la historia de Homer Wells, un joven que nace y crece en un orfanato donde su responsable, el Dr. Larch, le enseña a asistir partos y a practicar abortos. Un día Homer siente la necesidad de volar libre fuera del orfanato e inicia un viaje que le acercará a otras realidades que le llevarán a reconsiderar su postura en contra del aborto. Ambas películas pueden ser un material útil para estudiar aspectos clínicos, éticos y sociodemográficos del aborto inducido en las enseñanzas de medicina, enfermería y matrona.

Advances in medical imaging applied to bone metastases

Bone metastases are the result of a primary cancer invasion which spreads into the bone marrow through the lymphogenous or hematogenous pathways. Bone metastases are a common complication of cancer.The primary cancers that most frequently metastasize to bone are breast and prostate cancer (65 - 75 %) amongst many others (thyroid 42 %, lung 36 % or kidney 35 %) (Suva et al., 2011). Although the exact incidence of bone metastases is unknown given its dependence on the type of primary cancer, it is estimated that 350,000 people die of bone metastases annually in the United States.

Reversible and high capacity data hiding in medical images

In this paper we introduce a highly efficient reversible data hiding system. It is based on dividing the image into tiles and shifting the histograms of each image tile between its minimum and maximum frequency. Data are then inserted at the pixel level with the largest frequency to maximize data hiding capacity. It exploits the special properties of medical images, where the histogram of their nonoverlapping image tiles mostly peak around some gray values and the rest of the spectrum is mainlyempty. The zeros (or minima) and peaks (maxima) of the histograms of the image tiles are then relocated to embed the data. The grey values of some pixels are therefore modified.High capacity, high fidelity, reversibility and multiple data insertions are the key requirements of data hiding in medical images. We show how histograms of image tiles of medical images can be exploited to achieve these requirements. Compared with data hiding method applied to the whole image, our scheme can result in 30%-200% capacity improvement and still with better image quality, depending on the medical image content. Additional advantages of the proposed method include hiding data in the regions of non-interest and better exploitation of spatial masking.