The aim of this study is to clarify a feeling of difficulty that visiting nurses feel at the time of introduction to home-visit nursing care for end-stage cancer patients, which requires prompt action. Included are six nurses who, on their initiative, practice care for the patients and their families and have more than 3 years of experience as visiting nurses for end-stage cancer patients. The data collection, which was conducted by semi-structured interview using an interview guide, was analyzed qualitatively. As a feeling of difficulty that the nurses felt at the time of introduction to home-visit nursing care, two categories including "fluctuation as a nurse" and "agony to undertake home-visit nursing care" were extracted. At the time of introduction to home-visit nursing care for end-stage cancer patients, problems such as building trust relationship between the nurse and the patient or family and cooperation between the nurse and the home visiting doctor regarding notification to the patient have certain effects. It was suggested, therefore, that psychological and educational assistance for the nurses are particularly important.

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Flexion movement of the shoulder joint was analyzed on the sagittal plane in 8 healthy men (mean age, 21 years), using MRI in the human body without the involvement. The task of the measurement included spontaneous flexion movement (at 0°, 90°, 120°, 150°, and the maximum flexion angle) of the right shoulder joint on the sagittal plane in a left lateral recumbent position. The position of the extremity at each angle was passively maintained during imaging. Actually, the maximum angle of flexion of the shoulder joint was approximately 170°. The ratio of glenohumeral to scapulothoracic motion (scapula-humeral rhythm) was about 2.1:1 after 170° of flexion of the shoulder joint. The head of humerus ultimately showed internal rotation of 36.4° at 170° of flexion of the shoulder joint, and a length of the supraspinatus was reduced by the internal rotation. Taking abduction/adduction and upward rotation of the scapula into account, however, the shoulder joint ultimately showed external rotation of 29.6°. Based on these results, we reconfirmed that it is important to consider motion of the humerus and scapula during movement for improvement in range of motion of the shoulder joint.

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This study investigated what people with cerebral palsy (the following, CP) living at home with physical difficulties associated with ageing expected from occupational therapists. People with CP capable of making decisions were interviewed. As a result of this survey it was found that people with CP wanted care and periodic therapy from occupational therapists even after adolescence. More than the improvement of body functions, the CP patients wanted to use their ability to maintain their present condition by care and therapy. CP patients felt a sense of security and psychological support from the services of occupational therapists. In addition, the support of daily living from people trained in this field (e.g. occupational therapists) are required by CP patients. In the future it is important to understand the problems CP patients face with ageing to best care for them.

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We developed the display program to visualize the process of medical image registration, where registration criteria assessed image registration and resulted fused image are simultaneously shown, using C# language. Mutual information (MI) and normalized mutual information (NMI) that are useful between different modal images were used for similarity measure. We performed the image registration for the two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, and Simplex method was used for optimization. As a result, we were able to visually confirm the movement from the pre-registration images where there is misregistration to the post-registration images. In addition, high accuracy and precision were confirmed in the simulation of three-dimensional PET-MRI registration. This display program that visual evaluation in addition to numeric evaluation added is available for the image registration because the visual evaluation plays an important role in a clinical field.

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Modern radiotherapy has been improved and diversified, however, various human errors occur during treatment. Relationship between errors and workload was examined using text mining. A questionnaire survey was conducted executed with radiological technologists (n=665) that were working in Gunma Prefecture (n=553) and at hospitals affiliated with a university in Tokyo (n=112), in order to investigate errors made by the technologists. The results were analyzed using morphological analysis software "Win Cha 2000" and morphemes were extracted. Cluster analysis was also conducted. The results indicated that the errors of over, or under irradiation caused by input mistakes were the most frequent type of error. Morphemes of error conditions were "patient," "irradiation," and "therapy" according to the order of the frequency of these errors, and morphemes of the cause of error were "patient," "confirmation," and "irradiation." The method of analysis used in the present study made it possible to analyze the causes and conditions of errors both quantitatively and qualitatively.

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