Clinical evaluation of stretchable and wearable inkjet-printed strain gauge sensor for respiratory rate monitoring at different body postures

Respiratory rate (RR) is a vital sign with continuous, convenient, and accurate measurement which is difficult and still under investigation. The present study investigates and evaluates a stretchable and wearable inkjet-printed strain gauge sensor (IJP) to estimate the RR continuously by detecting the respiratory volume change in the chest area. As the volume change could cause different strain changes at different body postures, this study aims to investigate the accuracy of the IJP RR sensor at selected postures. The evaluation was performed twice on 15 healthy male subjects (mean ± SD of age: 24 ± 1.22 years). The RR was simultaneously measured in breaths per minute (BPM) by the IJP RR sensor and a reference RR sensor (e-Health nasal thermal sensor) at each of the five body postures namely standing, sitting at 90°, Flower’s position at 45°, supine, and right lateral recumbent. There was no significant difference in measured RR between IJP and reference sensors, between two trials, or between different body postures (all p \u3e 0.05). Body posture did not have any significant effect on the difference of RR measurements between IJP and the reference sensors (difference \u3c 0.01 BPM for each measurement in both trials). The IJP sensor could accurately measure the RR at different body postures, which makes it a promising, simple, and user-friendly option for clinical and daily uses

Improvement of visual acuity based on optical coherence tomography patterns following intravitreal bevacizumab treatment in patients with diabetic macular edema

<b>AIM:</b>To report the visual outcome based on various patterns of optical coherence tomography (OCT) morphology in diabetic macular edema (DME), following treatment with anti-VEGF intravitreal bevacizumab (IVB) injection.<b>METHODS:</b>Sixty-seven consecutive subjects with centre involving DME underwent intravitreal injection of Bevacizumab (1.25 mg/0.05 mL) in this retrospective, comparative, non randomized study. The DME was classified into one of four categories:focal, diffuse, focal cystoid and neurosensory detachment based on OCT. Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), macular appearance, and OCT findings were used to decide whether the subject should have a repeat injection of intravitreal bevacizumab. Outcome measures were a change in mean BCVA (Snellen converted to logMAR) and central macular thickness (CMT) in each group during the six month follow-up period.<b>RESULTS:</b>The mean BCVA improved to logMAR 0.23 at final follow-up from a baseline of 0.32 logMAR (<i>P=</i>0.040) in the focal group, logMAR 0.80 at final follow-up from a baseline of 0.82 logMAR (<i>P=</i>0.838) in the diffuse group, worsened to logMAR 0.53 at final follow-up from a baseline of 0.43 logMAR (<i>P=</i>0.276) in the focal cystoid group, and improved to logMAR 0.79 at final follow-up from a baseline of 0.93 logMAR (<i>P=</i>0.490) in the neurosensory detachment group. The mean CMT before treatment were 298.8±25.03 μm in the focal group, 310.8±40.6 μm in the diffuse group, 397.15±31.05 μm in the focal cystoid group and 401.03±75.1 μm in the neurosensory detachment group. A mean of 2.05 (range:1-5) injections in the focal group, 1.32 (range:1-2) in the diffuse group, 2.6 (range:1-6) in the focal cystoid group and 2.6 (range:1-6) in the neurosensory detachment group were performed during the six month follow-up period. Following intravitreal bevacizumab treatment, vision improved, remained unchanged or worsened in 11, 7 and 2 subjects in focal group; 11, 9 and 8 in diffuse group; 0, 2 and 4 in focal cystoid group and 5, 5 and 3 subjects respectively in neurosensory detachment group.<b>CONCLUSION:</b>OCT morpholgy patterns in DME may predict the effects of intravitreal bevacizumab treatment, and patients with focal DME are most likely to benefit from the improvent of visual acuity from this treatment

Exploiting Arabic Diacritization for High Quality Automatic Annotation

International audienceWe present a novel technique for Arabic morphological annotation. The technique utilizes diacritization to produce morphological annotations of quality comparable to human annotators. Although Arabic text is generally written without diacritics, diacritization is already available for large corpora of Arabic text in several genres. Furthermore, diacritization can be generated at a low cost for new text as it does not require specialized training beyond what educated Arabic typists know. The basic approach is to enrich the input to a state-of-the-art Arabic morphological analyzer with word diacritics (full or partial) to enhance its performance. When applied to fully diacritized text, our approach produces annotations with an accuracy of over 97% on lemma, part-of-speech, and tokenization combined

A review of the efficacy of mitomycin C in glaucoma filtration surgery

The success of trabeculectomy, which is considered the gold standard in the surgical treatment of glaucoma, depends on the wound healing response. The introduction of antiproliferative agents such as mitomycin C (MMC) has increased the success rates of trabeculectomy. However, complications due to these agents can be challenging to manage. Hence, it is important to determine the most efficacious dose and duration of exposure. Multiple studies suggest that many factors, including but not limited to MMC preparation, different concentrations, different exposure times, and method of application may affect success rate, and these factors were reviewed in this article. We concluded that lower concentrations of MMC that are prepared and applied in a standardized fashion, such as that using the Mitosol(®) kit (for 2–3 minutes) during trabeculectomy, could potentially provide trabeculectomy success rates similar to that reported with off-label preparations, and that such a treatment regime could result in in lower complication rates than higher doses of MMC

Mathematical model for the irradiance probability density function of a laser beam propagating through turbulent media

We develop a model for the probability density function (pdf) of the irradiance fluctuations of an optical wave propagating through a turbulent medium. The model is a two-parameter distribution that is based on a doubly stochastic theory of scintillation that assumes that small-scale irradiance fluctuations are modulated by large-scale irradiance fluctuations of the propagating wave, both governed by independent gamma distributions. The resulting irradiance pdf takes the form of a generalized K distribution that we term the gamma-gamma distribution. The two parameters of the gamma-gamma pdf are determined using a recently published theory of scintillation, using only values of the refractive-index structure parameter C-n(2) (or Rytov variance) and inner scale l(0) provided with the simulation data. This enables us to directly calculate various log-irradiance moments that are necessary in the scaled plots. We make a number of comparisons with published plane wave and spherical wave simulation data over a wide range of turbulence conditions (weak to strong) that includes inner scale effects. The gamma-gamma pdf is found to generally provide a good fit to the simulation data in nearly all cases tested

Literature review regarding the applicability and clinical out-come of basal implant

Objective: Restoring moderate to severely atrophic jaws with conventional implants often involves extensive surgical procedures. Basal implants, designed for immediate use in atrophied jawbones, offer an alternative by supporting single and multiple-unit restorations in the upper and lower jaws without the need for risky and expensive bone augmentation. However, their success rate diminishes significantly in areas with limited residual bone. This review aims to assess the applicability of basal implants compared to conventional endosseous implants.Methods: A comprehensive literature review was conducted utilizing PubMed, Scopus, the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and Google Scholar. The analysis focused on manuscripts and overviews published in more than 20 years until September 8, 2022.Results: Studies indicate that basal implants are a reliable option in specific cases, especially when other implants are not feasible, such as in severe alveolar bone atrophy. However, there is insufficient strong evidence to recommend basal implants over conventional ones. The evidence level of the reviewed papers, all belong to evidence level V, which encompasses case reports and studies lacking controls.Conclusions: The advantages of basal implants over conventional implants remain uncertain. The standard of care in dentistry should prioritize evidence-based practices, which commonly include the use of conventional implants. Further research is necessary to establish their efficacy and suitability in various clinical scenarios.<br/

A standard tag set expounding traditional morphological features for Arabic language part-of-speech tagging

The SALMA Morphological Features Tag Set (SALMA, Sawalha Atwell Leeds Morphological Analysis tag set for Arabic) captures long-established traditional morphological features of grammar and Arabic, in a compact yet transparent notation. First, we introduce Part-of-Speech tagging and tag set standards for English and other European languages, and then survey Arabic Part-of-Speech taggers and corpora, and long-established Arabic traditions in analysis of morphology. A range of existing Arabic Part-of-Speech tag sets are illustrated and compared; and we review generic design criteria for corpus tag sets. For a morphologically-rich language like Arabic, the Part-of-Speech tag set should be defined in terms of morphological features characterizing word structure. We describe the SALMA Tag Set in detail, explaining and illustrating each feature and possible values. In our analysis, a tag consists of 22 characters; each position represents a feature and the letter at that location represents a value or attribute of the morphological feature; the dash ‘-’ represents a feature not relevant to a given word. The first character shows the main Parts of Speech, from: noun, verb, particle, punctuation, and Other (residual); these last two are an extension to the traditional three classes to handle modern texts. ‘Noun’ in Arabic subsumes what are traditionally referred to in English as ‘noun’ and ‘adjective’. The characters 2, 3, and 4 are used to represent subcategories; traditional Arabic grammar recognizes 34 subclasses of noun (letter 2), 3 subclasses of verb (letter 3), 21 subclasses of particle (letter 4). Others (residuals) and punctuation marks are represented in letters 5 and 6 respectively. The next letters represent traditional morphological features: gender (7), number (8), person (9), inflectional morphology (10) case or mood (11), case and mood marks (12), definiteness (13), voice (14), emphasized and non-emphasized (15), transitivity (16), rational (17), declension and conjugation (18). Finally there are four characters representing morphological information which is useful in Arabic text analysis, although not all linguists would count these as traditional features: unaugmented and augmented (19), number of root letters (20), verb root (21), types of nouns according to their final letters (22). The SALMA Tag Set is not tied to a specific tagging algorithm or theory, and other tag sets could be mapped onto this standard, to simplify and promote comparisons between and reuse of Arabic taggers and tagged corpora

Splitting Arabic Texts into Elementary Discourse Units

International audienceIn this article, we propose the first work that investigates the feasibility of Arabic discourse segmentation into elementary discourse units within the segmented discourse representation theory framework. We first describe our annotation scheme that defines a set of principles to guide the segmentation process. Two corpora have been annotated according to this scheme: elementary school textbooks and newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank. Then, we propose a multiclass supervised learning approach that predicts nested units. Our approach uses a combination of punctuation, morphological, lexical, and shallow syntactic features. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We show that an extensive morphological analysis is crucial to achieve good results in both corpora. In addition, we show that adding chunks does not boost the performance of our system