Background and purpose
To estimate health‐related quality of life (HRQOL) in patients with untreated cavernous malformation of the CNS cavernous cerebral malformations (CCMs).
Methods
We performed a ...cross‐sectional observational study on patients with CCMs admitted to our department from 1 November 2017 to 10 January 2020 using standardized interviews short‐form‐36 questionnaire, hospital anxiety and depression score (HADS‐A/D), CCM perception questionnaire. Included criteria were diagnosis of an untreated CCM and information about the diagnosis in a specialized CCM consultation. Health‐related quality of life (HRQOL) data were analyzed and compared to the German normal population. Uni‐ and multivariate analyses were carried out to identify variables with impact on outcome.
Results
Two hundred nineteen (93%) of 229 eligible patients were included. Mean age was 46.3 ± 14.7 (18–86) years; 136 (62%) were female. Ninety‐eight (45%) patients presented with symptomatic hemorrhage (SH), and 17 (8%) with repetitive SH. Ninety‐two (42%) patients were asymptomatic. Thirty‐seven patients (17%) suffered from cavernoma‐related epilepsy. Twenty‐eight patients (13%) suffered from familial CCMs. Patients showed significantly decreased component scores and subdomain scores compared to the normal population, with effects ranging from small to large. This accounted largely also for asymptomatic patients (except for physical component score and main physical subdomains). Multivariate regression analysis confirmed impact of functional impairment on physical component score. HADS‐A was significantly increased. HADS‐A/D strongly correlated with mental component score and individual perception of the CCM.
Conclusions
Patients with the diagnosis of a CCM showed decreased HRQOL compared to the normal population even when not suffering functional impairment or neurological symptoms. Our data may function as benchmarks in evaluation of different (future) management strategies.
Abstract Background Proprioception has been defined as the capacity to feel the position of a joint in space as sensed by the central nervous system. Prophylactic knee braces are supposed to help in ...knee injury prevention not just with a mechanical support of the joint but also improving proprioception. The main aim of this study was to determine the effects of a knee brace and a knee sleeve on knee proprioception. The secondary aim was to determine if different starting angles of the knee and different movement directions influence knee proprioception. Methods We tested a group of twenty healthy male sport students without knee injuries. They were tested with the brace, with the sleeve and without support. The threshold of detection of passive knee movement with a starting knee angle of 30° and 60°, both in flexion and extension was determined. Results We did not find any statistically significant change in the threshold of detection of passive knee movement wearing the brace or the sleeve compared to the unsupported condition (p = 0.462, α = 0.05). We found a significantly lower proprioceptive sensitivity starting at the more flexed knee angle (p = 0.005, α = 0.05) and moving in extension than in the other test situations (p = 0.001, α = 0.05). Conclusion Movement direction and starting position appear to influence the threshold of detection of passive knee movement. The results of this study also suggest that knee supports do not influence either positively or negatively knee proprioception of uninjured active subjects.
Abstract The absence of uniformity, the use of different terminologies, and the diversity of methods used to translate numerical data into clinical outcomes have been described as potential problems ...when dealing with clinical knee scores for total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Gait analysis is believed to provide more objective parameters. The aim of the present study was to obtain information about the correlation between the outcome in terms of locomotion and the clinical knee score after TKA. Thirty consecutive patients awaiting TKA were involved in the study. One day prior to surgery and 3 months postoperatively, data pertaining to the Hospital for Special Surgery Score (HSS) and the Knee Society Score (KSS) (subgroups ‘pain’, ‘knee’, ‘function’ and ‘total sum’) were analyzed for correlations with kinematic and temporospatial parameters of gait analysis. At a significance-level of p ≤ 0.001 moderate correlations (0.4 < r < 0.6) were found preoperatively, particularly between ‘max knee flexion swing’ and the function-subscores of HSS and KSS and the ‘KSS total’. High correlations (0.6 < r < 0.8) were ascertained for ‘stride length’ and ‘gait velocity’ with ‘KSS function’. High correlations were also determined between ‘stride length’ and ‘KSS total’ and between ‘gait velocity’ and ‘HSS function’. The only correlation found postoperatively was between ‘max pelvic obliquity stance’ and ‘KSS knee’ ( r = 0.770, p < 0.001). We conclude that the ‘function’ subscores of KSS and HSS are highly suitable to assess the functional capacity of patients scheduled for TKA. However, because no adequate correlations between knee scores and gait parameter were found postoperatively, we cannot recommend the abandonment of gait analysis when monitoring the functional benefit of TKA.
Lagrangian particle dispersion models are indispensable tools for the study of atmospheric transport processes. However, Lagrangian transport simulations can become numerically expensive when large ...numbers of air parcels are involved. To accelerate these simulations, we made considerable efforts to port the Massive-Parallel Trajectory Calculations (MPTRAC) model to graphics processing units (GPUs). Here we discuss performance optimizations of the major bottleneck of the GPU code of MPTRAC, the advection kernel. Timeline, roofline, and memory analyses of the baseline GPU code revealed that the application is memory-bound, and performance suffers from near-random memory access patterns. By changing the data structure of the horizontal wind and vertical velocity fields of the global meteorological data driving the simulations from structure of arrays (SoAs) to array of structures (AoSs) and by introducing a sorting method for better memory alignment of the particle data, performance was greatly improved. We evaluated the performance on NVIDIA A100 GPUs of the Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science (JUWELS) Booster module at the Jülich Supercomputing Center, Germany. For our largest test case, transport simulations with 108 particles driven by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis, we found that the runtime for the full set of physics computations was reduced by 75 %, including a reduction of 85 % for the advection kernel. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of code optimization for GPUs, we show that the runtime of central processing unit (CPU-)only simulations is also improved. For our largest test case, we found a runtime reduction of 34 % for the physics computations, including a reduction of 65 % for the advection kernel. The code optimizations discussed here bring the MPTRAC model closer to applications on upcoming exascale high-performance computing systems and will also be of interest for optimizing the performance of other models using particle methods.
P¯ANDA is a future hadron and nuclear physics experiment at the FAIR facility in construction in Darmstadt, Germany. Unlike the majority of current experiments, P¯ANDA's strategy for data acquisition ...is based on online event reconstruction from free-streaming data, performed in real time entirely by software algorithms using global detector information. This paper reports on the status of the development of algorithms for the reconstruction of charged particle tracks, targeted towards online data processing applications, designed for execution on data-parallel processors such as GPUs (Graphic Processing Units). Two parallel algorithms for track finding, derived from the Circle Hough algorithm, are being developed to extend the parallelism to all stages of the algorithm. The concepts of the algorithms are described, along with preliminary results and considerations about their implementations and performance.
\(\bar{{\rm{P}}}\)ANDA is a future hadron and nuclear physics experiment at the FAIR facility in construction in Darmstadt, Germany. Unlike the majority of current experiments, ...\(\bar{{\rm{P}}}\)ANDA’s strategy for data acquisition is based on online event reconstruction from free-streaming data, performed in real time entirely by software algorithms using global detector information. This paper reports on the status of the development of algorithms for the reconstruction of charged particle tracks, targeted towards online data processing applications, designed for execution on data-parallel processors such as GPUs (Graphic Processing Units). Two parallel algorithms for track finding, derived from the Circle Hough algorithm, are being developed to extend the parallelism to all stages of the algorithm. The concepts of the algorithms are described, along with preliminary results and considerations about their implementations and performance.
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