The purpose of this study was to assess the diagnostic performance of FDG PET or PET/CT for detection of local, regional, and distant recurrences in the follow-up of patients with head and neck ...cancer who underwent definitive treatment.
A systematic search was performed in MEDLINE and Cochrane Library (updated September 2014) to identify relevant published studies. Studies investigating the accuracy of FDG PET/CT that were performed at least 4 months after therapy were included. Two authors independently screened all retrieved articles, selected studies that met the inclusion criteria, and extracted the data. Histopathologic confirmation or clinical follow-up of at least 6 month (or both) was considered as the reference standard.
Twenty-three studies constituting a total of 2247 FDG PET/CT examinations met our inclusion criteria. The pooled sensitivity and specificity of follow-up PET/CT for detection of recurrence were 0.92 (95% CI, 0.90-0.94), and 0.87 (95% CI, 0.82-0.91), respectively. The pooled sensitivity and specificity of scans performed 4-12 months after treatment were 0.95 (95% CI, 0.91-0.97) and 0.78 (95% CI, 0.70-0.84), respectively. Similar estimates for scans performed at or more than 12 months after treatment were 0.92 (95% CI, 0.85-0.96) and 0.91 (95% CI, 0.78-0.96), respectively. The overall accuracy of FDG PET/CT in detecting recurrence is higher in patients without suspicion of recurrence before the scan compared with the patients with suspected recurrence.
The high diagnostic performance of FDG PET/CT in detecting recurrence in curatively treated patients with head and neck cancer supports its use in clinical practice for patient follow-up. Further studies are needed to evaluate the prognostic utility of PET/CT in the follow-up of head and neck cancer.
ABSTRACT Objective: To determine the frequency of various complications encountered during cardiac catheterization angiography in patients with Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF). Study Design: A descriptive ...cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted at Paediatric Cardiology Department and Cardiac Catheterization Lab at Armed Forced Institute of Cardiology and National Institute of Heart Diseases, Rawalpindi, from Jan 2017 to Dec 2018. Material and Methods: All consecutive patients with Tetralogy of Fallot; undergoing cardiac catheterization angiography were included in the study. TOF diagnosis was made by 2D echocardiography (2D echo) done be paediatric cardiologist. Light sedation/general anesthesia were given for the procedure after getting fitness for general anesthesia from cardiac anesthetist. Patients were admitted in the ward and any complications observed were documented. The complications were addressed and the patients were discharged once stable. All the data was entered and analyzed using SPSS-21. Results: Total number of patients included in the study were 301, out of them male patients were 168 (55.8%) and 133 (44.1%) were female patients. Mean age of patients were 3.2 ± 1.8 (Mean ± SD). The most common venous access was right femoral vein in 290 (96.3%). 208 (59.1%) procedures were done under general anesthesia while 93 (30.9%) were done under local anesthesia. The most common complications observed were transient lower limb pulse loss needed IV Haparinoccurring in 13 (4.3%) of the patients, followed by cyanotic spell in 6 (2.0%) patients and transient pulse loss needed no heparin in 2 (0.7%) patients. All patients recovered without need of surgery. No complication of catheterization angiography was observed in 277 (92.0%) patients. Conclusion: Though catheterization angiography for TOF patients is a safe procedure in the hand of an experienced cardiologist but some complications do occur. The most common complications observed in our patients were transient lower limb pulse loss and cyanotic spell.
The dental literature contains a small number of reports of primary multirooted anomalies and even fewer reports on the clinical significance of these findings. When conducting routine clinical ...examinations, the authors found multirooted anomalies in three Native American children. The anomalies included a primary bifurcated maxillary left canine, a primary three-rooted mandibular right first molar and bilateral primary three-rooted mandibular first and second molars. The clinical significance of these types of anomalies is discussed.
Agriculture plays an important role in a country’s economy. The sector is challenged by many stresses, which led to huge loss in plant productivity worldwide. The ever-increasing population, rapid ...urbanization with shrinking agricultural lands, dramatic change in climatic conditions, and extensive use of agrochemicals in agricultural practices that caused environmental disturbances confront mankind of escalating problems of food security and sustainability in agriculture. Escalating environmental problems and global hunger have led to the development and adoption of genetic engineering and other conventional plant breeding approaches in developing stress-tolerant varieties of crops. However, these approaches have drawn flaws in their adoption as the process of generating tolerant varieties takes months to years in bringing the technology from the lab to the field. Under such scenario, sustainable and climate-smart agricultural practices that avail bacterial usage open the avenues in fulfilling the incessant demand for food for the global population. Ensuring stability on economic fronts, bacteria minimizes plant salt uptake by trapping ions in their exopolysaccharide matrix besides checking the expression of Na
+
/H
+
and high-affinity potassium transporters. Herein we describe information on salinity stress and its effect on plant health as well as strategies adopted by plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) in helping plants to overcome salinity stress and in mitigating loss in overall plant productivity. It is believed that acquisition of advanced knowledge of plant-beneficial PGPR will help in devising strategies for sustainable, environment-friendly, and climate-smart agricultural technologies for adoption in agriculture to overcome the constrained environmental conditions.
This article examines the effects of magnetohydrodynamics and heat absorption on an incompressible Jeffrey fluid' time-dependent free convection flow over an infinite, vertically heated plate with ...homogeneous heat flux. The constitutive equation for heat flow utilizes the Prabhakar-like fractional derivative. The Laplace transform technique obtains the precise solution for the momentum and thermal profiles. The typical case and well-known outcomes from the literature are retrieved as restraining cases. The graphical analysis of the impact of the flow and fractionalized parameters on the thermal and momentum profiles is presented. Additionally, a comparison is made between the ordinary model and the Prabhakar-like fractional model, which shows that the latter better captures the retention of the physical features of the problem. It is concluded that the Prabhakar-like fractional model is better suited for describing the memory effect of the thermal and momentum fields.
Alzheimer’s disease affects daily routine due to loss of memory and decline in cognition. In vitro data showed acetylcholine esterase inhibition activity of
Malva neglecta
but no in vivo evidence is ...available. The current study aims to investigate the anti-Alzheimer’s activity of
Malva neglecta
methanolic extract in the AlCl
3
-induced Alzheimer disease rats’ model. Thirty Wistar rats were divided into six groups and respective doses were given orally for 21 days. Behavioural observations were recorded and biochemical analysis was performed on brain homogenate. Improvement in memory and cognition was noted in treated rats as compared to disease control. A dose-dependent decrease (0.530 ± 0.009 at 200 mg/kg, 0.212 ± 0.007 at 400 mg/kg, 0.173 ± 0.005 at 600 mg/kg) in AChE activity was noted in the treatment groups with reference to disease control value (1.572 ± 0.013). This decrease in AChE activity is linked with an increase in acetylcholine in the brain which plays a key role in retaining memory. Oxidative stress biomarkers; GSH (66.77 ± 0.01 at 600 mg/kg), SOD (26.60 ± 0.10 at 600 mg/kg), CAT (21.46 ± 0.01 at 600 mg/kg) levels were increased with a decrease in MDA (103.33 ±0.49 at 600 mg/kg) level in a dose-dependently manner in the treatment groups as compared to disease control respective values. It is concluded that
Malva neglecta
could ameliorate Alzheimer’s symptoms possibly by decreasing AChE activity and oxidative stress.
Graphical abstract
Purpose
This study aims to measure the acceptance of digital resources by integrating knowledge management (KM) factors (i.e. acquisition, sharing, application and protection) into the factors of the ...technology acceptance model (TAM) (i.e. perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) and their impact on actual system use through behavioural intention.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the quantitative research method, a survey was conducted of the public sector universities of Punjab, Pakistan. Data were collected from postgraduate students and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling.
Findings
The findings showed that the factors of KM with the integration of TAM significantly impact the acceptance of digital resources. The study’s hypotheses are all supported, and the findings demonstrated that knowledge acquisition, knowledge sharing, knowledge application and knowledge protection significantly influenced perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, and that these factors are positively correlated with behavioural intentions to use digital resources.
Originality/value
This study has considerable significant implications for policymakers, developers and practitioners in designing digital resources. This study will also assist librarians to discover areas for development that may enhance the use of digital resources among users
Unmanned aerial systems, namely drones, have greatly improved and expanded drastically over the years. Due to their efficiency and ease of use, drones have been utilized in a wide range of ...applications. Despite various potential uses, drones are also being utilized for illegal operations and exposing security threats to citizens. It is vital to install an effective anti-drone system to identify and defend against intruding malevolent drones to protect national security. Although there has been tremendous advancement in the development of machine learning to deploy lightweight architectures in the sensor industry, no such drone detection approach has yet been described in the literature. Therefore, this paper proposed a lightweight convolution neural network (CNN), namely RFDNet, to investigate the problem of 17 types of drone RF fingerprint classification problems in the low SNR regime. The network is configured with two principle modules, which are leveraged by the grouped and depth-wise convolution layers, incorporating accuracy improvement while keeping the complexity low. Notably, most existing networks fail to outstandingly detect drones at low SNR levels because the RF signal envelope is distorted and the transient information is lost in the noise. To solve this issue, we collected an open-source RF dataset that stores 17 types of drone RF signals at 30 dB SNR. To investigate the RF dataset at various SNR levels, we regenerate the dataset at different SNRs (i.e., <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">-10</tex-math></inline-formula> dB to 30 dB SNR with the 5 dB interval) and analyze the performance of the proposed network. The empirical results show that RFDNet performed outstandingly compared to the existing deep learning-based drone detection methods and achieved an overall 99.07% accuracy at 15 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
Significance and popularity of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is inevitable; however, its application is highly challenging in multi-domain collaborative smart city environments. The reason is its ...limitations in adapting the dynamically changing information of users, tasks, access policies and resources in such applications. It also does not incorporate semantically meaningful business roles, which could have a diverse impact upon access decisions in such multi-domain collaborative business environments. We propose an Intelligent Role-based Access Control (I-RBAC) model that uses intelligent software agents for achieving intelligent access control in such highly dynamic multi-domain environments. The novelty of this model lies in using a core I-RBAC ontology that is developed using real-world semantic business roles as occupational roles provided by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), USA. It contains around 1400 business roles, from nearly all domains, along with their detailed task descriptions as well as hierarchical relationships among them. The semantic role mining process is performed through intelligent agents that use word embedding and a bidirectional LSTM deep neural network for automated population of organizational ontology from its unstructured text policy and, subsequently, matching this ontology with core I-RBAC ontology to extract unified business roles. The experimentation was performed on a large number of collaboration case scenarios of five multi-domain organizations and promising results were obtained regarding the accuracy of automatically derived RDF triples (Subject, Predicate, Object) from organizational text policies as well as the accuracy of extracted semantically meaningful roles.
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