Infantile methadone intoxication has been on the rise since the usage of methadone in opioid detoxification programs. We report a 30-month-old child with encephalopathy and acute hydrocephaly ...following methadone intoxication.
Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the accuracy of cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) in the diagnosis of vertical root fractures in a tooth with gutta-percha and prefabricated ...posts. Materials and Methods: This study selected 96 extracted molar and premolar teeth of the mandible. These teeth were divided into six groups as follows: Groups A, B, and C consisted of teeth with vertical root fractures, and groups D, E, and F had teeth without vertical root fractures; groups A and D had teeth with gutta-percha and prefabricated posts; groups B and E had teeth with gutta-percha but without prefabricated posts, and groups C and F had teeth without gutta-percha or prefabricated posts. Then, the CBCT scans were obtained and examined by three oral and maxillofacial radiologists in order to determine the presence of vertical root fractures. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 20.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). Results: The kappa coefficient was $0.875{\pm}0.049$. Groups A and D showed a sensitivity of 81% and a specificity of 100%; groups E and B, a sensitivity of 94% and a specificity of 100%; and groups C and F, a sensitivity of 88% and a specificity of 100%. Conclusion: The CBCT scans revealed a high accuracy in the diagnosis of vertical root fractures; the accuracy did not decrease in the presence of gutta-percha. The presence of prefabricated posts also had little effect on the accuracy of the system, which was, of course, not statistically significant.
Control of powered lower limb prostheses has a locomotion mode-dependent structure which demands a pattern recognizer that can classify the current locomotion mode and also detect transitions between ...them in an appropriate time. In order to achieve this goal, this paper presents a Fuzzy sequential locomotion mode recognition system to classify daily locomotion modes including level- walking, stair climbing, slope walking, standing and sitting using low-cost mechanical sensors. Since these signals have a quasi-periodic nature, using sequential pattern recognition tools, such as Hidden Markov Model(HMM) improves the recognition performance considering they use sequences of information to make a decision. On the other hand, simplicity of Fuzzy method, being a linguistic descriptor of patterns, makes training and classification procedures easier. Besides, the imprecise nature of Fuzzy modeling provides robustness to noisy signals from mechanical sensors which in turn, raises hopes to improving the recognition performance. The proposed Fuzzy sequential pattern recognizer models the daily locomotion modes with patterns consisting of some finite states and features of each state are described with a Fuzzy vector. Similar to HMMs, evaluation, assignment and training algorithms for such Fuzzy sequential tool are presented. Generating database for training the mentioned describing vectors and evaluating the performance of proposed system have been accomplished with the measured data from three IMUs and two FSRs mounted on the leg of four able-bodied subjects. Recognition performance has been evaluated for user-specific and user-independent classifications and the results have been compared with HMM. Overall accuracy of 95.8% for user-specific classification and 86.5% for user-independent classification has been achieved, which indicated higher recognition accuracy compared with HMM.
This paper describes an analysis of energy consumption in limit cycle bipedal walking. After modeling and simulating the biped robot, some important parameters of the robot have been chosen to ...evaluate the efficiency of walking, namely: torso angle of inclination, torso center of mass position, robot total mass, walking step size, walking speed, and actuators' inertia. The effect of the defined variables on energy consumption has been analyzed. Then, the variables have been classified according to the most effects on the robot energy consumption using Elementary Effects Method. The analysis shows that the most effective parameters for the energy consumption are walking step size, a robot walking speed, actuators' inertia, torso center of mass position, torso inclination angle and robot mass, respectively.
Background: Safe dose escalation is highly desirable in radiotherapy for prostate cancer. Prostate displacement due to bladder filling can be significant, so improved targeting of the prostate by ...ultrasound imaging potentially allows for a reduction in the target margin and consequently less toxicity. This study estimates the accuracy of ultrasound for prostate and bladder volume measurements by comparing ultrasound images taken immediately before and after magnetic resonance imaging to reduce the effect of organ filling on measurement accuracy. Methods: Three patients with a wide range of prostate sizes underwent pelvic magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound imaging. We tested the correlation between the two measurements and the differences between the ultrasound measurements before and after magnetic resonance imaging using statistical analysis. Results: Based on a total number of 18 volume measurements, a strong linear correlation was found (r=0.95), but there were no significant differences between ultrasound imaging performed before and after magnetic resonance imaging (P=0.809). Conclusion: Our results provide additional evidence that ultrasound imaging measures bladder and prostate volumes in a reproducible and accurate manner over awide range of volumes, which enables its use with different fractions of prostate radiotherapy.
A new transmission scheme is designed to maximize average spectral efficiency in a MIMO link considering instantaneous bit error rate (BER) and total power constraints. Discrete link adaptation using ...adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is utilized to combat multipath fading which is implementable in practical systems. ZF receiver is employed by which MIMO channel becomes equivalent to several parallel non interfering links. Instead of the mentioned actual links, virtual links are considered which are ordered based on their SNRs. Optimized power levels are assigned based on SNR ordering provisioning total power constraint. Numerical evaluations show a noticeable performance improvement by the proposed scheme compared to the scheme in which power is uniformly divided among actual links.
Electroactive-Polymers (EAPs) are one of the best soft materials with great applications in active microfluidics. Ionic ones (i-EAPs) have more promising features for being appropriate candidates to ...use in active microfluidic devices. Here, as a case study, we have designed and fabricated a microfluidic micromixer using an i-EAP named Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite (IPMC). In microfluidics, active devices have more functionality but due to their required facilities are less effective for Point of Care Tests (POCTs). In the direction of solving this paradox, we should use some active components that they need minimum facilities. IPMC can be one of these components, hence by integrating the IPMC actuator into a microfluidic channel, a micromixer chip was designed and put to the simulation and experimental tests. The result showed that the proposed micromixer is able to mix the micro fluids properly and IPMC actuator has adequate potential to be an active component for POCT-based microfluidic chips.
