In most cases, prosthetic rehabilitation of patients suffering from microstomia is inconvenient for the patient and challenging for both the dentist and dental technician. In such cases, conventional ...impression-taking requires an individualized tray design and modified impression techniques, amplifying the risk for impression and cast deformation and thereby compromising the final outcome. An intraoral scanner (IOS) might overcome these limitations due to its reduced size compared to an impression tray. In the present case history report, a microstomia patient was successfully restored with a telescopic prosthesis by digitizing both retaining teeth and the palate with an IOS.
Mobile and embedded devices like PDAs, mobile phones, and all kinds of consumer hardware populate the world we live in. Despite the vision of ubiquitous computing and its idea of spontaneous ...interaction among these devices more than fifteen years ago, most of them are still isolated and restricted in their interaction capabilities. One reason for this limitation is the poor support for dynamic adaptation and evolution of software in distributed environments.
This paper proposes AOCI, an Aspect-Oriented Component Infrastructure that takes the core ideas of AOP, the separation of concerns and system modularization to make them more adaptable and evolvable, to the domain of component systems. Components are usually considered as black boxes that can be combined to a complex system using their outer interfaces. In the context of our infrastructure, components export possible adaptation points, which are enriched by ontological information. This enables the application of AOP techniques without detailed knowledge about the component’s internals, enabling dynamic and distributed adaptation.
Our prototype is based on OSGi and provides a complete infrastructure to weave local as well as remote components. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by adapting the RUBiS infrastructure (a web-based bidding system) to support dynamic user-centric error detection.
AOCI Söldner, Guido; Kapitza, Rüdiger; Schober, Sven
Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Aspects, components, and patterns for infrastructure software,
03/2009
Conference Proceeding
In this paper, we propose ontology-based pointcuts, a novel mechanism based on the ideas of AOP, the separation of concerns and system modularization, to enhance components, thus making them more ...adaptable and evolvable. The core idea of ontologybased pointcuts is to specify pointcuts in terms of ontological concepts instead of patterns that are matched against source code. Components are usually considered as black boxes that can be combined to a complex system using their outer interfaces. In the context of our infrastructure, components are extended by exporting possible adaptation points, which are enriched by ontological information. This ontological metadata represents concepts from a domain model, defined by a domain expert. The ontology is implemented within an intermediate layer that decouples the matching pointcuts from the concrete source level within the components.
This enables the application of AOP techniques without detailed knowledge about the component's internals, enabling dynamic and distributed adaptation and reducing the fragile pointcut problem to the component scope. This paper presents the design and the expressiveness of the ontology-based pointcuts. We show several practical examples how to use joinpoint model and the pointcut specification followed by a short discussion.
In ubiquitous computing, dynamic adaptation and the evolvability of software become increasingly important. This paper proposes AOCI, an aspect-oriented component infrastructure that combines the ...core ideas of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and component based systems. Components are usually considered as black boxes that can be combined to form complex systems. In the context of our infrastructure, components export possible points of adaptation, which are tagged with ontological information. This information enables the use of AOP techniques without detailed knowledge about the component's internals, enabling distributed and dynamic adaptation.
Instant-X: Towards a generic API for multimedia middleware Elsholz, J.-P.; Schmidt, H.; Schober, S. ...
2009 IEEE International Conference on Internet Multimedia Services Architecture and Applications (IMSAA),
2009-Dec., 2009
Conference Proceeding
The globalisation of our society leads to an increasing need for spontaneous communication. However, the development of such applications is a tedious and error-prone process. This results from the ...fact that in general only basic functionality is available in terms of protocol implementations and encoders/decoders. This leads to inflexible proprietary software systems implementing unavailable functionality on their own. In this work we introduce Instant-X, a novel component-based middleware platform for multimedia applications. Unlike related work, Instant-X provides a generic programming model with an API for essential tasks of multimedia applications with respect to signalling and data transmission. This API abstracts from concrete component implementations and thus allows replacing specific protocol implementations without changing the application code. Furthermore, Instant-X supports dynamic deployment, i.e., unavailable components can be automatically loaded at runtime. To show the feasibility of our approach we evaluated our Instant-X prototype regarding code complexity and performance.
Prediction modelling increasingly becomes an important risk assessment tool in perioperative systems approaches, e.g. in complex patients with open abdomen treatment for peritonitis. In this ...population, combining predictors from multiple medical domains (i.e. demographical, physiological and surgical variables) outperforms the prediction capabilities of single-domain prediction models. However, the benefit of these prediction models for clinical decision-making remains to be investigated. We therefore examined the clinical utility of mortality prediction models in patients suffering from peritonitis with a decision curve analysis.
In this secondary analysis of a large dataset, a traditional logistic regression approach, three machine learning methods and a stacked ensemble were employed to examine the predictive capability of demographic, physiological and surgical variables in predicting mortality under open abdomen treatment for peritonitis. Calibration was examined with calibration belts and predictive performance was assessed with the area both under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and under the precision recall curve (AUPRC) and with the Brier Score. Clinical utility of the prediction models was examined by means of a decision curve analysis (DCA) within a treatment threshold range of interest of 0-30%, where threshold probabilities are traditionally defined as the minimum probability of disease at which further intervention would be warranted.
Machine learning methods supported available evidence of a higher prediction performance of a multi- versus single-domain prediction models. Interestingly, their prediction performance was similar to a logistic regression model. The DCA demonstrated that the overall net benefit is largest for a multi-domain prediction model and that this benefit is larger compared to the default "treat all" strategy only for treatment threshold probabilities above about 10%. Importantly, the net benefit for low threshold probabilities is dominated by physiological predictors: surgical and demographics predictors provide only secondary decision-analytic benefit.
DCA provides a valuable tool to compare single-domain and multi-domain prediction models and demonstrates overall higher decision-analytic value of the latter. Importantly, DCA provides a means to clinically differentiate the risks associated with each of these domains in more depth than with traditional performance metrics and highlighted the importance of physiological predictors for conservative intervention strategies for low treatment thresholds. Further, machine learning methods did not add significant benefit either in prediction performance or decision-analytic utility compared to logistic regression in these data.
Our understanding of pilonidal sinus disease (PSD) is based on a paper published 29 years ago by Karydakis. Since then, surgeons have been taught that hair more easily penetrates wet skin, leading to ...the assumption that sweating promotes PSD. This postulate, however, has never been proven. Thus we used pilocarpine iontophoresis to assess sweating in the glabella sacralis. 100 patients treated for PSD and 100 controls were matched for sex, age and body mass index (BMI). Pilocarpine iontophoresis was performed for 5 min, followed by 15 min of sweat collection. PSD patients sweated less than their matched pairs (18.4 ± 1.6 µl vs. 24.2 ± 2.1 µl, p = 0.03). Men sweated more than women (22.2 ± 1.2 µl vs. 15.0 ± 1.0 µl in non-PSD patients (p < 0.0001) and 20.0 ± 1.9 µl vs. 11.9 ± 2.0 µl in PSD patients (p = 0.051)). And regular exercisers sweated more than non-exercisers (29.1 ± 2.9 µl vs. 18.5 ± 1.6 µl, p = 0.0006 for men and 20.7 ± 2.3 µl vs. 11.4 ± 1.4 µl, p = 0.0005 for women). PSD patients sweat less than matched controls. Thus sweating may have a protective effect in PSD rather than being a risk factor.
The purpose of the study was to investigate associations between biomechanical resilience (failure load, failure strength) and the microarchitecture of cancellous bone in the vertebrae of human ...cadavers with low bone density with or without vertebral fractures (VFx).
Spines were removed from 13 body donors (approval no. A 2017-0072) and analyzed in regard to bone mineral density (BMD), Hounsfield units (HU), and fracture count (Fx) with the aid of high-resolution CT images. This was followed by the puncture of cancellous bone in the vertebral bodies of C2 to L5 using a Jamshidi™ needle. The following parameters were determined on the micro-CT images: bone volume fraction (BVF), trabecular thickness (Tb.Th), trabecular separation (Tb.Sp), degree of anisotropy (DA), trabecular number (Tb.N), trabecular pattern factor (Tb.Pf), and connectivity density (Conn.D). The axial load behavior of 104 vertebral specimens (C5, C6, T7, T8, T9, T12, L1, L3) was investigated with a servohydraulic testing machine.
Individuals with more than 2 fractures had a significantly lower trabecular pattern factor (Tb.Pf), which also proved to be an important factor for a reduced failure load in the regression analysis with differences between the parts of the spine. The failure load (FL) and endplate sizes of normal vertebrae increased with progression in the craniocaudal direction, while the HU was reduced. Failure strength (FS) was significantly greater in the cervical spine than in the thoracic or lumbar spine (p < 0.001), independent of sex. BVF, Tb.Th, Tb.N, and Conn.D were significantly higher in the cervical spine than in the other spinal segments. In contrast, Tb.Sp and Tb.Pf were lowest in the cervical spine. BVF was correlated with FL (r = 0.600, p = 0.030) and FS (r = 0.763, p = 0.002). Microarchitectural changes were also detectable in the cervical spine at lower densities.
Due to the unique microarchitecture of the cervical vertebrae, fractures occur much later in this region than they do in the thoracic or lumbar spine. Trial registration Approval no. A 2017-0072.
The purpose of this retrospective study was to evaluate the role of (18)F-FDG PET or PET/CT in the prediction of patient outcome in children and young adults affected by rhabdomyosarcoma.
Forty-one ...patients with histology-proven rhabdomyosarcoma who underwent PET or PET/CT were identified (age range, 1-20 y; mean age ± SD, 9.9 ± 5.8 y). Tumor maximum standardized uptake value (SUV(max)) and visually rated metabolic activity, as well as the presence of metabolically active lymph nodes and distant metastases, were compared with event-free and overall survival. Multivariate Cox regression analyses were performed to compare the prediction of outcome according to metabolic tumor intensity in relation to established prognostic factors.
Kaplan-Meier analyses revealed a significantly shorter overall survival in primary tumors visually rated as highly metabolically active or with a ratio of SUV(max) to SUV of the liver above 4.6. In addition, metabolically active lymph node and distant site involvement was indicative of significantly lower survival rates. On multivariate Cox regression analysis, the impact of intensity or SUV(max) of the primary tumor on outcome failed to attain significance, although PET performed better than some of the prognostic factors established in larger patient groups (P = 0.081).
(18)F-FDG PET/CT is a valuable tool for initial staging in children affected by rhabdomyosarcoma. (18)F-FDG PET/CT may be an additional predictor of outcome and may be used to refine risk-adapted therapy. PET performed better than some established risk factors. The borderline significance level of primary tumor metabolism in multivariate testing may be an effect of the limited sample size. Further prospective evaluations are warranted.
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