The aim of this study was to assess the morphological characteristics of the coronoid process (CP) and define coronoid hyperplasia (CH) using cadaveric mandibles of a Caucasian population. A sample ...of 151 adult dry cadaveric mandibles (302 CPs) was acquired. Three distances were measured, which included the width, height, and length of CP. The surface area measurements involved area A: above the width distance line; area B: between incisura mandibulae-Alveolar ridge line and width distance line; area C: between distance lines of width and height. Finally, angulations of the CP and gonial angles were identified. Both length and surface area A + B acted as hyperplastic indicators. Based on the selection criteria, a sample of 197 CPs was included. The hooked shape (59%) was most commonly observed. No significant difference existed between left and right sides (p > 0.05). The mean values of length and surface area A + B were 2.2 ± 0.3 cm and 3.3 ± 0.8 cm
, and any values above 2.7 cm (n = 5 CPs- 2.5%) and 5.0 cm
(n = 9 CPs- 4.6%) were described as hyperplastic, respectively. The presented data could act as quantitative reference for differentiating between normal and hyperplastic conditions.
•The laminar burning velocity has been measured for gasoline and surrogate components.•A toluene reference fuel reproduced the laminar burning velocity of gasoline.•The temperature dependence of the ...laminar burning velocity is shown.•The temperature dependence has a minimum around peak burning velocity.
Laminar burning velocities have been measured using the heat flux method on a flat flame adiabatic burner. Measurements were done for iso-octane, n-heptane, toluene, a toluene reference fuel (i.e., a mixture of iso-octane, n-heptane and toluene) and a commercial gasoline. The laminar burning velocities of the toluene reference fuel were in correspondence with the laminar burning velocities of the commercial gasoline. Measurements were done for an equivalence ratio from 0.7 to 1.3 and for a range of temperatures between 298K and 358K. The temperature dependence of the fuels is shown and the measurements are compared to literature data and simulations using reduced kinetic models.
The voice modification system studied allows selected voice characteristics (pitch, loudness, timing, and/or timbre) to be transplanted from a given donor utterance onto another (patient) utterance. ...Several potential applications exist for such a system, depending on the voice characteristics that are transplanted. The examples studied here are lip synchronization, voice dubbing and karaoke. Using overlap-add techniques for the actual speech modification, high quality results have been obtained that convincingly illustrate the potential of voice transplantation. In order to make voice transplantation widely applicable, its robustness should be further improved in order to avoid rejection of the transplanted characteristics, as discussed in some detail.
Postoperative pain is a major problem, especially in orthopedic surgery. Our data suggest suboptimal pain management after total knee arthroplasty. This study evaluated a sufentanil sublingual tablet ...system (Zalviso) to optimize postoperative pain treatment. This retrospective, single-center, cohort study was conducted between January 2017 and September 2017. Zalviso as standard treatment was compared with a cohort receiving oxycodone (Oxy) immediate release and Oxy extended release and another receiving Oxy immediate release, Oxy extended release, and dexamethasone (Dexa + Oxy). The primary end point, pain intensity, was assessed on a numeric rating scale (NRS). Highest, lowest, and number of NRS scores >7 were collected. Secondary end points included length of hospital stay, nausea, and mobilization on the day of surgery. Patients receiving Dexa + Oxy had a lower lowest-pain intensity on day 0 (median 0, IQR 0-0) when compared to patients receiving Oxy (median 2, IQR 0-3;
<0.0001) or Zalviso (median 2, IQR 0-4;
<0.0001). No differences were observed on day 1 or 2. No differences were observed in highest pain score or number of patients reporting NRS scores > 7. Patients treated with Dexa + Oxy or Zalviso were discharged earlier compared to patients treated with Oxy (
<0.001). Patients treated with Zalviso experienced more nausea compared to other groups on day 0 and day 1 (
<0.001). Patients treated with Dexa + Oxy had a higher percentage of mobilization on the day of surgery compared to Oxy and Zalviso (
<0.001). In conclusion, Zalviso did not improve postoperative pain management in patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty and increased nausea.
Objectives:
To investigate whether variations in head positioning may influence the reproducibility of cone-beam CT (CBCT) three-dimensional (3D) segmented models of the mandibular condyle.
Methods:
...Five fresh frozen cadaver heads were scanned in four different positions: reference position (RP) and a set of three tilted alternative head positions (AP) in anteroposterior direction (AP1: 2 cm anterior translation, AP2: 5° pitch rotation, AP3: 10° pitch rotation). Surface models of mandibular condyles were constructed and compared with the condylar reference position using voxel-based registration. Descriptive statistics and a linear mixed-effects model were performed to compare condylar volumetric differences and root mean square (RMS) distance between surfaces of AP vs RP.
Results:
The mean differences in condylar volumes of AP vs RP were 14.1 mm³ (95% CI −79.3, 107.4) for AP1, 1.0 mm³ (95% CI −87.2, 89.2) for AP2 and 0.1 mm³ (95% CI −88.3, 88.4) for AP3. Mean and absolute volumetric differences did not exceed earlier reported intraoperator differences of 30 mm³. The RMS distance values obtained per group were 0.12 mm (95% CI 0.05,0.20) for AP1, 0.17 mm (95% CI 0.10, 0.22) for AP2 and 0.17 mm for AP3 (95% CI 0.10,0.22). The confidence intervals (CI) for RMS distance remained far below the threshold for clinical acceptability (0.5 mm).
Conclusions:
Within the limits of the present study, it is suggested that tilted head positions may affect the reproducibility of 3D condylar segmentation, thereby influencing outcome in repeated CBCT scanning. Nevertheless, observed differences are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on clinical patient diagnosis and management.
In primary biliary cholangitis (PBC), bilirubin and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) are widely established as independent predictors of prognosis. Current treatment goals do not aim for normalization of ...surrogate markers because their association with survival has not been defined.
The patient cohort from the GLOBAL PBC Study Group was used, comprising of long-term follow-up data from European and North American centers. Ursodeoxycholic acid-treated and untreated patients with bilirubin levels ≤1 × upper limit of normal (ULN) at baseline or 1 year were included. The association of normal ALP with transplant-free survival was assessed in a subgroup with ALP ≤1.67 × ULN at 1 year. Optimal thresholds of bilirubin and ALP to predict liver transplantation (LT) or death were evaluated.
There were 2,281 patients included in the time zero cohort and 2,555 patients in the 1-year cohort. The bilirubin threshold with the highest ability to predict LT or death at 1 year was 0.6 × ULN (hazard ratio 2.12, 95% CI 1.69-2.66, P < 0.001). The 10-year survival rates of patients with bilirubin ≤0.6 × ULN and >0.6 × ULN were 91.3% and 79.2%, respectively (P < 0.001). The risk for LT or death was stable below the bilirubin levels of 0.6 × ULN, yet increased beyond this threshold. Ursodeoxycholic acid-induced reduction in bilirubin below this threshold was associated with an 11% improvement in 10-year survival. Furthermore, ALP normalization was optimal, with 10-year survival rates of 93.2% in patients with ALP ≤ 1 × ULN and 86.1% in those with ALP 1.0-1.67 × ULN.
Attaining bilirubin levels ≤0.6 × ULN or normal ALP are associated with the lowest risk for LT or death in patients with PBC. This has important implications for treatment targets.
•The laminar burning velocity has been measured for (m)ethanol-hydrocarbon blends.•The temperature dependence for pure methanol and ethanol is shown.•The temperature dependence has a minimum around ...peak burning velocity.•Mixing rules to predict the laminar burning velocity of fuel blends are tested.•These mixing rules are able to predict the laminar burning velocity of fuel blends.
Laminar burning velocities for methanol, ethanol, and binary and quaternary mixtures of these with iso-octane and n-heptane, have been determined using the heat flux method on a flat flame adiabatic burner. Measurements were done for an equivalence ratio range between 0.7 and 1.5 and for a range of temperatures between 298K and 358K at atmospheric pressure. The present study expands the available data on laminar burning velocities of alcohol–hydrocarbon blends and validates simple mixing rules for predicting the laminar burning velocity for a wider range of fuel blends of hydrocarbons with methanol and/or ethanol. It is shown that simple mixing rules that consider the energy fraction of the blend’s components are accurate enough to predict the experimentally determined laminar burning velocity of the mixtures.
Three-dimensional models of mandibular condyles provide a way for condylar remodeling follow-up. The overall aim was to develop and validate a user-friendly workflow for cone beam CT (CBCT)-based ...semi-automatic condylar registration and segmentation.
A rigid voxel-based registration (VBR) technique for registration of two post-operative CBCT-scans was tested. Two modified mandibular rami, with or without gonial angle, were investigated as the volume of interest for registration. Inter- and intraoperator reproducibility of this technique was tested on 10 mandibular rami of orthognathic patients by means of intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC's) and descriptive statistics of the transformation values from the VBR. The difference in reproducibility between the two modified rami was evaluated using a paired
-test (
< 0.05). For the segmentation, eight fresh frozen cadaver heads were scanned with CBCT and micro-CT. These data were used to test the inter- and intraoperator reproducibility (ICC's) and accuracy (Bland-Altman plot) of a newly designed workflow based on semi-automated contour enhancement.
Excellent ICC's (0.94-0.99) were obtained for the voxel-based registration technique using both modified rami. If the gonial angle was not included in the volume of interest, there was a trend of increased operator error suggested by significant higher interoperator differences in translation values (
= 0,0036). The segmentation workflow proved to be highly reproducible with excellent ICC's (0.99), low absolute mean volume differences between operators (23.19 mm
), within operators (28.93 mm
) and low surface distances between models of different operators (<0.20 mm). Regarding the accuracy, CBCT-models slightly overestimate the condylar volume compared to micro-CT.
This study provides a validated user-friendly and reproducible method of creating three-dimensional-surface models of mandibular condyles out of longitudinal CBCT-scans.
A digital outphasing transmitter is presented for 2.4-GHz WiFi. The transmitter consists of two delay-based phase modulators and a 26-dBm integrated switching class-D power amplifier. The delay-based ...phase modulator delays incoming LO edges with a resolution of 1.4 ps (8 bit) required to meet WiFi requirements. A phase MUX architecture is proposed to implement switching between phases once every LO period (2.4 GHz) without generating detrimental glitches at the output. Due to its open-loop nature, the proposed phase modulator is capable of delivering wide OFDM bandwidths up to 40 MHz. The paper analyzes the impact of impairments, e.g., delay mismatch within the delay cells and outphasing mismatches, as well as associated mitigation techniques. The transmitter has been implemented in a 32-nm digital CMOS process and delivers an OFDM average power of 20 dBm with an overall system efficiency of 18.6% when transmitting 54-Mb/s 64QAM signal. The fully digital design is expected to further improve in power dissipation and chip-area with further CMOS scaling.
Abstract The movement ecology of European seabass, Dicentrarchus labrax , remains poorly understood, especially in the northern ranges of its distribution. To investigate migration patterns of ...seabass from the southern North Sea, we combined data from different projects from four countries using various tagging techniques. This resulted in 146 recaptures (out of 5598 externally marked seabass), 138 detected animals (out of 162 seabass fitted with an acoustic transmitter) and 76 archived depth and temperature series (out of 323 seabass with an archival tag). Using geolocation modelling, we distinguished different migration strategies, whereby individual fish migrated to the eastern English Channel (15.1%), the western English Channel (28.3%), the Celtic Sea and the norther part of the Bay of Biscay (17.0%), or stayed in the North Sea (39.6%). A high number of seabass exhibited fidelity to the North Sea (90.5% of recaptures, 55.3% for acoustic transmitters and 44.7% of archival tags). Although seabass are generally considered to migrate southwards in winter, a large number of individuals (n = 62) were observed in the southern North Sea, where spawning might potentially occur in a particular deep location along the coast of Norfolk in the UK. Our results highlight the need to consider fine-scaled population structuring in fisheries assessment, and indicate that current seasonal fisheries closures are not aligned with the ecology of seabass in the North Sea.
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