Computers in biology and medicine
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- Acute respiratory failure is one of the most common problems encountered in intensive care units (ICU) and mechanical ventilation is the mainstay of supportive therapy for such patients. A mismatch between ventilator delivery and patient demand is referred to as patient-ventilator asynchrony (PVA). An important hurdle in addressing PVA is the lack of a reliable framework for continuously and automatically monitoring the patient and detecting various types of PVA. ⋯ - The pilot study establishes the feasibility of using a machine learning framework to provide waveform analysis equivalent to an expert human.
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While there is much literature describing the radiologic detection of breast cancer, there are limited data available on the agreement between experts when delineating and classifying breast lesions. The aim of this work is to measure the level of agreement between expert radiologists when delineating and classifying breast lesions as demonstrated through Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) and quantitative shape metrics. ⋯ Fair to moderate levels of agreement was shown by radiologists for shape and margin classifications of cancers using the BI-RADS lexicon. When quantitative shape metrics were used to evaluate radiologists' delineation of lesions, good to excellent inter-observer agreement was found. The results suggest that qualitative descriptors such as BI-RADS lesion shape and margin understate the actual level of expert radiologist agreement.
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In lumbar interbody fusion, a porous additive manufactured (AM) cage can provide more desirable stiffness, and may be beneficial to bone ingrowth. The biomechanical influence of porous cages on stability, subsidence, and facet contact force has not been fully described. The aim of this study was to verify biomechanical effects of porous cages. ⋯ Compared among three FP cages, the stresses in cage and endplate decreased with increasing porosity, whereas ROM increased with increasing porosity. FJF for various cages was substantially reduced compared to the intact model in all motion modes except for flexion. In summary, fully porous cages with a porosity of between 65% and 80% may offer an alternative to solid PEEK cages in TLIF.
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Multicenter Study Clinical Trial
Fuzzy spectral clustering for automated delineation of chronic wound region using digital images.
Chronic wound is an abnormal disease condition of localized injury to the skin and its underlying tissues having physiological impaired healing response. Assessment and management of such wound is a significant burden on the healthcare system. Currently, precise wound bed estimation depends on the clinical judgment and remains a difficult task. ⋯ Jaccard score. The sensitivity and specificity was found to be 87.3% and 95.7% respectively. The performance evaluation shows the robustness of the proposed method of wound area segmentation and its potential to be used for designing patient comfort centric wound care system.
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There are no studies about the biomechanical analysis of lumbar decompression surgery in relation to degenerative changes of the lumbar spine. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare, by using finite element (FE) analysis, the biomechanical changes of the lumbar spine in terms of annulus stress and nucleus pressure after two different kinds of lumbar decompression surgery in relation to disc degenerative changes. ⋯ Although the ConLa model with moderate disc degeneration showed the highest annulus stress, the degenerative models would be less influenced by the decompression technique.