Burns : journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries
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Observational Study
Application of calcium nebulization for mass exposure to an accidental hydrofluoric acid spill.
To determine the long-term prevalence and characteristics of acute hydrofluoric acid (HF) exposure in 2223 patients during the first 30 months after a mass-casualty exposure, and to confirm the antidotal effect of nebulized calcium on inhalation burns caused by HF. ⋯ Respiratory toxicity after mass exposure to an HF spill was successfully treated by calcium nebulizer. Based on our experience, detoxification processes and the amounts of antidote stocked are important when planning for future chemical disasters at the community level.
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Burn wounds continue to worsen after initial injury in a process known as burn conversion, which lasts about 3-5 days. It causes burn wounds to enlarge and deepen, leading to greater morbidity. Apoptosis is one of the factors contributing to the conversion of the zone of stasis into the zone of coagulation. Suppression of apoptosis has been associated with reducing burn conversion. Connexin 43 (Cx43) gap junctions facilitate the spread of apoptotic signals from dying cells to healthy neighbouring cells in injured tissues through the bystander effect. ⋯ Our findings suggest that elevation of Cx43 may play an active role in burn conversion spreading apoptosis in the early and intermediate burn wound.
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Burns are a serious health problem leading to several thousand deaths annually, and despite the growth of science and technology, automated burns diagnosis still remains a major challenge. Researchers have been exploring visual images-based automated approaches for burn diagnosis. Noting that the impact of a burn on a particular body part can be related to the skin thickness factor, we propose a deep convolutional neural network based body part-specific burns severity assessment model (BPBSAM). ⋯ The main contributions of this work along with burn images labelled datasets creation is that the proposed customized body part-specific burn severity assessment model can significantly improve the performance in spite of having small burn images dataset. This highly innovative customized body part-specific approach could also be used to deal with the burn region segmentation problem. Moreover, fine tuning on pre-trained non-burn body part images network has proven to be robust and reliable.