A cephalometric assessment of the nasolabial angle of an adult Nigerian population

Objective: One of the most important components of orthodontic diagnosis and treatment planning is an evaluation of the patient\u27s soft tissue profile. An assessment of the nasolabial angle is a vital component of this evaluation. The purpose of this study was to establish norms for the nasolabial angle of an adult Nigerian population; compare the male and female values and to compare the values obtained for Nigerians with those reported for other populations. Method: Lateral cephalometric radiographs of one hundred students (44 males and 56 females) of the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, aged 18-25years were taken. Selected subjects were of Nigerian ancestry with normal occlusion. The radiographs were manual ly t raced and the nasolabial angle of each subject measured. Result: A mean value of 84.35° +13.71° was computed for the entire sample. No statistically significant difference was observed between the male and female values (p>0.05), although 0 0 the males recorded a lower nasolabial angle (83.70 ) than the females (85.28 ).The nasolabial angle recorded in this study was similar to that reported for South African blacks, but much lower than that reported for Caucasian populations.Conclusion: The mean nasolabial angle of 84.35 + 13.71 was observed in the Nigerian population studied. Sexual differences were not observed; however, the values observed in this study differ from that reported for Caucasians and other racial groups

Restorative and orthodontic interdisciplinary management of an adult patient using modified Hawley appliance: a case report

This report presents a case of an adult female patient who had undergone orthodontic treatment to correct her malocclusion was referred to the Restorative Dentistry Clinic at the time when her brackets were due for debonding. The patient had presented with spacing of the anterior segments of both upper and lower arches with the upper canines in crossbite. At the end of the orthodontic correction of the occlusion the patient was referred to the restorative dentist for replacement of missing molars in the upper and lower arches. Fixed bridge prosthesis, implant-retained crowns or removable dentures were the treatment options for tooth replacement. Due to financial challenges the first two options were unavailable to the patient. The need to wear retainers made it impractical for the patient to be provided the third option of removable dentures. A modified design of Hawley retainers was then made for the patient that had pink acrylic bases and acrylic stock teeth to replace missing teeth. Thus, the functions of retainer and removable denture were combined in one appliance. The modified Hawley appliance designed for the patient in this study is a typical example of interdisciplinary management by the restorative dentist and the orthodontist to give appropriate care to the adult orthodontic patient

Biometrics of the primary dentition in a Nigerian sample

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine normative values of crown dimensions, arch dimensions, and amount of interdental space in the primary dentition of Nigerian children. Method: Dental casts from alginate impressions obtained from 125 randomly selected nursery school children (65 boys, 60 girls) aged 3 to 5 years, were measured with electronic caliper. Independent tests were used to analyze sample differences between sexes. Result: There were significant gender differences in arch width, depth and length dimensions, with the exception of the left mandibular anterior length. The boys showed significantly larger mesiodistal crown dimensions, except in the maxillary and mandibular primary lateral incisors. Gender differences in buccolingual crown diameters were statistically significant for maxillary second primary molars. There was no significant gender difference in amount of interdental spaces. Conclusion: It can be concluded that males had larger tooth/arch dimensions than females in the primary dentition stage

Polymers in Curved Boxes

We apply results derived in other contexts for the spectrum of the Laplace operator in curved geometries to the study of an ideal polymer chain confined to a spherical annulus in arbitrary space dimension D and conclude that the free energy compared to its value for an uncurved box of the same thickness and volume, is lower when $D < 3$, stays the same when $D = 3$, and is higher when \mbox{$D > 3$}. Thus confining an ideal polymer chain to a cylindrical shell, lowers the effective bending elasticity of the walls, and might induce spontaneous symmetry breaking, i.e. bending. (Actually, the above mentioned results show that {\em {any}} shell in $D = 3$ induces this effect, except for a spherical shell). We compute the contribution of this effect to the bending rigidities in the Helfrich free energy expression.Comment: 20 pages RevTeX, epsf; 4 figures; submitted to Macromoledule

Combined effect of bumetanide, bromide, and GABAergic agonists: An alternative treatment for intractable seizures

Univ Fed Sao Joao del Rei, Lab Neurociencia Expt & Computac, Programa Inst Bioengn, Sao Joao Del Rei, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Escola Paulista Med, Dept Expt Neurol, São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Escola Paulista Med, Dept Fisiol, São Paulo, BrazilPontificia Univ Catolica Rio Grande do Su, Inst Cerebro, Porto Alegre, RS, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Escola Paulista Med, Dept Expt Neurol, São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Escola Paulista Med, Dept Fisiol, São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc

Outcomes associated with antibiotic regimens for treatment of Mycobacterium abscessus in cystic fibrosis patients

Background Mycobacterium abscessus infection is associated with declining lung function in cystic fibrosis (CF), but there is little evidence on clinical efficacy to guide treatment. Methods Retrospective review of 37 CF patients treated for M. abscessus respiratory infection at a single center from 2006 to 2014. Outcomes included change in FEV1 at 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days after treatment and clearance of M. abscessus from sputum cultures. Results Lung function was significantly improved after 30 and 60 days of treatment, but not at later time points. Gains were inversely related to starting lung function. Antibiotic choices did not influence outcomes except for greater clearance with clarithromycin. Conclusions Treatment of M. abscessus resulted in short term improvement in lung function that is inversely related to pre-treatment FEV1

Discovering Representations for Black-box Optimization

The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main insight is that this process can be automated by generating a dataset of high-performing solutions with a quality diversity algorithm (here, MAP-Elites), then learning a representation with a generative model (here, a Variational Autoencoder) from that dataset. Our second insight is that this representation can be used to scale quality diversity optimization to higher dimensions -- but only if we carefully mix solutions generated with the learned representation and those generated with traditional variation operators. We demonstrate these capabilities by learning an low-dimensional encoding for the inverse kinematics of a thousand joint planar arm. The results show that learned representations make it possible to solve high-dimensional problems with orders of magnitude fewer evaluations than the standard MAP-Elites, and that, once solved, the produced encoding can be used for rapid optimization of novel, but similar, tasks. The presented techniques not only scale up quality diversity algorithms to high dimensions, but show that black-box optimization encodings can be automatically learned, rather than hand designed.Comment: Presented at GECCO 2020 -- v2 (Previous title 'Automating Representation Discovery with MAP-Elites'