Application of bioabsorbable screw fixation for anterior cervical decompression and bone grafting

OBJECTIVES: To examine the application of bioabsorbable screws for anterior cervical decompression and bone grafting fixation and to study their clinical effects in the treatment of cervical spondylosis. METHODS: From March 2007 to September 2012, 56 patients, 36 males and 20 females (38-79 years old, average 58.3±9.47 years), underwent a novel operation. Grafts were fixed by bioabsorbable screws (PLLA, 2.7 mm in diameter) after anterior decompression. The bioabsorbable screws were inserted from the midline of the graft bone to the bone surface of the upper and lower vertebrae at 45 degree angles. Patients were evaluated post-operatively to observe the improvement of symptoms and evaluate the fusion of the bone. The Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) score was used to evaluate the recovery of neurological functions. RESULTS: All screws were successfully inserted, with no broken screws. The rate of symptom improvement was 87.5%. All of the grafts fused well with no extrusion. The average time for graft fusion was 3.8±0.55 months (range 3-5 months). Three-dimensional reconstruction of CT scans demonstrated that the grafts fused with adjacent vertebrae well and that the screws were absorbed as predicted. The MRI findings showed that the cerebrospinal fluid was unobstructed. No obvious complications appeared in any of the follow-up evaluations. CONCLUSIONS: Cervical spondylosis with one- or two-level involvement can be effectively treated by anterior decompression and bone grafting with bioabsorbable screw fixation. This operative method is safe and can avoid the complications induced by metal implants

Prospects for Constraining interacting dark energy cosmology with gravitational-wave bright sirens detected by future SKA-era pulsar timing arrays

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) have the potential to detect Nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs) that are usually generated by the individual inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) in the galactic centers. The GW signals as cosmological standard sirens can provide the absolute cosmic distances, thereby can be used to constrain the cosmological parameters. In this paper, we analyze the ability of future SKA-era PTAs to detect the existing SMBHBs candidates assuming the root mean square of timing noise $\sigma_t=20\ {\rm ns}$, and use the simulated PTA data to constrain the interacting dark energy (IDE) models with energy transfer rate $Q = \beta H\rho_c$. We find that, the future SKA-era PTAs will play an important role in constraining the IDE cosmology. Using only the mock PTA data consisting of 100 pulsars, we obtain $\sigma(H_0)=0.239\ {\rm km} \ {\rm s}^{-1} {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ and $\sigma(\Omega_m)=0.0103$ in the I$\Lambda$CDM model, which are much better than the results from the Planck TT, TE, EE+lowE. However, the PTA data cannot provide a tight constraint on the coupling parameter $\beta$ compared with Planck, but the data combination of Planck+PTA can provide a rather tight constraint, i.e., $\sigma(\beta)=0.00232$, since the PTA data could break the parameter degeneracies inherent in CMB. In the I$w$CDM model, we obtain $\sigma(\beta)=0.00137$ and $\sigma(w)=0.0492$ from the Planck+PTA data combination. In addition, we also find that with the increase of the number of pulsars in PTA, the constraint results from the Planck+PTA will be further improved to some extent. We show that the observations of Nanohertz GWs with future SKA-era PTAs will provide a powerful tool for exploring the nature of dark energy and measuring the coupling between dark energy and dark matter

Clinical comparison between a percutaneous hydraulic pressure delivery system and balloon tamp system using high-viscosity cement for the treatment of osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures

OBJECTIVES: Osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures (OVCFs) affect the elderly population, especially postmenopausal women. Percutaneous kyphoplasty is designed to treat painful vertebral compression fractures for which conservative therapy has been unsuccessful. High-viscosity cement can be injected by either a hydraulic pressure delivery system (HPDS) or a balloon tamp system (BTS). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare the safety and clinical outcomes of these two systems. METHODS: A random, multicenter, prospective study was performed. Clinical and radiological assessments were carried out, including assessments of general surgery information, visual analog scale, quality of life, cement leakage, and height and angle restoration. RESULTS: Using either the HPDS or BTS to inject high-viscosity cement effectively relieved pain and improved the patients’ quality of life immediately, and these effects lasted at least two years. The HPDS using high-viscosity cement reduced cost, surgery time, and radiation exposure and showed similar clinical results to those of the BTS. In addition, the leakage rate and the incidence of adjacent vertebral fractures after the HPDS treatment were reduced compared with those after treatment using the classic vertebroplasty devices. However, the BTS had better height and angle restoration abilities. CONCLUSIONS: The percutaneous HPDS with high-viscosity cement has similar clinical outcomes to those of traditional procedures in the treatment of vertebral fractures in the elderly. The HPDS with high-viscosity cement is better than the BTS in the treatment of mild and moderate OVCFs and could be an alternative method for the treatment of severe OVCFs

Exposing Fine-Grained Adversarial Vulnerability of Face Anti-Spoofing Models

Face anti-spoofing aims to discriminate the spoofing face images (e.g., printed photos) from live ones. However, adversarial examples greatly challenge its credibility, where adding some perturbation noise can easily change the predictions. Previous works conducted adversarial attack methods to evaluate the face anti-spoofing performance without any fine-grained analysis that which model architecture or auxiliary feature is vulnerable to the adversary. To handle this problem, we propose a novel framework to expose the fine-grained adversarial vulnerability of the face anti-spoofing models, which consists of a multitask module and a semantic feature augmentation (SFA) module. The multitask module can obtain different semantic features for further evaluation, but only attacking these semantic features fails to reflect the discrimination-related vulnerability. We then design the SFA module to introduce the data distribution prior for more discrimination-related gradient directions for generating adversarial examples. Comprehensive experiments show that SFA module increases the attack success rate by nearly 40$\%$ on average. We conduct this fine-grained adversarial analysis on different annotations, geometric maps, and backbone networks (e.g., Resnet network). These fine-grained adversarial examples can be used for selecting robust backbone networks and auxiliary features. They also can be used for adversarial training, which makes it practical to further improve the accuracy and robustness of the face anti-spoofing models.Comment: Accepted by IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshop, 202

Systematic Analysis of Impact of Sampling Regions and Storage Methods on Fecal Gut Microbiome and Metabolome Profiles.

The contribution of human gastrointestinal (GI) microbiota and metabolites to host health has recently become much clearer. However, many confounding factors can influence the accuracy of gut microbiome and metabolome studies, resulting in inconsistencies in published results. In this study, we systematically investigated the effects of fecal sampling regions and storage and retrieval conditions on gut microbiome and metabolite profiles from three healthy children. Our analysis indicated that compared to homogenized and snap-frozen samples (standard control [SC]), different sampling regions did not affect microbial community alpha diversity, while a total of 22 of 176 identified metabolites varied significantly across different sampling regions. In contrast, storage conditions significantly influenced the microbiome and metabolome. Short-term room temperature storage had a minimal effect on the microbiome and metabolome profiles. Sample storage in RNALater showed a significant level of variation in both microbiome and metabolome profiles, independent of the storage or retrieval conditions. The effect of RNALater on the metabolome was stronger than the effect on the microbiome, and individual variability between study participants outweighed the effect of RNALater on the microbiome. We conclude that homogenizing stool samples was critical for metabolomic analysis but not necessary for microbiome analysis. Short-term room temperature storage had a minimal effect on the microbiome and metabolome profiles and is recommended for short-term fecal sample storage. In addition, our study indicates that the use of RNALater as a storage medium of stool samples for microbial and metabolomic analyses is not recommended.IMPORTANCE The gastrointestinal microbiome and metabolome can provide a new angle to understand the development of health and disease. Stool samples are most frequently used for large-scale cohort studies. Standardized procedures for stool sample handling and storage can be a determining factor for performing microbiome or metabolome studies. In this study, we focused on the effects of stool sampling regions and stool sample storage conditions on variations in the gut microbiome composition and metabolome profile