Transcriptomic Analyses of Sexual Dimorphism of the Zebrafish Liver and the Effect of Sex Hormones

10.1371/journal.pone.0053562PLoS ONE81

Feature reduction and multi-classification of different assistive devices according to the gait pattern

Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is a surgical procedure used in patients with Osteoarthritis to improve their state. An understanding about how gait patterns differ from patient to patient and are influenced by the assistive device (AD) that is prescribed is still missing. This article focuses on such purpose. Standard walker, crutches and rollator were tested. Symmetric indexes of spatiotemporal and postural control features were calculated. In order to select the important features which can discriminate the differences among the ADs, different techniques for feature selection are investigated. Classification is handled by Multi-class Support Vector Machine. Results showed that rollator provides a more symmetrical gait and crutches demonstrated to be the worst. Relatively to postural control parameters, standard walker is the most stable and crutches are the worst AD. This means that, depending on the patient's problem and the recovery goal, different ADs should be used. After selecting a set of 16 important features, through correlation, it was demonstrated that they provide important quantitative information about the functional capacity, which is not represented by velocity, cadence and clinical scales. Also, they were capable of distinguishing the gait patterns influenced by each AD, showing that each patient has different needs during recovery.The authors report no conflicts of interest. This study was supported by the Portuguese Science Foundation (grant SFRH/BD/76097/2011).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evaluation of gait performance of knee osteoarthritis patients after total knee arthroplasty with different assistive devices

Introduction: Nowadays Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) affects a large percentage of the elderly, and one solution is to perform a Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA). In this paper, one intends to study the gait and posture of these patients after the TKA, while walking with three assistive devices (ADs) (crutches, standard walker (SW) and rollator with forearm supports (RFS)). Methods: Eleven patients were evaluated in 2 phases: 5 days and 15 days after surgery. This evaluation was conducted with two inertial sensors, one attached to the operated leg ankle, to measure spatiotemporal parameters, and the other at the sacrum, to measure posture and fall risk-related parameters. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with repeated measures was performed to detect group differences. Results: The MANOVA results show that all spatiotemporal parameters are significantly different (p 0.05). The interaction between time and ADs only affects significantly the velocity (p < 0.05). In terms of fall risk parameters, time only significantly affects the antero-posterior direction (p < 0.05) and ADs affects significantly root mean square in medio-lateral direction (p < 0.05). In terms of interaction between time and ADs, there are no statistical significant differences. Conclusion: This study concludes that depending on the state of recovery of the patient, different ADs should be prescribed. On the overall, standard walker is good to give stability to the patient and RFS allows the patient to present a gait pattern closer to a natural gait.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio