Newborn hearing screening program in China: a narrative review of the issues in screening and management

Hearing loss is one of the most common sensory disorders in humans. The purpose of this review is to summarize the history and current status of newborn hearing screening in China and to investigate future developmental trends in newborn hearing screening with the intention of sharing experiences and providing a reference for other populations. In the 1980s, the research on hearing monitoring for high-risk infants led to the gradual development of newborn hearing screening in China. With the continuous improvement of screening technology, the newborn hearing screening program was gradually extended to the whole country and became a government-led multidisciplinary public health program. Genetic screening for deafness has been incorporated into newborn hearing screening in many regions of China to help screen for potential and late-onset deafness in newborns. In the future, it is necessary to further establish and improve whole life-cycle hearing screening and healthcare, conduct screening for congenital cytomegalovirus infection, and create a full-coverage, whole life course hearing screening and intervention system. Screening for deafness in China has been marked by 40 years of achievements, which have been a source of pride for entrepreneurs and comfort for patients and their families. Managing hearing screening data information more efficiently and establishing a quality control index system throughout the whole screening process are of paramount importance. The genetic screening for concurrent newborn hearing and deafness has a great clinical importance for the management of congenital deafness and prevention of ototoxicity. A hearing screening and intervention system across the whole life course should be developed

Modified basket plate for inferior patellar pole avulsion fractures—A report of three cases

AbstractIn patients who have sustained an avulsion fracture of the inferior patellar pole, the extensor mechanism is disrupted and should be repaired. The normal height of the patella can be maintained by preserving the patellar pole, but fractures of the inferior pole of the patella are not easy to reduce and fix firmly. In contrast with partial patellectomy, which requires postoperative immobilization, internal fixation with a basket plate allows for immediate mobilization and early weight-bearing. Owing to the unavailability of the basket plate in Taiwan, we have modified the plate with the titanium mesh as a possible alternative. We present three cases of this modified basket plate, which took place between 2008 and 2010. This technique avoided long-term immobilization of the knee with good clinical results

Integrating SPC and EPC for Multivariate Autocorrelated Process

Statistical process control (SPC) is a widely employed quality control method in industry. SPC is mainly designed for monitoring single quality characteristic. However, as the design of a product/process becomes complex, a process usually has multiple quality characteristics related to it. These characteristics must be monitored by multivariate SPC. When the autocorrelation is present in the process data, the traditional SPC may mislead the results. Hence, the autocorrelated data must be treated to eliminate the autocorrelation effect before employing SPC to detect the assignable causes. Besides, chance causes also have impact on the processes. When the process is out of control but no assignable cause is found, it can be adjusted by employing engineering process control (EPC). However, only using EPC to adjust the process may make inappropriate adjustments due to external disturbances or assignable causes. This study presents an integrated SPC and EPC procedure for multivariate autocorrelated process. The SPC procedure constructs a predicting model using group method of data handling (GMDH), which can transfer the autocorrelated data into uncorrelated data. Then, the Hotelling’s T2 and multivariate cumulative sum control charts are constructed to monitor the process. The EPC procedure constructs a controller utilizing data mining technique to adjust the multiple quality characteristics to their target values. Industry can employ this procedure to monitor and adjust the multivariate autocorrelated process

Pentagon-Match (PMatch): Identification of View-Invariant Planar Feature for Local Feature Matching-Based Homography Estimation

In computer vision, finding correct point correspondence among images plays an important role in many applications, such as image stitching, image retrieval, visual localization, etc. Most of the research works focus on the matching of local feature before a sampling method is employed, such as RANSAC, to verify initial matching results via repeated fitting of certain global transformation among the images. However, incorrect matches may still exist. Thus, a novel sampling scheme, Pentagon-Match (PMatch), is proposed in this work to verify the correctness of initially matched keypoints using pentagons randomly sampled from them. By ensuring shape and location of these pentagons are view-invariant with various evaluations of cross-ratio (CR), incorrect matches of keypoint can be identified easily with homography estimated from correctly matched pentagons. Experimental results show that highly accurate estimation of homography can be obtained efficiently for planar scenes of the HPatches dataset, based on keypoint matching results provided by LoFTR. Besides, accurate outlier identification for the above matching results and possible extension of the approach for multi-plane situation are also demonstrated.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.0300

A catalog of collected debris disks: properties, classifications and correlations between disks and stars/planets

We have collected a catalog of 1095 debris disks with properties and classification (resolved, planet, gas) information. From the catalog, we defined a less biased sample with 612 objects and presented the distributions of their stellar and disk properties to search for correlations between disks and stars. We found debris disks were widely distributed from B to M-type stars while planets were mostly found around solar-type stars, gases were easier to detect around early-type stars and resolved disks were mostly distributed from A to G- type stars. The fractional luminosity dropped off with stellar age and planets were mostly found around old stars while gas-detected disks were much younger. The dust temperature of both one-belt systems and cold components in two-belt systems increased with distance while decreasing with stellar age. In addition, we defined a less biased planet sample with 211 stars with debris disks but no planets and 35 stars with debris disks and planets and found the stars with debris disks and planets had higher metallicities than stars with debris disks but no planets. Among the 35 stars with debris disks and planets, we found the stars with disks and cool Jupiters were widely distributed with age from 10 Myr to 10 Gyr and metallicity from -1.56 to 0.28 while the other three groups tended to be old (> 4Gyr) and metal-rich (> -0.3). Besides, the eccentricities of cool Jupiters are distributed from 0 to 0.932 wider than the other three types of planets (< 0.3).Comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in RA