250 research outputs found
Surgical Treatment for Unstable Distal Clavicle Fracture with Micromovable and Anatomical Acromioclavicular Plate
Between 2006 and 2009, 18 patients of distal clavicle fracture were treated with micro-movable and anatomical acromioclavicular plate (MAAP) in our department. According to the Neer's classification, all cases were unstable with type IIA (12 cases) and type IIB (6 cases). Functional outcome was evaluated using the Karlsson's criteria. The mean follow-up was 18 months (range, 12-36months). No postoperative plate screws complication was observed. Osseous union could be achieved at a mean time of 12 weeks after operation in 18 patients (range, 8 -16 weeks). According to Karlsson's criteria, radiographic appearances and postoperative shoulder functional recovery revealed a good and excellent rate in these cases. We conclude that surgical treatment using MAAP seems to be a good option for unstable type II fractures of the distal clavicle. This technique allows for reliable fixation with early functional exercises and functional recovery
High glucose upregulates connective tissue growth factor expression in human vascular smooth muscle cells
BACKGROUND: Connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) is a potent profibrotic factor, which is implicated in fibroblast proliferation, angiogenesis and extracellular matrix (ECM) synthesis. It is a downstream mediator of some of the effects of transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) and is potentially induced by hyperglycemia in human renal mesangial cells. However, whether high glucose could induce the CTGF expression in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) remains unknown. Therefore, this study was designed to test whether high glucose could regulate CTGF expression in human VSMC. The effect of modulating CTGF expression on VSMC proliferation and migration was further investigated. RESULTS: Expression of CTGF mRNA was up-regulated as early as 6 hours in cultured human VSMCs after exposed to high glucose condition, followed by ECM components (collagen type I and fibronectin) accumulation. The upregulation of CTGF mRNA appears to be TGFβ-dependent since anti-TGFβ antibody blocks the effect of high glucose on CTGF gene expression. A small interference RNA (siRNA) targeting CTGF mRNA (CTGF-siRNA) effectively suppressed CTGF up-regulation stimulated by high glucose up to 79% inhibition. As a consequence of decreased expression of CTGF gene, the deposition of ECM proteins in the VSMC was also declined. Moreover, CTGF-siRNA expressing vector partially inhibited the high glucose-induced VSMC proliferation and migration. CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that in the development of macrovascular complications in diabetes, CTGF might be an important factor involved in the patho-physiological responses to high glucose in human VSMCs. In addition, the modulatory effects of CTGF-siRNA during this process suggest that specific targeting CTGF by RNA interference could be useful in preventing intimal hyperplasia in diabetic macrovascular complications
ODSum: New Benchmarks for Open Domain Multi-Document Summarization
Open-domain Multi-Document Summarization (ODMDS) is a critical tool for
condensing vast arrays of documents into coherent, concise summaries. With a
more inter-related document set, there does not necessarily exist a correct
answer for the retrieval, making it hard to measure the retrieving performance.
We propose a rule-based method to process query-based document summarization
datasets into ODMDS datasets. Based on this method, we introduce a novel
dataset, ODSum, a sophisticated case with its document index interdependent and
often interrelated. We tackle ODMDS with the \textit{retrieve-then-summarize}
method, and the performance of a list of retrievers and summarizers is
investigated. Through extensive experiments, we identify variances in
evaluation metrics and provide insights into their reliability. We also found
that LLMs suffer great performance loss from retrieving errors. We further
experimented methods to improve the performance as well as investigate their
robustness against imperfect retrieval. We will release our data and code at
https://github.com/yale-nlp/ODSum
Shapes of distal tibiofibular syndesmosis are associated with risk of recurrent lateral ankle sprains
Distal tibiofibular syndesmosis (DTS) has wide anatomic variability in depth of incisura fibularis and shape of tibial tubercles. We designed a 3-year prospective cohort study of 300 young physical training soldiers in an Army Physical Fitness School. Ankle computed tomography (CT) scans showed that 56% of the incisura fibularis were a "C" shape, 25% were a "1" shape, and 19% were a "Gamma"shape. Furthermore, we invited a randomly selected subcohort of 6 participants in each shape of DTS to undergo a three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning. The "1" shape group showed widest displacement range of the DTS in the y-axis, along with the range of motion (ROM) on the position more than 20 degrees of the ankle dorsiflexion, inversion and eversion. During the 3-year study period, 23 participants experienced recurrent lateral ankle sprains. 7 cases of the incisura fibularis were "C" shape, 13 cases were "1" shape, and 3 cases were "Gamma"shape. The "1" shape showed highest risk among the three shapes in incident recurrent lateral ankle sprains. We propose that it is possible to classify shapes of DTS according to the shapes of incisura fibularis, and people with "1" shape may have more risk of recurrent lateral ankle sprains
Reconstruction-Aware Prior Distillation for Semi-supervised Point Cloud Completion
Point clouds scanned by real-world sensors are always incomplete, irregular,
and noisy, making the point cloud completion task become increasingly more
important. Though many point cloud completion methods have been proposed, most
of them require a large number of paired complete-incomplete point clouds for
training, which is labor exhausted. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel
Reconstruction-Aware Prior Distillation semi-supervised point cloud completion
method named RaPD, which takes advantage of a two-stage training scheme to
reduce the dependence on a large-scale paired dataset. In training stage 1, the
so-called deep semantic prior is learned from both unpaired complete and
unpaired incomplete point clouds using a reconstruction-aware pretraining
process. While in training stage 2, we introduce a semi-supervised prior
distillation process, where an encoder-decoder-based completion network is
trained by distilling the prior into the network utilizing only a small number
of paired training samples. A self-supervised completion module is further
introduced, excavating the value of a large number of unpaired incomplete point
clouds, leading to an increase in the network's performance. Extensive
experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that RaPD, the first
semi-supervised point cloud completion method, achieves superior performance to
previous methods on both homologous and heterologous scenarios
RGBGrasp: Image-based Object Grasping by Capturing Multiple Views during Robot Arm Movement with Neural Radiance Fields
Robotic research encounters a significant hurdle when it comes to the
intricate task of grasping objects that come in various shapes, materials, and
textures. Unlike many prior investigations that heavily leaned on specialized
point-cloud cameras or abundant RGB visual data to gather 3D insights for
object-grasping missions, this paper introduces a pioneering approach called
RGBGrasp. This method depends on a limited set of RGB views to perceive the 3D
surroundings containing transparent and specular objects and achieve accurate
grasping. Our method utilizes pre-trained depth prediction models to establish
geometry constraints, enabling precise 3D structure estimation, even under
limited view conditions. Finally, we integrate hash encoding and a proposal
sampler strategy to significantly accelerate the 3D reconstruction process.
These innovations significantly enhance the adaptability and effectiveness of
our algorithm in real-world scenarios. Through comprehensive experimental
validations, we demonstrate that RGBGrasp achieves remarkable success across a
wide spectrum of object-grasping scenarios, establishing it as a promising
solution for real-world robotic manipulation tasks. The demonstrations of our
method can be found on: https://sites.google.com/view/rgbgras
Object Level Depth Reconstruction for Category Level 6D Object Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB Image
Recently, RGBD-based category-level 6D object pose estimation has achieved
promising improvement in performance, however, the requirement of depth
information prohibits broader applications. In order to relieve this problem,
this paper proposes a novel approach named Object Level Depth reconstruction
Network (OLD-Net) taking only RGB images as input for category-level 6D object
pose estimation. We propose to directly predict object-level depth from a
monocular RGB image by deforming the category-level shape prior into
object-level depth and the canonical NOCS representation. Two novel modules
named Normalized Global Position Hints (NGPH) and Shape-aware Decoupled Depth
Reconstruction (SDDR) module are introduced to learn high fidelity object-level
depth and delicate shape representations. At last, the 6D object pose is solved
by aligning the predicted canonical representation with the back-projected
object-level depth. Extensive experiments on the challenging CAMERA25 and
REAL275 datasets indicate that our model, though simple, achieves
state-of-the-art performance.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 4 table
Automatic Identification of Individual Nanoplastics by Raman Spectroscopy Based on Machine Learning
The increasing prevalence of nanoplastics in the environment underscores the need for effective detection and monitoring techniques. Current methods mainly focus on microplastics, while accurate identification of nanoplastics is challenging due to their small size and complex composition. In this work, we combined highly reflective substrates and machine learning to accurately identify nanoplastics using Raman spectroscopy. Our approach established Raman spectroscopy data sets of nanoplastics, incorporated peak extraction and retention data processing, and constructed a random forest model that achieved an average accuracy of 98.8% in identifying nanoplastics. We validated our method with tap water spiked samples, achieving over 97% identification accuracy, and demonstrated the applicability of our algorithm to real-world environmental samples through experiments on rainwater, detecting nanoscale polystyrene (PS) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Despite the challenges of processing low-quality nanoplastic Raman spectra and complex environmental samples, our study demonstrated the potential of using random forests to identify and distinguish nanoplastics from other environmental particles. Our results suggest that the combination of Raman spectroscopy and machine learning holds promise for developing effective nanoplastic particle detection and monitoring strategies.</p
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