Evaluation of retrobulbar blood flow in patients with age-related cataract; color Doppler ultrasonographic findings

Afshin Mohammadi1, Nilofar Khorasani2, Farzad Moloudi2, Mohammad Ghasemi-rad31Department of Radiology, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran; 2Student Research Committee, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran; 3Genius and Talented Student Organization, Student Research Committee, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, IranObjectives: Cataracts are the most common cause of blindness worldwide, with cataract surgery being the most common ophthalmic procedure. To our best knowledge, this is the first case-control study with a large number of participants to evaluate ocular blood flow in patients with cataracts.Materials and methods: Color Doppler and duplex sonography of the orbital vessels was performed in 224 eyes of 112 patients with known bilateral age-related cataracts and in 76 eyes of 38 healthy age- and sex-matched volunteers.Results: The mean ± (standard deviation [SD]) of peak systolic velocity (PSV) of the ophthalmic artery in patients with cataracts (34.59 ± 22.49 cm/second) was significantly different to that in controls (52.11 ± 14.01 cm/second) (P < 0.001). The mean ± SD PSV of the central retinal artery in patients with cataracts (15.31 ± 4.93 cm/second) was significantly different to that in controls (9.61 ± 5.64 cm/second) (P < 0.001).Conclusion: The mean PSV and resistive index (RI) of the ophthalmic and central retinal arteries were lower in cataract patients when compared with normal subjects. This suggests that ocular hypoperfusion and changes in ocular hemodynamic may have a role in the formation of age-related cataracts.Keywords: retrobulbar blood flow, age-related, cataract, color Doppler ultrasonographi

LightPlay: Efficient Replay with GPUs

Abstract. Previous deterministic replay systems reduce the runtime overhead by either relying on hardware support or by relaxing the de-terminism requirements for replay. We propose LightPlay that fulfills stricter determinism requirements with low overhead without requiring hardware or OS support. LightPlay guarantees that the memory state af-ter each instruction instance in a replay run is the same as in original run. It reduces logging overhead using a lightweight thread local technique that avoids synchronization between threads during the recording run. GPUs are used to efficiently identify the memory ordering constraints that produce the same memory states before the replay run. LightPlay incurs low space overhead for logging as it only stores the part of log where data races occur. During the logging run LightPlay is 20x–100x faster than logging the total order and requires only 1 % space overhead.

Global injury morbidity and mortality from 1990 to 2017 : results from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Correction:Background Past research in population health trends has shown that injuries form a substantial burden of population health loss. Regular updates to injury burden assessments are critical. We report Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 Study estimates on morbidity and mortality for all injuries. Methods We reviewed results for injuries from the GBD 2017 study. GBD 2017 measured injury-specific mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) using the Cause of Death Ensemble model. To measure non-fatal injuries, GBD 2017 modelled injury-specific incidence and converted this to prevalence and years lived with disability (YLDs). YLLs and YLDs were summed to calculate disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Findings In 1990, there were 4 260 493 (4 085 700 to 4 396 138) injury deaths, which increased to 4 484 722 (4 332 010 to 4 585 554) deaths in 2017, while age-standardised mortality decreased from 1079 (1073 to 1086) to 738 (730 to 745) per 100 000. In 1990, there were 354 064 302 (95% uncertainty interval: 338 174 876 to 371 610 802) new cases of injury globally, which increased to 520 710 288 (493 430 247 to 547 988 635) new cases in 2017. During this time, age-standardised incidence decreased non-significantly from 6824 (6534 to 7147) to 6763 (6412 to 7118) per 100 000. Between 1990 and 2017, age-standardised DALYs decreased from 4947 (4655 to 5233) per 100 000 to 3267 (3058 to 3505). Interpretation Injuries are an important cause of health loss globally, though mortality has declined between 1990 and 2017. Future research in injury burden should focus on prevention in high-burden populations, improving data collection and ensuring access to medical care.Peer reviewe

Mapping local patterns of childhood overweight and wasting in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2017

A double burden of malnutrition occurs when individuals, household members or communities experience both undernutrition and overweight. Here, we show geospatial estimates of overweight and wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age in 105 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2000 to 2017 and aggregate these to policy-relevant administrative units. Wasting decreased overall across LMICs between 2000 and 2017, from 8.4% (62.3 (55.1–70.8) million) to 6.4% (58.3 (47.6–70.7) million), but is predicted to remain above the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025. Prevalence of overweight increased from 5.2% (30 (22.8–38.5) million) in 2000 to 6.0% (55.5 (44.8–67.9) million) children aged under 5 years in 2017. Areas most affected by double burden of malnutrition were located in Indonesia, Thailand, southeastern China, Botswana, Cameroon and central Nigeria. Our estimates provide a new perspective to researchers, policy makers and public health agencies in their efforts to address this global childhood syndemic

High Performance Vertex-Centric Graph Analytics on GPUs

Massive parallel processing power of GPU's presents an attractive opportunity for accelerating large scale vertex-centric graph computations. However, the inherent irregularity and large sizes of real-world power law graphs creates many challenges. Lock-step execution by threads within a SIMD group restricts exploitable parallelism, the limited GPU's DRAM size restricts the sizes of graphs that can be offloaded to the GPU, and the limited inter-GPU communication bandwidth necessitates judicious use available bandwidth. This dissertation addresses all of these challenges.We present Warp Segmentation that greatly enhances GPU device utilization by dynamically assigning appropriate number of SIMD threads to process a vertex while employing the compact CSR representation to maximize the graph size that can be held in GPU global memory. Prior works can either maximize graph sizes (e.g., VWC) or device utilization (e.g., CuSha). We scale graph processing over multiple GPUs via Vertex Refinement that dynamically collects and transfers only the updated boundary vertices leading to dramatically reduced amount of inter-GPU data transfer. Existing multi-GPU techniques (Medusa, TOTEM) perform high degree of wasteful vertex transfers. Since processing all vertices at every iteration wastes much of GPU's computation power, we present a work-efficient solution that processes only those vertices during an iteration that were activated in the previous iteration. We employ an effective task expansion strategy that avoids intra-warp thread underutilization. For multi-GPU graph computation, we present permissive partitioning to dynamically balance load across GPUs. Also, as recording vertex activeness requires additional data structures, to manage the graph storage overhead, we introduce vertex grouping that enables trade-off between memory consumption and work efficiency. Finally, to apply the proposed solutions to other irregular applications, we generalize our techniques and present Collaborative Context Collection (CCC) and Collaborative Task Engagement (CTE). CCC is a software/compiler technique to enhance the SIMD-efficiency in loops containing thread divergence. CTE abstracts away the complexities of a rather complicated technique using a CUDA C++ device side template library and balances load across threads within a SIMD group

An Evaluation of Effects of Source -Sink Limitation on Yield and Yield Components in Two Soybean Varieties

ABSTRACT To evaluate effects of source -sink limitation on yield and yield components in Soybean varieties, a field experiment was conducted at Research Farm of Islamic Azad University of Karaj, Iran during 2010-2011. The experimental design was a factorial in randomized complete block with 4 replications. The treatments included seven treatments of source -sink limitation: 20% pod removal (L1), 40% pod removal (L2), 60% pod removal (L3), 80% pod removal (L4), control (L5), 50% leaf removal (elimination upper half of plants (L6) and 50% leaf removal (elimination lower half of plants) (L7). The other treatments were included two varieties (M7 and M9). The results showed main effects of different varieties had significant effect on plant height, the number of nod, grain yield and harvest index. Furthermore, main effects of different levels of source-sink limitation had significant effect on plant height, the number of nod, the number of pod in plant, the number of pod in sub stem, the number of seed per plant, seed yield in single plant, seed yield, harvest index, biomass and 1000 seed weight. Moreover, interaction effects of different varieties and different levels of source-sink limitation had significant effect on the number of nod, sub stem and biomass. Variety of M7 had more yield than M9 (with 535.77 Kg per hectare). On the other hands, removal of 20% and 40% of the pods were placed in one statistical group with the control but removal of 60% and 80% of pods showed significant difference with control and reduced the seed yield

Innovation of a new silicone prosthesis for inguinal hernioplasty : new method for silicone prosthesis production, a preliminary study

Purpose: The main strategy in inguinal hernia repair is mesh hernioplasty (specially prolene mesh): Pain in anterior femoral, inguinal and scrotal-areas, Mainly due to sensory-nerve-injury in the very regions and was deferen injury are the-main complications reported following repairing inguinal hernia. In:this study we decided to use semiliquid silicone in order to form it in an in-vivo prosthesis production method to perform hernioplasty. Methods: In this technique, silicone Was produced through Room Temperature Vulcanization (RTV) technique, which is feasible in the; room temperature. The produced semiliquid polymer was shaped in the inguinal canal in six cadavers. Result : While the prostheses adequately covered all the anatomic area Of the canal with an acceptable thickness in all of the cases, a Satisfactory shape was developed in four cases. While 15-20 cc of silicone was-needed to cover all anatomic areas properly the hardness equal to 15 was achieved after curing process. Conclusion: New silicone prosthesis forms satisfyingly in the, inguinal canal and can protect it by encapsulation mechanism. It is soft with no risk of damage to the nerves or vat. It is inert and has no toxicity to the adjacent tissue. This technique of silicone remodeling can also be used in other fields of surgery such as plastic or vascular surgery