Central Macular Thickness in Children with Myopia, Emmetropia, and Hyperopia: An Optical Coherence Tomography Study

published_or_final_versio

Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness in Myopic, Emmetropic, and Hyperopic Children

published_or_final_versio

Experience of South and Southeast Asian minority women in Hong Kong during COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND: Hong Kong has a relatively low incidence rate of COVID-19 across the globe. Nevertheless, ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, especially South Asians (SAs) and Southeast Asians (SEAs), face numerous physical, mental, social, economic, cultural and religious challenges during the pandemic. This study explores the experiences of SA and SEA women in a predominantly Chinese metropolitan city. METHODS: Ten SA and SEA women were recruited and face-to-face interviews were conducted. Questions about participants’ daily life experience, physical and mental health conditions, economic situation and social interaction amid COVID-19 pandemic were asked to assess the impact of COVID-19. RESULTS: SAs and SEAs have a distinctive family culture, and women experienced significant physical and mental impact of COVID-19 due to their unique gender role in the family. In addition to taking care of their family in Hong Kong, SA and SEA women also had to mentally and financially support family members residing in their home countries. Access to COVID-related information was restricted due to language barrier. Public health measures including social distancing imposed extra burden on ethnic minorities with limited social and religious support. CONCLUSIONS: Even when COVID-19 incidence rate is relatively low in Hong Kong, the pandemic made life even more challenging for SAs and SEAs, which is a community already struggling with language barriers, financial woes, and discrimination. This in turn could have led to greater health inequalities. Government and civil organizations should take the social determinants of health inequalities into account when implementing COVID-19-related public health policies and strategies

Light-convolution dense selection u-net (Lds u-net) for ultrasound lateral bony feature segmentation

Scoliosis is a widespread medical condition where the spine becomes severely deformed and bends over time. It mostly affects young adults and may have a permanent impact on them. A periodic assessment, using a suitable modality, is necessary for its early detection. Conventionally, the usually employed modalities include X-ray and MRI, which employ ionising radiation and are expensive. Hence, a non-radiating 3D ultrasound imaging technique has been developed as a safe and economic alternative. However, ultrasound produces low-contrast images that are full of speckle noise, and skilled intervention is necessary for their processing. Given the prevalent occurrence of scoliosis and the limitations of scalability of human expert interventions, an automatic, fast, and low-computation assessment technique is being developed for mass scoliosis diagnosis. In this paper, a novel hybridized light-weight convolutional neural network architecture is presented for automatic lateral bony feature identification, which can help to develop a fully-fledged automatic scoliosis detection system. The proposed architecture, Light-convolution Dense Selection U-Net (LDS U-Net), can accurately segment ultrasound spine lateral bony features, from noisy images, thanks to its capabilities of smartly selecting only the useful information and extracting rich deep layer features from the input image. The proposed model is tested using a dataset of 109 spine ultrasound images. The segmentation result of the proposed network is compared with basic U-Net, Attention U-Net, and MultiResUNet using various popular segmentation indices. The results show that LDS U-Net provides a better segmentation performance compared to the other models. Additionally, LDS U-Net requires a smaller number of parameters and less memory, making it suitable for a large-batch screening process of scoliosis without a high computational requirement

Validation of scolioscan air-portable radiation-free three-dimensional ultrasound imaging assessment system for scoliosis

202109 bcvcVersion of RecordPublishe

Spinal deformity measurement using a low-density flexible array ultrasound transducer : a feasibility study with phantoms

202202 bcvcVersion of RecordRGCOthersThis work was supported by Hong Kong Research Grant Council ( 152220/14E , R5017-18 ), Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University .Publishe

3D ultrasound imaging provides reliable angle measurement with validity comparable to X-ray in patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis

202110 bcvcVersion of RecordRGCPublishe

Analysis of sagittal profile of spine using 3D ultrasound imaging : a phantom study and preliminary subject test

202205 bcfcAccepted ManuscriptRGCResearch Grant Council of Hong KongPublishe

Investigation of the phenomenon of coronal-sagittal curvature coupling on curve progression : an exploratory study using 3-D ultrasound

202205 bcfcNot applicableRGCHong Kong Research Grant Council Research 15 Impact Fund; the Stryker Spine Research Grant.Published12 month