Comparison of the Keratometric Corneal Astigmatic Power after Phacoemulsification: Clear Temporal Corneal Incision versus Superior Scleral Tunnel Incision

Objective. This is prospective randomized control trial to compare the mean keratometric corneal astigmatism diopter power (not surgical induced astigmatism) among preop and one-month and three-month postop phacoemulcification of either a clear temporal corneal incision or a superior scleral tunnel Incision, using only keratometric astigmatic power reading to evaluate the difference between the two cataract surgery incisions. Methods. 120 patients (134 eyes) underwent phacoemulcification were randomly assigned to two groups: Group A, the clear temporal corneal incision group, and Group B, the superior scleral tunnel incision group. SPSS11.5 Software was used for statistical analysis to compare the postsurgical changes of cornea astigmatism on keratometry. Results. The changes of corneal astigmatic diopter in Groups A and B after 3 month postop from keratometric reading were 1.04 + 0.76 and 0.94 + 0.27, respectively (P = .84 >.05), which showed no statistic significance difference. Conclusion. The incision through either temporal clear cornea or superior scleral tunnel in phacoemulcification shows no statistic difference in astigmatism change on keratometry 3-month postop

ContraGen: Effective Contrastive Learning For Causal Language Model

Despite exciting progress in large-scale language generation, the expressiveness of its representations is severely limited by the \textit{anisotropy} issue where the hidden representations are distributed into a narrow cone in the vector space. To address this issue, we present ContraGen, a novel contrastive learning framework to improve the representation with better uniformity and discrimination. We assess ContraGen on a wide range of downstream tasks in natural and programming languages. We show that ContraGen can effectively enhance both uniformity and discrimination of the representations and lead to the desired improvement on various language understanding tasks where discriminative representations are crucial for attaining good performance. Specifically, we attain $44\%$ relative improvement on the Semantic Textual Similarity tasks and $34\%$ on Code-to-Code Search tasks. Furthermore, by improving the expressiveness of the representations, ContraGen also boosts the source code generation capability with $9\%$ relative improvement on execution accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark.Comment: 10 page

Thin minimal rim width at Bruch’s membrane opening is associated with glaucomatous paracentral visual field loss

Purpose To compare optic nerve head (ONH) measurements in glaucomatous eyes with paracentral visual field (VF) loss to eyes with peripheral VF loss and controls. Methods: Open-angle glaucoma (OAG) patients with early paracentral VF loss or isolated peripheral VF loss as well as control subjects underwent ONH imaging with swept-source optical coherence tomography (OCT) and retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) imaging with spectral-domain OCT. Minimum rim width at Bruch’s membrane opening (BMO-MRW), lamina cribrosa depth (LCD), and RNFL thickness were compared among the glaucoma and control groups with one-way analysis of variance, Kruskal–Wallis test, and multiple regression analysis. Results: Twenty-nine eyes from 29 OAG patients (15 early paracentral and 14 isolated peripheral VF loss) and 20 eyes of 20 control subjects were included. The early paracentral and isolated peripheral VF loss groups had similar VF mean deviation (MD) (−5.3±2.7 dB and −3.7±3.0 dB, p=0.15, respectively). Global BMO-MRW was lower in OAG eyes than in controls (193.8±40.0 vs 322.7±62.2 μm, p0.99). In contrast, the minimal BMO-MRW was lower in eyes with early paracentral loss (69.0±33.6 μm) than in eyes with isolated peripheral loss (107.7±40.2 μm; p=0.03) or control eyes (200.1±40.8 μm; p<0.001). Average and thinnest RNFL thickness did not differ between OAG groups (p=0.61 and 0.19, respectively). Horizontal and vertical LCD did not differ among the OAG groups and controls (p=0.80 and 0.82, respectively). Multivariable linear regression analysis among OAG cases confirmed the association between lower minimal BMO-MRW and early paracentral VF loss (β=−38.3 μm; 95% confidence interval, −69.8 to −6.8 μm; p=0.02) after adjusting for age, gender, MD, and disc size. Conclusion: Thin minimal BMO-MRW may represent a new structural biomarker associated with early glaucomatous paracentral VF loss

Pulse energy packing effects on material transport during laser processing of &lt; 1

The effects of energy pulse packing on material transport during single-pulse laser processing of silicon is studied using temporarily shaped pulses with durations from 50 to 150 ns. Six regimes of material transport were identified and disambiguated through energy packing considerations over a range of pulse durations. Energy packing has been shown to shift the interaction to energetically costlier regimes without appreciable benefit in either depth, material removal or crater morphology and quality.The authors would like to thank the UK Technology Strategy Board under project TP14/HVM/6/I/BD5665. The authors acknowledge the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Photonic Systems Development for their generous support

Clinical Study Comparison of the Keratometric Corneal Astigmatic Power after Phacoemulsification: Clear Temporal Corneal Incision versus Superior Scleral Tunnel Incision

Objective. This is prospective randomized control trial to compare the mean keratometric corneal astigmatism diopter power (not surgical induced astigmatism) among preop and one-month and three-month postop phacoemulcification of either a clear temporal corneal incision or a superior scleral tunnel Incision, using only keratometric astigmatic power reading to evaluate the difference between the two cataract surgery incisions. Methods. 120 patients (134 eyes) underwent phacoemulcification were randomly assigned to two groups: Group A, the clear temporal corneal incision group, and Group B, the superior scleral tunnel incision group. SPSS11.5 Software was used for statistical analysis to compare the postsurgical changes of cornea astigmatism on keratometry. Results. The changes of corneal astigmatic diopter in Groups A and B after 3 month postop from keratometric reading were 1.04 + 0.76 and 0.94 + 0.27, respectively (P = .84 &gt;.05), which showed no statistic significance difference. Conclusion. The incision through either temporal clear cornea or superior scleral tunnel in phacoemulcification shows no statistic difference in astigmatism change on keratometry 3-month postop

A New NVM Device Driver for IoT Time Series Database

Numerous IoT devices in IoT systems collect data concurrently, which brings great challenges to IoT time series databases to store and manage these data. NVM device has high read&ndash;write speed compared with HDD and Flash-based SSD, and it is a possible way to solve the storage bottleneck. However, there are some limitations that should be solved such as the overhead of the I/O software stack for NVM devices and the lack of optimization for IoT time series databases in a Linux environment. By analyzing the characteristics of IoT time series databases and NVM devices, we optimized the device driver of NVM in Linux and provide a new structure of a NVM device driver for IoT time series databases. A multi-queue management strategy and a lightweight load balance mechanism based on frequency were designed to improve the concurrency and efficiency of NVM device drivers. The prototype of an IoT-oriented NVM device driver named TS-PMEM was implemented based on an open-source NVM device driver. Six prototypes were used for evaluation with YCSB-TS, a test tool for time series databases. Results showed that TS-PMEM can improve write throughput of the time series databases by 18.6%, query throughput by 10.6%, and reduce the write latency by 8.3% and query latency by 6.4%

A Fast Spatial Pool Learning Algorithm of Hierarchical Temporal Memory Based on Minicolumn’s Self-Nomination

As a new type of artificial neural network model, HTM has become the focus of current research and application. The sparse distributed representation is the basis of the HTM model, but the existing spatial pool learning algorithms have high training time overhead and may cause the spatial pool to become unstable. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose a fast spatial pool learning algorithm of HTM based on minicolumn’s nomination, where the minicolumns are selected according to the load-carrying capacity and the synapses are adjusted using compressed encoding. We have implemented the prototype of the algorithm and carried out experiments on three datasets. It is verified that the training time overhead of the proposed algorithm is almost unaffected by the encoding length, and the spatial pool becomes stable after fewer iterations of training. Moreover, the training of the new input does not affect the already trained results