Assessing Walking Ability in People with HTLV-1-Associated Myelopathy Using the 10 Meter Timed Walk and the 6 Minute Walk Test

Five to ten million persons, are infected by HTLV-1 of which 3% will develop HTLV-1-associated myelopathy (HAM) a chronic, disabling inflammation of the spinal cord. Walking, a fundamental, complex, multi-functional task is demanding of multiple body systems. Restricted walking ability compromises activity and participation levels in people with HAM (pwHAM). Therapy aims to improve mobility but validated measures are required to assess change.Prospective observational study.To explore walking capacity in pwHAM, walking endurance using the 6 minute walk (6MW), and gait speed, using the timed 10m walk (10mTW).Out-patient setting in an inner London Teaching hospital.Prospective documentation of 10mTW and 6MW distance; walking aid usage and pain scores measured twice, a median of 18 months apart.Data analysis was completed for twenty-six pwHAM, (8♂; 18♀; median age: 57.8 years; median disease duration: 8 years). Median time at baseline to: complete 10m was 17.5 seconds, versus 21.4 seconds at follow up; 23% completed the 6MW compared to 42% at follow up and a median distance of 55m was covered compared to 71m at follow up. Using the 10mTW velocity to predict the 6MW distance, overestimated the distance walked in 6 minutes (p<0.01). Functional decline over time was captured using the functional ambulation categories.The 10mTW velocity underestimated the degree of disability. Gait speed usefully predicts functional domains, shows direction of functional change and comparison with published healthy age matched controls show that these patients have significantly slower gait speeds. The measured differences over 18 months were sufficient to reliably detect change and therefore these assessments can be useful to detect improvement or deterioration within broader disability grades. Walking capacity in pwHAM should be measured using the 10mTW for gait speed and the 6MW for endurance

طريقة شبه آلية لاستخلاص معلومات مختصرة لمقالات ويكيبيديا العربية

Arabic Language is one of the popular languages over the world. There is 5% of people over the world speak Arabic. However, it suffers from a low percentage of content over the internet. Wikipedia is a very well-known multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of openly editable content. It is one of the greatest repositories of human knowledge ever constructed, and has high ranks in Google that makes its pages often pop up in search results. Arabic Wikipedia, which is part of Wikipedia website, lacks valuable content compared to Wikipedia content for other languages. Besides, many of existing articles are stub pages containing only one or few sentences of text that is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject. Some researchers worked on increasing and enriching the content of Wikipedia, but most of these efforts focused on developing methods that process text in other languages rather than Arabic. This research aims at boosting online Arabic content. In particular, it aims to boost the editing process in Arabic Wikipedia. Our main objective is to develop method for suggesting contents for Arabic Wikipedia articles either to enrich the contents of existing stub pages or to generate new ones that contain infobox. The proposed methods build on existing methods in Information Retrieval, Question Answering, and Text Mining in order to extract key information from relevant documents on the web. The automatically generated contents and the different resources from which these contents are extracted will be available for Wikipedia editors for revision and proofreading before adding them to Wikipedia. In this research, we focus on enriching the Infobox which is a summary of some unifying parameters at the top left/right corner of an article. We developed four main algorithms to extract) birth, death (locations, (birth, death) dates and full name of entity. We have conducted many experiments to evaluate our methods on articles about named entities in the political domain. Our results achieved an overall accuracy of 80.3%. Keywords: Wikipedia, Infobox, Information Retrievalتعتبر اللغة العربية واحدة من أكثر اللغات إنتشارا في العالم. هناك ما يقارب %5 من سكان العالم يتحدثون اللغة العربية، على الرغم من ذلك فإن اللغة العربية تعاني من ضعف نسبة المحتوى العربي على الانترنت. ويكيبيديا هو موقع ويب يحتوي على موسوعة من المقالات متعددة اللغات ومدعوم من مؤسسة ويكيميديا. هو واحد من أكبر قواعد البيانات التي تحتوي على المعرفة في مختلف المجالات حتى اللحظة بالإضافة لانه من المواقع التي تستحوذ على ترتيب مترفع في تصنيف جوجل حيث أنه يظهر دائما في أولى نتائج البحث. النسخة العربية من ويكيبيديا هي جزء من موقع ويكيبيديا ولكنه يعتبر ذو محتوى ضعيف مقارنة بمحتوى اللغات الأخرى. هناك عدد كبير من المقالات الموجودة في النسخة العربية من ويكيبيديا تعتبر مقالات (بذرة) وهي مقالات تحتوي على معلومات قليلة جدا عن موضوع المقال. بعض الباحثين عملوا على زيادة وإثراء المحتوى الخاص ب ويكيبيديا، لكن أغلب الجهود مركزة على اللغات الأخرى غير اللغة العربية. هذا البحث يهدف لزيادة المحتوى الرقمي العربي بالإضافة لتحسين عملية التعديل الخاصة بالمقالات العربية. يركز الهدف الأساسي للبحث على تطوير طريقة لإقتراح محتوى لمقالات ويبيكيديا العربية لإثراء المحتوى الخاص بمقالات (بذرة) العربية أو إنشاء مقالات جديدة. تأتي هذه الطريقة المقترحة بالاعتماد على طرق تابعة لمجال إستخراج المعلومات، الأسئلة المجابة والتنقيب عن النصوص لاستخلاص المعلومات من المستندات والوثائق الموجودة على الويب. المعلومات التي يتم استخراجها ستكون متاحة للمحررين للمراجعة والتعديل قبل اضافتها على ويكيبيديا. في هذا البحث تم التركيز على إثراء صندوق المعلومات والذي يعتبر ملخص للمقالات ويتم وضعه في الزاوية اليمنى / اليسرى للمقال. قمنا بتطوير أربعة خوارزميات رئيسية تهدف لاستخلاص مكان (ميلاد، وفاة) وتاريخ (ميلاد، وفاة) والإسم الكامل للشخصية التي يتم البحث عنها بالإضافة لعمل خوارزمية التصويت التي تعمل على كل خوارزمية لزيادة دقة النتيجة المرشحة للظهور للمستخدم. قمنا بعمل العديد من التجارب لقياس أداء الخوارزميات وإقتصرت التجارب على المجال السياسي، وحققت هذه التجارب دقة نسبتها .80.3

Designing for rehabilitation at home

New technologies open up possibilities for designing interactive experiences that can engage and motivate post-stroke survivors to undertake what would otherwise be boring repetitive movements. In this paper we outline a few of the challenges we met as part of the cross-disciplinary Motivating Mobility project. These are: the extended ‘user’; autonomy and motivation; and early prototype studies

Implications of HAM/TSP functional incapacity in the quality of life

OBJECTIVE: To identify the functional status and quality of life of HAM/TSP patients. METHOD: We evaluated prospectively 30 HAM/TSP patients (20 females) seen in the Neuroinfection Clinic of the HUGG. The functional capacity was analyzed by the functional independence measure (FIM), the expanded disability status (EDSS) scale and the Osame's motor disability score (OMDS). The quality of life was assed by the Short-Form Health Survey 36 (SF-36)TM. RESULTS: All patients need assistance device. The FIM, OMDS and EDSS scores classified 70%, 67% and 67% of the patients as dependent, respectively. The lowest scores of the SF-36 survey were found in the domains related to the physical health (D1, D2), role-emotional functioning (D7) and social functioning (D6). CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that the HAM/TSP physical impairment has an impact in the emotional and social issues, considering the limitation in the daily activities

A vision and strategy for the virtual physiological human: 2012 update

European funding under Framework 7 (FP7) for the virtual physiological human (VPH) project has been in place now for 5 years. The VPH Network of Excellence (NoE) has been set up to help develop common standards, open source software, freely accessible data and model repositories, and various training and dissemination activities for the project. It is also working to coordinate the many clinically targeted projects that have been funded under the FP7 calls. An initial vision for the VPH was defined by the FP6 STEP project in 2006. In 2010, we wrote an assessment of the accomplishments of the first two years of the VPH in which we considered the biomedical science, healthcare and information and communications technology challenges facing the project (Hunter et al. 2010 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 368, 2595-2614 (doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0048)). We proposed that a not-for-profit professional umbrella organization, the VPH Institute, should be established as a means of sustaining the VPH vision beyond the time-frame of the NoE. Here, we update and extend this assessment and in particular address the following issues raised in response to Hunter et al. (i) a vision for the VPH updated in the light of progress made so far, (ii) biomedical science and healthcare challenges that the VPH initiative can address while also providing innovation opportunities for the European industry, and (iii) external changes needed in regulatory policy and business models to realize the full potential that the VPH has to offer to industry, clinics and society generally. © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

A Vision and Strategy for the VPH: 2012 update

European funding under Framework 7 (FP7) for the virtual physiological human (VPH) project has been in place now for 5 years. The VPH Network of Excellence (NoE) has been set up to help develop common standards, open source software, freely accessible data and model repositories, and various training and dissemination activities for the project. It is also working to coordinate the many clinically targeted projects that have been funded under the FP7 calls. An initial vision for the VPH was defined by the FP6 STEP project in 2006. In 2010, we wrote an assessment of the accomplishments of the first two years of the VPH in which we considered the biomedical science, healthcare and information and communications technology challenges facing the project (Hunter et al. 2010 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 368, 2595–2614 (doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0048)). We proposed that a not-for-profit professional umbrella organization, the VPH Institute, should be established as a means of sustaining the VPH vision beyond the time-frame of the NoE. Here, we update and extend this assessment and in particular address the following issues raised in response to Hunter et al.: (i) a vision for the VPH updated in the light of progress made so far, (ii) biomedical science and healthcare challenges that the VPH initiative can address while also providing innovation opportunities for the European industry, and (iii) external changes needed in regulatory policy and business models to realize the full potential that the VPH has to offer to industry, clinics and society generally