Correlation Between Sagittal Balance and Mechanical Distal Junctional Failure in Degenerative Pathology of the Spine: A Retrospective Analysis

Study design Retrospective cohort study. Objectives This study aimed to investigate the failure of the caudal end of lumbar posterior fixation in terms of pre-operative and post-operative spinopelvic parameters, correction performed, demographic and clinical data. Methods The lumbar, thoraco-lumbar and lumbo-sacral posterior fixations performed with pedicle screws and rods in 2017-2019 were retrospectively analyzed. As 81% failures occurred within 4 years, an observational period of 4 years was chosen. The revision surgeries due to the failure in the caudal end were collected in the junctional group. Fixations which have not failed were gathered in the control group. The main spinopelvic parameters were measured for each patient on standing lateral radiographs with the software Surgimap. Demographic and clinical data were extracted for both groups. Results Among the 457 patients who met the inclusion criteria, the junctional group included 101 patients, who required a revision surgery. The control group collected 356 primary fixations. The two most common causes of revision surgeries were screws pullout (57 cases) and rod breakage (53 cases). SVA, PT, LL, PI-LL and TPA differed significantly between the two groups (P = .021 for LL, P < .0001 for all the others). The interaction between the two groups and the pre-operative and post-operative conditions was significant for PT, SS, LL, TK, PI-LL and TPA (P < .005). Sex and BMI did not affect the failure onset. Conclusions Mechanical failure is more likely to occur in patients older than 40 years with a thoraco-lumbar fixation where PT, PI-LL and TPA were not properly restored

UI X-Ray: Interactive mobile UI testing based on computer vision

User Interface/eXperience (UI/UX) significantly affects the lifetime of any software program, particularly mobile apps. A bad UX can undermine the success of a mobile app even if that app enables sophisticated capabilities. A good UX, however, needs to be supported of a highly functional and user friendly UI design. In spite of the importance of building mobile apps based on solid UI designs, UI discrepancies- inconsistencies between UI design and implementation-Are among the most numerous and expensive defects encountered during testing. This paper presents UI X-RAY, an interactive UI testing system that integrates computer-vision methods to facilitate the correction of UI discrepancies- such as inconsistent positions, sizes and colors of objects and fonts. Using UI X-RAY does not require any programming experience; therefore, UI X-RAY can be used even by non-programmers-particularly designers-which significantly reduces the overhead involved in writing tests. With the feature of interactive interface, UI testers can quickly generate defect reports and revision instructions-which would otherwise be done manually. We verified our UI X-RAY on 4 developed mobile apps of which the entire development history was saved. UI X-RAY achieved a 99.03% true-positive rate, which significantly surpassed the 20.92% true-positive rate obtained via manual analysis. Furthermore, evaluating the results of our automated analysis can be completed quickly (< 1 minute per view on average) compared to hours of manual work required by UI testers. On the other hand, UI X-RAY received the appreciations from skilled designers and UI X-RAY improves their current work flow to generate UI defect reports and revision instructions. The proposed system, UI X-RAY, presented in this paper has recently become part of a commercial product

Improving the performance of printable carbon electrodes by femtosecond laser treatment

Low-cost carbon-conductive films were screen-printed on a Plexiglas® substrate, and then, after a standard annealing procedure, subjected to femtosecond (fs) laser treatments at different values of total accumulated laser fluence ΦA. Four-point probe measurements showed that, if ΦA &gt; 0.3 kJ/cm2, the sheet resistance of laser-treated films can be reduced down to about 15 Ω/sq, which is a value more than 20% lower than that measured on as-annealed untreated films. Furthermore, as pointed out by a comprehensive Raman spectroscopy analysis, it was found that sheet resistance decreases linearly with ΦA, due to a progressively higher degree of crystallinity and stacking order of the graphitic phase. Results therefore highlight that fs-laser treatment can be profitably used as an additional process for improving the performance of printable carbon electrodes, which have been recently proposed as a valid alternative to metal electrodes for stable and up-scalable perovskite solar cells

Hierarchical Bayesian level set inversion

The level set approach has proven widely successful in the study of inverse problems for inter- faces, since its systematic development in the 1990s. Re- cently it has been employed in the context of Bayesian inversion, allowing for the quantification of uncertainty within the reconstruction of interfaces. However the Bayesian approach is very sensitive to the length and amplitude scales in the prior probabilistic model. This paper demonstrates how the scale-sensitivity can be cir- cumvented by means of a hierarchical approach, using a single scalar parameter. Together with careful con- sideration of the development of algorithms which en- code probability measure equivalences as the hierar- chical parameter is varied, this leads to well-defined Gibbs based MCMC methods found by alternating Metropolis-Hastings updates of the level set function and the hierarchical parameter. These methods demon- strably outperform non-hierarchical Bayesian level set methods

Aluminum (Oxy)nitride thin films grown by fs-PLD as electron emitters for thermionic applications

Thin films based on aluminum nitride were obtained by fs-laser assisted Pulsed Laser Deposition (fs-PLD) at room temperature on tantalum substrates for studying the electron emission performance in the temperature range 700- 1600 °C, so to investigate the possibility of their exploitation as thermionic cathodes. Results of structural, chemical and morphological analyses show the growth of nanostructured thin films with a significant oxygen contamination, forming a mixture of crystalline aluminum nitride and aluminum oxide as well as metallic aluminum inclusions. Despite the considerable presence of oxygen, the developed cathodes demonstrate to possess promising thermionic emission characteristics, with a work function of 3.15 eV, a valuable Richardson constant of 20.25 A/(cm²K²), and a highly thermo-electronic stability up to operating temperatures of 1600 °C

Methiocarb metabolites are systemically distributed throughout corn plants grown from coated seeds

Funder: Università degli Studi di PadovaAbstract: Systemic insecticides such as neonicotinoids are widely used in seed coating practices for pest control in many crops, e.g., corn. Their success is due to their ability to protect the whole plant, from the roots to the upper leaves, but their use at high amounts is causing possible adverse effects on non-target animals exposed to contaminated pollen, nectar, leaves, and dust emitted during sowing. In 2018, the European Union banned some neonicotinoids and fipronil as seed coating insecticides in open fields. Consequently, the methylcarbamate methiocarb and less-toxic neonicotinoids, e.g., thiacloprid, have been authorized and largely used as alternative pesticides for corn seed coating. Here, an analytical protocol based on QuEChERS extraction/purification procedure and analysis by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry has been optimized for the identification and the quantification of methiocarb, thiamethoxam, thiacloprid, and their metabolites in guttation drops, the xylem fluid excreted at leaf margins, and in leaves of corn plants grown from coated seeds. Although methiocarb is a non-systemic pesticide, we unexpectedly found high concentrations of its metabolites in both guttations and leaves, whereas methiocarb itself was below detection limits in most of the samples. The methiocarb main metabolite, methiocarb sulfoxide, was found at a mean concentration of 0.61 ± 1.12 µg mL−1 in guttation drops and 4.4 ± 2.1 µg g−1 in leaves. Conversely, parent compounds of neonicotinoids (thiamethoxam, thiacloprid) are systemically distributed in corn seedlings. This result raises safety concerns given that methiocarb sulfoxide is more toxic than the parent compound for some non-target species

LIPSS Applied to Wide Bandgap Semiconductors and Dielectrics: Assessment and Future Perspectives

With the aim of presenting the processes governing the Laser-Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS), its main theoretical models have been reported. More emphasis is given to those suitable for clarifying the experimental structures observed on the surface of wide bandgap semiconductors (WBS) and dielectric materials. The role played by radiation surface electromagnetic waves as well as Surface Plasmon Polaritons in determining both Low and High Spatial Frequency LIPSS is briefly discussed, together with some experimental evidence. Non-conventional techniques for LIPSS formation are concisely introduced to point out the high technical possibility of enhancing the homogeneity of surface structures as well as tuning the electronic properties driven by point defects induced in WBS. Among these, double- or multiple-fs-pulse irradiations are shown to be suitable for providing further insight into the LIPSS process together with fine control on the formed surface structures. Modifications occurring by LIPSS on surfaces of WBS and dielectrics display high potentialities for their cross-cutting technological features and wide applications in which the main surface and electronic properties can be engineered. By these assessments, the employment of such nanostructured materials in innovative devices could be envisaged