Correlation between low skeletal muscle index and 3D anthropometric data measured by 3D body scanner: screening sarcopenia

BackgroundThe screening tools for sarcopenia are measuring calf circumference, SARC-F or SPPB. However, not all of these tools have high sensitivity, specificity, and low margins of error. This research investigates potential of 3D anthropometry of the lower extremities on screening of sarcopenia.MethodsFrom October 2022 to February 2023, we retrospectively analyzed results of 3D body scanner and bio-impedance analysis for patients aged 45 to 85 at risk of sarcopenia. The 3D scanner measured the surface and volume values of both thighs and calves. When skeletal muscle index (SMI) is less than 5.7, patients were classified to Low SMI group, indicative of sarcopenia.ResultsA total six out of 62 patients were classified to Low SMI group, showing significantly lower values of right, left, mean calf volumes and mean calf surface than the other patients (right calf volume 2.62 L vs. 3.34 L, p = 0.033; left calf volume 2.62 L vs. 3.25 L, p = 0.044; mean calf volume 2.62 L vs. 3.29 L, p = 0.029; mean calf surface 0.12 m2 vs. 0.13 m2, p = 0.049). There was no statistical difference in thigh volume and surface. Through AUC-ROC analysis, mean calf volume was the most significant cut-off value (right calf volume 2.80 L, AUC = 0.768; left calf volume 2.75 L, AUC = 0.753; mean calf volume 3.06 L, AUC = 0.774; mean calf surface 0.12 m2, AUC = 0.747).ConclusionThe calf volume and surface values have significant relationship with low SMI, and the mean calf volume was the most significant cut-off screening value for Low SMI. The 3D scanner demonstrated its value as a new means for screening sarcopenia

Towards standardizing Korean Grammatical Error Correction: Datasets and Annotation

Research on Korean grammatical error correction (GEC) is limited compared to other major languages such as English and Chinese. We attribute this problematic circumstance to the lack of a carefully designed evaluation benchmark for Korean. Thus, in this work, we first collect three datasets from different sources (Kor-Lang8, Kor-Native, and Kor-Learner) to cover a wide range of error types and annotate them using our newly proposed tool called Korean Automatic Grammatical error Annotation System (KAGAS). KAGAS is a carefully designed edit alignment & classification tool that considers the nature of Korean on generating an alignment between a source sentence and a target sentence, and identifies error types on each aligned edit. We also present baseline models fine-tuned over our datasets. We show that the model trained with our datasets significantly outperforms the public statistical GEC system (Hanspell) on a wider range of error types, demonstrating the diversity and usefulness of the datasets.Comment: Add affiliation and email addres

Effect of medications on prevention of secondary osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture, non-vertebral fracture, and discontinuation due to adverse events: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Background Bone loss with aging and menopause increases the risk of fragile vertebral fracture, osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture (OVCF). The fracture causes severe pain, impedes respiratory function, lower the quality of life, and increases the risk of new fractures and deaths. Various medications have been prescribed to prevent a secondary fracture, but few study summarized their effects. Therefore, we investigated their effects on preventing subsequent OVCF via meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials. Methods Electronic databases, including MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, and Web of Science were searched for published randomized controlled trials from June 2015 to June 2019. The trials that recruited participants with at least one OVCF were included. We assessed the risk of bias of every study, estimated relative risk ratio of secondary OVCF, non-vertebral fracture, gastrointestinal complaints and discontinuation due to adverse events. Finally, we evaluated the quality of evidence. Results Forty-one articles were included. Moderate to high quality evidence proved the effectiveness of zoledronate (Relative Risk, RR: 0.34; 95% CI, 0.17–0.69, p = 0.003), alendronate (RR: 0.54; 95% CI: 0.43–0.68; p < 0.0001), risedronate (RR: 0.61; 95% CI: 0.51–0.73; p < 0.0001), etidronate (RR, 0.50; 95% CI, 0.29–0.87, p < 0.01), ibandronate (RR: 0.52; 95% CI: 0.38–0.71; p < 0.0001), parathyroid hormone (RR: 0.31; 95% CI: 0.23–0.41; p < 0.0001), denosumab (RR, 0.41; 95% CI, 0.29–0.57; p < 0.0001) and selective estrogen receptor modulators (Raloxifene, RR: 0.58; 95% CI: 0.44–0.76; p < 0.0001; Bazedoxifene, RR: 0.66; 95% CI: 0.53–0.82; p = 0.0002) in preventing secondary fractures. Moderate quality evidence proved romosozumab had better effect than alendronate (Romosozumab vs. alendronate, RR: 0.64; 95% CI: 0.49–0.84; p = 0.001) and high quality evidence proved that teriparatide had better effect than risedronate (risedronate vs. teriparatide, RR: 1.98; 95% CI: 1.44–2.70; p < 0.0001). Conclusion Zoledronate, alendronate, risedronate, etidronate, ibandronate, parathyroid hormone, denosumab and selective estrogen receptor modulators had significant secondary prevention effects on OVCF. Moderate quality evidence proved romosozumab had better effect than alendronate. High quality evidence proved PTH had better effect than risedronate, but with higher risk of adverse events.This work was supported by Mid-career Researcher Program through NRF grant (2016R1A2B3015048) funded by the Korea government (MSIP)

Effect of Whitlockite as a new bone substitute for bone formation in spinal fusion and ectopic ossification animal model

Background Bone substrates like hydroxyapatite and tricalcium phosphate have been widely used for promoting spinal fusion and reducing the complications caused by autograft. Whitlockite has been reported to promote better bone formation in rat calvaria models compare with them, but no study investigated its effect on spinal fusion yet. Also, the higher osteoinductivity of whitlockite raised concern of ectopic ossification, which was a complication of spinal fusion surgery that should be avoided. Methods In this study, we compared the osteoinductivity of whitlockite, hydroxyapatite, and tricalcium phosphate porous particles with SD rat spine posterolateral fusion model and investigated whether whitlockite could induce ectopic ossification with SD rat abdominal pouch model. Results The micro-CT result from the posterolateral fusion model showed whitlockite had slightly but significantly higher percent bone volume than tricalcium phosphate, though none of the materials formed successful fusion with surrounding bone tissue. The histology results showed the bone formed on the cortical surface of the transverse process but did not form a bridge between the processes. The result from the abdominal pouch model showed whitlockite did not induce ectopic bone formation. Conclusion Whitlockite had a potential of being a better bone substrate hydroxyapatite and tricalcium phosphate in spinal fusion with low risk of inducing ectopic ossification.This study was supported by clinical research program funded by SMG-SNU Boramae Medical Center (03–2015-1)

Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models

Recently, using a powerful proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) (e.g., GPT-4) as an evaluator for long-form responses has become the de facto standard. However, for practitioners with large-scale evaluation tasks and custom criteria in consideration (e.g., child-readability), using proprietary LLMs as an evaluator is unreliable due to the closed-source nature, uncontrolled versioning, and prohibitive costs. In this work, we propose Prometheus, a fully open-source LLM that is on par with GPT-4's evaluation capabilities when the appropriate reference materials (reference answer, score rubric) are accompanied. We first construct the Feedback Collection, a new dataset that consists of 1K fine-grained score rubrics, 20K instructions, and 100K responses and language feedback generated by GPT-4. Using the Feedback Collection, we train Prometheus, a 13B evaluator LLM that can assess any given long-form text based on customized score rubric provided by the user. Experimental results show that Prometheus scores a Pearson correlation of 0.897 with human evaluators when evaluating with 45 customized score rubrics, which is on par with GPT-4 (0.882), and greatly outperforms ChatGPT (0.392). Furthermore, measuring correlation with GPT-4 with 1222 customized score rubrics across four benchmarks (MT Bench, Vicuna Bench, Feedback Bench, Flask Eval) shows similar trends, bolstering Prometheus's capability as an evaluator LLM. Lastly, Prometheus achieves the highest accuracy on two human preference benchmarks (HHH Alignment & MT Bench Human Judgment) compared to open-sourced reward models explicitly trained on human preference datasets, highlighting its potential as an universal reward model. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://kaistai.github.io/prometheus/.Comment: ICLR 202

Advanced Technologies for High-Energy Aluminum???Air Batteries

Aluminum???air batteries are considered as next-generation batteries owing to their high energy density with the abundant reserves, low cost, and lightweight of aluminum. However, there are several hurdles to be overcome, such as the sluggish rate of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at the air electrode, precipitation of aluminum hydroxides and oxides at the anode, and severe hydrogen evolution problems at the interface of the anode and the electrolyte. Here, recent advances in silver metal and metal???nitrogen???carbon-based ORR electrocatalysts, aluminum anodes, electrolytes, and the requirements of future research directions are mainly summarized

Catalytic effects of B/N-co-Doped porous carbon incorporated with ketjenblack nanoparticles for all-vanadium redox flow batteries

Heteroatom-doping in carbon structures plays a key role in the catalytic activities. We report bio-derived porous carbon catalysts by a self-contained nitrogen in orange peels with additional boron co-doping. This heteroatom co-doped porous carbon materials are coated with the ketjenblack nanoparticles (KB-BNPC) to increase electrical conductivity. We newly discover that the KB-BNPC electrocatalyst increases electrocatalytic activities toward vanadium redox couples of V2+/V3+ and VO2+/VO2+, demonstrating the improvement of redox onset potentials and peak currents. Notably, we control the doping ratio of B and N atoms, suggesting that B/N ratio of 0.65 gives rise to a synergistic effect of the heteroatoms for vanadium redox reactions. We believe that the optimized porous structures and defects in the KB-BNPC catalyst can facilitate the absorption and desorption of the vanadium ions by enhancing electron and mass transfer kinetics.close0

Corn protein-derived nitrogen-doped carbon materials with oxygen-rich functional groups: a highly efficient electrocatalyst for all-vanadium redox flow batteries

Recent studies on all-vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) have focused on carbon-based materials for cost-effective electrocatalysts to commercialize them in grid-scale energy storage markets. We report an environmentally friendly and safe method to produce carbon-based catalysts by corn protein self-assembly. This new method allows carbon black (CB) nanoparticles to be coated with nitrogen-doped graphitic layers with oxygen-rich functionalities (N-CB). We observed increased catalytic activity of this catalyst toward both V2+/V3+ and VO2+/VO2+ ions, showing a 24% increased mass transfer process and ca. 50 mV higher reduction onset potential compared to CB catalyst. It is believed that the abundant oxygen active sites and nitrogen defects in the N-CB catalyst are beneficial to the vanadium redox reaction by improving the electron transfer rate and giving faster vanadium ion transfer kinetics.close

Material selection and optimization for highly stable composite bipolar plates in vanadium redox flow batteries

The design of a graphite-based polymer composite bipolar plate is systematically studied for the vanadium redox flow battery system by the compression molding method with different major and minor filler contents. The optimized composite bipolar plate (denoted as the f-GKB-80) composed of flake-type natural graphite (&lt;80 ??m) and ketjenblack nanoparticles (&lt;50 nm) exhibits excellent electrical conductivity of 114 S cm-1and flexural strength of 26 MPa at a total filler loading of 85 wt%. This result can be attributed to the well-developed conducting pathways between the natural graphite flakes that are effectively filled with the ketjenblack minor fillers. Furthermore, this sample is substantially stable even when in storage in highly oxidative V5+electrolyte solution at 80 ??C for a week. We believe this excellent stability is due to the well-established packing structures, which protect it from concentrated acid-based electrolytes. Significantly, the f-GKB-80 demonstrates enhanced rate capability stable cycling performance, including only a 0.87% decay in energy efficiency for 50 cycles compared with commercial graphite plates (2.5% decay in energy efficiency).close1