Efficacy and Safety of a Dexamethasone Implant in Patients with Diabetic Macular Edema at Tertiary Centers in Korea

Purpose. To evaluate the real-world efficacy and safety of the dexamethasone implant (DEX implant) in patients with diabetic macular edema (DME). Methods. Retrospective, multicenter, and noncomparative study of DME patients who were treated with at least one DEX implant. A total of 186 eyes from 165 patients were included. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), central retinal thickness (CRT), complications, and number of retreatments were collected. Data at baseline and monthly for 6 months were analyzed. Results. The average baseline BCVA and CRT were 0.60 LogMAR and 491.6 μm, respectively. The mean BCVA improved until 3 months and then decreased up to 6 months of follow-up (0.53, 0.49, and 0.55 LogMAR at 1, 3, and 6 months; p=0.001, <0.001, and 0.044, resp.). The change of mean CRT was similar to BCVA (345.0, 357.7, and 412.5 μm at 1, 3, and 6 months, p<0.001, <0.001, and <0.001, resp.). 91 eyes (48.9%) received additional treatment with anti-VEGF or DEX implant. The average treatment-free interval was 4.4 months. In group analyses, the DEX implant was more effective in pseudophakic eyes, DME with subretinal fluid (SRF), or diffuse type. Conclusions. Intravitreal dexamethasone implants are an effective treatment for patients with DME, most notably in pseudophakic eyes, DME with SRF, or diffuse type. A half of these patients require additional treatment within 6 months

Effect of Dietary Beta-Glucan on the Performance of Broilers and the Quality of Broiler Breast Meat

A total of 400, one day-old commercial broiler chicks were divided into five diet groups (negative control, positive control group with 55 ppm Zn-bacitracin, 15 ppm β-glucan, 30 ppm β-glucan, and 60 ppm β-glucan) and fed for six weeks. Ten broilers were allotted to each of 40 floor pens. Eight floor pens were randomly assigned to one of the 5 diets. Each diet was fed to the broilers for 6 weeks with free access to water and diet. The survival rate, growth rate, feed efficiency, and feed conversion rate of the broilers were calculated. At the end of the feeding trial, the birds were slaughtered, breast muscles deboned, and quality parameters of the breast meat during storage were determined. The high level of dietary β-glucan (60 ppm) showed better feed conversion ratio and survival rate than the negative control. The survival rate of 60 ppm β-glucan-treated group was the same as that of the antibiotic-treated group, which showed the highest survival rate among the treatments. There was no significant difference in carcass yield, water holding capacity, pH, color, and 2-thiobarbituric acid reactive substances values of chicken breast meat among the 5 treatment groups. Supplementation of 60 ppm β-glucan to broiler diet improved the survival rate and feed conversion rate of broilers to the same level as 55 ppm Zn-bacitracin group. The result indicated that use of β-glucan (60 ppm) can be a potential alternative to antibiotics to improve the survival and performance of broilers. However, dietary β-glucan showed no effects on the quality parameters of chicken breast meat

TRust: A Compilation Framework for In-process Isolation to Protect Safe Rust against Untrusted Code

Rust was invented to help developers build highly safe systems. It comes with a variety of programming constructs that put emphasis on safety and control of memory layout. Rust enforces strict discipline about a type system and ownership model to enable compile-time checks of all spatial and temporal safety errors. Despite this advantage in security, the restrictions imposed by Rust???s type system make it difficult or inefficient to express certain designs or computations. To ease or simplify their programming, developers thus often include untrusted code from unsafe Rust or external libraries written in other languages. Sadly, the programming practices embracing such untrusted code for flexibility or efficiency subvert the strong safety guarantees by safe Rust. This paper presents TRUST, a compilation framework which against untrusted code present in the program, provides trustworthy protection of safe Rust via in-process isolation. Its main strategy is allocating objects in an isolated memory region that is accessible to safe Rust but restricted from being written by the untrusted. To enforce this, TRUST employs software fault isolation and x86 protection keys. It can be applied directly to any Rust code without requiring manual changes. Our experiments reveal that TRUST is effective and efficient, incurring runtime overhead of only 7.55% and memory overhead of 13.30% on average when running 11 widely used crates in Rust

The usefulness of Time-of-Flight MR angiography in detection of intraplaque hemorrhage in patients with acute ischemic stroke with symptomatic carotid stenosis.

OBJECTIVE:Carotid intraplaque hemorrhage (IPH) is a well-known risk indicator of thromboembolism, but it is not easy to rapidly detect IPH in acute symptomatic carotid disease. The aim of this study was to assess the utility of time-of-flight (TOF) magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) in the detection of IPH and evaluate the degree of stenosis and stroke patterns in patients with acute symptomatic carotid disease. METHODS:We retrospectively identified consecutive patients with acute symptomatic carotid disease who were admitted within 12 h after stroke onset. Fifty-nine patients underwent TOF MRA at admission and were categorized according to the presence or absence of intraplaque high signal intensity (HSI). The severity of carotid stenosis and diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging lesion patterns were evaluated. RESULTS:Intraplaque HSI was detected in 28.8% of the enrolled patients (17/59). Mild-to-moderate symptomatic carotid stenosis was more frequent in the intraplaque HSI-positive group (70.6%) than in the intraplaque HSI-negative group (42.8%) (p = 0.015). The patients with intraplaque HSI more frequently exhibited a disseminated small infarction pattern (76.5% in the intraplaque HSI-positive group, 47.6% in the -negative group), and did not exhibit a border-zone infarction pattern (0% in the positive group, 16.7% in the negative group). CONCLUSIONS:TOF MRA may be a useful noninvasive and rapid tool to detect IPH in patients with acute symptomatic carotid disease. IPH was common in those with a lower degree of carotid stenosis and manifested as a disseminated small infarction pattern. Intraplaque HSI on TOF MRA in acute symptomatic carotid disease may help to determine the mechanism of stroke and establish early treatment plans

Effect of Dietary Beta-Glucan on the Performance of Broilers and the Quality of Broiler Breast Meat

A total of 400, one day-old commercial broiler chicks were divided into five diet groups (negative control, positive control group with 55 ppm Zn-bacitracin, 15 ppm β-glucan, 30 ppm β-glucan, and 60 ppm β-glucan) and fed for six weeks. Ten broilers were allotted to each of 40 floor pens. Eight floor pens were randomly assigned to one of the 5 diets. Each diet was fed to the broilers for 6 weeks with free access to water and diet. The survival rate, growth rate, feed efficiency, and feed conversion rate of the broilers were calculated. At the end of the feeding trial, the birds were slaughtered, breast muscles deboned, and quality parameters of the breast meat during storage were determined. The high level of dietary β-glucan (60 ppm) showed better feed conversion ratio and survival rate than the negative control. The survival rate of 60 ppm β-glucan-treated group was the same as that of the antibiotic-treated group, which showed the highest survival rate among the treatments. There was no significant difference in carcass yield, water holding capacity, pH, color, and 2-thiobarbituric acid reactive substances values of chicken breast meat among the 5 treatment groups. Supplementation of 60 ppm β-glucan to broiler diet improved the survival rate and feed conversion rate of broilers to the same level as 55 ppm Zn-bacitracin group. The result indicated that use of β-glucan (60 ppm) can be a potential alternative to antibiotics to improve the survival and performance of broilers. However, dietary β-glucan showed no effects on the quality parameters of chicken breast meat.This article is published as Moon, Sun Hee, Inyoung Lee, Xi Feng, Hyun Yong Lee, Jihee Kim, and Dong Uk Ahn. "Effect of dietary beta-glucan on the performance of broilers and the quality of broiler breast meat." Asian-Australasian journal of animal sciences 29, no. 3 (2016): 384. doi:10.5713/ajas.15.0141.</p

Phase transition-induced improvement in the capacity of fluorine-substituted LiFeBO3 as a cathode material for lithium ion batteries

Among polyanion-type cathode materials used for large-scale lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), LiFeBO3 (LFeB) has received attention due to its lowest weight framework with a larger theoretical capacity of 220 mAh g(-1) compared with commercialized LiFePO4 (170 mAh g(-1)). The main drawback of LFeB, however, is its poor specific discharge capacity as a cathode material for LIBs. Herein, the fluorine-substituted LFeB at the oxygen site, LiFeBO3-xF2x (LFeBF, x = 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5), has been prepared as a cathode material for LIBs via a solid-state reaction to improve the electrochemical behavior accompanied by phase transition. Morphological change as increasing x and well-distributed fluorine element of LFeBF have been observed using a scanning electron microscope combined with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer. X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and solid-state Li-7 and B-11 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy studies of LFeBF as well as increasing x show a dramatic phase transition from monoclinic to vonsenite-type structure. The plausible atomic arrangement has been also investigated using density functional theory. Furthermore, the fluorine substitution at the oxygen site of LFeB leads to a remarkable improvement in discharge capacity, the highest value (361.15 mAh g(-1) for LFeBF (x = 0.3)) of which is about five times larger than that of LFeB (73.43 mAh g(-1)) at 0.05 C rate, without any additional carbon source. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved