A systematic overview of dental methods for age assessment in living individuals: from traditional to artificial intelligence-based approaches

Dental radiographies have been used for many decades for estimating the chronological age, with a view to forensic identification, migration flow control, or assessment of dental development, among others. This study aims to analyse the current application of chronological age estimation methods from dental X-ray images in the last 6 years, involving a search for works in the Scopus and PubMed databases. Exclusion criteria were applied to discard off-topic studies and experiments which are not compliant with a minimum quality standard. The studies were grouped according to the applied methodology, the estimation target, and the age cohort used to evaluate the estimation performance. A set of performance metrics was used to ensure good comparability between the different proposed methodologies. A total of 613 unique studies were retrieved, of which 286 were selected according to the inclusion criteria. Notable tendencies to overestimation and underestimation were observed in some manual approaches for numeric age estimation, being especially notable in the case of Demirjian (overestimation) and Cameriere (underestimation). On the other hand, the automatic approaches based on deep learning techniques are scarcer, with only 17 studies published in this regard, but they showed a more balanced behaviour, with no tendency to overestimation or underestimation. From the analysis of the results, it can be concluded that traditional methods have been evaluated in a wide variety of population samples, ensuring good applicability in different ethnicities. On the other hand, fully automated methods were a turning point in terms of performance, cost, and adaptability to new populationsOpen Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work has received financial support from Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (accreditation 2019–2022 ED431G-2019/04 and Group with Growth Potential ED431B 2020–2022 GPC2020/27) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which acknowledges the CiTIUS-Research Center in Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela as a Research Center of the Galician University SystemS

Effects of violence against women on health during menopause: a systematic review and metanalysis

Objective(s): This review aimed to respond to the question of how a history of violence against women (VAW) influences their health during menopause. Mechanism: We searched all articles (published in peer-reviewed journals up to March 2021) related to menopausal symptoms, sexual dysfunction, and chronic complications in postmenopausal women affected by VAW. Findings in brief : The literature search strategy identified 194 articles, of which 19 were selected for analysis. All articles described cross-sectional or cohort studies concerning menopausal or genitourinary symptoms, psychological health, physical conditions, sexual health, and cardiovascular or metabolic problems. The analyzed data set included 16436 women who reported experiencing violence in the USA, Brazil, and Australia. The combined data on the effect of VAW on menopausal symptoms suggest that the risk of suffering from such effects is 1.51 (95% CI: 1.23–1.86), while for sexual health, the risk was 1.4875 (95% CI: 1.2060–1.8346). Conclusions: A history of VAW increases the symptoms of menopause and worsens the physical conditions and sexual and psychological health after the age of 40. Thus, it is essential to investigate these antecedents in routine clinical practice when treating menopausal women with additional symptoms and to warn of the long-term general health risks for any woman who has experienced an episode of violence

Actitud del consumidor frente a los alimentos genéticamente modificados

Uno de los grandes retos en materia de seguridad alimentaria con los que se enfrenta la sociedad del siglo XXI es la aparición de una gran variedad de nuevos alimentos entre los que se encuentran los alimentos genéticamente modificados. Sin embargo, el futuro de estos alimentos va a depender de cómo sean percibidos por los consumidores y de la aceptación de los mismos. En este trabajo se analiza el grado de conocimiento que el consumidor de la Región de Murcia tiene sobre los alimentos genéticamente modificados y el nivel de aceptación de los mismos. Los resultados muestran que el consumidor de la Región de Murcia carece de conocimientos suficientes sobre este tipo de alimentos, lo que lo lleva a considerarlos poco seguros. Pero a pesar de ello, manifiesta una actitud positiva frente a su consumo. Lo que hemos podido concluir en este estudio es que el nivel de conocimiento de los consumidores sobre los alimentos genéticamente modificados es bajo y que a mayor conocimiento, mayor aceptación de los mismos.One of the challenges in food security in this century is the growth of new food as food genetically modified. However, the future of these products will be link to Consumer acceptation. The main aim of this article was to analyze the knowledge and acceptation of these products in Murcia. Results showed that these consumers don�t know very well this kind of products and in consequence, GMO are perceived as not very safe even though they show a positive behavior to eat them. Despite of the low knowledge level showed by these consumers, a positive correlation between knowledge level and acceptation has been found: The higher knowledge, the higher acceptability

Influencias en el pensamiento de Jutta Burggraf acerca de la mujer

El objetivo de este trabajo es encontrar en el pensamiento de Jutta Burggraf acerca de la mujer conexiones con el pensamiento de otros autores a los que ella misma ha hecho referencia en sus escritos, prestando especial atención a temas como la diferencia entre varón y mujer, la dignidad de la mujer, el feminismo y la ideología de género, así como a Santa María como modelo eminente para la mujer, y profundizando en los rasgos maternales de Dios

DenTiUS Plaque, a Web-Based Application for the Quantification of Bacterial Plaque: Development and Usability Study

Background: In the dentistry field, the analysis of dental plaque is vital because it is the main etiological factor in the 2 most prevalent oral diseases: caries and periodontitis. In most of the papers published in the dental literature, the quantification of dental plaque is carried out using traditional, non-automated, and time-consuming indices. Therefore, the development of an automated plaque quantification tool would be of great value to clinicians and researchers. Objective: This study aimed to develop a web-based tool called DenTiUS and various clinical indices to evaluate dental plaque levels using image analysis techniques. Methods: The tool was executed as a web-based application to facilitate its use by researchers. Expert users are free to define experiments, including images from either a single patient (to observe an individual plaque growth pattern) or several patients (to perform a group characterization) at a particular moment or over time. A novel approach for detecting visible plaque has been developed as well as a new concept known as nonvisible plaque. This new term implies the classification of the remaining dental area into 3 subregions according to the risk of accumulating plaque in the near future. New metrics have also been created to describe visible and nonvisible plaque levels. Results: The system generates results tables of the quantitative analysis with absolute averages obtained in each image (indices about visible plaque) and relative measurements (indices about visible and nonvisible plaque) relating to the reference moment. The clinical indices that can be calculated are the following: plaque index of an area per intensity (API index, a value between 0 and 100), area growth index (growth rate of plaque per unit of time in hours; percentage area/hour), and area time index (the time in days needed to achieve a plaque area of 100% concerning the initial area at the same moment). Images and graphics can be obtained for a moment from a patient in addition to a full report presenting all the processing data. Dentistry experts evaluated the DenTiUS Plaque software through a usability test, with the best-scoring questions those related to the workflow efficiency, value of the online help, attractiveness of the user interface, and overall satisfaction. Conclusions: The DenTiUS Plaque software allows automatic, reliable, and repeatable quantification of dental plaque levels, providing information about area, intensity, and growth pattern. Dentistry experts recognized that this software is suitable for quantification of dental plaque levels. Consequently, its application in the analysis of plaque evolution patterns associated with different oral conditions, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of various oral hygiene measures, can represent an improvement in the clinical setting and the methodological quality of research studiesThis work received financial support from Johnson & Johnson company (Grant 2016‐CE219), Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (accreditation 2019-2022 ED431G-2019/04, 2017-2020 Potential Growth Group ED431B 2017/029, 2017-2020 Competitive Reference Group ED431C 2017/69, and N. Vila-Blanco support ED481A-2017), and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which acknowledges the CiTIUS-Research Center in Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela as a Research Center of the Galician University SystemS

XAS: Automatic yet eXplainable Age and Sex determination by combining imprecise per-tooth predictions

Chronological age and biological sex estimation are two key tasks in a variety of procedures, including human identification and migration control. Issues such as these have led to the development of both semiautomatic and automatic prediction models, but the former are expensive in terms of time and human resources, while the latter lack the interpretability required to be applicable in real-life scenarios. This paper therefore proposes a new, fully automatic methodology for the estimation of age and sex. This first applies a tooth detection by means of a modified CNN with the objective of extracting the oriented bounding boxes of each tooth. Then, it feeds the image features inside the tooth boxes into a second CNN module designed to produce per-tooth age and sex probability distributions. The method then adopts an uncertainty-aware policy to aggregate these estimated distributions. Our approach yielded a lower mean absolute error than any other previously described, at 0.97 years. The accuracy of the sex classification was 91.82%, confirming the suitability of the teeth for this purpose. The proposed model also allows analyses of age and sex estimations on every tooth, enabling experts to identify the most relevant for each task or population cohort or to detect potential developmental problems. In conclusion, the performance of the method in both age and sex predictions is excellent and has a high degree of interpretability, making it suitable for use in a wide range of application scenariosS

Deep Neural Networks for Chronological Age Estimation From OPG Images

Chronological age estimation is crucial labour in many clinical procedures, where the teeth have proven to be one of the best estimators. Although some methods to estimate the age from tooth measurements in orthopantomogram (OPG) images have been developed, they rely on time-consuming manual processes whose results are affected by the observer subjectivity. Furthermore, all those approaches have been tested only on OPG image sets of good radiological quality without any conditioning dental characteristic. In this work, two fully automatic methods to estimate the chronological age of a subject from the OPG image are proposed. The first (DANet) consists of a sequential Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) path to predict the age, while the second (DASNet) adds a second CNN path to predict the sex and uses sex-specific features with the aim of improving the age prediction performance. Both methods were tested on a set of 2289 OPG images of subjects from 4.5 to 89.2 years old, where both bad radiological quality images and images showing conditioning dental characteristics were not discarded. The results showed that the DASNet outperforms the DANet in every aspect, reducing the median Error (E) and the median Absolute Error (AE) by about 4 months in the entire database. When evaluating the DASNet in the reduced datasets, the AE values decrease as the real age of the subjects decreases, until reaching a median of about 8 months in the subjects younger than 15. The DASNet method was also compared to the state-of-the-art manual age estimation methods, showing significantly less over- or under-estimation problems. Consequently, we conclude that the DASNet can be used to automatically predict the chronological age of a subject accurately, especially in young subjects with developing dentitionsThis work was supported in part by the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria under Grant ED431G/08, in part by the Potential Growth Group ED431B 2017/029, in part by the Competitive Reference Group ED431C 2017/69, in part by the N Vila-Blanco Support ED481A-2017, and in part by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)S

Rediseño de un parque infantil para niños discapacitados basado en la teoría de la actividad de Vygotsky

En el presente trabajo se desarrolla una metodología para el diseño de parques infantiles inclusivos, basada en la teoría de la actividad de Vygotsky y la teoría del juego de Piaget. Se ilustra la aplicación de dicha metodología al diseño de un parque infantil para niños discapacitados.In the present study develops a methodology for designing playgrounds inclusive, based on the theory of activity Vygotsky and theory of game Piaget. It illustrates the application of the methodology to the design of a playground for children with disabilities

Bases de la respuesta inflamatoria en la forma respiratoria del PRRS

El Síndrome Reproductivo y Respiratorio Porcino (PRRS) es una enfermedad de distribución mundial que causa graves pérdidas económicas al sector porcino. Este virus no sólo es importante como agente causal del PRRS sino también por su participación en el desarrollo del Complejo Respiratorio Porcino. Su interacción con las defensas pulmonares, la alteración de la respuesta inmune y su persistencia en los órganos linfoides conlleva a que los cerdos tengan dificultades para luchar contra la enfermedad.Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) is considered as the most economically important disease of the modern swine industry. The importance of this virus lies in not only being the causative agent of PRRSV, but also due to its implication in the onset of the Porcine Respiratory Disease Complex. The interaction of the virus with pulmonary defenses, the impairment of the immune response as well as the viral persistence in lymphoid organs make overcoming the disease diffi cult to infected pigs

Socioeconomic differences in COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation and mortality in urban areas in a region in the South of Europe

Background: To analyse differences in confirmed cases, hospitalisations and deaths due to COVID-19 related to census section socioeconomic variables. METHODS: Ecological study in the 12 largest municipalities in Andalusia (Spain) during the first three epidemic waves of the COVID-19 (02/26/20-03/31/21), covering 2,246 census sections (unit of analysis) and 3,027,000 inhabitants. Incidence was calculated, standardised by age and sex, for infection, hospitalisation and deaths based on average gross income per household (AGI) for the census tracts in each urban area. Association studied using a Poisson Bayesian regression model with random effects for spatial smoothing. Results: There were 140,743 cases of COVID-19, of which 12,585 were hospitalised and 2,255 died. 95.2% of cases were attributed to the second and third waves, which were jointly analysed. We observed a protective effect of income for infection in 3/12 cities. Almeria had the largest protective effect (smoothed relative risk (SRR) = 0.84 (0.75-0.94 CI 95%). This relationship reappeared with greater magnitude in 10/12 cities for hospitalisation, lowest risk in Algeciras SRR = 0.41 (0.29-0.56). The pattern was repeated for deaths in all urban areas and reached statistical significance in 8 cities. Lowest risk in Dos Hermanas SRR = 0.35 (0.15-0.81). Conclusions: Income inequalities by geographical area were found in the incidence of COVID-19. The strengths of the association increased when analysing the severe outcomes of hospitalisations and, above all, deaths.This work was supported by the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII) under the project Fundación BBVA.DGVI 256/22 "COVID 19 Urban Atlas Spain".S