Age-related changes in cervical sagittal range of motion and alignment

Study Design Retrospective cohort study. Objective To compare sagittal cervical range of motion (ROM) and alignment in young versus middle-aged adults. Methods One hundred four asymptomatic adults were selected randomly out of 791 subjects who underwent lateral cervical radiographs in neutral, flexion, and extension positions. They were divided into two groups: young (age 20 to 29, 52 people) and middle-aged adults (age 50 to 59, 52 people). We determined the ROMs of upper cervical (occipital–C2 angle), midcervical (C2–C7 angle), and cervicothoracic spine (cervicosternal angle). We compared the alignment differences of the two groups by calculating the distances between C2 and C7 plumb lines, and C2 central-offset distance. Results In neutral position, there was no significant difference between young and middle-aged adults. However, in flexion, C2–C7 angle, distance between C2–C7 plumb lines, and C2 central-offset distance decreased with age. In extension, C2–C7 angle and C2 central-offset distance decreased with age. During flexion and extension, midcervical ROM and the range of C2 central-offset distance decreased in the middle-aged group. However, there was no difference between the two age groups in the ROM of the upper cervical and the cervicothoracic regions during flexion and extension. Conclusion We found that, despite of the presence of age-related cervical alignment changes, the only difference between the two groups was in the sagittal ROM of the midcervical spine during flexion and extension. Only the ROM of the midcervical spine appears to change significantly, consistent with findings that these levels are most likely to develop both symptomatic and asymptomatic degenerative changes

Electroactive Artificial Muscles Based on Functionally Antagonistic Core–Shell Polymer Electrolyte Derived from PS-b-PSS Block Copolymer

Electroactive ionic soft actuators, a type of artificial muscles containing a polymer electrolyte membrane sandwiched between two electrodes, have been intensively investigated owing to their potential applications to bioinspired soft robotics, wearable electronics, and active biomedical devices. However, the design and synthesis of an efficient polymer electrolyte suitable for ion migration have been major challenges in developing high-performance ionic soft actuators. Herein, a highly bendable ionic soft actuator based on an unprecedented block copolymer is reported, i.e., polystyrene-b-poly(1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium-4-styrenesulfonate) (PS-b-PSS-EMIm), with a functionally antagonistic core–shell architecture that is specifically designed as an ionic exchangeable polymer electrolyte. The corresponding actuator shows exceptionally good actuation performance, with a high displacement of 8.22 mm at an ultralow voltage of 0.5 V, a fast rise time of 5 s, and excellent durability over 14 000 cycles. It is envisaged that the development of this high-performance ionic soft actuator could contribute to the progress toward the realization of the aforementioned applications. Furthermore, the procedure described herein can also be applied for developing novel polymer electrolytes related to solid-state lithium batteries and fuel cells

Candidate selection based on significance testing and its use in normalisation and scoring

ABSTRACT Log likelihood ratio normalisation and scoring methods have been studied by many researchers and have improved the performance of speaker identi cation systems. However, these studies have disadvantages: the recognised distorted speech segments are di erent for each speaker. Also the background model in log likelihood ratio normalisation is changed in each speech segment e v en for the same speaker. This paper presents two techniques. Firstly, candidate selection based on signi cance testing, which designs the background speaker model more accurately. And secondly, the scoring method, which recognises the same distorted speech segments for every speaker. We perform a n umber of experiments with the SPIDRE database

Chirality of a resonance in the absence of backscatterings

Chirality of a resonance localized on an islands chain is studied in a deformed Reuleaux triangular-shaped microcavity, where clockwise and counter clockwise traveling rays are classically separated. A resonance localized on a period-5 islands chain exhibits chiral emission due to the asymmetric cavity shape. Chirality is experimentally proved in a InGaAsP multiquantum-well semiconductor laser by showing that the experimental emission characteristics well coincide with the wave dynamical ones. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America1

Hydrauric Analysis On Water Stage Change Along The Submerged Weir And Tides Effect In Han River

Sinkok submerged weir in Han river, Seoul Korea was built in early 1980’s for the purpose of water level maintenance and protection from sea water intrusion from the estuary. Its length is almost 1 km and 2.4 meter height which has two composite structures of rigid and movable weir. Huge wetland developed as the results of weir construction just down to the weir. However, recently social conflicts for the weir removal occurred for the river rehabilitation and aqua-eco system recover. This study focused on hydraulic analysis, especially water level changes in terms of with and without submerged weir along the tides where the height has 9 meters difference between ebb and high tide. HEC-RAS for the 1-D simulation and SMS for 2-D analysis were used covering 25 km river length and tributaries. Tides time series records and discharge records from upstream dam of 1-year were and 2 submerged weirs as well as 25 bridges were considered in boundaries. Hydraulic data in the 4 gauging stations were collected for the model calibration. Water level changes were reviewed along 4 cases – with/without weir and flood/dry season - The results showed that more than 3 meter difference of water surface fluctuation along up and downstream including wetland as tide changes in a day. The wetland dimension and water quality were also affected along the water level. The contraction of wetland area might cause the changes of aqua habitat to plants and animals. These results make it difficult to make a decision of removal of the submerged weir. A comprehensive analysis of not only hydraulic but also water quality and environmental effect should be considered. Achknowledgement : This research was supported by a grant (12-TI-C01) from Advanced Water Management Research Program funded by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport of Korean governmen

Human dopamine receptor nanovesicles for gate-potential modulators in high-performance field-effect transistor biosensors

The development of molecular detection that allows rapid responses with high sensitivity and selectivity remains challenging. Herein, we demonstrate the strategy of novel bio-nanotechnology to successfully fabricate high-performance dopamine (DA) biosensor using DA Receptor-containing uniform-particle-shaped Nanovesicles-immobilized Carboxylated poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (CPEDOT) NTs (DRNCNs). DA molecules are commonly associated with serious diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. For the first time, nanovesicles containing a human DA receptor D1 (hDRD1) were successfully constructed from HEK-293 cells, stably expressing hDRD1. The nanovesicles containing hDRD1 as gate-potential modulator on the conducting polymer (CP) nanomaterial transistors provided high-performance responses to DA molecule owing to their uniform, monodispersive morphologies and outstanding discrimination ability. Specifically, the DRNCNs were integrated into a liquid-ion gated field-effect transistor (FET) system via immobilization and attachment processes, leading to high sensitivity and excellent selectivity toward DA in liquid state. Unprecedentedly, the minimum detectable level (MDL) from the field-induced DA responses was as low as 10 pM in real- time, which is 10 times more sensitive than that of previously reported CP based-DA biosensors. Moreover, the FET-type DRNCN biosensor had a rapid response time (<1 s) and showed excellent selectivity in human serum

Analysis of the Penn Korean Universal Dependency Treebank (PKT-UD): Manual Revision to Build Robust Parsing Model in Korean

In this paper, we first open on important issues regarding the Penn Korean Universal Treebank (PKT-UD) and address these issues by revising the entire corpus manually with the aim of producing cleaner UD annotations that are more faithful to Korean grammar. For compatibility to the rest of UD corpora, we follow the UDv2 guidelines, and extensively revise the part-of-speech tags and the dependency relations to reflect morphological features and flexible word-order aspects in Korean. The original and the revised versions of PKT-UD are experimented with transformer-based parsing models using biaffine attention. The parsing model trained on the revised corpus shows a significant improvement of 3.0% in labeled attachment score over the model trained on the previous corpus. Our error analysis demonstrates that this revision allows the parsing model to learn relations more robustly, reducing several critical errors that used to be made by the previous model.Comment: Accepted by The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies, IWPT 202