In vitro measurement of nucleus pulposus swelling pressure: A new technique for studies of spinal adaptation to gravity

Swelling of the intervertebral disc nucleus pulposus is altered by posture and gravity. We have designed and tested a new osmometer for in vitro determination of nucleus pulposus swelling pressure. The functional principle of the osmometer involves compressing a sample of nucleus pulposus with nitrogen gas until saline pressure gradients across a 0.45 microns Millipore filter are eliminated. Swelling pressure of both pooled dog and pooled pig lumbar disc nucleus pulposus were measured on the new osmometer and compared to swelling pressures determined using the equilibrium dialysis technique. The osmometer measured swelling pressures comparable to those obtained by the dialysis technique. This osmometer provides a rapid, direct, and accurate measurement of swelling pressure of the nucleus pulposus

On invertor elements and finitely generated subgroups of groups acting on trees with inversions

An element of a group acting on a graph is called invertor if it transfers an edge of the graph to its inverse. In this paper, we show that if G is a group acting on a tree X with inversions such that G does not fix any element of X, then an element g of G is invertor if and only if g is not in any vertex stabilizer of G and g2 is in an edge stabilizer of G. Moreover, if H is a finitely generated subgroup of G, then H contains an invertor element or some conjugate of H contains a cyclically reduced element of length at least one on which H is not in any vertex stabilizer of G, or H is in a vertex stabilizer of G

Association of Physical Activity with Co-morbid Conditions in Geriatric Population

To find out association of physical activity with co-morbid conditions in geriatric population, a cross-sectional study was conducted in different cties of Pakistan in 2015. A total of 114 participants were inducted by non-probability convenience sampling technique. Data was collected after informed verbal consent by a validated questionnaire that is Rapid Assessment of Physical Activity (RAPA). Participants were categorized into two groups i.e. physically active and physically inactive. Data was entered and analyzed in SPSS version 20. There were 66 (57.9%) males and 48 (42.1%) females with mean age of 57.04±7.348 years. Among hypertensive individuals (n=43, 37.7%) there were 39 (90.7%) physically inactive, among individuals having angina (n=17, 14.9%) there were 15 (88.2%) physically inactive. Out of 37 (32.5%) diabetics, 35 (94.6%) were physically inactive. Among individuals suffering from arthritis (n=40, 35.1%), there were 38 (95%) physically inactive. A significant association was found between physical activity and diabetes and arthritis with p-value of 0.048 and 0.029 respectively. Physical activity is significantly associated with diabetes and arthritis in geriatric population. Adequate physical activity should be performed to reduce the risk of co-morbid conditions and improve the quality of life in geriatric population

Evaluation, Antioxidant, Antimitotic and Anticancer Activity of Iron Nanoparticles Prepared by Using Water Extract of Vitis Vinifera L. Leaves

The water extract of Vitis vinifera was used for the rapid synthesis of the iron nanoparticle, which is very simple and eco-friendly in nature. The UV-visible spectroscopy technique was employed to establish the formation of which inhibition onion root growth in a dose-dependent manner. A decrease in the mitotic index may indicate its genotoxic effect on Allium cepa root assay. Nanoparticle was studied for its in vitro anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity using different models, all the testing, gave significant correlation existed between concentrations of the nanoparticle and percentage inhibition of protein denaturation and scavenging free radicals.  These results clearly indicate that iron nanoparticle is effective against inflammation and free radical-mediated disease

Deep Depth From Focus

Depth from focus (DFF) is one of the classical ill-posed inverse problems in computer vision. Most approaches recover the depth at each pixel based on the focal setting which exhibits maximal sharpness. Yet, it is not obvious how to reliably estimate the sharpness level, particularly in low-textured areas. In this paper, we propose `Deep Depth From Focus (DDFF)' as the first end-to-end learning approach to this problem. One of the main challenges we face is the hunger for data of deep neural networks. In order to obtain a significant amount of focal stacks with corresponding groundtruth depth, we propose to leverage a light-field camera with a co-calibrated RGB-D sensor. This allows us to digitally create focal stacks of varying sizes. Compared to existing benchmarks our dataset is 25 times larger, enabling the use of machine learning for this inverse problem. We compare our results with state-of-the-art DFF methods and we also analyze the effect of several key deep architectural components. These experiments show that our proposed method `DDFFNet' achieves state-of-the-art performance in all scenes, reducing depth error by more than 75% compared to the classical DFF methods.Comment: accepted to Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 201

Subgroups of quasi-HNN groups

We extend the structure theorem for the subgroups of the class of HNN groups to a new class of groups called quasi-HNN groups. The main technique used is the subgroup theorem for groups acting on trees with inversions