134 research outputs found
Comment on “early efficacy of intra-articular HYADD® 4 (Hymovis®) injections for symptomatic knee osteoarthritis”
We read with great interest the study by Priano titled“Early
efficacy of intra-articular HYADD® 4 (Hymovis®) injections
for symptomatic knee osteoarthritis.”
1
The author would like
to explore the efficacy of intra-articular HYADD 4 (Hymovis)
injections for symptomatic knee osteoarthritis. Results from
this study are very interesting and promising from a clinical
aspect; however, we believe that studying patient’sclinical
status with visual analog scale and Western Ontario and
McMaster Universities Arthritis Index scale should be supported by biomechanical information. From this point of
view, to have more data that could influence the clinical
practice, it is important to note the possible action that intraarticular injections of different kinds of hyaluronic acid could
have on walking biomechanics using an objective measurement tool as gait analysis. In our opinion, the work by Priano1
is promising because it investigates the efficacy of a new
formulation of hyaluronic acid. Nowadays, many hyaluronic
acid formulations are approved for clinical use in Europe and
the United States. Furthermore, hyaluronic acid injections’
efficacy has been demonstrated also in hip osteoarthritis.
2
However, even if these formulations differ in their chemical–
physical properties, joint space half-life, rheological properties, and clinical efficacy, there are few studies that investigate hyaluronic acid’s possible action from a biomechanical
point of view.
3,4
From this point of view, we believe that
osteoarthritis management and rehabilitation should be
prescribed after an objective analysis of functional walking
alterations using gait analysis instrumentations. The use
of gait analysis should be desirable during diagnosis and
follow-up. In fact, it is capable to identify different walking
patterns in patient with osteoarthritis of the lower limbs,
whereas the radiology can evaluate the status of the joint’s
structures
Secure rendezvous and static containment in multi-agent systems with adversarial intruders
In this paper we propose a novel distributed local interaction protocol for networks of multi-agent systems (MASs) in a multi-dimensional space under directed time-varying graph with the objective to achieve secure rendezvous or static containment within the convex hull of a set of leader agents. We consider the scenario where a set of anonymous adversarial agents may intrude the network (or may be hijacked by a cyber-attack) and show that the proposed strategy guarantees the achievement of the global objective despite the continued influence of the adversaries which cannot be detected nor identified by the collaborative agents. We characterize the convergence properties of the proposed protocol in terms of the characteristics of the underlying network topology of the multi-agent system. Numerical simulations and examples corroborate the theoretical results
Assessing the cervical range of motion in infants with positional plagiocephaly
Purpose: To determine if infants with positional plagiocephaly
have limitations of active and passive cervical range of motion
measured with simple and reliable methods.
Methods: The examiners assessed bilateral active and passive
cervical rotations and passive cervical lateral flexion. Cervical
assessment was performed twice by 2 different physicians to
assess intertester reliability. To assess intratester reliability the
first investigator performed a second examination 48 hours after
the first one.
Results: One-hundred nine subjects were analyzed; 70.7% of the
sample had head positional preference on the right, while 29.3% had
head positional preference on the left (x2 35.52, P <0.001).
Cervical rotations and lateral flexion showed reliable levels of
agreement for intra and intertester reliability.
Conclusions: The most limited range of motion in infants with
positional plagiocephaly was cervical active rotation which affected
more than 90% of patients. Passive cervical rotations and lateral
flexion were limited in more than 60% of patient
Matrix Models and Holography: Mass Deformations of Long Quiver Theories in 5d and 3d
We enlarge the dictionary between matrix models for long linear quivers
preserving eight supercharges in and and type IIB supergravity
backgrounds with AdS factors. We introduce mass deformations of the
field theory that break the quiver into a collection of interacting linear
quivers, which are decoupled at the end of the RG flow. We find and solve a
Laplace problem in supergravity which realises these deformations
holographically. The free energy and expectation values of antisymmetric Wilson
loops are calculated on both sides of the proposed duality, finding agreement.
Our matching procedure sheds light on the F-theorem in five dimensions.Comment: 46 pages plus appendices. Various figures. Some improvements and
references added. SciPost Physics versio
Multimodal Neural Databases
The rise in loosely-structured data available through text, images, and other
modalities has called for new ways of querying them. Multimedia Information
Retrieval has filled this gap and has witnessed exciting progress in recent
years. Tasks such as search and retrieval of extensive multimedia archives have
undergone massive performance improvements, driven to a large extent by recent
developments in multimodal deep learning. However, methods in this field remain
limited in the kinds of queries they support and, in particular, their
inability to answer database-like queries. For this reason, inspired by recent
work on neural databases, we propose a new framework, which we name Multimodal
Neural Databases (MMNDBs). MMNDBs can answer complex database-like queries that
involve reasoning over different input modalities, such as text and images, at
scale. In this paper, we present the first architecture able to fulfill this
set of requirements and test it with several baselines, showing the limitations
of currently available models. The results show the potential of these new
techniques to process unstructured data coming from different modalities,
paving the way for future research in the area. Code to replicate the
experiments will be released at
https://github.com/GiovanniTRA/MultimodalNeuralDatabase
Latent Autoregressive Source Separation
Autoregressive models have achieved impressive results over a wide range of
domains in terms of generation quality and downstream task performance. In the
continuous domain, a key factor behind this success is the usage of quantized
latent spaces (e.g., obtained via VQ-VAE autoencoders), which allow for
dimensionality reduction and faster inference times. However, using existing
pre-trained models to perform new non-trivial tasks is difficult since it
requires additional fine-tuning or extensive training to elicit prompting. This
paper introduces LASS as a way to perform vector-quantized Latent
Autoregressive Source Separation (i.e., de-mixing an input signal into its
constituent sources) without requiring additional gradient-based optimization
or modifications of existing models. Our separation method relies on the
Bayesian formulation in which the autoregressive models are the priors, and a
discrete (non-parametric) likelihood function is constructed by performing
frequency counts over latent sums of addend tokens. We test our method on
images and audio with several sampling strategies (e.g., ancestral, beam
search) showing competitive results with existing approaches in terms of
separation quality while offering at the same time significant speedups in
terms of inference time and scalability to higher dimensional data.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 202
Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding
Autoregressive decoding limits the efficiency of transformers for Machine
Translation (MT). The community proposed specific network architectures and
learning-based methods to solve this issue, which are expensive and require
changes to the MT model, trading inference speed at the cost of the translation
quality. In this paper, we propose to address the problem from the point of
view of decoding algorithms, as a less explored but rather compelling
direction. We propose to reframe the standard greedy autoregressive decoding of
MT with a parallel formulation leveraging Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel fixed-point
iteration methods for fast inference. This formulation allows to speed up
existing models without training or modifications while retaining translation
quality. We present three parallel decoding algorithms and test them on
different languages and models showing how the parallelization introduces a
speedup up to 38% w.r.t. the standard autoregressive decoding and nearly 2x
when scaling the method on parallel resources. Finally, we introduce a decoding
dependency graph visualizer (DDGviz) that let us see how the model has learned
the conditional dependence between tokens and inspect the decoding procedure.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023 main conferenc
A Case of Coinfection with SARS-COV-2 and Cytomegalovirus in the Era of COVID-19
The World Health Organization has declared novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) an international public health emergency. We describe the case of a 92-year-old woman who was admitted to our unit with fever and chills with laboratory evidence of coinfection with SARS-CoV-2 and cytomegalovirus
- …