Treatment of glenohumeral instability in rugby players

Rugby is a high-impact collision sport, with impact forces. Shoulder injuries are common and result in the longest time off sport for any joint injury in rugby. The most common injuries are to the glenohumeral joint with varying degrees of instability. The degree of instability can guide management. The three main types of instability presentations are: (1) frank dislocation, (2) subluxations and (3) subclinical instability with pain and clicking. Understanding the exact mechanism of injury can guide diagnosis with classical patterns of structural injuries. The standard clinical examination in a large, muscular athlete may be normal, so specific tests and techniques are needed to unearth signs of pathology. Taking these factors into consideration, along with the imaging, allows a treatment strategy. However, patient and sport factors need to be also considered, particularly the time of the season and stage of sporting career. Surgery to repair the structural damage should include all lesions found. In chronic, recurrent dislocations with major structural lesions, reconstruction procedures such as the Latarjet procedure yields better outcomes. Rehabilitation should be safe, goal-driven and athlete- specific. Return to sport is dependent on a number of factors, driven by the healing process, sport requirements and extrinsic pressures

Delayed voltammetric with respect to amperometric electrochemical detection of concentration changes in microchannels

The time response of an electrode incorporated into a fluidic channel to variations in analyte concentration of the outer-sphere redox probe ferrocenemethanol was investigated both for amperometry (AMP) and cyclic voltammetry (CV). The experimental data show that the temporal resolution of CV is not as good as that of AMP, as CV cannot properly detect fast concentration transients. The delayed response of CV was previously reported, for neurotransmitters, and mostly attributed to the adsorption of the analyte on the electrode surface. By using an outer-sphere redox couple, we show that mass transport also significantly delays the response of CV. The experimental delay time in CV was understood from mass transfer limitations due to the relaxation of the diffusion layer during repeated potential scanning. Furthermore, a robust protocol for the analysis of fast concentration transients was established, using the impulse and modulation transfer functions of the system. This method was found to be more precise than the mere analysis of undifferentiated traces in the time domain. As a proof of concept, the effect of increased viscosity was investigated, showing that AMP was more sensitive than CV to these variations. Overall, this analysis underlines further the enhanced temporal sensitivity of AMP over CV, at the expense of decreased chemical resolution, potentially having implications for in situ electrochemical detection of biologically relevant molecules

Image Compression Using Integrated Lossless/Lossy Methods

A new compression scheme is described that aims at improving the fidelity of reconstructed images through the parallel application of both lossless and lossy compression techniques. The purpose of the scheme is to obtain compression ratios higher than those obtained by lossless compression schemes and at the same time produce reconstructed images with better fidelity than those normally obtained with lossy techniques. Tests so far have shown that the integrated lossless/lossy (IL/L) compression scheme consistently improves the fidelity of reconstructed images compared to well-known image compression algorithms. Specifically, the new scheme gives better fidelity (20% to 55% reduction in mean square error) than the DCT algorithm under equal compression ratios

Fractal-Based Multi-Feature Texture Description

Fractal geometry receives recently increasing attention in analyzing natural scenes. The fractal dimension of a surface image has been used as segmentation feature, but since it is not sufficient to characterize important configurative texture characteristics, additional features are necessary. In this work we use a combination of fractal and non-fractal features to segment and classify natural textures

Texture Description Using Fractal And Energy Features

The fractal dimension of a texture has been used in the past as a segmentation feature, but since it cannot sufficiently describe enough textural characteristics, additional features are needed. In this paper we demonstrate that by combining the fractal dimension with a simple textural energy measure, a significant performance improvement is achieved compared to using each feature alone. The fractal dimension is computed using an efficient method that is also more accurate than most other popular methods, and the textural energy is easily computed using convolutional masks. Segmentation and classification of natural textures based on these two features is presented and the effect of additive noise is considered. © 1994

Multisignal Spectral Estimation Using An Iterative Relative Entropy Method.

A generalization of a method of spectral estimation (M. A. Tzannes, Ch. Moussas, and N. S. Tzannes, Digital Signal Processing, 84, 1984) is presented. The algorithm extends the method to the multiple signals case while still using an iterative procedure of the relative entropy method for estimating the spectral densities of the multisignal input data. Several current methods of relative entropy spectral estimation which involves solving N nonlinear equations simultaneously are also presented. The performance of the presented algorithm is compared to the maximum-entropy and other relative entropy methods, in terms of precision and computational efficiency. Classical examples are repeated and compared between the different methods