Primary and secondary prevention of stroke

Results from recent clinical trials have shown that stroke is preventable both before and after symptomatic cerebrovascular disease through a change in lifestyle, medical therapy and surgical procedures. Risk factor control, antiplatelet agents, anticoagulation, and carotid endarterectomy have been proven to be effective under appropriate clinical circumstances. In this update, we shall highlight the areas in which scientific evidence is available.published_or_final_versio

Medical disorders in pregnancy

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An acidic fibroblast growth factor protein generated by alternate splicing acts like an antagonist.

Polymerase chain reaction amplification of cDNA for acidic fibroblast growth factor in several lines of cultured human cells revealed two forms of mRNA. The novel smaller mRNA lacks the entire second coding exon of the acidic fibroblast growth factor gene, whereas the previously identified mRNA consists of three coding exons. The truncated variant of acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF') is only 60 amino acids long with an apparent molecular mass of 6.7 kD on sodium dodecyl sulfate gels in contrast to 18 kD for the full-length acidic fibroblast growth factor. aFGF' elicits only minimal fibroblast proliferation and antagonizes the effects of acidic fibroblast growth factor when added exogenously to or when coexpressed with aFGF in BALB/c/3T3 fibroblasts. Thus, the truncated variant of acidic fibroblast growth factor may provide fibroblasts with a unique mechanism for endogenous regulation of their responses to acidic fibroblast growth factor

Handwritten Chinese character recognition using spatial Gabor filters and self-organizing feature maps

So far the bottleneck of Chinese recognition, especially handwritten recognition, still lies in the effectiveness of feature-extraction to cater for various distortions and position shifting. In the paper, a novel method is proposed by applying a set of Gabor spatial filters with different directions and spatial frequencies to character images, in an effort to reach the optimum trade-off between feature stability and feature localization. While a classic self-organizing map is used for unsupervised clustering feature codes, a multi-staged LVQ with a fuzzy judgement unit is applied for the final recognition on the feature mapping result.published_or_final_versio

Self-organized learning of receptive fields in multi-resolution

The statistical likelihood of Gabor filters and primary visual cortex has been of interest for years, yet learning mechanisms proposed did not generate satisfactory Gabor-like receptive fields. In this paper, a new computational model of self-organised Hebbian learning (SOHL) is proposed to work on a multi-resolution image pyramid for the problem of visual receptive field learning. Receptive fields of both orientation and spatial frequency selectivity are observed in the authors' simulation result.published_or_final_versio

Myopathy in acute hypothyroidism

Hypothyroid myopathy has so far been reported in long standing cases of hypothyroidism. We describe two adult patients with myopathy associated with acute transient hypothyroidism. Both presented with severe muscle aches and cramps, stiffness and spasms. Muscle enzymes were markedly elevated and electromyography in one patient showed myopathic features. Histological changes were absent in muscle biopsy, probably because of the short duration of metabolic disturbance. The myopathy subsided promptly when the hypothyroid state was reversed.published_or_final_versio

Dynamic response of buried heterostructure and stripe geometry λ/4 DFB semiconductor lasers

A comparison between different lateral confinement structures in DFB laser is analyzed with identical material parameters and structure in transverse and longitudinal directions. Results show that stripe geometry DFB lasers offer better dynamic response than buried heterostructure DFB lasers.published_or_final_versio

Clinical characteristics of viral infection of central nervous system in Queen Mary Hospital

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Radical anterior decompression and fusion for cervical spondylotic myelopathy

Sixty-seven patients with cervical spondylotic myelopathy were treated by radical anterior decompression and anterior spinal fusion. Of the 51 patients followed post-operatively for an average of 4.02 years, 34 obtained complete or partial relief, nine were unchanged and two deteriorated. Early complete anterior decompression and spinal fusion led to the most favourable results.published_or_final_versio

They are Not Equally Reliable: Semantic Event Search Using Differentiated Concept Classifiers

© 2016 IEEE. Complex event detection on unconstrained Internet videos has seen much progress in recent years. However, state-of-the-art performance degrades dramatically when the number of positive training exemplars falls short. Since label acquisition is costly, laborious, and time-consuming, there is a real need to consider the much more challenging semantic event search problem, where no example video is given. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art event search system without any example videos. Relying on the key observation that events (e.g. dog show) are usually compositions of multiple mid-level concepts (e.g. 'dog,' 'theater,' and 'dog jumping'), we first train a skip-gram model to measure the relevance of each concept with the event of interest. The relevant concept classifiers then cast votes on the test videos but their reliability, due to lack of labeled training videos, has been largely unaddressed. We propose to combine the concept classifiers based on a principled estimate of their accuracy on the unlabeled test videos. A novel warping technique is proposed to improve the performance and an efficient highly-scalable algorithm is provided to quickly solve the resulting optimization. We conduct extensive experiments on the latest TRECVID MEDTest 2014, MEDTest 2013 and CCV datasets, and achieve state-of-the-art performances