Microscopic and endoscopic “chopstick” technique removal of choroid plexus papilloma in the third ventricle of an infant: a case report with systematic review of literature

BackgroundChoroid plexus papilloma (CPP) is rare and even rarer in infants and young children, and it usually occurs in the ventricles. Due to the physical peculiarities of infants, tumor removal by microscopic or endoscopic surgery alone is difficult.Case PresentationA 3-month-old patient was found to have an abnormally enlarged head circumference for 7 days. Cranial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination revealed a lesion in the third ventricle. The patient underwent combined microscopic and endoscopic “chopstick” technique to remove the tumor. He recovered well after the surgery. Postoperative pathological examination revealed CPP. Postoperative MRI suggested total resection of the tumor. Follow-up for 1 month showed no recurrence or distant metastasis.ConclusionsCombined microscopic and endoscopic “chopstick” technique may be a suitable approach to remove tumors in infant ventricles

Visual Dysfunction in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia: Magnocellular-Dorsal Pathway Deficit or Noise Exclusion Deficit?

Many studies have suggested that children with developmental dyslexia (DD) not only show phonological deficit but also have difficulties in visual processing, especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. However, mechanisms underlying this impairment in vision are still unclear. Visual magnocellular deficit theory suggests that the difficulties in the visual processing of dyslexia are caused by the dysfunction of the magnocellular system. However, some researchers have pointed out that previous studies supporting the magnocellular theory did not control for the role of "noise". The visual processing difficulties of dyslexia might be related to the noise exclusion deficit. The present study aims to examine these two possible explanations via two experiments. In experiment 1, we recruited 26 Chinese children with DD and 26 chronological age-matched controls (CA) from grades 3 to 5. We compared the Gabor contrast sensitivity between the two groups in high-noise and low-noise conditions. Results showed a significant between-group difference in contrast sensitivity in only the high-noise condition. In experiment 2, we recruited another 29 DD and 29 CA and compared the coherent motion/form sensitivity in the high- and low-noise conditions. Results also showed that DD exhibited lower coherent motion and form sensitivities than CA in the high-noise condition, whereas no evidence was observed that the group difference was significant in the low-noise condition. These results suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia have noise exclusion deficit, supporting the noise exclusion hypothesis. The present study provides evidence for revealing the visual dysfunction of dyslexia from the Chinese perspective. The nature of the perceptual noise exclusion and the relationship between the two theoretical hypotheses are discussed

Impaired Ability in Visual-Spatial Attention in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia

A growing body of evidence suggests that children with dyslexia in alphabetic languages exhibit visual-spatial attention deficits that can obstruct reading acquisition by impairing their phonological decoding skills. However, it remains an open question whether these visual-spatial attention deficits are present in children with dyslexia in non-alphabetic languages. Chinese, with its logographic writing system, offers a unique opportunity to explore this question. The presence of visual-spatial attention deficits in Chinese children with dyslexia remains insufficiently investigated. Therefore, this study aimed to explore whether such deficits exist, employing a visual search paradigm. Three visual search tasks were conducted, encompassing two singleton feature search tasks and a serial conjunction search task. The results indicated that Chinese children with dyslexia performed as well as chronological age-matched control children in color search tasks but less effectively in orientation search, suggesting a difficulty in the rapid visual processing of orientation: a deficit potentially specific to Chinese dyslexia. Crucially, Chinese children with dyslexia also exhibited lower accuracy, longer reaction times, and steeper slopes in the reaction times by set size function in the conjunction search task compared to control children, which is indicative of a visual-spatial attention deficit.</p

Porous Structure Reconstruction Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The three-dimensional high-resolution imaging of rock samples is the basis for pore-scale characterization of reservoirs. Micro X-ray computed tomography (µCT) is considered the most direct means of obtaining the three-dimensional inner structure of porous media without deconstruction. The micrometer resolution ofµ-CT, however, limits its application in the detection of small structures such as nanochannels, which are critical for fluid transportation. An effective strategy for solving this problem is applying numerical reconstruction methods to improve the resolution of the µ-CT images. In this paper, a convolutional neural network reconstruction method is introduced to reconstruct high-resolution porous structures based on low-resolution µ-CT images and high-resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) images. The proposed method involves four steps. First, a three-dimensional low-resolution tomographic image of a rock sample is obtained by µ-CT scanning. Next, one or more sections in the rock sample are selected for scanning by SEM to obtain high-resolution two-dimensional images. The high-resolution segmented SEM images and their corresponding low-resolution µ-CT slices are then applied to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. Finally, the trained CNN model is used to reconstruct the entire low-resolution three-dimensional µ-CT image. Because the SEM images are segmented and have a higher resolution than the µ-CT image, this algorithm integrates the super-resolution and segmentation processes. The input data are low-resolution µCT images, and the output data are high-resolution segmented porous structures. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance

Trends in Cause-Specific Injury Mortality in China in 2005-2019: Longitudinal Observational Study

BackgroundOver the last few decades, although the age-standardized mortality rate (ASMR) of injury has shown a significant declining trend in China, this pattern has dramatically reversed recently. ObjectiveWe aimed to elucidate the geographical, demographic, and temporal trends of cause-specific injuries, the reversal phenomenon of these trends, and the fluctuations of injury burden from 2005 to 2019 in China. MethodsA longitudinal observational study was performed using the raw data of injury deaths in the National Cause-of-Death surveillance data provided by the disease surveillance points system in 2005-2019. The cause-specific injuries were divided into disparate subgroups by sex, age, urban/rural region, and eastern/central/western areas of China. The burden of injury was assessed using potential years of life lost (PYLL), average years of life lost (AYLL), and PYLL rate (PYLLR). Temporal trends of mortality rates and burden were evaluated using best-fitting joinpoint models. ResultsInjury deaths accounted for 7.51% (1,156,504/15,403,835) of all-cause deaths in China in 2005-2019. The crude mortality rate of all-cause injury was 47.74 per 100,000 persons. The top 3 injury types (traffic accident, falls, and suicide) accounted for 70.57% (816,145/1,156,504) of all injury-related deaths. The ASMR of all-cause injury decreased (P=.003), while the crude mortality rate remained unchanged (P=.52) during 2005-2019. A significant reverse trend in ASMR of all-cause injury was observed in urban older adults since 2013, mainly due to the inverted trend in injuries from falls. A reverse trend in ASMR of suicide was observed among individuals aged 10-24 years, with notable increases by 35.18% (annual percentage change 15.4%, 95% CI 4.1%-28.0%) in men since 2017. The AYLL and PYLLR of all-cause injury among older adults showed consistent ascending trends from 2005 to 2019 (average annual percentage change [AAPC] 6.1%, 95% CI 5.4%-6.9%, 129.04% increase for AYLL; AAPC 5.4%, 95% CI 2.4%-8.4%, 105.52% increase for PYLLR). The AYLL due to suicide for individuals aged 10-24 years showed a considerable upswing tendency (AAPC 0.5%, 95% CI 0.4%-0.7%, 8.02% increase). ConclusionsAlthough the ASMR of all-cause injury decreased in China from 2005 to 2019, the trend in suicide among adolescents and young adults and falls among older adults has been on the rise in recent years. Interventions should be encouraged to mitigate the cause-specific burdens of injury death

sj-docx-1-ldx-10.1177_00222194241241040 – Supplemental material for Impaired Ability in Visual-Spatial Attention in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ldx-10.1177_00222194241241040 for Impaired Ability in Visual-Spatial Attention in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia by Mengyu Tian, Yuzhu Ji, Runzhou Wang and Hong-Yan Bi in Journal of Learning Disabilities</p

Using a GPU to Accelerate a Longwave Radiative Transfer Model with Efficient CUDA-Based Methods

Climatic simulations rely heavily on high-performance computing. As one of the atmospheric radiative transfer models, the rapid radiative transfer model for general circulation models (RRTMG) is used to calculate the radiative transfer of electromagnetic radiation through a planetary atmosphere. Radiation physics is one of the most time-consuming physical processes, so the RRTMG presents large-scale and long-term simulation challenges to the development of efficient parallel algorithms that fit well into multicore clusters. This paper presents a method for improving the calculative efficiency of radiation physics, an RRTMG long-wave radiation scheme (RRTMG_LW) that is accelerated on a graphics processing unit (GPU). First, a GPU-based acceleration algorithm with one-dimensional domain decomposition is proposed. Then, a second acceleration algorithm with two-dimensional domain decomposition is presented. After the two algorithms were implemented in Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) Fortran, a GPU version of the RRTMG_LW, namely G-RRTMG_LW, was developed. Results demonstrated that the proposed acceleration algorithms were effective and that the G-RRTMG_LW achieved a significant speedup. In the case without I/O transfer, the 2-D G-RRTMG_LW on one K40 GPU obtained a speed increase of 18.52&times; over the baseline performance on a single Intel Xeon E5-2680 CPU core