Clinical efficacy of cross-sectional imaging compared with panoramic imaging and virtual 3D models for the assessment of dental implant placement.

Introduction: This study compared the clinical efficacy of panoramic imaging and Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) in the optimal placement of virtual dental implants in the posterior edentulous bounded regions of the jaws. Material and methods: From a retrospective audit of patient records, fifty-two subjects were recruited with sixty-one dental implant sites in the maxilla and mandible. Physical measurements of the residual alveolar ridge were performed and consensus decisions of optimal implant length and bone graft necessity were obtained using reformatted panoramic alone (RP) or cross-sectional imaging (XS). Results: Horizontal restorative space measurements greater for RP (p=0.001). Shorter implants were chosen more often using CS than RP. Use of XS allowed planning that reduced the need for bone graft procedures by 50%. Conclusion: The use of cross-sectional imaging provides supplemental information that significantly influences virtual implant position and the need for bone grafting

Transfusion related acute lung injury--TRALI: an under diagnosed entity

Transfusion related acute lung injury (TRALI) is a life-threatening complication of transfusion of blood and its components resembling acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or acute lung injury (ALI). TRALI is a particular form of ARDS that follows blood transfusion and is caused by donor-derived antibodies present in the transfused products, reacting with the recipients\u27 blood cells, inducing release of inflammatory mediators thus compromising lung functions. Anti-HLA antibodies are the most frequently indicted inducers in this category. Literature search has not revealed any documented case of TRALI from Pakistan. This in no way implies that TRALI is non existent in this part of the world but rather indicates that many clinicians may be unaware of the condition or may not recognize transfusion as the cause and like in other parts of the world, is almost certainly under-diagnosed. The lack of agreement on the definite cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the development of TRALI renders the task of improving the safety of blood transfusion far more complex and potentially quite expensive. This review discusses the modern concepts of pathogenesis of TRALI along with its clinicopathological manifestations and management with the aim to improve awareness of our clinicians towards this dreadful and potentially fatal condition

A Review of Ethical Leadership and Other Ethics- Related Leadership Theories

The role of ethics in leadership studies is very important for organizations. Leadership without ethics and integrity can be harmful both for the organizational stakeholders and society. The high-profiled scandals and the leadership involvement in unethical activities caused increase attention of the scholars and mainstream media in the leadership ethics (Hartog, 2015). This resulted a growing research in the field of ethical leadership behavior. For this reason, the present study review ethics-related leadership including ethical leadership and other ethic-related leadership theories to better understand the importance of the ethics and morality in these leadership constructs. This study also presented a comprehensive review on ethical leadership and its similarities and differences with other related leadership styles. Another focus of this study was to present the definitions of each leadership style and their scales, and to establish that how ethical leadership is distinct from each leadership style. Future directions and conclusion are presented in the last of the paper

Impact of Ethical Leadership on Follower’s In-role Performance: Evidence from Pakistan

In the modern world of business, the competition is fierce, the margins are thinning; raising employee performance and loyalty is a major concern for organizations. Many cradles of enhancing productivity and loyalty have been unearthed by researchers and one such driver is “ethical leadership” and that is why Douglas Conant explains “to win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” In this study, we investigate the mediating mechanisms of perceived organizational support (POS) and organizational identification (OI) in explaining the process by which ethical leadership influences follower’s in-role performance. This study covers the banking sector in Pakistan, which recommends that ethical leadership nurtures employee in-role performance via POS and organizational identification. This study also offers implication for theory and practices. Keywords. Organizational Identification. POS. In-role Performance. Ethical leadership. Pakistan

Extracting respiratory signals from thoracic cone beam CT projections

Patient respiratory signal associated with the cone beam CT (CBCT) projections is important for lung cancer radiotherapy. In contrast to monitoring an external surrogate of respiration, such signal can be extracted directly from the CBCT projections. In this paper, we propose a novel local principle component analysis (LPCA) method to extract the respiratory signal by distinguishing the respiration motion-induced content change from the gantry rotation-induced content change in the CBCT projections. The LPCA method is evaluated by comparing with three state-of-the-art projection-based methods, namely, the Amsterdam Shroud (AS) method, the intensity analysis (IA) method, and the Fourier-transform based phase analysis (FT-p) method. The clinical CBCT projection data of eight patients, acquired under various clinical scenarios, were used to investigate the performance of each method. We found that the proposed LPCA method has demonstrated the best overall performance for cases tested and thus is a promising technique for extracting respiratory signal. We also identified the applicability of each existing method.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Phys. Med. Bio

Gene Expression Programming for Estimating Shear Strength of RC Squat Wall

The flanged, barbell, and rectangular squat reinforced concrete (RC) walls are broadly used in low-rise commercial and highway under and overpasses. The shear strength of squat walls is the major design consideration because of their smaller aspect ratio. Most of the current design codes or available published literature provide separate sets of shear capacity equations for flanged, barbell, and rectangular walls. Also, a substantial scatter exists in the predicted shear capacity due to a large discrepancy in the test data. Thus, this study aims to develop a single gene expression programming (GEP) expression that can be used for predicting the shear strength of these three cross-sectional shapes based on a dataset of 646 experiments. A total of thirteen influencing parameters are identified to contrive this efficient empirical compared to several shear capacity equations. Owing to the larger database, the proposed model shows better performance based on the database analysis results and compared with 9 available empirical models

Imaging of X-Ray-Excited Emissions from Quantum Dots and Biological Tissue in Whole Mouse

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Optical imaging in clinical and preclinical settings can provide a wealth of biological information, particularly when coupled with targetted nanoparticles, but optical scattering and absorption limit the depth and resolution in both animal and human subjects. Two new hybrid approaches are presented, using the penetrating power of X-rays to increase the depth of optical imaging. Foremost, we demonstrate the excitation by X-rays of quantum-dots (QD) emitting in the near-infrared (NIR), using a clinical X-ray system to map the distribution of QDs at depth in whole mouse. We elicit a clear, spatially-resolved NIR signal from deep organs (brain, liver and kidney) with short (1 second) exposures and tolerable radiation doses that will permit future in vivo applications. Furthermore, X-ray-excited endogenous emission is also detected from whole mouse. The use of keV X-rays to excite emission from QDs and tissue represent novel biomedical imaging technologies, and exploit emerging QDs as optical probes for spatial-temporal molecular imaging at greater depth than previously possible.Peer reviewe

Design and Optimization of Four-dimensional Cone-beam Computed Tomography in Image-guided Radiation Therapy

The influence of respiratory motion on patient anatomy poses a challenge to accurate radiation therapy, especially in lung cancer treatment. Modern radiation therapy planning uses models of tumor respiratory motion to account for target motion in targeting. The tumor motion model can be verified on a per-treatment session basis with four-dimensional cone-beam computed tomography (4D-CBCT), which acquires an image set of the dynamic target throughout the respiratory cycle during the therapy session. 4D-CBCT is undersampled if the scan time is too short. However, short scan time is desirable in clinical practice to reduce patient setup time. This dissertation presents the design and optimization of 4D-CBCT to reduce the impact of undersampling artifacts with short scan times. This work measures the impact of undersampling artifacts on the accuracy of target motion measurement under different sampling conditions and for various object sizes and motions. The results provide a minimum scan time such that the target tracking error is less than a specified tolerance. This work also presents new image reconstruction algorithms for reducing undersampling artifacts in undersampled datasets by taking advantage of the assumption that the relevant motion of interest is contained within a volume-of-interest (VOI). It is shown that the VOI-based reconstruction provides more accurate image intensity than standard reconstruction. The VOI-based reconstruction produced 43% fewer least-squares error inside the VOI and 84% fewer error throughout the image in a study designed to simulate target motion. The VOI-based reconstruction approach can reduce acquisition time and improve image quality in 4D-CBCT