In vitro comparison of a new stand-alone anterior lumbar interbody cage device with established fixation techniques

Around 70% of the population in the United States experience low back pain at some point of their lives, of these 4% underwent surgical intervention on the lumbar spine to relieve the pain. Spinal arthrodesis, i.e. joint fusion, is beneficial in many cases as the final option for patients suffering from certain types of low back pain (LBP). In order to promote solid fusion across a decompressed spinal segment, interbody spacers/cages are used with and without posterior instrumentation to provide an initial rigid fixation of the segment. In this study three fresh/frozen human cadaveric lumbar spines were used. Each lumbar spine was dissected into two Functional Spinal Units (FSUs, L3-L4 and L5-S1) making a total of 6 motion segments. The objective of this study was to evaluate the biomechanical behavior of a new stand-alone anterior lumbar interbody device, by assessing its performance in terms of FSU motion in comparison with the intact FSU and FSUs additional posterior fixation (i.e., facet bolts and pedicle screws). Descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine if the differences between the different treatment groups are significant or not. Statistical analysis was also used to determine the contribution of the supplemental fixation for the anterior interbody fusion device (AFD) system

Physiotherapist’s Perspective to Importance of Pathophysiology of Supraspinatus Tendonitis in Proper Rehabilitation of Pain and Dysfunction

This article focuses on the physiotherapist perspective on the importance of pathophysiology of the Supraspinatus. Tendonitis is a very frequent cause of shoulder pain. The tendinopathy of supraspinatus most frequently affects people involved in various sports driven actions and above the head work in our daily living. It is thought to be caused by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, but for simplification they were divided into Anatomical, Biomechanical, Vascularity, Activity related, Biochemical and Age-related factors. The following data-bases were searched for both published and unpublished studies in English language for the period of 1962 to 2022: PubMed, EMBRACE, MedLine, Web of Science, Scopus. The following terms were used to carry out the search: Shoulder, impingement, supraspinatus, pain, pathophysiology, physiotherapy implication, athletes, older adults. We conclude that it is important to have in-depth knowledge about these concepts of pathophysiology of pain in terms of all possible etiologies and the healing process which helps the physiotherapist to make wise decisions about the rehabilitation process

Blockchain Technology and Artificial Intelligence Based Decentralized Access Control Model to Enable Secure Interoperability for Healthcare

Healthcare, one of the most important industries, is data-oriented, but most of the research in this industry focuses on incorporating the internet of things (IoT) or connecting medical equipment. Very few researchers are looking at the data generated in the healthcare industry. Data are very important tools in this competitive world, as they can be integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) to promote sustainability. Healthcare data include the health records of patients, drug-related data, clinical trials data, data from various medical equipment, etc. Most of the data management processes are manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. Even then, different healthcare industries do not trust each other to share and collaborate on data. Distributed ledger technology is being used for innovations in different sectors including healthcare. This technology can be incorporated to maintain and exchange data between different healthcare organizations, such as hospitals, insurance companies, laboratories, pharmacies, etc. Various attributes of this technology, such as its immutability, transparency, provenance etc., can bring trust and security to the domain of the healthcare sector. In this paper, a decentralized access control model is proposed to enable the secure interoperability of different healthcare organizations. This model uses the Ethereum blockchain for its implementation. This model interfaces patients, doctors, chemists, and insurance companies, empowering the consistent and secure exchange of data. The major concerns are maintaining a history of the transactions and avoiding unauthorized updates in health records. Any transaction that changes the state of the data is reflected in the distributed ledger and can be easily traced with this model. Only authorized entities can access their respective data. Even the administrator will not be able to modify any medical records

International criteria for acute kidney injury: advantages and remaining challenges

• Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) is defined using widely accepted international criteria that are based on changes in serum creatinine concentration and degree of oliguria. • AKI, when defined in this way, has a strong association with poor patient outcomes, including high mortality rates and longer hospital admissions with increased resource utilisation and subsequent chronic kidney disease. • The detection of AKI using current criteria can assist with AKI diagnosis and stratification of individual patient risk. • The diagnosis of AKI requires clinical judgement to integrate the definition of AKI with the clinical situation, to determine underlying cause of AKI, and to take account of factors that may affect performance of current definitions

Broad yellow orange emission from SrAl2O4:Pr3+ phosphor with blue excitation for application to white LEDs

Photoluminescence excitation to intermediate atomic levels of rare earth activator ion (praseodymium) situated intragap in alkaline earth aluminate (AEA) SrAl2O4 has been tailored. This lead to blue excitation (2.7 eV) of large band gap AEA possible. Photoluminescence (PL) emission in the visible region extends from 525 to 650 nm corresponding to transition from 3P0 and 1D2 excited states to different 3HJ and 3FJ states of Pr3+, broadened by crystal field effect of SrAl2O4. Thus SrAl2O4:Pr3+ promise to be a good candidate for solid state lighting in conjunction with blue LED