The diagnostic value of the resistivity index of the common carotid arteries in severe internal carotid artery stenosis

Duplex ultrasound is currently used both for screening and for preoperative assessment of the carotid arteries and has completely replaced carotid angiography for the latter purpose in many institutions. The study aimed to identify resistivity index abnormalities in the common carotid arteries in patients with occluded or severely stenosed internal carotid arteries. Sixteen patients with severe internal carotid artery stenosis or occlusion over a twelve-month period were studied by duplex ultrasonography. The resistivity index in the common carotid artery was 0.85 &#177; 0.03 on the stenotic side compared to 0.74 &#177; 0.04 on the opposite side (p < 0.05). There was no side difference regarding flow velocity. In patients with occluded or severely stenosed internal carotid arteries compensatory vasodilation occurs in cerebral vessels on the same side, and this is also significant, resulting in a decrease in the resistivity index in the common carotid artery of the opposite side

Action Capsules: Human Skeleton Action Recognition

Due to the compact and rich high-level representations offered, skeleton-based human action recognition has recently become a highly active research topic. Previous studies have demonstrated that investigating joint relationships in spatial and temporal dimensions provides effective information critical to action recognition. However, effectively encoding global dependencies of joints during spatio-temporal feature extraction is still challenging. In this paper, we introduce Action Capsule which identifies action-related key joints by considering the latent correlation of joints in a skeleton sequence. We show that, during inference, our end-to-end network pays attention to a set of joints specific to each action, whose encoded spatio-temporal features are aggregated to recognize the action. Additionally, the use of multiple stages of action capsules enhances the ability of the network to classify similar actions. Consequently, our network outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on the N-UCLA dataset and obtains competitive results on the NTURGBD dataset. This is while our approach has significantly lower computational requirements based on GFLOPs measurements.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Do pre-adenotonsillectomy echocardiographic findings change postoperatively in children with severe adenotonsillar hypertrophy

AbstractPurposeHypertrophy of adenotonsillar tissue is one of the most common problems in childhood age and causes upper airway obstruction and even obstructive sleep apnea symptoms in severe forms. The aim of this study is to evaluate the changes of pre-adentonsillectomy echocardiographic findings after operation.Material and methodsFrom August 2007 to November 2008, 55 children with adenotonsillar hypertrophy and obstructive-sleep symptoms (aged 3–11years old of which 35 were males and 20 females) were randomly selected. Preoperatively echocardiography was performed for all patients by the pediatric cardiologist.In control group 55 children who referred to otolaryngology clinic because of non adenotonsillar related disease evaluated. One month and six months after operation, patients with positive findings were followed up and again echocardiography was performed separately.ResultsNo complaints of apnea were reported. Tonsillar grades of all cases were type III or IV. The preoperative mean pulmonary arterial pressure levels of the 4 (7.3%) children were higher than normal range (25mmHg) and it decreased significantly after operation (P<0.000) (Preoperative MPAP=32±3mmHg, and six months postoperative follow up, MPAP=11±5mmHg). All the patients’ parents complained about severe open mouth snoring, agitated sleep and hyperpnoea of their children.The preoperative tricuspid regurgitation pressure level of 7 children was higher than normal range and it decreased significantly after operation (P<0.000 preoperative TR=34±8mmHg postoperative TR=19±6mmHg). AC/ET in these seven patients were lower than 0.4. In control group echocardiography findings are normal.ConclusionSevere chronic hypertrophic adenotonsillar tissue caused higher tricuspid regurgitation pressure and mean pulmonary arterial pressure

Bis{2-[(2,4-dimethyl­phen­yl)imino­meth­yl]pyridine-κ2 N,N′}bis­(thio­cyanato-κN)cadmium

The title compound, [Cd(NCS)2(C14H14N2)2], features crystallographic inversion symmetry with the CdII ion located on a centre of inversion. The CdII ion is six-coordinated in a slightly distorted octa­hedral geometry with the thiocyanate anions in axial positions. The angle between the benzene and pyridine rings is 69.64 (9)°. An inter­molecular C—H⋯S hydrogen bond stabilizes the crystal structure

Meta-heuristic Optimization Algorithms for Predicting the Scouring Depth Around Bridge Piers

An accurate estimation of bridge pier scour has been considered as one of the important parameters in designing of bridges. However, due to the numerous involved parameters and convolution of this phenomenon, many existing approaches cannot predict scour depth with an acceptable accuracy. Obtained results from the empirical relationships show that these relationships have low accuracy in determining the maximum scour depth and they need a high safety factor for many cases, which leads to uneconomic designs of bridges. To cover these disadvantages, three new models are provided to estimate the bridge pier scour using an adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system. The parameters of the system are optimized by using the colliding bodies optimization, enhanced colliding bodies optimization and vibrating particles system methods. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed methods, their results were compared with those of simple adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system and its improved versions by using the particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm as well as the empirical equations. Comparison of results showed that the new vibrating particles system based algorithm could find better results than other two ones. In addition, comparison of the results obtained by the proposed methods with those of the empirical relations confirmed the high performance of the new methods