Application of ultrasonography in diagnosis and treatment of children with congenital muscular torticollis.

Congenital muscular torticollis (CMT) is a more common childcare disease, which belongs to muscle-skeletal system diseases, and is more common in newborns. The disease is mainly due to congenital contracture due to chest locks, which leads to asymmetric head and neck. For such diseases, clear diagnosis and treatment in the early days is an important way to improve the prognosis of children. Compared with X-ray film, CT, and MRI, ultrasound examination has the advantages of low examination cost, short time, and no exposure to radiation during the examination. Moreover, ultrasound examination can provide an objective basis for the clinical diagnosis and prognosis evaluation of CMT children. This article reviews the latest research progress of conventional ultrasound, color Doppler ultrasound, and ultrasound elastography in the clinical diagnosis of CMT children and assisting in the formulation of treatment plans.

Prospects for the application of home care in chronic wound management.

With the aggravation of population aging, the number of patients with chronic diseases increases and public medical resources are increasingly strained. Home care allows patients to receive professional nursing services at home while achieving disease prevention, health promotion, and ease of public healthcare resources. Nowadays, home care services have been gradually applied and promoted in patients with chronic wounds. This article reviews the application effect of current home care services in the daily management of chronic wound patients and puts forward relevant suggestions.

A Study on the Dimension Accuracy on the Inner Structure of the 3D Printed Parts Caused by the Scanning Strategy.

Selective laser melting (SLM) has been used in many fields recently, especially in the aerospace field. Many studies have been done on mechanical properties of the printed parts, but the dimension accuracy of the inner structure received little attention during these years. In this work, the dimension accuracy of the inner structure was measured and compared using different scanning strategies. Compared with the measured data, a new scanning strategy was used and finds that the dimension accuracy was better than the previous one that used a two-scanning strategy. To explain this phenomenon, finite element analysis (FEA) was used to show the temperature distribution after a 0.1 s cooling using two different scanning strategies, which caused the dimensional deviation in printing.

Object Tracking Algorithm Based on Dual Color Feature Fusion with Dimension Reduction.

Aiming at the problem of poor robustness and the low effectiveness of target tracking in complex scenes by using single color features, an object-tracking algorithm based on dual color feature fusion via dimension reduction is proposed, according to the Correlation Filter (CF)-based tracking framework. First, Color Name (CN) feature and Color Histogram (CH) feature extraction are respectively performed on the input image, and then the template and the candidate region are correlated by the CF-based methods, and the CH response and CN response of the target region are obtained, respectively. A self-adaptive feature fusion strategy is proposed to linearly fuse the CH response and the CN response to obtain a dual color feature response with global color distribution information and main color information. Finally, the position of the target is estimated, based on the fused response map, with the maximum of the fused response map corresponding to the estimated target position. The proposed method is based on fusion in the framework of the Staple algorithm, and dimension reduction by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the scale; the complexity of the algorithm is reduced, and the tracking performance is further improved. Experimental results on quantitative and qualitative evaluations on challenging benchmark sequences show that the proposed algorithm has better tracking accuracy and robustness than other state-of-the-art tracking algorithms in complex scenarios.

Degradation of Thiamethoxam in aqueous solution by ozonation: Influencing factors, intermediates, degradation mechanism and toxicity assessment.

This paper focuses on the degradation of Thiamethoxam (THIA) in aqueous solution by ozonation. Four influencing factors: pH, THIA initial concentration, ozone concentration and temperature were investigated in order to optimize the conditions, and pH showed the greatest impact; the removal efficiency reached up to 71.19% under the condition of pH 5-11, THIA initial concentration 50-300 mg L(-1), the ozone concentration 10-22.5 mg L(-1) at 293-308 K after 90 min. Four main intermediates were separated and identified and the possible degradation mechanism was proposed. The luminous intensity of photobacteria and the chemical oxygen demand (COD) were measured to assess the changes of toxicity and mineralization in ozonation process, and results showed that the inhibition rate decreased by 60% and 76% of COD was removed after 180 min with the THIA initial concentration was 200 mg L(-1). Our study powerfully demonstrates that the degradation of THIA in aqueous solution by ozonation is a promising technology.

Effects of perfluorooctanesulfonate and perfluorobutanesulfonate on the growth and sexual development of Xenopus laevis.

Perfluorobutanesulfonate (PFBS), as a substitute for perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS), is widespread in the environment and biotic samples as well as PFOS. To investigate effects of PFOS and PFBS on the growth and sexual development of amphibians, we exposed Xenopus laevis tadpoles at a series of concentrations of PFOS and PFBS (0.1; 1; 100; 1,000 µg/l) as well as 17-beta-estradiol (E2, 100 ng/l) and 5 alpha-androstan-17-beta-ol-3-one (DHT, 100 ng/l) from stage 46/47 to 2 months postmetamorphosis. We found that neither PFOS nor PFBS had a significant effect on the survival and growth. However, they caused hepatohistological impairment at higher concentrations (100; 1,000 µg/l). Unlike E2, PFOS at all concentrations did not alter the sex ratio and induce intersex, but caused degeneration of spermatogonia in testes except for the lowest concentration. PFBS had no effect on the sex ratio and gonadal histology. PFOS and PFBS promoted expression of estrogen receptor (ER) and androgen receptor (AR), but not affected aromatase expression in the brain. The increase in expression of ER and AR suggests an increase in the responsiveness to the corresponding sex hormone and potential effects on sexual development. Our results show that PFBS as well as PFOS have adverse effects on hepato-histology and sexual development on X. laevis. Also, PFOS- and PFBS-induced increase in ER and AR expression highlights the need to further study effects of PFOS and PFBS on subsequently gonadal development, sexual dimorphism, and secondary sex characteristics in X. laevis. It is debatable that PFBS is widely used as a substitute of PFOS.