Augmentative Plating in the Treatment of Femoral Nonunion after Intramedullary Nail Fixation.

Objective: Failure of bone healing after intramedullary nailing (IMN) of a femoral diaphyseal fracture is an uncommon condition, which can cause obvious pain symptoms and seriously affect the daily life of patients. Ununion of femoral fracture requires treatment to promote successful bone union. Augmentative plating (AP) has yielded good results in treating femoral nonunion after IMN. However, there are few large cohort studies and no technical standard for this treatment. To determine (1) the proportion of individuals with femoral nonunion after IMN who achieved radiographic signs of osseous union following the additional treatment of AP and autogenous bone grafting and (2) the factors associated with the failure of this treatment. Methods: Nonunion after IMN fixation is defined as an unhealed fracture with no radiographic signs of osseous union at least six months after IMN treatment. Osseous union as bridging bone on three of four cortices with the absence of a radiolucent line. Between January 2011 and January 2022, 83 individuals diagnosed with femoral nonunion after IMN fixation underwent AP and an autogenous bone graft. Results: Seventy-six of the 83 nonunion individuals attained osseous union by 12 months. Six of 36 (16.7%) subjects with mono-cortical plates had non-union. Conversely, one of 47 subjects (2%) with bi-cortical plates had non-union. There were 18 individuals whose AP had ≤6 cortices. Five of these 18 (38.5%) individuals had non-union. Two of 65 with an AP of >6 cortices had non-union. AP with ≤ 6 cortices was a major risk factor for the likelihood of unsuccessful procedures compared to AP with > 6 cortices. Three individuals experienced incision infection at the bone graft harvest site and were treated with local wound care. Conclusions: A high proportion of individuals with femoral nonunion after IMN fixation were salvaged by AP and an autogenous bone graft. Bi-cortical plate and screw intersection of more than six cortices may increase the treatment effectiveness. Limitations: There were limitations of this study. First, it was a retrospective study over a 10-year period, and the patients were treated by different orthopedic surgeons. Second, lack of functional evaluation is another limitation of the present work. Generalizability: The technique of bi-cortical plate and screw intersection of more than six cortices is not difficult for experienced orthopedic surgeons, and no special surgical tools is required. Closing Statement: Many literature has confirmed the good effect of APP technology in treating femoral nonunion after intramedullary nail fixation, but there are still cases of failure. Our study may enable this technology to achieve better therapeutic effects.

Multi-Object Detection in Security Screening Scene Based on Convolutional Neural Network.

The technique for target detection based on a convolutional neural network has been widely implemented in the industry. However, the detection accuracy of X-ray images in security screening scenarios still requires improvement. This paper proposes a coupled multi-scale feature extraction and multi-scale attention architecture. We integrate this architecture into the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) algorithm and find that it can significantly improve the effectiveness of target detection. Firstly, ResNet is used as the backbone network to replace the original VGG network to improve the feature extraction capability of the convolutional neural network for images. Secondly, a multi-scale feature extraction (MSE) structure is designed to enrich the information contained in the multi-stage prediction feature layer. Finally, the multi-scale attention architecture (MSA) is fused onto the prediction feature layer to eliminate the redundant features' interference and extract effective contextual information. In addition, a combination of Adaptive-NMS and Soft-NMS is used to output the final prediction anchor boxes when performing non-maximum suppression. The results of the experiments show that the improved method improves the mean average precision (mAP) value by 7.4% compared to the original approach. New modules make detection much more accurate while keeping the detection speed the same.

Identifying Irregular Potatoes Using Hausdorff Distance and Intersection over Union.

Further processing and the added value of potatoes are limited by irregular potatoes. An ellipse-fitting-based Hausdorff distance and intersection over union (IoU) method for identifying irregular potatoes is proposed to solve the problem. First, the acquired potato image is resized, translated, segmented, and filtered to obtain the potato contour information. Secondly, a least-squares fitting method fits the extracted contour to an ellipse. Then, the similarity between the irregular potato contour and the fitted ellipse is characterized using the perimeter ratio, area ratio, Hausdorff distance, and IoU. Next, the characterization ability of the four features is analyzed, and an identification standard of irregular potatoes is established. Finally, we discuss the algorithm's shortcomings in this paper and draw the advantages of the algorithm by comparison. The experimental results showed that the characterization ability of perimeter ratio and area ratio was inferior to that of Hausdorff distance and IoU, and using Hausdorff distance and IoU as feature parameters can effectively identify irregular potatoes. Using Hausdorff distance separately as a feature parameter, the algorithm achieved excellent performance, with precision, recall, and F1 scores reaching 0.9423, 0.98, and 0.9608, respectively. Using IoU separately as a feature parameter, the algorithm achieved a higher overall recognition rate, with precision, recall, and F1 scores of 1, 0.96, and 0.9796, respectively. Compared with existing studies, the proposed algorithm identifies irregular potatoes using only one feature, avoiding the complexity of high-dimensional features and significantly reducing the computing effort. Moreover, simple threshold segmentation does not require data training and saves algorithm execution time.

Magnolol reduces bleomycin-induced rodent lung fibrosis.

Magnolol, a compound extracted from the Chinese medicinal herb Magnolia officinalis, has been proved to exert multiple pharmacological effects, including anti-oxidant and anti-inflammation activities. In this study, how it influenced bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis of rats was investigated. A single intratracheal instillation of bleomycin (5 mg/Kg, sacrificed 7 and 28 days post bleomycin instillation) caused body weight decrease and lung indices increase. Hodroxyproline content, myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and transforming growth factor-ß (TGF-ß) levels increased in the rat lung tissues after bleomycin administration, while superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity decreased in the rat lung tissues. Collagen were excessively deposited in rat lung tissues after bleomycin treatment. However, oral administration of magnolol (10 mg/Kg, 20 mg/Kg, 30 mg/Kg) apparently and significantly inhibited the fibrotic process. It partly reversed the bleomycin-induced increase of hydroxyproline content, MPO activity, TNF-α and TGF-ß levels in the lung tissues, significantly inhibited the bleomycin-induced decrease of SOD activity, Excessive collagen deposition was also inhibited by magnolol administration. In summary, our results suggested that magnolol might be a potent anti-inflammatory and anti-fibrotic agent against bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis.

[Phosphorus removal of agriculture wastewater through subsurface constructed wetland].

Phosphorus removal in subsurface constructed wetland treating agriculture non-pointed wastewater was studied in pilot-scale. The experimental results showed that the removal rates of TP increased with HRT increasing when the nominal hydraulic retention time was less than 5 days. The pH decreased distinctly when the retention time was too longer in the batch and sequence style, it may bring on a lower removel rate of TP. The amount of TP that can be removed by harvesting were about 15.8% and 9.5% compared to the total quantity of removing in Phragmitas communis and zizania caduciflora constructed system respectively. Temperature impacted on the removel of TP, the removel rate of TP decreased 30% in the winter compared to summuer.