Clinical effectiveness of International Team for Oral Implantology dental implant treatment in Taiwan: a seven-year longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND: International Team for Oral Implantology (ITI) dental implant has been clinically tested for the most parts of the world, especially in Europe and America, and has not been conducted on Asian population. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the cumulative survival and success rates over 7 years of ITI dental implants. MATERIALS: The ITI dental implant system has been used in the Dental Department of Chi Mei Medical Center since August of 1997. At the end of 2005, 717 solid-screw implants had been placed and loaded at least 6 months in 316 patients. The patient population included 145 males and 171 females, with a mean age of 43.18 +/- 11.60 years. The follow-up interval was from 6 months after the prosthesis was completed to 7 years. The success criteria of dental implant survival was based on Buser et al, Clin Oral Implants Res. 1990;1:33-40. RESULTS: Most implants (486, 67.8%) were placed in the mandible and 231 (32.2%) were placed in the maxilla. Two implants were removed before prostheses fabrication because of postsurgical infections. One implant was removed due to a periapical infection of an adjacent natural tooth. The life table analysis of survival rate and success rate were 99.58% and 96.13%, respectively. CONCLUSION: This 7-year clinical effectiveness study demonstrated this dental implant system gave a clinical reliable result in a Taiwanese population.

Toll-Like Receptor 3 Is Involved in Detection of Enterovirus A71 Infection and Targeted by Viral 2A Protease.

Enterovirus A71 (EV-A71) has emerged as a major pathogen causing hand, foot, and mouth disease, as well as neurological disorders. The host immune response affects the outcomes of EV-A71 infection, leading to either resolution or disease progression. However, the mechanisms of how the mammalian innate immune system detects EV-A71 infection to elicit antiviral immunity remain elusive. Here, we report that the Toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3) is a key viral RNA sensor for sensing EV-A71 infection to trigger antiviral immunity. Expression of TLR3 in HEK293 cells enabled the cells to sense EV-A71 infection, leading to type I, IFN-mediated antiviral immunity. Viral double-stranded RNA derived from EV-A71 infection was a key ligand for TLR3 detection. Silencing of TLR3 in mouse and human primary immune cells impaired the activation of IFN-ß upon EV-A71 infection, thus reinforcing the importance of the TLR3 pathway in defending against EV-A71 infection. Our results further demonstrated that TLR3 was a target of EV-A71 infection. EV-A71 protease 2A was implicated in the downregulation of TLR3. Together, our results not only demonstrate the importance of the TLR3 pathway in response to EV-A71 infection, but also reveal the involvement of EV-A71 protease 2A in subverting TLR3-mediated antiviral defenses.

Electrochemical study on microbiology-related corrosion of metallic dental materials.

Microbiology-related corrosion has been noted in industry for many years. It is widely recognized that microorganisms affect the corrosion of metal and alloys immersed in aqueous environments. Under similar conditions, the effect of bacteria in the oral environment on the corrosion of dental metallic materials remains unknown. The purpose of this study is to investigate the corrosion behavior of dental metallic materials in the presence of Streptococcus mutans and its growth byproducts. Samples were commercially pure titanium (CPT), Ti-6Al-4V (TAV), Ti-Ni (TN), Co-Cr-Mo alloy (CCM), 316L stainless steel (SSL), 17Cr-4Ni PH-type stainless steel (PH), and Ni-Cr alloy (NC). Using Gamry corrosion test system, surfaces were exposed to (1) sterilized Ringer's solution as a control for (2), (2) S. mutans mixed with sterilized Ringer's solution; (3) sterilized tryptic soy broth as a control for (4), and (4) byproducts of S. mutans mixed with sterilized tryptic soy broth. Corrosion parameters (EOCP, ECORR, ICORR, etc.) were corrected for all tested samples. Averaged values of these parameters were statistically analyzed by t-test to identify significant differences. It was concluded that (1) S. mutans reduced the EOCP of CPT, TAV, TN, and SSL, and the byproducts of S. mutans reduced the EOCP of TAV, TN, SSL, and PH. (2) S. mutans increased the ICORR of PH, and byproducts of S. mutans increased the ICORR of all the samples. (3) S. mutans reduced the ECORR of CPT, TAV and TN, and the byproducts of S. mutans reduced the ECORR of TN, SSL, PH, and NC. (4) S. mutans increased the IPASS of CPT, and the byproducts of S. mutans increased the IPASS of CPT, PH, and NC.

An efficient ASIC implementation of 16-channel on-line recursive ICA processor for real-time EEG system.

This is a proposal for an efficient very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design, 16-channel on-line recursive independent component analysis (ORICA) processor ASIC for real-time EEG system, implemented with TSMC 40 nm CMOS technology. ORICA is appropriate to be used in real-time EEG system to separate artifacts because of its highly efficient and real-time process features. The proposed ORICA processor is composed of an ORICA processing unit and a singular value decomposition (SVD) processing unit. Compared with previous work [1], this proposed ORICA processor has enhanced effectiveness and reduced hardware complexity by utilizing a deeper pipeline architecture, shared arithmetic processing unit, and shared registers. The 16-channel random signals which contain 8-channel super-Gaussian and 8-channel sub-Gaussian components are used to analyze the dependence of the source components, and the average correlation coefficient is 0.95452 between the original source signals and extracted ORICA signals. Finally, the proposed ORICA processor ASIC is implemented with TSMC 40 nm CMOS technology, and it consumes 15.72 mW at 100 MHz operating frequency.

A pipeline VLSI design of fast singular value decomposition processor for real-time EEG system based on on-line recursive independent component analysis.

This paper presents a pipeline VLSI design of fast singular value decomposition (SVD) processor for real-time electroencephalography (EEG) system based on on-line recursive independent component analysis (ORICA). Since SVD is used frequently in computations of the real-time EEG system, a low-latency and high-accuracy SVD processor is essential. During the EEG system process, the proposed SVD processor aims to solve the diagonal, inverse and inverse square root matrices of the target matrices in real time. Generally, SVD requires a huge amount of computation in hardware implementation. Therefore, this work proposes a novel design concept for data flow updating to assist the pipeline VLSI implementation. The SVD processor can greatly improve the feasibility of real-time EEG system applications such as brain computer interfaces (BCIs). The proposed architecture is implemented using TSMC 90 nm CMOS technology. The sample rate of EEG raw data adopts 128 Hz. The core size of the SVD processor is 580×580 um(2), and the speed of operation frequency is 20MHz. It consumes 0.774mW of power during the 8-channel EEG system per execution time.