Parametric modeling the human calves for evaluation and design of medical compression stockings.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Accurate dose of compression imposed by functional compression garments, such as medical compression stockings, is critical for medical treatment or rehabilitation. To evaluate or provide fitted compression stockings for individuals, the real curved calf shapes other than just anthropometric parameters are required. METHODS: This paper proposes and verifies a simple 3D parametric model of human calf that can fast and efficiently construct representative calves for evaluation or size-design purposes. Instead of selecting feature points, shape parameters were used to characterize the real calves. RESULTS: Based on principal component analysis and a database of 220 scanned Chinese subjects, the proposed parametric model was found as capable of largely reducing the data complexity to only the 1st order principal component with a major variance percentage of as high as 96%. A methodological framework of parametric modeling was then proposed. Results show that the proposed parametric model and method can fast produce valid representative shapes of patients' calves, with which commercial stockings can be evaluated and customized stockings can be designed. CONCLUSIONS: It can be concluded that the proposed parametric model and method can highly boost evaluation/size customization of MCSs, and will also inspire the research on customization of other compression garments.

Comparison of gastrointestinal adverse events with different doses of metformin in the treatment of elderly people with type 2 diabetes.

WHAT IS KNOWN AND OBJECTIVE: Gastrointestinal discomfort is the most common adverse event of metformin treatment for type 2 diabetes, especially in elderly patients. The aim of this study was to compare gastrointestinal adverse events resulting from different doses of metformin used for the treatment of elderly people with type 2 diabetes. METHODS: A total of 361 elderly patients with newly diagnosed diabetes were randomly divided into three groups: metformin 1000 mg/d (N = 120), metformin 1500 mg/d (N = 121) and metformin 2000 mg/d (N = 120). Glycaemic control and gastrointestinal adverse events (abdominal pain, diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, bloating and anorexia) were assessed and compared among the three groups after 12 weeks of treatment. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: At baseline, there was no significant difference in gastrointestinal symptoms among the three groups. After 12 weeks of treatment with metformin, the change in HbA1c level was -0.7%, -0.9% and -1.0% for the 1000 mg/d, 1500 mg/d and 2000 mg/d groups, respectively (P < .0001). There was no significant difference in gastrointestinal adverse events among the three groups after treatment with metformin. In total, 62 people (17.2%) could not tolerate the adverse effects of metformin, and most of them stopped treatment in the first 4 weeks. Logistic regression analysis shows that female sex (OR = 2.660, 95%CI 1.692-4.183, P < .0001) and the concurrent use of organic cation transporter 1-inhibiting drugs (OR = 1.874, 95%CI 1.076-3.265, P = .027) are independent risk factors for adverse events. WHAT IS NEW AND CONCLUSIONS: Our data demonstrate that metformin doses of 1000 mg/d-2000 mg/d have similar adverse events but that 2000 mg/d of metformin yields the best glycaemic control in elderly people with diabetes. If elderly people can tolerate 1000 mg/d of metformin, we could gradually increase the dose to 2000 mg/d to achieve better glycaemic control.

Association between dawn phenomenon and sleep disorders in elderly patients with type 2 diabetes / 中华全科医师杂志

Objective To investigate the association between dawn phenomenon and sleep disorders in elderly patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).Methods Three hundred and ninety-six T2DM patients aged 60-80 years were recruited from Department of Endocrinology,Huadong Hospital from January 2014 to January 2017.All cases used oral hypoglycemic drug more than 3 months,their glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) was lower than 8.5％ and underwent continuous glucose monitoring for 72 h.The Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI) scale was applied to evaluate sleep quality,and the PSQI＞7 was defined as the sleep disorder.There was dawn phenomenon in 165 cases (group Ⅰ) and no dawn phenomenon in 231 cases(group Ⅱ).The clinical data,blood glucose related indicators,homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) and PSQI scores were compared between two groups.The correlation between dawn phenomenon and sleep disorder was analyzed with Logistic regression.Results There were no significant differences in age,BMI,blood lipids,liver and kidney function,hypersensitive CRP(hCRP),serum cystatin and serum cortisol between the two groups (all P＞0.05).Patients in group Ⅰ presented a higher ratio of urinary protein/creatinine [1.3 (0.7,5.4) mg/mmol vs.1.1 (0.5,3.4) mg/mmol,t=-2.105,P=0.04],PSQI scores [(7.3±3.3) vs.(5.4±2.7),t=3.587,P＜0.01] and the incidence of sleep disorders [57.0％ (94/165) vs.25.1％ (58/231),x2=3.765,P＜0.01] than those in group Ⅱ.The HbA1c [(7.4±0.9)％ vs.(7.0±1.0)％,t=3.384,P＜0.01] and fasting glucose [(8.3±1.6) mmol/L vs.(7.0± 1.4) mmol/L,t=8.778,P＜0.01] were significantly higher in group Ⅰ than those in group Ⅱ;while the fasting insulin [(8.2±7.2) mU/L vs.(10.3±10.2) mU/L,t=-2.286,P=0.02] and nocturnal nadir [(5.7± 1.3) mmol/L vs.(6.6± 1.4) mmol/L,t =-6.331,P＜0.01] were lower than those in group Ⅱ.Pearson correlation analysis showed that dawn phenomenon was positively correlated with sleep disorders (r=0.323,P＜0.01).Logistic regression analysis showed that sleep disorders were associated with increased risk of dawn phenomenon (OR=4.143,95％CI:1.69-10.16,P＜0.0 1).Conclusion Sleep disorders may play a relevant pathological role in the occurrence of dawn phenomenon in elderly T2DM patients.

Robust 2D principal component analysis: a structured sparsity regularized approach.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used to extract features and reduce dimensionality in various computer vision and image/video processing tasks. Conventional approaches either lack robustness to outliers and corrupted data or are designed for one-dimensional signals. To address this problem, we propose a robust PCA model for two-dimensional images incorporating structured sparse priors, referred to as structured sparse 2D-PCA. This robust model considers the prior of structured and grouped pixel values in two dimensions. As the proposed formulation is jointly nonconvex and nonsmooth, which is difficult to tackle by joint optimization, we develop a two-stage alternating minimization approach to solve the problem. This approach iteratively learns the projection matrices by bidirectional decomposition and utilizes the proximal method to obtain the structured sparse outliers. By considering the structured sparsity prior, the proposed model becomes less sensitive to noisy data and outliers in two dimensions. Moreover, the computational cost indicates that the robust two-dimensional model is capable of processing quarter common intermediate format video in real time, as well as handling large-size images and videos, which is often intractable with other robust PCA approaches that involve image-to-vector conversion. Experimental results on robust face reconstruction, video background subtraction data set, and real-world videos show the effectiveness of the proposed model compared with conventional 2D-PCA and other robust PCA algorithms.

Association Between Angiotension-converting Enzyme and Stroke / 医学研究杂志

Objective To investigate the correlation between ACE gene polymorphisms and stroke of Han nationality people in Fangshan district of Beijing. Methods The Insertion/Deletion(ID) polymorphisms of ACE gene were detected in 63 patients with cerebral hemorrhage,and 713 patients with cerebral infarction and 235 health control by polymerase chain reaction(PCR). We observed the frequencies of genotype of deletion homozygote(DD),insertion homozygote(II) and insertion/deletion heterozygote (ID) and the alleles of D and I. Also we analyzed the association among I/D polymorphisms of ACE gene with serum glucose(GLU),triglyceride(TG),cholesterol(TC) levels. Results There was no significant difference in the frequencies of both genotypes of DD,ID,II and alleles of D and I in three groups. The serum GLU levels in patients carrying ID,II genotype were higher than those in healthy control(P