[Iliopsoas muscle hematoma after anticoagulant therapy for pyogenic thrombophlebitis that spilled over from ascending colon diverticulitis:a case report].

A 79-year-old male patient presented to our hospital with chief complaints of fever, abdominal pain, and jaundice. Laboratory data revealed marked hepatobiliary enzyme and inflammatory marker elevations, and computed tomography revealed ascending colon diverticulitis, thrombophlebitis, portal vein thrombus, and intrahepatic cholangitis. Blood culture revealed the presence of Prevotella sp. The patient was treated with anticoagulant therapy in addition to antimicrobial therapy;however, activated partial thromboplastin time prolongation remained insufficient. Antithrombin therapy was combined with the current therapy because antithrombin levels were low, which resulted in iliopsoas muscle hematoma. The hematoma resolved conservatively after discontinuing anticoagulation, and the patient was discharged after 19 days of hospitalization with improved cholangitis and diverticulitis. The portal vein thrombus remained after discharge;however, anticoagulation therapy was not restarted due to adverse events. This case was presented because of its difficult treatment.

[Jejunal stromal tumor concomitant ectopic pancreas in a young man with sarcoidosis:a case report].

During a medical health check, a 29-year-old man was presented to our hospital with iron deficiency anemia. He had no significant medical history in his family. Despite being diagnosed with ocular sarcoidosis 5 years ago, he had no vision problems. Physical examination revealed normal vital signs and a nontender abdomen;however, his eyelid conjuvitis was pale, and he became aware of fatigue when moving vigorously. He had upper gastrointestinal endoscopy and colonoscopy, but there was no evidence of bleeding detected. A contrasted mass 30mm in size was discovered on abdominal contrast-enhanced computed tomography at the dorsal wall of the proximal jejunum. Positron emission tomography showed an accumulation image in the bilateral hilar lymph and upper jejunum. A 30-mm submucosal tumor with a central depression in the upper jejunum was discovered using a double-balloon enteroscopy. We performed biopsies from the depression margin and tattoo marking on the oral side of the tumor. Even though the biopsies specimen revealed granulation tissue, the patient was referred to surgery and underwent a partial jejunum resection because the tumor was diagnosed as the cause of anemia. The operation went smoothly, and the patient was discharged on the seventh postoperative day. Histological examination showed a proliferation of densely packed spindle cells with prominent nuclear palisading. The immunohistochemical examination revealed that c-kit and CD34 were highly expressed, whereas desmin and S-100 proteins were not. Ki-67 expression demonstrated a very low proliferative index (2%). We discovered gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), as well as an ectopic pancreas. GIST is extremely rare in young people, and the coexistence of ectopic pancreas and sarcoidosis has never been reported.

Super-Resolution of Plant Disease Images for the Acceleration of Image-based Phenotyping and Vigor Diagnosis in Agriculture.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) are a very promising branch of technology, and they have been utilized in agriculture-in cooperation with image processing technologies-for phenotyping and vigor diagnosis. One of the problems in the utilization of UAVs for agricultural purposes is the limitation in flight time. It is necessary to fly at a high altitude to capture the maximum number of plants in the limited time available, but this reduces the spatial resolution of the captured images. In this study, we applied a super-resolution method to the low-resolution images of tomato diseases to recover detailed appearances, such as lesions on plant organs. We also conducted disease classification using high-resolution, low-resolution, and super-resolution images to evaluate the effectiveness of super-resolution methods in disease classification. Our results indicated that the super-resolution method outperformed conventional image scaling methods in spatial resolution enhancement of tomato disease images. The results of disease classification showed that the accuracy attained was also better by a large margin with super-resolution images than with low-resolution images. These results indicated that our approach not only recovered the information lost in low-resolution images, but also exerted a beneficial influence on further image analysis. The proposed approach will accelerate image-based phenotyping and vigor diagnosis in the field, because it not only saves time to capture images of a crop in a cultivation field but also secures the accuracy of these images for further analysis.

Machine Learning-Based Calibration of Low-Cost Air Temperature Sensors Using Environmental Data.

The measurement of air temperature is strongly influenced by environmental factors such as solar radiation, humidity, wind speed and rainfall. This is problematic in low-cost air temperature sensors, which lack a radiation shield or a forced aspiration system, exposing them to direct sunlight and condensation. In this study, we developed a machine learning-based calibration method for air temperature measurement by a low-cost sensor. An artificial neural network (ANN) was used to balance the effect of multiple environmental factors on the measurements. Data were collected over 305 days, at three different locations in Japan, and used to evaluate the performance of the approach. Data collected at the same location and at different locations were used for training and testing, and the former was also used for k-fold cross-validation, demonstrating an average improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) from 1.62 to 0.67 by applying our method. Some calibration failures were noted, due to abrupt changes in environmental conditions such as solar radiation or rainfall. The MAE was shown to decrease even when the data collected in different nearby locations were used for training and testing. However, the results also showed that negative effects arose when data obtained from widely-separated locations were used, because of the significant environmental differences between them.

Addition of leukotriene receptor antagonists to inhaled corticosteroids improved QOL of patients with bronchial asthma surveyed in suburban Tokyo, Japan.

BACKGROUND: Bronchial asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that has a severe impact on health worldwide. METHODS: A survey of 10,771 patients with bronchial asthma in the Tama region, Tokyo was conducted for 5 years to examine treatment and quality of life (QOL). Subjects were patients aged ≥ 16 years and their physicians who replied to a questionnaire sent in November from 2002 to 2006. Symptoms of bronchial asthma, visits to an emergency room, use of drugs, and severity of asthma were investigated. RESULTS: Asthmatic symptoms improved over the 5 years, with a reduction in the number of emergency room visits. Since inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) were used by >80% of patients in 2002, we suspected that increased use of concomitant leukotriene receptor antagonists (LTRA) and long-acting ß(2) agonists (LABA) might have contributed to these findings. The effects of these drugs were compared between ICS + LTRA (n = 45) and ICS + LABA (n = 54) groups of patients. There was no significant difference in the ICS dose between these groups. In the ICS + LABA group, 18.5% and 22.2% of patients visited an emergency room before and after initiation of combination therapy, respectively, with no statistically significant difference. In contrast, the rate of emergency room visits in the ICS + LTRA group decreased from 24.4% to 6.6% after addition of LTRA. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the frequency of visits to an emergency room was decreased by complementing the anti-inflammatory effect of ICS with further treatment of inflammation, particularly with LTRA.

Electron microscopy observation of interface in diffusion-bonded copper joint.

The microstructure at the interface of diffusion-bonded joints of oxygen-free high-conductivity copper for two kinds of surface conditions, with and without argon ion bombardment treatment, was investigated using scanning and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The results showed that argon ion bombardment effectively removed the surface oxide film layer and lowered the height of the surface asperity, so that inclusion formation was decreased and void shrinkage time was shortened at the interface of the bonded copper joints, and the tensile strength of diffusion-bonded copper joints was improved obviously.