Clinical study on multi-focused laser in the treatment of vulvar lichen sclerosus.

Objective: To investigate the clinical effect of Multi-focused (MF) laser in the treatment of vulvar lichen sclerosus (VLS). Methods: In this single-center, randomized controlled trial, we compared the effect of fractionated MF laser with other treatments on patients with biopsy-proven VLS. Patients with VLS were enrolled in this study and randomly divided into three groups. Patients in the experimental group were treated with a CO2 laser, control group 1 was treated with radiofrequency, and control group 2 was treated topically with glucocorticoids and soaking with Chinese patent medicine. The pruritus degree, skin elasticity, skin color, lesion scope, and total score were compared before treatment, at one month after treatment, and three months after treatment. Results: One month after treatment, the pruritus degree, skin elasticity, skin color, lesion scope, and total score decreased in the experimental group, and the differences were statistically significant (P < 0.05). In control group 1, the differences in pruritus degree, skin color, and total score were statistically significant (P < 0.05), but the differences in skin elasticity and lesion scope were not statistically significant (P > 0.05). In control group 2, the differences in pruritus degree and total score were statistically significant (P < 0.05), but the differences in skin elasticity, skin color, and lesion scope were not statistically significant (P > 0.05). At one month after the end of treatment, the differences in pruritus degree, skin elasticity, skin color, lesion scope, and total score among the three groups were not statistically significant. At three months after the end of treatment, the differences in the scores of the five indicators were statistically significant. Conclusion: For the three treatment methods for VLS, topical corticosteroids + traditional Chinese medicine can quickly relieve itching symptoms in patients, but it cannot significantly improve skin elasticity, skin color, and lesion scope, and VLS easily relapses after treatment. Radiofrequency can improve itching symptoms and skin color but has poor effects on the change of skin elasticity and lesion scope. Multi-focused laser treatment can alleviate the degree of pruritus, improve skin color and elasticity, and narrow the lesion scope, and VLS will not relapse within three months after treatment.

A hybrid deep learning approach for driver anomalous lane changing identification.

Reliable knowledge of driving states is of great importance to ensure road safety. Anomaly detection in driving behavior means recognizing anomalous driving states as a direct result of either environmental or psychological factors. This paper provides an efficient anomaly recognition approach to identify anomalous lane-changing events in a personalized manner. The proposed framework includes three unsupervised algorithms. First, a Recurrent-Convolutional Autoencoder extracts the spatio-temporal characteristics from a high-dimensional naturalistic driving dataset. Second, in order to recognize anomalous lane-changing events of individual drivers, the extracted latent feature space is analyzed using Pauta criterion-based reconstruction loss analysis, as well as one-class Support Vector Machine. Last, t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding is employed to visualize the latent space for better understanding and interpretability. Temporal anomalies of lane-changing events were analyzed by a personalized grey relational coefficient analysis, to represent robust similarities for individual drivers. Validation and calibration were performed with a natural driving study dataset collected from 50 drivers with 59,372 lane change events. The results showed heterogeneity in the pattern of abnormal lane changing behavior across the sample. At the same time, each driver exhibited heterogeneous anomalous behaviors in both temporal and spatial sequences. Without prior labels, the proposed model effectively captures personalized driving patterns and abnormal lane-changing events from high-dimensional time-series data. This unsupervised hybrid approach is a novel attempt to complete personalized anomalous lane-changing behaviors identification based on naturalistic driving data involving various traffic environments. Our approach enables the extraction of natural individual lane-changing behavior patterns and provides insights for the improvement of personalized driving behavior monitoring systems.

A Motorcyclist-Injury Severity Analysis: A Comparison of Single-, Two-, and Multi-Vehicle Crashes Using Latent Class Ordered Probit Model.

Motorcycle crashes increasingly become a high proportion of the overall motorized vehicle fatalities. However, limited research has been conducted to compare the injury severity of single-, two- and multi-vehicle crashes involving a motorcycle. This study aims to investigate the effects of rider characteristics, road conditions, pre-crash situations, and crash features on motorcycle severities with respect to different numbers of vehicles involved. The crash data used was obtained through a comprehensive Motorcycle Crash Causation Study (MCCS) by the Federal Highway Administration. An anatomic injury severity indicator, the New Injury Severity Score (NISS), is utilized to calculate a total score as the sum of squared the abbreviated injury scale scores of each of the rider's three most severe injuries. A hybrid approach integrating Latent Class Clustering (LCC) and Ordered Probit (OP) models was used to uncover the unobserved heterogeneity and to explore the major factors which significantly affect the injury severities resulting from single-, two- and multi-vehicle crashes involving a motorcycle. The results show that the significant differences in severity exist between different numbers of vehicles involved. More importantly, they also indicate dividing motorcycle crashes into homogeneous classes before modelling helps to discover insightful information. Pre-speed of the motorcycle is found to be a main factor associated with serious and critical injuries in most types of crashes. Findings of the study provide specific and insightful countermeasures targeting at the contributing factors of motorcycle crashes.

Middle-aged Drivers' subjective categorization for combined alignments on mountainous freeways and their speed choices.

Road geometric design is a fundamental factor that impacts driving speed. Previous research generally paid attentions to the influences of specific road characteristics (e.g. curvature) on driving behaviors. Limited studies have focused on how drivers identify different alignments and how they further take the varying speed choices. This study aims at filling the gap by investigating the subjective categorization of road alignments based on middle-aged driver groups. A total of sixteen participants with ages ranging from 23 to 40 years were recruited. Participants were first asked to undertake naturalistic driving tests on a four-lane divided mountainous freeway while photos of the road and the driving speed were collected. Participants were then asked to subjectively sort the photos of the road into piles, within each pile we considered their driving behaviors would be similar. Finally, questionnaire survey was conducted in terms of comfort, safety, speed choice and sight distance. The picture grouping revealed three distinct and non-overlapping subjective categories of road alignment. And driver's ratings about comfort and safety were significantly different between these categories. The category with the largest sight distance and highest speed choice turned out to have the lowest rating in comfort and safety (note that the rating scales for comfort and safety had reversed polarity such that low numbers indicated high comfort and high safety). Statistical evidences indicated that the drivers have developed underlying mental schema about road alignment. Therefore, their speed choices on combined alignment were further investigated. The difference between actual driving speed and driver's expected speed showed close relation to the ratings and significant difference between two of the categories. Road with large absolute value in speed difference informed inconsistency between geometric design and driver's expectation from the aspects of drivers' perception and expectation of the road. The findings provided insight into how middle-aged driver views and categorizes road alignment. And it was found that the drivers relied on visual characteristics of the alignment to distinguish the categories instead of separate horizontal and vertical geometric parameters. It was implied that more considerations should be taken into driver's perception of road during alignment design to improve road safety.

[A study on examination of color vision with pattern-visual evoked potential].

OBJECTIVE: To understand the specific nature of the color and brightness components of the human visual evoked potential and explore the possibility of an objective method for examining the color vision. METHOD: The transient VEP was measured in normal subjects and persons with deficient color vision by multichannel electro-physiological apparatus. In the experiment, four kinds of reversal checkerboard patterns are simulated by the computer software technology as stimuli. The patterns included black-white (95% contrast), isoluminance chromatic checkerboards red-white, green-white, red-green (100% saturation), which were 25 ' in visual angle and alternated at a rate of 0.8 Hz. The main component, P (1) wave, was analyzed. RESULTS: (1) The normal subject group: The P (1) latencies in four conditions were obtained in terms of the length of latencies, the ordinal of P (1) latencies (from short to long) was as follows: red-white < black-white < red-green < green-white. There were very significant differences among the four latencies (P < 0.01). The P (1) amplitudes elicited with the black-white were higher than those with chromatic ones. But among the P(1) amplitudes elicited with chromatic checkerboards there were no difference. (2) The group with deficient color vision: There were no significant differences in the P(1) latencies and amplitudes elicited with the four stimuli. The length of latencies with black- white stimulus was the shortest. Red-green blindness as well as deuteranopia had no response to green stimulus but did to red or red-green stimulus. (3) Between the two groups, there were no differences in the P (1) latencies, but the P (1) amplitudes of persons with deficient color vision elicited with the chromatic stimuli were obviously lower. CONCLUSION: The results show that it is feasible to use chromatic VEP for examining congenital color vision deficiency, especially for red-green blindness and deuteranopia. At present, there is lack of quantitative and qualitative results of color VEP examination.