Role of Newly Introduced Teledentistry Service in the Management of Dental Emergencies During COVID-19 Pandemic in Qatar: A Cross-Sectional Analysis.

Introduction: The lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic rendered teledentistry (TD) necessary to maintain the continuity of oral health services and avoid missing emergency dental conditions, while minimizing face-to-face visits. Our objective was to evaluate the ability of a newly introduced triage-based TD service to deliver its goals, by evaluating its processes and outcomes and assessing the demand for TD. Methods: This cross-sectional report assessed the triage processes and outcomes (triage category, referral to emergency/dental facility undertaken, remote medications prescribed, and procedures performed at the point of referral); and evaluated the demand for the newly introduced TD service during 5 months of the first wave of the pandemic. Results: Of 850 calls, about 70.6% of the samples were managed remotely; 29.4% were categorized as emergency/urgent and referred to the emergency/dental facility. Compared with other complaints, orofacial dental pain was the most common reason for the calls (41.6%, p < 0.0001). About 14.71% of callers received prescription for medications remotely. The most demanded disciplines were general dentistry, orthodontics, and oral surgery, respectively (p < 0.0001). Of those referred to a dental facility, 31.84% required no clinical intervention, 28.7% received orthodontic appliance repair, and 14.3% and 11.2% had urgent dental extractions or root canal treatments. Demand on the service fluctuated through various distinct stages of the lockdown. Conclusions: There has been continuous demand for the newly introduced TD service throughout the period of the current report despite the fluctuations, with most complaints managed remotely. TD was effective and suitable for triage, service delivery, and care during the pandemic.

Sensibility of male rats fertility against olive oil, Nigella sativa oil and pomegranate extract.

OBJECTIVE: To clarify the modulatory effects of daily consumption of pomegranate extract (PE), olive oil (OO) and Nagilla sativa oil (NSO) on antioxidant activity, sperm quality and pituitary-testicular axis of adult male wistar rats. METHODS: Thirty-two adult male Wistar rats were divided into four equal groups, eight rats each. Using rat gastric tubes, 1.0 mL distilled water, 1.0 mL PE, 0.4 mL NSO and 0.4 mL OO were orally administered daily for 6 weeks in the first, second, third and fourth groups, respectively. Reproductive organs, body weight, sperm criteria, testosterone, FSH, LH, inhibin-B, lipid peroxidation, and antioxidant enzyme activities were investigated. At the end of the study protocol, analyses occurred at the same time. Data were analysed by ANOVA test and P<0.05 was considered to be a significant value. RESULTS: In all studied groups, malondialdehyde level was significantly decreased accompanied with an increases in glutathione peroxidase and glutathione. Rats treated with PE showed an increase in catalase activities accompanied with an increase in sperm concentration which was also observed in NSO group. In PE treated group, sperm motility was also increased accompanied with decreased abnormal sperm rate. NSO, OO and PE treated groups shows an insignificant effect on testosterone, inhibin-B, FSH and LH in comparison with control group. CONCLUSIONS: These results show that administration of PE, NSO and OO could modify sperm characteristics and antioxidant activity of adult male wistar rats.

MIARS: a medical image retrieval system.

The next generation of medical information system will integrate multimedia data to assist physicians in clinical decision-making, diagnoses, teaching, and research. This paper describes MIARS (Medical Image Annotation and Retrieval System). MIARS not only provides automatic annotation, but also supports text based as well as image based retrieval strategies, which play important roles in medical training, research, and diagnostics. The system utilizes three trained classifiers, which are trained using training images. The goal of these classifiers is to provide multi-level automatic annotation. Another main purpose of the MIARS system is to study image semantic retrieval strategy by which images can be retrieved according to different levels of annotation.

Automatic multilevel medical image annotation and retrieval.

Image retrieval at the semantic level mostly depends on image annotation or image classification. Image annotation performance largely depends on three issues: (1) automatic image feature extraction; (2) a semantic image concept modeling; (3) algorithm for semantic image annotation. To address first issue, multilevel features are extracted to construct the feature vector, which represents the contents of the image. To address second issue, domain-dependent concept hierarchy is constructed for interpretation of image semantic concepts. To address third issue, automatic multilevel code generation is proposed for image classification and multilevel image annotation. We make use of the existing image annotation to address second and third issues. Our experiments on a specific domain of X-ray images have given encouraging results.