Association between medial meniscal extrusion and knee structural progression in adults with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis - a prospective cohort study.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the association between medial meniscal extrusion and structural progression in adults with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis (OA). METHODS: This prospective cohort study examined 176 participants with symptomatic knee OA recruited into a randomised controlled trial. The participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the study knee at baseline and approximately 2 years later. Meniscal extrusion, tibial cartilage volume, and tibiofemoral bone marrow lesions (BMLs) were measured from MRI using validated methods. RESULTS: Participants with medial meniscal extrusion ≥ 3 mm had a higher prevalence of lateral tibiofemoral BMLs at baseline (OR = 2.21, 95% CI 1.06-4.61, p = 0.035), and those with medial meniscal extrusion 2-3 mm had a higher likelihood of lateral BML worsening over 2 years (OR = 3.76, 95% CI 1.35-10.52, p = 0.011), compared with those with medial meniscal extrusion < 2 mm. Participants with stable medial meniscal extrusion had a lower likelihood of lateral BML worsening compared with those with regression of medial meniscal extrusion over 2 years (OR = 0.20, 95% CI 0.07-0.56, p = 0.002). There were no associations between medial meniscal extrusion and tibial cartilage volume or medial tibiofemoral BMLs. CONCLUSIONS: Our study showed associations between medial meniscal extrusion and baseline prevalence and worsening over 2 years of lateral tibiofemoral BMLs in people with symptomatic knee OA. Although the reasons for the lack of associations in the medial compartment are not clear, our results suggest a role of medial meniscal extrusion in predicting structural progression in lateral knee OA and that meniscal extrusion might be a potential target in the management of knee OA.

Associations of Osteoarthritis with Prevalence and Incidence of Cardiovascular Disease over 10 Years in Community-Dwelling Older Adults: The Sydney Memory and Ageing Study.

INTRODUCTION: The data are limited for the association between osteoarthritis (OA) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) in community-based older populations and whether there is sex difference. This study aimed to examine the relationship between OA and prevalence and incidence of CVD over 10 years in community-dwelling older adults. METHODS: Data on self-reported OA, high cholesterol, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes were collected from 1,025 community-dwelling participants aged 70-90 years in the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study. The presence of CVD at baseline was defined as self-reported presence of stroke, heart attack, transient ischaemic attack, angina, aortic aneurysm, or claudication. The incidence of CVD was defined by a combination of incident self-reported CVD or CVD mortality at different follow-up timepoints over 10 years. RESULTS: At baseline, 395 (38.5%) participants self-reported OA (252 [44.6%] women, 143 [31.1%] men). Self-reported OA was associated with increased prevalence of CVD in women (OR 1.67, 95% CI 1.12-2.47) but not men (1.26, 0.80-1.98). In the total population, self-reported OA at baseline was associated with increased incidence of CVD at 4 years (OR 1.77, 95% CI 1.10-2.83), 6 years (1.59, 1.03-2.46), 8 years (1.56, 1.02-2.38), and 10 years (1.66, 1.10-2.50), but not at 2 years (1.43, 0.79-2.57). Significant associations were observed in female participants at 4, 8, and 10 years, with no significant associations seen in male participants. CONCLUSION: OA was associated with increased prevalence at baseline and incidence of CVD over 10 years in community-based older adults, especially women. Identifying those with OA to target their cardiovascular risk factors while managing their OA has the potential to reduce the burden of CVD in older people, particularly women.

Efficacy and safety of sodium hyaluronate combined with celecoxib for knee osteoarthritis: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Due to the large cost of joint replacement for surgical treatment of knee osteoarthritis, there are many complications in elderly patients, and there are many contraindications to surgery, and conservative treatment is still based on drugs. To further evaluate the efficacy and safety of sodium hyaluronate combined with celecoxib for the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee. In total, 202 studies were screened, with a final selection of 9 RCTs involving 2339 participants; of these, 9 RCTs were included in the final meta-analysis. Treatment group reduces VAS (SMD = -1.61; 95 % CI [-2.25, -0.98]; I2 = 95 %; P < 0.00001) and adverse reactions (OR = 0.45; 95 % CI [0.22,0.94]; I2 = 0 %; P < 0.33); Meanwhile, improving Lysholm knee scores (SMD = 0.19; 95 % CI [-0.06, -0.44]; I2 = 76 %; P = 0.0004) and Clinical efficiency (OR = 0.31; 95 % CI [0.19,0.50]; I2 = 0 %; P < 0.00001). All indicators were superior to the control group. Our primary findings suggest that KOA treatment with celecoxib combined with sodium hyaluronate reduces VAS, while improving Lysholm scores and Clinical efficiency. In addition, we found that celecoxib combined with sodium hyaluronate treatment had fewer adverse effects than the control group, indicating that the combination is safe and effective in the treatment of KOA.

A new strategy to simultaneous removal and recovery of nitrogen from wastewater without N2O emission by heterotrophic nitrogen-assimilating bacterium.

Biological assimilation that recovery the nitrogen from wastewater in the form of biomass offers a more environmentally friendly solution for the limitations of the conventional wastewater treatments. This study reported the simultaneous removal and recovery of nitrogen from wastewater without N2O emission by a heterotrophic nitrogen-assimilating Acinetobacter sp. DN1 strain. Nitrogen balance, biomass qualitative analysis, genome and enzyme studies have been performed to illustrate the mechanism of nitrogen conversion by strain DN1. Results showed that the ammonium removal followed one direct pathway (GOGAT/GDH) and three indirect pathways (NH4+ → NH2OH → NO → NO2- → NH4+ → GOGAT/GDH; NH4+ → NH2OH → NO → NO2- → NO3- → NO2- → NH4+ → GOGAT/GDH; NH4+ → NH2OH → NO → NO3- → NO2- → NH4+ → GOGAT/GDH). Nitrogen balance and biomass qualitative analysis showed that over 70 % of the ammonium in the wastewater was converted into intracellular nitrogen-containing compounds and stored in the cells of strain DN1. Traditional denitrification pathway was not detected and the ammonium was removed through assimilation, which makes it more energy-saving for nitrogen recovery when compared with Haber-Bosch process. This study provides a new direction for simultaneous nitrogen removal and recovery without N2O emission by the heterotrophic nitrogen-assimilating bacterium.

A Novel Adaptive Deskewing Algorithm for Document Images.

Document scanning often suffers from skewing, which may seriously influence the efficiency of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Therefore, it is necessary to correct the skewed document before document image information analysis. In this article, we propose a novel adaptive deskewing algorithm for document images, which mainly includes Skeleton Line Detection (SKLD), Piecewise Projection Profile (PPP), Morphological Clustering (MC), and the image classification method. The image type is determined firstly based on the image's layout feature. Thus, adaptive correcting is applied to deskew the image according to its type. Our method maintains high accuracy on the Document Image Skew Estimation Contest (DISEC'2013) and PubLayNet datasets, which achieved 97.6% and 80.1% accuracy, respectively. Meanwhile, extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Paroxetine combined with traditional chinese medicine prescriptions in the treatment of postpartum depression: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials.

BACKGROUND: Postpartum depression is a common mental disease in obstetric puerperium. Its etiology is not completely clear, and its clinical manifestations are complex. It has serious adverse effects on the body and mind of mothers and infants. Treatment should also follow the principle of individualization. Preliminary studies have shown that traditional chinese medicine prescriptions combined with paroxetine is effective in treating postpartum depression. In order to better determine the therapeutic effect, further exploration was carried out. HYPOTHESIS: Does the study better evaluate the therapeutic effect and provide data support for clinical promotion? STUDY DESIGN: The search comes from using the following electronic databases established until January 2022. STUDY RESULTS: The meta analysis results show that paroxetine combined with traditional chinese medicine prescriptions can reduce the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAMD) score [WMD = -7.35, 95 % CI (-10.84, -3.87), P＜0.001] and Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale (EPDS) score [WMD = -3.24, 95 % CI (-5.96, -0.53), P < 0.001].And better than paroxetine treatment alone in terms of improving clinical efficacy [RR = 1.22, 95 % CI (1.16, 1.30), P < 0.001]. CONCLUSIONS: Based on the combination of paroxetine and traditional chinese medicine prescriptions in the treatment of postpartum depression, there is a certain clinical effect, and a strong research design and a certain number of RCTs are required at the same time. Future research should clarify the specific composition and composition of traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions.

TransConver: transformer and convolution parallel network for developing automatic brain tumor segmentation in MRI images.

Background: Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. Both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with strong local information extraction capacities and transformers with excellent global representation capacities have achieved remarkable performance in medical image segmentation. However, because of the semantic differences between local and global features, how to combine convolution and transformers effectively is an important challenge in medical image segmentation. Methods: In this paper, we proposed TransConver, a U-shaped segmentation network based on convolution and transformer for automatic and accurate brain tumor segmentation in MRI images. Unlike the recently proposed transformer and convolution based models, we proposed a parallel module named transformer-convolution inception (TC-inception), which extracts local and global information via convolution blocks and transformer blocks, respectively, and integrates them by a cross-attention fusion with global and local feature (CAFGL) mechanism. Meanwhile, the improved skip connection structure named skip connection with cross-attention fusion (SCCAF) mechanism can alleviate the semantic differences between encoder features and decoder features for better feature fusion. In addition, we designed 2D-TransConver and 3D-TransConver for 2D and 3D brain tumor segmentation tasks, respectively, and verified the performance and advantage of our model through brain tumor datasets. Results: We trained our model on 335 cases from the training dataset of MICCAI BraTS2019 and evaluated the model's performance based on 66 cases from MICCAI BraTS2018 and 125 cases from MICCAI BraTS2019. Our TransConver achieved the best average Dice score of 83.72% and 86.32% on BraTS2019 and BraTS2018, respectively. Conclusions: We proposed a transformer and convolution parallel network named TransConver for brain tumor segmentation. The TC-Inception module effectively extracts global information while retaining local details. The experimental results demonstrated that good segmentation requires the model to extract local fine-grained details and global semantic information simultaneously, and our TransConver effectively improves the accuracy of brain tumor segmentation.

Chinese herbal medicine Buyang Huanwu Decoction combined with acupuncture to treat sequela of apoplexy: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

BACKGROUND: Buyang Huanwu Decoction combined with acupuncture has a wide range of applications in the treatment of stroke sequelae, and there are many clinical trial reports. We systematically evaluated the clinical efficacy and safety of Buyang Huanwu Decoction combined with acupuncture in treating stroke sequelae, and evaluated overall research quality. METHODS: We searched 7 databases which includes the Chinese Journal Full-text Database (CNKI), VIP Database (VIP), China Biomedicine (SinoMed), Wanfang Database and PubMed, Cochrane Central, EMBASE from January 2010 to December 2019 Literature references. We selected randomized controlled trials that tested the effects of Buyang Huanwu Decoction combined with acupuncture on stroke sequelae. The authors extracted data and independently assessed quality. We used RevMan 5.3.0 software to analyze the data of randomized trials. RESULTS: A total of 7 articles were identified, including 902 patients. The overall quality of the included trials was poor, and one of them was moderate. Meta-analysis results showed that the experimental group of Buyang Huanwu decoction combined with acupuncture treatment of stroke sequela compared with the control group clearly improved the clinical efficacy improved the clinical efficacy rate (RR 1.18, 95% CI: 1.12, 1.25), P<0.00001]. Among them, three trials included the incidence of adverse reactions (RR 0.22, 95% CI: 0.09, 0.52, P=0.0006), which also confirmed the safety of its treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Buyang Huanwu Decoction combined with acupuncture is an effective therapy to ameliorate the clinical symptoms of stroke sequelae. In order to further determine the effectiveness and safety of Buyang Huanwu Decoction combined with acupuncture in treating stroke sequelae, more rigorous design, multicenter and prospective RCT must be carried out.

Traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen treating corona virus disease 2019(COVID-19): Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

INTRODUCTION: As the global epidemic continues to spread, countries have tapped effective drugs to treat new coronavirus pneumonia. The therapeutic effect of the traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in this new coronary pneumonia epidemic has attracted attention from all walks of life, and relevant research reports continue to appear. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of the clinical efficacy and safety of the traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) (referred to as "new coronary pneumonia"), and evaluated the overall level of research quality. METHODS: We searched seven databases and retrieved the Chinese Journal Full-text Database (CNKI), Vip Database (VIP), China Biomedicine (SinoMed), Wanfang Database and PubMed, Cochrane Central, EMBASE from October 2019 to May 2020 Literature references. We included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that tested the efficacy of the traditional Chinese medicine lotus clearing plague in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia. The authors extracted data and independently assessed quality. We used Stata15.1 software to analyze the data of randomized trials. RESULTS: A total of 2 articles were identified, including 154 patients. All the participating patients were diagnosed with new coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19). The meta-analysis results showed that the disappearance rate of the main clinical symptoms of Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen in the treatment of new coronavirus pneumonia was significantly higher than that of the control group [OR = 3.34, 95% CI (2.06, 5.44), P <0.001]; the disappearance rate of other clinical secondary symptoms is significantly higher than the control group [OR = 6.54, 95% CI (3.59, 11.90), P <0.001]. The duration of fever was significantly lower than that of the control group [OR = -1.04, 95% CI (-1.60, -0.49), P <0.001]. It is confirmed that the traditional Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen treatment improves the clinical effectiveness, and also has certain advantages in relieving cough and fever. CONCLUSION: The treatment of new pneumonia with traditional Chinese medicine lotus clearing plague can be used as an effective therapy to improve the clinical symptoms of new coronary pneumonia. More rigorous design, multi-center, and prospective RCTs are necessary to further determine the effectiveness and safety of the traditional Chinese medicine lotus decoction in the treatment of new pneumonia.

Navigation Algorithm Based on the Boundary Line of Tillage Soil Combined with Guided Filtering and Improved Anti-Noise Morphology.

An improved anti-noise morphology vision navigation algorithm is proposed for intelligent tractor tillage in a complex agricultural field environment. At first, the two key steps of guided filtering and improved anti-noise morphology navigation line extraction were addressed in detail. Then, the experiments were carried out in order to verify the effectiveness and advancement of the presented algorithm. Finally, the optimal template and its application condition were studied for improving the image-processing speed. The comparison experiment results show that the YCbCr color space has minimum time consumption of 0.094   s in comparison with HSV, HIS, and 2R-G-B color spaces. The guided filtering method can effectively distinguish the boundary between the tillage soil compared to other competing vanilla methods such as Tarel, multi-scale retinex, wavelet-based retinex, and homomorphic filtering in spite of having the fastest processing speed of 0.113   s . The extracted soil boundary line of the improved anti-noise morphology algorithm has the best precision and speed compared to other operators such as Sobel, Roberts, Prewitt, and Log. After comparing different sizes of image templates, the optimal template with the size of 140   ×   260 pixels could achieve high-precision vision navigation while the course deviation angle was not more than 7.5 ° . The maximum tractor speed of the optimal template and global template were 51.41   km / h and 27.47   km / h , respectively, which can meet the real-time vision navigation requirement of the smart tractor tillage operation in the field. The experimental vision navigation results demonstrated the feasibility of the autonomous vision navigation for tractor tillage operation in the field using the tillage soil boundary line extracted by the proposed improved anti-noise morphology algorithm, which has broad application prospect.