Blue Widefield Images of Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope Can Detect Retinal Ischemic Areas in Eyes With Diabetic Retinopathy.

PURPOSE: To determine whether the hyporeflective areas in the blue images obtained by widefield scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) correspond to the non-perfused areas (NPAs) in the fluorescein angiograms (FA) in eyes with diabetic retinopathy (DR). DESIGN: Retrospective observational case series. METHODS: Ninety patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) were studied. All had undergone multicolor widefield SLO imaging. The NPAs in the FA images and hyporeflective areas in the blue widefield SLO images were examined. The morphology of the retina was determined by optical coherence tomography. RESULTS: Hyporeflective areas in the blue SLO images were found with a rate of 76.6% in eyes with proliferative DR eyes. In a comparison of the hyporeflective areas of the blue SLO images to the non-perfused areas in the FA images, the appearance and the correspondence in the locations of these two types of images were found, and the rate was highly concordant with a Cohen's kappa value of 0.675. CONCLUSIONS: The high concordance between the hyporeflective areas in the widefield blue SLO and the NPAs in the FA indicates that widefield blue SLO can be used to identify ischemic retinal areas in eyes with DR without the intravenous injection of any dye.

Sterile subconjunctival abscess in an HLA-B51-positive patient with ulcerative colitis.

PURPOSE: To report a rare case of aseptic abscess presenting as a subconjunctival abscess in an HLA-B51-positive patient with ulcerative colitis. OBSERVATIONS: A 25-year-old, male, Japanese patient with ulcerative colitis presented with an unilateral subconjunctival abscess. Infective endocarditis with endophthalmitis was suspected of being the cause, and systemic antimicrobial therapy was begun. The patient became critically ill and experienced the complication of heart failure with mitral valve perforation but improved dramatically with high-dose corticosteroids and intravenous infliximab following mitral valvuloplasty. His HLA typing was positive for HLA-B51. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPORTANCE: Both infectious and non-infectious etiologies should be considered in a patient with a subconjunctival abscess with systemic inflammation. An aseptic abscess can present as a subconjunctival abscess, and HLA-B51 may play a role in the pathogenesis of this rare condition.

Layered Graph Drawing for Visualizing Evaluation Structures.

An evaluation structure is a hierarchical structure of human cognition extracted from interviews based on the evaluation grid method. An evaluation structure can be defined as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The authors propose a layer-assignment method that is part of the Sugiyama framework, a popular method for drawing DAGs, to satisfy the requirements for drawing evaluation structures. Their evaluations demonstrate that the layered graph drawing produced by the proposed layer-assignment method is preferred by users and aids in the understanding of evaluation structures.

Minimizing the Number of Edges via Edge Concentration in Dense Layered Graphs.

Edge concentration in dense bipartite graphs is a technique for reducing the numbers of edges and edge crossings in graph drawings. The conventional method proposed by Newbery is designed to reduce the number of edge crossings; however, it does not always reduce the number of edges. Reducing the number of edges is also an important factor for improving the readability of graphs. However, no edge concentration method with the explicit purpose of minimizing the number of edges has previously been studied. In this study, we propose a novel, efficient heuristic method for minimizing the number of edges during edge concentration. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method via a comparison using randomly generated graphs. We find that Newbery's method fails to reduce the number of edges when the number of vertices is large. By contrast, the proposed method achieves an average compression ratio of 47 to 82 percent for all generated graph groups. We also present a real-world application of the proposed method using a causality network of biological data.