Transpalpebral Electrical Stimulation as a Novel Therapeutic Approach to Decrease Intraocular Pressure for Open-Angle Glaucoma: A Pilot Study.

PURPOSE: To determine the effect on intraocular pressure of transpalpebral specific exogenous voltages in a cohort of open-angle glaucoma patients. METHODS: This is a prospective, comparative, and experimental pilot study. The electrical stimuli applied consisted of 10 Hz, biphasic, nonrectangular current pulses (100 µA) delivered from an isolated constant current stimulator. At intake, baseline IOP measurements were obtained from each eye. The measurement was repeated before and after microstimulation until the end of the treatment. RESULTS: Seventy-eight eyes of 46 patients diagnosed with POAG were studied: 58 eyes with maximum tolerated medical treatment and 20 eyes without treatment (naïve). The mean baseline IOP on the treated POAG group was 19.25 mmHg ± 4.71. Baseline IOP on the naïve group was 20.38 mmHg ± 3.28. At the four-month follow-up visit, the mean IOP value on the treatment group was 14.41 mmHg ± 2.06 (P < 0.0001). The obtained mean IOP measurement on the treatment-naïve group was 15.29 mmHg ± 2.28 (P < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: The hypotensive response obtained using transpalpebral electrical stimulation on POAG patients, both on treatment-naïve patients and on patients receiving maximum tolerable treatment, was statistically significant when comparing basal IOP measurements to those obtained at the four-month follow-up visit.

Study of the effect of distance and misalignment between magnetically coupled coils for wireless power transfer in intraocular pressure measurement.

An analysis of the effect of distance and alignment between two magnetically coupled coils for wireless power transfer in intraocular pressure measurement is presented. For measurement purposes, a system was fabricated consisting of an external device, which is a Maxwell-Wien bridge circuit variation, in charge of transferring energy to a biomedical implant and reading data from it. The biomedical implant is an RLC tank circuit, encapsulated by a polyimide coating. Power transfer was done by magnetic induction coupling method, by placing one of the inductors of the Maxwell-Wien bridge circuit and the inductor of the implant in close proximity. The Maxwell-Wien bridge circuit was biased with a 10 MHz sinusoidal signal. The analysis presented in this paper proves that wireless transmission of power for intraocular pressure measurement is feasible with the measurement system proposed. In order to have a proper inductive coupling link, special care must be taken when placing the two coils in proximity to avoid misalignment between them.

Fuzzy filtering method for color videos corrupted by additive noise.

A novel method for the denoising of color videos corrupted by additive noise is presented in this paper. The proposed technique consists of three principal filtering steps: spatial, spatiotemporal, and spatial postprocessing. In contrast to other state-of-the-art algorithms, during the first spatial step, the eight gradient values in different directions for pixels located in the vicinity of a central pixel as well as the R, G, and B channel correlation between the analogous pixels in different color bands are taken into account. These gradient values give the information about the level of contamination then the designed fuzzy rules are used to preserve the image features (textures, edges, sharpness, chromatic properties, etc.). In the second step, two neighboring video frames are processed together. Possible local motions between neighboring frames are estimated using block matching procedure in eight directions to perform interframe filtering. In the final step, the edges and smoothed regions in a current frame are distinguished for final postprocessing filtering. Numerous simulation results confirm that this novel 3D fuzzy method performs better than other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of objective criteria (PSNR, MAE, NCD, and SSIM) as well as subjective perception via the human vision system in the different color videos.

Wavelet transform fuzzy algorithms for dermoscopic image segmentation.

This paper presents a novel approach to segmentation of dermoscopic images based on wavelet transform where the approximation coefficients have been shown to be efficient in segmentation. The three novel frameworks proposed in this paper, W-FCM, W-CPSFCM, and WK-Means, have been employed in segmentation using ROC curve analysis to demonstrate sufficiently good results. The novel W-CPSFCM algorithm permits the detection of a number of clusters in automatic mode without the intervention of a specialist.

Interaction of electromagnetic waves with granular agricultural product and insects.

The basic correlation is defined which characterizes an influence of electromagnetic radiation on a system of individual particles of ellipsoidal geometry dispersed into some volume (chaotic arrangement) of another medium. The field intensity inside one isolated particle is determined depending on the parameters of the external (relative to the volume) electromagnetic field. Energy loss in an isolated particle is calculated. The shielding effect of a field in an isolated particle by other surrounding particles is taken into account. The relative dielectric permittivity and the relative loss tangent as a function of grain moisture content are measured. Drying and disinfestation of wheat grain by electromagnetic methods are observed.