Individualized management of velopharyngeal insufficiency for cleft lip and palate / 中华整形外科杂志

Objective@#Velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) is a common postoperative sequela secondary tocleft palate. It could significantly impairpatients′living quality. Treatment of VPI includes surgery and speech therapy, but the reported success rates are inconsistent. A consensus in the literatures is needed, to guide procedure selection for patients with VPI.@*Methods@#This is a retrospective study on management options for patients with VPI.This study systematically introduces the assessment, management plan and treatment effect of VPI, in the Craniofacial center of Hospital Stomatology of Xi′an Jiaotong University.The challenges of VPI diagnosis and treatment with cleft palate are discussed in-depth.@*Results@#Most patients with VPI underwent evaluation and treatment (surgical or/and speech therapy) had speech improvement. The average value of hypernasality decreased from 3.67 before interventions to 1.57 after interventions.A multidisciplinary team using multi-modal to evaluate velopharyngeal function and speech. All patients had no bleeding, would dehiscence or fistula postoperatively. The difficulty of stimulability test was significantly reduced. Fourteen patients completed speech therapy, with the averaged treatments period of 3 months.@*Conclusions@#Speech pathologist is the manager of speech rehabilitation of cleft palate patients with VPI. The operation skill plays a key role in the treatment of VPI. Detailed diagnostic information is important for performing excellent surgical techniques. The cooperation of surgeon and speech pathologist, could be helpful to achieve the final speech rehabilitation.

Probabilistic Decision Based Block Partitioning for Future Video Coding.

In the latest Joint Video Exploration Team development, the quadtree plus binary tree (QTBT) block partitioning structure has been proposed for future video coding. Compared to the traditional quadtree structure of High Efficiency Video coding (HEVC) standard, QTBT provides more flexible patterns for splitting the blocks, which results in dramatically increased combinations of block partitions and high computational complexity. In view of this, a confidence interval based early termination (CIET) scheme is proposed for QTBT to identify the unnecessary partition modes in the sense of rate-distortion (RD) optimization. In particular, a RD model is established to predict the RD cost of each partition pattern without the full encoding process. Subsequently, the mode decision problem is casted into a probabilistic framework to select the final partition based on the confidence interval decision strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed CIET algorithm can speed up QTBT block partitioning structure by reducing 54.7% encoding time with only 1.12% increase in terms of bit rate. Moreover, the proposed scheme performs consistently well for the high resolution sequences, of which the video coding efficiency is crucial in real applications.

Adaptive Progressive Motion Vector Resolution Selection Based on Rate-Distortion Optimization.

In the state-of-the-art H.265/HEVC video coding standard, the motion vector (MV) resolution is fixed to be 1/4-pel for the entire video sequence, while the inherent video characteristics, e.g., texture complexities and motion activities, have been largely ignored. Obviously such strategy may not suffice the demand of high-accuracy motion compensation. In this paper, we propose a specially designed rate-distortion model in terms of the MV resolution by taking the video characteristics into consideration. In particular, the MV resolution selection is formulated as a rate-distortion optimization problem by analyzing the rate-distortion cost of each MV resolution candidate. To further improve the coding performance, the progressive MV resolution strategy is employed, where the optimal progressive MV resolution is determined by decision trees constructed with the rate-distortion model. In this manner, a novel adaptive progressive motion vector resolution selection scheme can be realized and the MV resolution can be adaptively adjusted based on the properties of local content. Extensive experiments and comparisons show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the coding performance, and 1.8% BD-rate gain on average has been achieved without introducing any noticeable computational complexity.

Low-Rank Decomposition-Based Restoration of Compressed Images via Adaptive Noise Estimation.

Images coded at low bit rates in real-world applications usually suffer from significant compression noise, which significantly degrades the visual quality. Traditional denoising methods are not suitable for the content-dependent compression noise, which usually assume that noise is independent and with identical distribution. In this paper, we propose a unified framework of content-adaptive estimation and reduction for compression noise via low-rank decomposition of similar image patches. We first formulate the framework of compression noise reduction based upon low-rank decomposition. Compression noises are removed by soft thresholding the singular values in singular value decomposition of every group of similar image patches. For each group of similar patches, the thresholds are adaptively determined according to compression noise levels and singular values. We analyze the relationship of image statistical characteristics in spatial and transform domains, and estimate compression noise level for every group of similar patches from statistics in both domains jointly with quantization steps. Finally, quantization constraint is applied to estimated images to avoid over-smoothing. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method not only improves the quality of compressed images obviously for post-processing, but are also helpful for computer vision tasks as a pre-processing method.

Image Denoising via Bandwise Adaptive Modeling and Regularization Exploiting Nonlocal Similarity.

This paper proposes a new image denoising algorithm based on adaptive signal modeling and regularization. It improves the quality of images by regularizing each image patch using bandwise distribution modeling in transform domain. Instead of using a global model for all the patches in an image, it employs content-dependent adaptive models to address the non-stationarity of image signals and also the diversity among different transform bands. The distribution model is adaptively estimated for each patch individually. It varies from one patch location to another and also varies for different bands. In particular, we consider the estimated distribution to have non-zero expectation. To estimate the expectation and variance parameters for every band of a particular patch, we exploit the nonlocal correlation in image to collect a set of highly similar patches as the data samples to form the distribution. Irrelevant patches are excluded so that such adaptively learned model is more accurate than a global one. The image is ultimately restored via bandwise adaptive soft-thresholding, based on a Laplacian approximation of the distribution of similar-patch group transform coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms several state-of-the-art denoising methods in both the objective and the perceptual qualities.

The correlation study between early postsurgery phonetic acquisition of speech stop and speech outcomes of the children aged 30 months after cleft palate repair / 实用口腔医学杂志

Objective:To study the correlation between early postsurgery phonetic acquisition of speech stop and speech outcomes of young children.Methods:28 children with cleft palate were included in the study.An one-stage palatal repair procedure was per-formed by one surgeon for the children before the age of 1 8 months.Naming tests were used in the speech therapy room when the chil-dren were aged 23 months and 30 months.Stop consonant inventory number,percent correct consonants(PCC),percent correct man-ners(PCM)and percent correct places(PCP)were analyzed.Results:Number of stop consonant was significantly correlated with PCC,PCM and PCP at 24 and 30 months of age in the children.Coefficient of determination between stop consonant number and PCC was 0.535.Conclusion:Speech stop may be used as the “sensitive sound”for the analysis of speech development of the chinese children aged 2-3 years after cleft palate repair and as the individuation guideline to determine the best assessment and therapy time.

The effects of presurgical nasal mode combined with nasal diorthosis in the treatment of nasal deformity and incomplete unilateral cleft lip / 实用口腔医学杂志

Objective:To evaluate the effect of presurgical nasal mode(PNM)combined with nasal diorthosis in the treatment of na-sal deformity and incomplete unilateral cleft lip(IUCL)in infants.Methods:35 infants with IUCL were treated by PNM followed by nasal diorthosis and cheiloplasty.The nasal asymmetry was analysed by measurments of nostrils height,nostrils width and nasal colu-mella angle skewness on the photographs at the initial visit(T0),pre-operation(T1),1 week after operation(T2),1 month after opera-tion(T3)and a year after operation(T4).The other 35 infants with IUCL without PNM treatment were served as the controls.Re-sults:Compared with the controls,the symmetry of nostrils height,nostrils width,nasal columella angle skewness in PNM treated children were significantly improved at T0-T1 and T1-T2(P ＜0.05).there was no significant difference at T2-T3 and T3-T4(P >0. 05).Conclusion:Nasal asymmetry can be improved by presurgical nasal mode treatment followed by preliminary nasal deformity di-orthosis and cheiloplasty.