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This paper studies the spatial group-by query over complex polygons. Given a set of spatial points and a set of polygons, the spatial group-by query returns the number of points that lie within the boundaries of each polygon. Groups are selected from a set of non-overlapping complex polygons, typically in the order of thousands, while the input is a large-scale dataset that contains hundreds of millions or even billions of spatial points. This problem is challenging because real polygons (like counties, cities, postal codes, voting regions, etc.) are described by very complex boundaries. We propose a highly-parallelized query processing framework to efficiently compute the spatial group-by query on highly skewed spatial data. We also propose an effective query optimizer that adaptively assigns the appropriate processing scheme based on the query polygons. Our experimental evaluation with real data and queries has shown significant superiority over all existing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Breast reconstruction after breast cancer excision is becoming increasingly important owing to changes in patient expectations and demand. There is growing recognition that immediate reconstruction in appropriately selected women can combine an oncological and esthetic procedure in one operation with excellent results. In some oncoplastic techniques or in patients with severe macromastia undergoing reduction, surgeons might not be able to use traditional pedicles because the blood supply of the nipple-areolar complex (NAC) may be altered or destroyed, necessitating the urge to locate an alternative adequate feeding vessel for NAC away from the resected tissues to avoid postoperative vascular compromise. This would improve NAC survival, wound healing, and rapid full recovery, permitting early administration of radiotherapy or chemotherapy if needed. Aim This study aimed to characterize NAC blood supply using magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) to locate available alternative and adequate feeding vessels to design a custom-made NAC flap away from the proposed resected area in patients with breast cancer to avoid postoperative vascular compromise. Patients and methods This prospective randomized study was performed on 15 patients presented to plastic, burn, and maxillofacial surgery department, Ain Shams University Hospitals, with breast tumors amenable to NAC preservation from January 2018 to June 2022. Bilateral breast MRA was performed using an MRI scanner locating the different adequate pedicles that supply the NAC. Based on MRI results, a custom-made NAC flap was designed and used in oncoplastic reconstruction after tumor excision. Results MRI could delineate multiple feeding vessels of variable diameters. Based on these results, different flaps could be used for NAC transposition and breast remodeling. All cases went uneventful regarding NAC vascularity, and six patients showed minimal wound complications that did not delay the administration of postoperative adjuvant tumor therapy. Conclusion Preoperative marking of the available feeding vessels of the NAC using MRA played a central role in designing untraditional NAC flaps that can be used in oncoplastic surgery or severe macromastia reduction with minimal complications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents GeoTrend+; a system approach to support scalable local trend discovery on recent microblogs, e.g., tweets, comments, online reviews, and check-ins, that come in real time. GeoTrend+ discovers top-k trending keywords in arbitrary spatial regions from recent microblogs that continuously arrive with high rates and a significant portion has uncertain geolocations. GeoTrend+ distinguishes itself from existing techniques in different aspects: (1) Discovering trends in arbitrary spatial regions, e.g., city blocks. (2) Considering both exact geolocations, e.g., accurate latitude/longitude coordinates, and uncertain geolocations, e.g., district-level or city-level, that represents a significant portion of past years microblogs. (3) Promoting recent microblogs as first-class citizens and optimizes different components to digest a continuous flow of fast data in main-memory while removing old data efficiently. (4) Providing various main-memory optimization techniques that are able to distinguish useful from useless data to effectively utilize tight memory resources while maintaining accurate query results on relatively large amounts of data. (5) Supporting various trending measures that effectively capture trending items under a variety of definitions that suit different applications. GeoTrend+ limits its scope to real-time data that is posted during the last T time units. To support its queries efficiently, GeoTrend+ employs an in-memory spatial index that is able to efficiently digest incoming data and expire data that is beyond the last T time units. The index also materializes top-k keywords in different spatial regions so that incoming queries can be processed with low latency. In peak times, the main-memory optimization techniques are employed to shed less important data to sustain high query accuracy with limited memory resources. Experimental results based on real data and queries show the scalability of GeoTrend+ to support high arrival rates and low query response time, and at least 90+% query accuracy even under limited memory resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring market share changes over space and time is an essential and continuous task for commercial companies and their third-party local agents to adjust their sale campaigns and marketing efforts for profit maximisation. This paper uses social media data as a cheap and up-to-date source to reveal the implicit semantics that are embedded in the meta-data of public geosocial datasets. We use Twitter data as a prime example of rich geosocial data. These data are associated with several meta-data attributes. Using this meta-data, we perform a geospatial analysis for the source platform from which a tweet is posted, e.g. from Apple or Android device. Our analysis studies all counties in US connected states over 2 years 2016-2017. We show that market structure at the national level masks substantial variation at the county scale. Moreover, we find strong spatial autocorrelation in platform distribution and market share in the US. In addition, we show interesting changes over the 2 years that motivates further analysis at different spatial and temporal levels. Our results are supported with visual maps of location quotients and market dominance, in addition to formal test results of spatial autocorrelation, and spatial Markov analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microblogging services have become among the most popular services on the web in the last few years. This led to significant increase in data size, speed, and applications. This paper presents Venus; a system that supports real-time spatial queries on microblogs. Venus supports its queries on a spatial boundary $R$ and a temporal boundary $T$ , from which only the top- $k$ microblogs are returned in the query answer based on a spatio-temporal ranking function. Supporting such queries requires Venus to digest hundreds of millions of real-time microblogs in main-memory with high rates, yet, it provides low query responses and efficient memory utilization. To this end, Venus employs: (1) an efficient in-memory spatio-temporal index that digests high rates of incoming microblogs in real time, (2) a scalable query processor that prune the search space, $R$ and $T$ , effectively to provide low query latency on millions of items in real time, and (3) a group of memory optimization techniques that provide system administrators with different options to save significant memory resources while keeping the query accuracy almost perfect. Venus memory optimization techniques make use of the local arrival rates of microblogs to smartly shed microblogs that are old enough not to contribute to any query answer. In addition, Venus can adaptively, in real time, adjust its load shedding based on both the spatial distribution and the parameters of incoming query loads. All Venus components can accommodate different spatial and temporal ranking functions that are able to capture the importance of each dimension differently depending on the applications requirements. Extensive experimental results based on real Twitter data and actual locations of Bing search queries show that Venus supports high arrival rates of up to 64 K microblogs/second and average query latency of 4 msec. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: Flexor tendon injuries are a commonly occurring injury presenting to hand surgeons. Using PRP to augment tendon healing has been advocated only recently. Few studies discussed the effect of injection of PRP in tendon healing after tendon repair in large joints as regard functional outcome and range of motion (e.g. Achilles tendon and rotator cuff) Objective: To study the effect of combination of PRP injection with physiotherapy on gliding and range of motion improvement after zone II flexor tendon repair. Patients and Methods: prospective interventional controlled clinical study preformed on 40 patients with zone II flexor tendon injury. Patients were divided into two groups, group I (interventional group) PRP was injected around the tendon at the site of repair after one and six weeks of repair and patients received physiotherapy according to our unit protocol. In group II (control group) patients received physiotherapy only. Both groups were evaluated at six and twelve weeks regarding the range of motion according to Buck-Gramko II criteria. Results: Based on the Buck-Gramcko II criteria, the overall results ranged between fair and good in both groups after six weeks of repair, the score ranged between 7-16 (mean= 11.5) in group I and 6-14 (mean= 10) in group II, There was no statistical difference between the two groups (P = 0.46).After 12 weeks of repair, the overall results ranged between good and excellent in both groups, the score ranged between 11-17 (mean= 14) in group I and 9-16 (mean=12.5) in group II. There was no statistical difference between the two groups (p = 0.207). Conclusion: PRP injection had no statistical significant effect of on the gliding after flexor tendon repair at zone II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of the geospatial services industry is increasing the demand for a workforce with training at the intersection of geography and computing (i.e., geocomputation) in terms of skills, knowledge, and disciplinary background. To be more effective at increasing the supply of geocomputational professionals, we need to better understand the existing educational pathways that are available to acquire knowledge and skills in geography, computing, or both. In this article, we aimed to enhance our understanding of the current standing of geocomputational career pathways by (1) articulating the existing curriculum pathways from school to career and identifying broadening participation challenges associated with training opportunities; and (2) identifying specific gaps in knowledge, skills, and training needs and opportunities between geographers, computer scientists, and the geospatial technology industry. Our analysis of a survey of geocomputational professionals identified significant differences in knowledge, skills, and access to training between different educational pathways and between different demographic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Our study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) intervention for pain and anxiety relief during outpatient hysteroscopy. Methods: Various databases were searched for available clinical trials from inception until June 2023. We selected randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared virtual reality intervention versus standard care among women undergoing outpatient hysteroscopy. We used Revman software to perform our meta-analysis. The primary outcome was the pain score during the procedure. The secondary outcomes were anxiety during the procedure and pain post-procedure. The Visual Analog Scale (VAS) was used to assess pain and anxiety. Results: Six RCTs were retrieved, involving a total of 457 patients. Virtual reality was associated with a significant reduction in pain score during the procedure in comparison with the control group (MD = − 1.43, 95% CI [− 1.69, − 1.16], p < 0.001). In addition, there was a significant decrease in anxiety during the procedure among the virtual reality group compared to the control group (p = 0.01). The pain score post-procedure significantly decreased within the virtual reality group (MD = − 1.52, 95% CI [− 1.78, − 1.26], p < 0.001). Conclusions: Virtual reality technology is a simple, feasible, and effective intervention for reducing pain and anxiety during outpatient hysteroscopy. More trials are required to confirm our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyclophosphamide is an anti-neoplastic drug that has shown competence in the management of a broad range of malignant tumors. In addition, it represents a keystone agent for management of immunological conditions. Despite these unique properties, induction of lung toxicity may limit its clinical use. Omarigliptin is one of the dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors that has proven efficacy in management of diabetes mellitus. Rosinidin is an anthocyanidin flavonoid that exhibited promising results in management of diseases characterized by oxidative stress, inflammation, and apoptosis. The present work investigated the possible effects of omarigliptin with or without rosinidin on cyclophosphamide-induced lung toxicity with an exploration of the molecular mechanisms that contribute to these effects. In a rodent model of cyclophosphamide elicited lung toxicity, the potential efficacy of omarigliptin with or without rosinidin was investigated at both the biochemical and the histopathological levels. Both omarigliptin and rosinidin exhibited a synergistic ability to augment the tissue antioxidant defenses, mitigate the inflammatory pathways, restore glucagon-like peptide-1 levels, modulate high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1)/receptors of advanced glycation end products (RAGE)/nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) axis, downregulate the fibrogenic mediators, and create a balance between the pathways involved in apoptosis and the autophagy signals in the pulmonary tissues. In conclusion, omarigliptin/rosinidin combination may be introduced as a novel therapeutic modality that attenuates the different forms of lung toxicities induced by cyclophosphamide. [Display omitted] • The effects of omarigliptin &/or rosinidin on CPA-lung toxicity were investigated. • Omarigliptin &/or rosinidin restored the antioxidant defenses in the lung tissues. • Omarigliptin &/or rosinidin mitigated inflammation & fibrosis in the lung tissues. • Omarigliptin &/or rosinidin restored autophagy/apoptosis balance in the lung. • Omarigliptin/rosinidin combination was better than each of these agents alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: To evaluate the safety and effectiveness of insulin glargine 300 U/mL (Gla-300) in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in the Gulf region who fast during Ramadan. Methods: ORION was a real-world, prospective, observational study in people with T2DM treated with Gla-300 during pre-Ramadan, Ramadan, and post-Ramadan periods. This subgroup analysis included 222 participants from the Gulf region (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar). The primary endpoint was the percentage of participants experiencing severe and/or symptomatic documented hypoglycemia (self-monitored plasma glucose [SMPG] ≤ 70 mg/dL) during Ramadan. Changes in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), SMPG, body weight, insulin dose, and adverse events (AEs) were also evaluated. Results: The primary endpoint was reported in one (0.5%) participant during Ramadan. The incidence rate of symptomatic documented hypoglycemia (SMPG ≤ 70 mg/dL) decreased from the pre-Ramadan (3.2%) to Ramadan period (0.5%), and no severe hypoglycemia events were reported during the study. Reductions were observed in HbA1c (mean ± standard deviation: − 0.51 ± 0.95% [− 5.5 ± 10.4 mmol/mol]), FPG (− 13.9 ± 47.5 mg/dL), and SMPG (− 6.1 ± 27.1 mg/dL). No significant changes were observed in body weight or Gla-300 dose. AEs were reported in 11 (5.0%) participants. Conclusion: In a real-world setting in the Gulf region, Gla-300 treatment in people with T2DM during Ramadan was associated with a low incidence of hypoglycemia and improved glycemic control. Trial Registration: CTRI/2019/02/017636. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]