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Purpose. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the clinical efficacy of peripheral repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in the treatment of idiopathic facial paralysis, to explore an ideal treatment scheme for idiopathic facial paralysis, and to provide evidence for clinical rehabilitation. Methods. 65 patients with idiopathic facial nerve palsy with the first onset were recruited and randomly divided into rTMS group and control group. Both groups received conventional treatment, rTMS group received additional repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the affected side once a day, 5 times a week for 2 weeks. House-Brackmann (HB) grading scale, Sunnybrook facial grading system (SFGS), and modified Portmann scale (MPS) were used to assess facial nerve function before and after treatment, and the time for patients to return to normal facial nerve function and adverse reaction (AR) was also the main observation index. Results. After a 2-week intervention, HB, SFGS, and MPS increased in both groups ( P < 0.01 ); the improvement of HB, SFGS, and MPS in rTMS group was significantly higher than that in control group ( P < 0.01 ). The effective improvement rate of the TMS group after 2 weeks was 90.0%, and that of the control group was 53.3%, and the difference was statistically significant ( P < 0.01 ). Conclusions. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is a safe and effective noninvasive method for the treatment of idiopathic facial paralysis, which can significantly accelerate the recovery of facial nerve function and provide a new treatment idea for further improving the prognosis of patients with idiopathic facial paralysis.

Lift-off can cause significant errors in the measurement of metallic ball thickness using the eddy current method. In this paper, a triple-coil sensor, which is composed of two receiving coils and one excitation coil, is applied to address the problem of lift-off variation. There exists a peak frequency feature, which is the frequency where the peak value of the imaginary part of the inductance change occurs. The difference in peak frequencies of two receiving coils is linearly proportional to the thickness of the metal balls, with the advantage of reducing the effect of the lift-off during the measurements. The simulation results agree well with the experimental results and therefore a look-up table can be built for different thicknesses by simulation and the actual thickness can be found through comparing the measured results with the look-up table. This thickness measurement approach is effective and the error of the measurement is within 6.1% based on the experimental results.

Background. Disorder of consciousness (DoC) is a clinical condition caused by severe brain damage. Some studies have reported that acupuncture, a traditional Chinese treatment, could facilitate the recovery of the patient’s consciousness. The therapeutic effects of acupuncture may be due to its modulation of facilitating cortex (PFC) activity, but it has not been greatly demonstrated. Objectives. We intended to observe the effects of acupuncture on prefrontal cortical activity, explore the potential correlation between cortical activation and the severity of DoC, and analyze the functional brain network connectivity to provide a theoretical basis for its application in clinical practice. Methods. Participants diagnosed with DoC were included in the study. Before the intervention, we assessed the patient’s state of consciousness using relevant scales, such as the Glasgow coma scale (GCS) and the coma recovery scale-revised (CRS-R). All patients received acupuncture manipulation with the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system monitored. Result. A total of 16 subjects participated in our study. We observed that the concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) in the PFC was increased during the acupuncture manipulation and declined during the resting state. Then, the connection strength of the left cerebral cortex was generally higher than that of the right. Finally, we observed only a weak difference in hemodynamic responses of PFC between the vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) groups. However, the difference was not statistically significant. Conclusion. Our results indicated that acupuncture can increase the concentration of HbO in the PFC and strengthen the connection strength of the left cerebral cortex. However, our present study did not find a significant correlation between the cortical hemodynamic response and the severity of DoC.

Eddy current testing (ECT) is an effective technique for evaluating depth of metal surface defects. However, in practice, evaluation primarily relies on the experience of an operator and is often carried out by manual inspection. In this article, we address the challenges of automatic depth evaluation of metal surface defects by virtual of state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) techniques. The main contributions are threefold. First, a highly integrated portable ECT device is developed, taking the advantage of an advanced field-programmable gate array (Zynq-7020 system on chip) and provides fast data acquisition and in-phase/quadrature demodulation. Second, a dataset, termed metal defects of different depths by ECT (MDDECT), is constructed using the ECT device by human operators and made openly available. It contains 48000 scans from 18 defects of different depths and liftoffs. Third, the depth evaluation problem is formulated as a time series classification problem, and various state-of-the-art 1-D residual convolutional neural networks are trained and evaluated on the MDDECT dataset. A 38-layer 1-D ResNeXt achieves an accuracy of 93.58% in discriminating the surface defects in a stainless steel sheet with depths from 0.3 to 2.0 mm in the resolution of 0.1 mm. In addition, the results show that the trained ResNeXt1D-38 model is immune to liftoff signals.