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BACKGROUND Osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture (OVCF) is usually treated by percutaneous kyphoplasty (PKP) which has limitations. We aimed to evaluate the effects of PKP combined with zoledronic acid (ZOL) injection on OVCF and bone metabolism indices. METHODS A total of 600 OVCF patients admitted from June 2015 to June 2020 were randomly divided into group A (PKP alone), group B (PKP combined with ZOL 1 month later) and group C (PKP concurrently combined with ZOL) (n=200). Before as well as 1 month (before ZOL treatment in group B) and 1 year after PKP, the pain degree, physical function and self-care ability in daily life were assessed, the height and kyphosis Cobb angle of vertebral body with compression fracture and bone mineral densities (BMDs) at different parts were measured, the clinical efficacy, adverse reactions and recurrence of vertebral fractures during 3 years of follow-up were observed, and the serum levels of BAP, BGP, β-CTx and TP1NP were detected. RESULTS Compared with groups A and B, group C had significantly reduced visual analogue scale (VAS) and Oswestry disability index (ODI) scores and raised activity of daily living (ADL) score 1 month after PKP (P

The key technique of a kinetic energy rod (KER) warhead is to control the flight attitude of rods. The rods are usually designed to different shapes. A new conceptual KER named profiled rod which has large L/D ratio is described in this paper. The elastic dynamic equations of this profiled rod flying at high velocity after detonation are set up on the basis of Euler-Bernoulli beam, and the aeroelastic deformation of profiled rod is calculated by semi-analytical method for calculating the vibration characteristics of variable cross-section beam. In addition, the aeroelastic deformation of the undeformed profiled rod and the aeroelastic deformation of deformed profiled rod which is caused by the detonation of explosive are simulated by computational fluid dynamic and finite element method (CFD/FEM), respectively. A satisfactory agreement of these two methods is obtained by the comparison of two methods. The results show that the semi-analytical method for calculating the vibration characteristics of variable cross-section beam is applied to analyze the aeroelastic deformation of profiled rod flying at high velocity.

Digital image degradation normally arises during image acquisition and processing, which has a direct influence on the visual quality of the image. This paper proposes a combined method for enhancement of noisy image by using the mirror-extended curvelet transform and nonlinear anisotropic diffusion. First, an improved enhancement function is proposed to nonlinearly shrink and stretch the curvelet coefficients. Then, the enhanced results are further processed by the nonlinear diffusion where only the nonsignificant, i.e., nonthresholded, curvelet coefficients are changed by means of a diffusion process in order to reduce the pseudo-Gibbs artifacts. Experimental results indicate the proposed method has better performances to enhance the shape of edges and important detailed features as well as suppress noise, in comparison to the curvelet-based enhancement method without diffusion and the wavelet-based enhancement methods with/without diffusion.