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Introduction Polypharmacy induces side effects or drug interaction for elderly patients. Whether polypharmacy negatively affects stroke rehabilitation of patients is unclear in Japan. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between polypharmacy and recovery of daily activity among convalescent stroke patients. Methods In this retrospective cohort study, we screened 719 stroke patients who were admitted to and discharged from the Sagami Rehabilitation Hospital or the Tsurumaki Onsen Hospital between April 2012 and July 2014 in Kanagawa, Japan. Among 719 patients screened, 509 were excluded because of propensity score matching. The primary outcome was Functional Independence Measure-Motor (FIM-M) effectiveness, and participants were divided according to FIM-M effective scores into the following two groups: non-improvement (105 patients) or improvement of FIM-M effectiveness (105 patients). Results Risk factors associated with non-improvement of FIM-M effectiveness included epilepsy and number of drugs used upon admission. FIM-M effectiveness in the patients in whom five or more drugs were used upon admission was significantly lower than in those in whom one drug was used. Through this finding, we defined the use of five or more drugs as polypharmacy. Drugs with significant differences regarding polypharmacy included antihypertensive and antidiabetic drugs. Conclusions These findings suggested that polypharmacy negatively affects stroke rehabilitation outcomes. Thus, pharmacists should make attempts to respond to individual patient outcomes to optimize prescriptions, which may minimize the brunt of polypharmacy on patient outcomes.

Professional organizations and federal legislation stipulate that assessments of all students must be fair and unbiased. Although these entities provide guidance, there continues to be a gap between guidelines and practice. This article examines the nature of culturally competent practice with Ebonics-speaking youth. Many school psychologists face challenges such as large caseloads, lack of knowledge about Ebonics, and limited access to culturally appropriate assessment materials. The present article fills this gap by providing practitioners with information on the history of Ebonics, implications for the students they assess, and practical ways to address these issues with limited resources.

Povidone-iodine sugar ointment is an excellent preparation for the treatment of decubitus. It has been used as an intrahospital preparation made according to the formula each hospital decided on from experience. Although commercial products have also been developed and used, they are too expensive. The efficacy of a povidone-iodine sugar ointment formulation which can be prepared by a single method and which has the stability and antibacterial activity equal to commercially available products was evaluated. As the test drugs, one commercially available product (UP), and three preparations with different formulas (P-1, P-2 and P-3) were used. All of these test drugs were stored at 20 and 40 degrees C. Specimens were sampled immediately after storage and after 20, 60, 90, 120 and 150 days and examined pharmaceutically (measurement of pH value and determinations of available iodine and sucrose levels). For the determination of bacteriological effects, 5 standard strains of 5 genera and 5 strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) were used and the time required to kill the bacteria was determined. For UP and P-3, no changes were seen pharmaceutically after 150 days of storage at 20 and 40 degrees C. However, MRSA could not be killed within 30 min. P-1 and P-2 showed remarkable changes pharmaceutically after 60 days of storage at 40 degrees C and could not be used any more. It became possible to make a preparation of povidone-iodine sugar ointment which has a stability almost similar to that of UP. Moreover, such a preparation can be made at low cost. However, since the bactericidal activity against MRSA was not higher than those of other drugs, the future task is to improve the bactericidal activity.

This paper proposes a step size control method capable of steadily canceling acoustic echo resisting double talk. The method is characterized by applying a sub-adaptive filter to the control. The step size and the number of taps of the sub- adaptive filter are larger and fewer than those of the main adaptive filter used for canceling the acoustic echo, respectively. Accordingly, the sub-adaptive filter can reduce the residual echo more rapidly than the main adaptive filter. The proposed method applies the step size calculated using the residual echo to the main adaptive filter, and thereby, quickly and steadily reduces the acoustic echo. This paper finally verifies that the proposed method can provide almost the same convergence speed as that obtained by applying a fixed large step size to the main adaptive filter.

The distribution of coronary blood volume is of fundamental importance to cardiac function. Previous investigators have demonstrated that myocardial vascular volume varies with both perfusion pressure and contraction. The purpose of this study is to measure vascular volume in an isolated rabbit heart model under a variety of controlled mechanical conditions using 3-D MCE. Isolated rabbit hearts were perfused with a room temperature crystalloid solution in a Langendorff perfusion apparatus and a small balloon was placed inside the left ventricle and attached to a volume infusion pump. Digital images of the heart were acquired with a Volumetrics 3D ultrasound scanner at perfusion pressures of 0, 30, and 50 mmHg without and with a microbubble-based contrast agent. LV pressure was held at a constant level of 0 mmHg. Regional videointensity and LV area were measured from short axis images in six hearts. Background-subtracted videointensity increased linearly with normalized coronary blood flow (R/sup 2/=.99), demonstrating the ability of this method to noninvasively determine myocardial perfusion. Coronary vascular volume was estimated using a calibration technique and assuming the perfused myocardium may be modeled as a composite material, consisting of incompressible tissue and distensible vessels. Coronary volume was estimated to be 16-24% of the myocardium, comparable to values found in previous studies. Our method may be extended to noninvasively measuring regional coronary volume in patients, thereby providing an additional tool for physicians.

This paper propose a method of writer verification basedon on-line features extracted from a process of drawing afigure, and evaluate its performance on handdrawn figuresby genuine writers and pretenders. In the proposed method,a person in registration writes only the reference figure,which is composed of as many parts as possible and theperson can be verified with a arbitrary part of the referencefigure. The verification is based on a spotting methodcalled CDP (Continuous Dynamic Programming). Fromsome requirements in authentication system, the proposedmethod is tested through some experiments using figures.The error rates in the experiment were different dependingon conditions such as kind of on-line features, minimumnumber of strokes comprised in acceptable test sequence asinput, figure for determination of threshold and the genuinewriter. The result of the experiment shows that the proposedmethod is effective.

The purpose of the paper is to propose an algorithm for pseudo-phonemic labelling of each frame feature in a continuous speech. The algorithm is consisting of the two key concepts; 1) Utilization of speech feature composed of spectrum and vector field feature of spectrum based on Vector Field Model of Speech for realizing a system which works speaker-independently, and 2) Application of a new algorithm for accumulating pseudo-phonemic evidence of each frame based on both Continuous Dynamic Programming (CDP) and Partial Matching Method.

A new model called Vector Field Model is proposed for providing new algorithms of both segmentation and feature extraction in order to recognize phonemic units in continuous speech spoken by many speakers. The original vector field is obtained by differentiating a time-frequency pattern (the output of band-pass filters). In order to extract steady , increasing transient or decreasing transient feature of the point on the time-frequency pattern, three auxiliary vector fields are created by characterizing coherent orientations of vectors. The crowded vectors in an arbitary auxiliary vector field produce a pseudo-phonemic segment. Recognition of /VCV/ is carried out by applying so-called Continuous Dynamic Programming to a segment sequence pattern.

Whereas the increase in insulin requirement in late gestation is well described in diabetic pregnancy, a decrease in insulin dosage in the end of the third trimester has also been noted in clinical experience and the prevention of hypoglycaemia is important. Here we report a large decrease (over 50%) in the final few weeks of her two gestations in a woman with type 1 diabetes mellitus.

This paper describes how the cause of noise in a hybrid vehicle reactor was elucidated by the development of technology to analyze the coupling between the magnetic field and vibration in the high-frequency range (5 to 10 kHz) and how reactor noise was reduced as a result. To date, magnetic field and vibration analyses, for reactors have been done but mainly within conditions at the commercial frequency range (around 60 Hz). (Hagiwara, S, 1982), (Hori, Y, 1995), (Yanari, T, 1996). This paper describes how the reactor behavior in the high-frequency range (5 to 10 kHz) was clarified by constructing a suitable model and analyzing electromagnetic fields and vibration phenomena occurring in it. Experimental results were also used for the analyses. In addition, this analytical technique was used to elucidate the cause of noise and to develop a new form of reactor to reduce noise. As a result, noise was reduced by 10 dB or more.

We propose a method to self-organize a user model for realizing a text search system. The method self-organizes a model from phoneme sequences and their texts using 6 basic rules. An inference method associated with the self-organized model searches texts corresponding to inputted phoneme sequences. Experiments using 50 voice waveforms of 10 speakers show that the self-organized model is useful to realize a text search system and is robust for noisy speech utterances.

We develop a technique for robustly positioning and guiding mobile robots in the real world, such as offices and homes, by using topological maps consisting of image sequences capturing the environment. This technique uses reference interval-free continuous dynamic programming (DP) which allows positioning by spotting, but it restricts the direction of mobile robot navigation to the same one as the map creation. We propose to use the nonmonotonic continuous DP for gesture recognition, to allow the positioning of a robot within the same framework even when it navigates backwards or stops. We also propose the use of average values of local features in each section generated by horizontally dividing the omnidirectional view as rotation-invariant features to allow global positioning of a robot regardless of its direction. In addition, we demonstrate the usefulness of this technique through evaluation experiments using mobile robots.

We propose a method to recognize human gestures using both motion images and text. The method uses two kinds of network models obtained from two kinds of sequences in a style of self-organization. We can extract both so-called common and singular parts of a gesture by analyzing the topology of the network of gesture motion images. If the order of movements in a gesture motion image matches with that of words included in a corresponding sentence, then we can also extract both so-called common and singular parts of the network model of test. The proposed method for recognizing gestures uses morphological features between two networks made of gesture motion images and word sequences. We show the usefulness of the method through an experiment using a database composed of pairs of gesture motion images and text.

A spotting algorithm to recognize the meanings of human gestures from motion images is proposed. Feature vectors are extracted from temporal edge image. And input image sequences are matched with models by spotting algorithm. The spotting algorithm removes the need for temporal segmentation of gesture duration and introduces frame-wise recognition. In this paper, a new spotting method called nonmonotonic continuous DP is proposed for spotting gestures and their variations such as reverse, partial and stop motions. We showed the effectiveness of the new spotting method.

This paper proposes two new methods of how to carry out automatic topic spotting in continuous speech and how to describe its summary in the form of the slot expression. The topic spotting works independently of both speakers and topics. The method of topic spotting is based on a dialogue model to segment a topic using only a surface feature of continuous speech. The spotted speech are selected by the co-occurrence relations and are classified by the word thesaurus. We evaluated our methods using the speech of the broadcasting news and the spoken dialogue speech. The result shows that detection quality was over 80% on the broadcasting news.

In order to obtain flexibility of recognition system of human motion behaviors, omni-directional vision sensors are used for both tracking humans and getting multiple. views of different directions that allows human to move with natural behavior in large area. First, a vision-based aspect model is proposed which realize the recognition independent of the human-direction. It contains feature vector sequences that were taken from all direction around the human. Next, the authors' appearance-based feature extraction method is demonstrated to be useful for whole body motion recognition. A new technique, spatio-temporal continuous dynamic programming, allows a human to rotate even when he is doing a motion behavior.

Intraperitoneal injection of benzodiazepine receptor agonists (estazolam, zopiclone, triazolam: 0.03–0.24 mmol/kg) induces the head twitch response (HTR). The present study was undertaken to examine the possible participation of the serotonergic system in the mechanism of head twitches induced by benzodiazepine receptor agonists (BZ-RAs). The HTR induced by BZ-RAs was suppressed by pretreatment with ketanserine (1 mg/kg, i.p.), a selective 5-HT2 receptor antagonist. Pretreatment with fluoxetine (10 mg/kg, i.p.), a 5-HT reuptake inhibitor, and 8-hydroxy-2-(di-n-propylamino)tetralin, a 5-HT1A receptor agonist, also suppressed the HTR induced by BZ-RAs. These results suggest that the HTR induced by BZ-RAs may be the result of an activation of postsynaptic 5-HT2 receptors, probably due to direct action.

We have been developing a localization method for an autonomous robot without using any prior knowledge or assumptions about the environment. The method is general and robust and can be used in real world robot tasks. With a map description based on a reduced image sequence, we detect a frame sequence in the map which matches an input frame sequence, by means of reference interval-free continuous dynamic programming (RIFCDP). The method can cope with changes in the robot's speed because RIFCDP can spot arbitrary frame sequences by nonlinear matching. In this paper, we show a real-time localization system, and we illustrate the effectiveness of our method in the real world by some evaluation experiments.

Purpose Pediatric tibial eminence avulsion fractures occur when immature subchondral bone structurally yields before the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Repairs with screw fixation may provide the greatest stability to fracture fragments. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of metal screws for fixation of pediatric tibial eminence avulsion fractures compared to bioabsorbable (polymer) screws. Methods Data for bioabsorbable screws were compiled from a previous phase of the study.* For comparison, six 16-week old bovine knees were dissected, leaving the ACL intact. Tibial eminence avulsion fractures were created using a curved osteotome. These fractures were repaired by a surgeon using metal screws. The repaired knees were then mounted to a servohydraulic materials testing machine at 30 degrees of flexion. After preconditioning, cyclic tensile loads simulating anterior tibial translation were applied to the tibia (5-150N, 1Hz, 200 cycles) then tested to failure. Displacement (mm) and force (N) were recorded for the duration of testing. Gross mechanical stiffness was determined by taking the rate of deformation over the initial loading. Statistics were compared using a one-way ANOVA. (Table) Conclusion Polymer screws have been shown to be difficult to place and prone to breakage. This was reflected in the variable performance of the polymer screws. The primary disadvantage of metal screw fixation is that pediatric patients require implant removal to prevent early physeal arrest. Based upon the data of this study, the metal screws showed less deformation during cyclic testing and more consistent mechanical behavior. Both fixation methods may withstand a maximum force greater than a pediatric ACL would experience during rehabilitation. However, the low initial deformation suggests that the metal screw would better maintain repair integrity.