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Although histopathological dermal elastosis is the current gold standard for the diagnosis of photoageing, noninvasive methods for quantifying the amount of photodamage to skin are clearly preferable. This study is the first to survey five noninvasive methods of assessing photoageing (clinical examination, spectrophotometry, skin surface topography, reflectance confocal microscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy) in the same individual. Measurements for each noninvasive method were compared across nine individuals from three participant groups ('younger', 'older' and 'photodamaged') in UV-protected volar and UV-exposed dorsal forearm skin. Overall, participants in the younger group had the lowest measures of photodamage, while those in the photodamaged group had the highest, as indicated by each modality. The five noninvasive strategies surveyed in this study may demonstrate potential as a suitable methodology for the quantification of photoageing. The advantage of such noninvasive methods is that they allow for skin visualisation in vivo and repeated assessments of the same site. The main limitation of this study was its small sample size, which may have precluded many findings of statistical significance.

BACKGROUND:: The aim of this paper is to assess the effect that the isolated coronal plane obliquity/angle of cut made for an opening wedge osteotomy has on the opening wedge gap, and determine whether this effect is likely to have clinical relevance with respect to bony union. The proximal tibial osteotomy has been used as an example. METHODS:: Mathematical/schematic assessment. RESULTS:: The single plane obliquity of the osteotomy cut cannot be used in isolation to predict opening gap distance, unless an osteotomy is performed on a perfectly cylindrical bone whereby the smallest gap is produce by the most horizontal cut. CONCLUSIONS:: Reducing the opening gap distance can be achieved by utilizing the shortest osteotomy through the bone at the desired point of correction. CLINICAL RELEVANCE:: The degree of change in opening wedge gap between various angles of high tibial opening wedge osteotomy is small-and focus should probably be placed on other mechanical and surgical considerations.

An economic motion and texture aware denosing framework is proposed to facilitate parallel hardware design. The denoising framework performs on a block basis and features a spatial and temporal predictor and then a linear denoising filter optimal in the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) sense. We first analyze the texture and motion strength around the neighborhood of a noisy pixel and then produce an effective predictor to correlate with the pixel of interest. Both the predictor and the noisy pixel are input into the linear denoiser to finally remove the noise. This framework only refers the information of the neighborhood of a noisy pixel and explores the best spatial and temporal denoising ratio adaptive to its local characteristics. Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the traditional block based denoising method by 1–3 dB of PSNR in denoising quality and also achieves a 1–3 dB gain when using it in HEVC encoder.

AVS2 is an ongoing standardization effort by Audio Video coding Standard Workgroup of China toward high efficiency coding of multimedia compared to the previous standard (AVS1). AVS2-P2 is the video part for high-definition, ultra-high-definition and three dimensional video contents. Raw video content of 10-bit bit depth has superior visual quality compared to traditional 8-bit counterpart. Thanks to the advance of computing power of hardware, support for video content of 10-bit bit depth is becoming very important in current high resolution video processing applications. We present here a new 10-bit design to AVS2-P2 standard based on our 10-bit encoding proposal [1] on the 48 th AVS2 working group meeting.

Ocular vasospasm in response to local and/or systemic stimuli may contribute to ischemia of the optic nerve. The Hettinger hand vibration test was applied to patients with and without glaucoma to identify subgroups with a high systemic vasospastic tendency. A total of 580 subjects were tested (113 controls, 86 glaucoma suspects, 270 with primary open-angle glaucoma, 71 with secondary open-angle glaucoma, 30 with normal-tension glaucoma, and 10 with angle-closure glaucoma). The frequency distribution curve of Hettinger scores (HS) was bimodal, suggesting two distinct groups. Within each diagnostic group, a subpopulation with a high HS could be identified. Multivariate analysis demonstrated a significant association between the nonselective topical beta-blocker timolol and higher mean HS (P = 0.04) and a significantly higher proportion of subjects with HS of 1.5 or more (P = 0.01). Although subjects taking systemic beta1-selective blockers had significantly lower mean HS (P = 0.04), the proportion of patients with HS of 1.5 or more was not affected significantly by topical and systemic beta1-selective blocker use. Whereas topical nonselective beta-blockers may have an adverse effect on vasospastic tendency, systemic beta1-selective blockers may be partially protective against this effect.

Two short visual field tests were performed on 106 subjects approximately 5 minutes apart with or without a hand vibration stimulus between the field tests. There were 31 eyes in the control group (10 without glaucoma, eight glaucoma suspects, 10 with primary open-angle glaucoma, and three with secondary open-angle glaucoma). There were 75 eyes in the hand vibration group (16 without glaucoma, 20 glaucoma suspects, 25 with primary open-angle glaucoma, eight with secondary open-angle glaucoma, three with normal-tension glaucoma, and three with other forms of glaucoma). Average visual field sensitivities were significantly reduced in the arcuate zones after a hand vibration stimulus (−0.42 dB; SD, 1.26 dB) when compared with sensitivities in the arcuate zones in subjects without the hand vibration stimulus (+0.38 dB; SD, 1.53 dB; P = 0.01). Multivariate analysis demonstrated a significant reduction in this response in the arcuate zone associated with use of betaxolol (P = 0.021) and timolol (P = 0.047). Betaxolol was associated with significantly smaller reductions in visual field sensitivities in the paracentral zone (P = 0.01). Reductions in visual field sensitivities that may be related to ocular vasospasm occurred after a hand vibration stimulus. This response may be able to be modified pharmacologically with topical β-blockers, particularly betaxolol.

There are many simple techniques available for source reduction of wastes from metal plating operations. They may be grouped into eight categories: reactive rinsing, counterflow rinsing, dragout minimization, dragout recovery, process modifications/operational changes, material substitutions, waste exchange opportunities and housekeeping improvements. A technical assistance project and financial incentive programs offered by Environment Canada are also described.