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Introduction: The management of refractory immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is challenging and difficult. The treatment was mainly comprised of cytotoxic and immunosuppressed drugs that rarely lead to long-term remission but potentially cause severe and dangerous side effects. Our current study is a retrospective clinical analysis of refractory ITP patients who underwent phytotherapy as nutritional supplements. Methods: A retrospective clinical analysis of 15 refractory immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) patients aged 12–64 with ITP history for more than 24 months before the enrollments. All patients presented with low platelet count (< 30 × 109/L) and moderate to severe bleeding symptoms such as extensive petechiae, bruising, epistaxis, prolonged menses, rectal bleeding, and hematuria. The patients underwent supportive phytotherapy as nutritional supplements using herbal extracts with hemostatic, immunomodulating, and platelet function augmenting functions Results: The 6-month retrospective clinical evaluation indicated that phytotherapy might offer an effective and safe solution for controlling bleeding symptoms and improving platelet counts for refractory ITP patients. Moreover, phytotherapy also significantly improved patients' red cell count, hemoglobulin, and liver enzyme levels compared to baseline data. Conclusions: In individual cases and economically disadvantaged regions, investigating and applying an appropriate combination of phytotherapy based on scientific knowledge and traditional folk medical experiences might offer an effective, inexpensive, and safe solution for refractory ITP and other bleeding disorders.

Therapeutic communication and interpersonal relationships in care homes can help people to improve their mental wellbeing. Assessment of the efficacy of these dynamic and complex processes are necessary for psychosocial planning and management. This paper presents a pilot application of photoplethysmography in synchronized physiological measurements of communications between the care-giver and people with dementia. Signal-based evaluations of the therapy can be carried out using the measures of spectral distortion and the inference of phylogenetic trees. The proposed computational models can be of assistance and cost-effectiveness in caring for and monitoring people with cognitive decline.

The modeling of the spatial distribution of image properties is important for many pattern recognition problems in science and engineering. Mathematical methods are needed to quantify the variability of this spatial distribution based on which a decision of classification can be made in an optimal sense. However, image properties are often subject to uncertainty due to both incomplete and imprecise information. This paper presents an integrated approach for estimating the spatial uncertainty of vagueness in images using the theory of geostatistics and the calculus of probability measures of fuzzy events. Such a model for the quantification of spatial uncertainty is utilized as a new image feature extraction method, based on which classifiers can be trained to perform the task of pattern recognition. Applications of the proposed algorithm to the classification of various types of image data suggest the usefulness of the proposed uncertainty modeling technique for texture feature extraction.