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Internal carotid artery dissection (ICAD) results from disruption of the intima of the arterial wall, and can lead to intrusion of blood into the arterial wall and form an intramural hematoma. The hematoma can compress the true lumen of the vessel, causing functional stenosis or occlusion. The classic triad signs of ICAD include pain in the ipsilateral neck, head and orbital regions; a (partial) Horner syndrome; and cerebral or retinal ischemia. However, not all ICAD patients present with this classic signs. In some cases, ocular manifestations are the initial (and sometimes the only) findings. We summarize the ocular manifestations associated with ICAD in 3 categories: visual symptoms, oculosympathetic palsy, and ocular motor nerve palsy.

Objective Atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome (aHUS) is associated with defective complement regulation. Anti-complement factor H (CFH) antibodies were thought to participate in the pathogenesis of aHUS. The aim of this study was to address the functions and properties of CFH autoantibodies in a Chinese Han cohort of aHUS patients. Methods Thirty-six anti-CFH antibody-positive aHUS patients at the acute phase of the disease were involved in this study. Clinical data of the patients were collected. Anti-CFH immunoglobulin G (IgG) subclasses and antibody isotypes were detected by ELISA. Epitope mapping was performed using recombinant CFH fragments (SCRs 1-4, SCR 7, SCRs 11-14, and SCRs 19-20). Purified IgG from plasma from seven patients were used for functional analyses. Results All patients presented with the classic triad of HUS. The anti-CFH autoantibodies mostly bound to the SCRs 19-20 domains of CFH but not the SCRs 1-4 domains. CFI cofactor activity was not disturbed by the anti-CFH antibody in any of the seven patients. Purified IgG interfered with the binding of CFH to C3b and CFH-mediated sheep erythrocyte protection in all seven patients. IgG from 4/5 (80%) patients tested inhibited the binding of CFH to glomerular endothelial cells. Conclusions Our study suggests that the properties of CFH antibodies from patients with aHUS, including the recognition of SCRs and IgG subclasses, can influence and impair the biological role of CFH and therefore contribute to aHUS susceptibility., Author(s): Wei-yi Guo [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] [sup.4] , Di Song [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] [sup.4] , Xiao-rong Liu [sup.5] , Zhi Chen [sup.5] , Hui-jie Xiao [sup.6] , Jie Ding [sup.6] [...]

Introduction: The aim of the study was to evaluate characteristics and provide the normal values of wall shear stress (WSS) and flow turbulence (Tur), and the relationship between them in the carotid bifurcation based on an ultrasound vector flow imaging (V Flow) in healthy adults. Methods: Max and mean WSS and Tur values at three segments (initial segments of internal and external carotid arteries [IICA and IECA]; distal segment of common carotid artery [DCCA]), both in anterior and posterior walls, were successfully obtained in 56 healthy adults, using ultrasound V Flow function. Relationship between mean WSS and Tur was further explored. Results: The mean WSS value was 0.71 Pa, 0.86 Pa, and 0.96 Pa at IICA, IECA, and DCCA, respectively (IICA < IECA < DCCA, p < 0.05). The mean Tur value was 13.85%, 5.46%, and 4.17% at IICA, IECA, and DCCA, respectively (IICA > IECA > DCCA, p < 0.05). A cutoff value (WSS = 0.4 Pa) was selected and Tur values were significantly higher in group with WSS cutoff value <0.4 Pa than group with WSS cutoff value ≥0.4 Pa (p < 0.01). Conclusion: WSS and Tur are moderately negatively correlated, which can be used in the quantitative evaluation of carotid bifurcation and could be a potential dual-parameter tool in the clinical research for early detection of carotid atherosclerosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the condition of variable speeds, the blade crack signal generated by the single-mode sensor is an inherent risk of being misled by noise. Besides, it is challenging to reach the required integrity of information through feature extraction in single analysis domain, leading to the loss of detection accuracy for blade cracks. Therefore, a blade crack detection method based on domain adaptation and autoencoder (AE) of multidimensional vibro-acoustic feature fusion is proposed to extract more complete fault information from multi-sensor and multi-analysis domains. This method extracts one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) features from the frequency domain and smoothed pseudo-wigner-ville distribution (SPWVD) spectrum of the vibro-acoustic signal. Firstly, the 1D and 2D features are extracted without supervision through Stacked Denoising Autoencoder (SDAE) and Convolution Denoising Autoencoder (CDAE), respectively. Then, the extracted multidimensional features are fused and classified through the fully connected network. Finally, for insufficient diagnosis accuracy and data imbalance under certain working condition models with variable speed and combined with inductive transfer mechanism and domain adaptation, the stable diagnosis model under specific speed is applied for transferring and learning the unsupervised networks of other models compensating the weak generalization ability and robustness of the model. The experimental results show that this method is characterized by higher accuracy and robustness compared with the diagnosis method of single-domain feature for the single-mode sensor. Moreover, the proposed migration mechanism can well solve the data imbalance under different working conditions and improve the generalization ability of the few-shot model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Increased intraperitoneal pressure (IPP) is associated with abdominal wall complications and technical failure in peritoneal dialysis (PD). Since the standard measurement of IPP is limited due to its cumbersome procedures, we aimed to develop and validate equations for estimating IPP. Methods We performed a cross-sectional study with a total of 200 prevalent PD patients who were divided into development and validation datasets after random sampling matched by body mass index. The IPPs were measured using the Durand method, with whole-body and abdominal anthropometry indices collected. Equations with 2.0-L and 1.5-L fill volumes were generated by stepwise linear regression modelling. The bias, accuracy and precision of the estimated IPP (eIPP) with 2-L and 1.5-L fill volumes were compared with actual IPPs by the Durand method. The eIPP for the 2-L fill volume was also compared with other existing equations. Results Two new equations incorporating waist circumference and height from the decubitus plane to mid-axillary line were generated. The eIPPs exhibited small biases in relation to the Durand method , with median differences of −0.24 cmH2O and −0.10 cmH2O for 2 L and 1.5 L, respectively. The precisions evaluated by the standard deviation of the absolute value of the differences were 2.59 cmH2O and 2.50 cmH2O, respectively. The accuracies evaluated by the value of the percentage of estimates that differed by >20% for the eIPP were 26% for 2.0 L and 27% for 1.5 L. Better bias, precision and accuracy were observed for the eIPP equation compared with other existing equations for the 2.0-L fill volume. Conclusions We provided two new equations developed from abdominal anthropometry indices to accurately estimate the IPP in the PD population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the hidden Markov model (HMM) idea,a timing attack on the elliptic curve digital signature system,which adopted the “double-and-add” scalar multiplication,was proposed.Simulation experiments on the secure Koblitz curve which released by the National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) were implemented and four secure Koblitz curves except the K-571 were attacked successfully.The experiment results show that the attack can recover almost all the key bits in a few minutes by collecting only once time data,and is easy to imple-ment at a high success rate.