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The study aimed to assess the marginal, axial, and internal adaptation, as well as the fracture resistance of zirconia-reinforced lithium silicate (ZLS) endocrowns with varying pulpal inlay extensions and marginal geometry. Sixty extracted maxillary first molar teeth were divided into six groups (n = 10) according to pulpal inlay extension and marginal configuration. The first three groups (J2, J3, and J4) utilized prepared teeth for endocrowns without ferrule design and 2 mm, 3 mm, and 4 mm pulpal extensions, respectively. The second three groups (F2, F3, and F4) utilized prepared teeth with 1 mm shoulder margins and 2 mm, 3 mm, and 4 mm pulpal extensions. The endocrowns were fabricated from ZLS blocks using CAD/CAM milling technology. After cementation, the specimens underwent thermal aging for 5000 cycles and were evaluated for marginal adaptation. Using a universal testing machine, the fracture resistance was tested under quasistatic loading (1 mm/min). Two-way ANOVA and the Tukey's post hoc test were employed for data analysis (p ≤ 0.05). The results of this study revealed that endocrowns without ferrule exhibited superior fracture strength than a 1 mm ferrule design p < 0.05, irrespective of the inlay depth. All designs with and without ferrule and all inlay depths showed clinically acceptable marginal and internal fit. The conventional endocrown design without ferrule and 2 mm inlay depth showed the lowest surface gap. The pulpal surface showed the highest discrepancy among all groups compared to the other surfaces. Endocrowns without ferrule are more conservative and have higher fracture strength than 1 mm ferrule designs; extending the inlay depth showed a significant increase in fracture resistance of the 1 mm ferrule design, but not for the conventional design without ferrule and 2 mm inlay depth. All groups exhibited a high auspicious fracture strength value for molar endocrown restorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a beat-based autoencoder is proposed for mapping photoplethysmography (PPG) to a single-lead electrocardiogram (single-lead ECG) signal. The main limiting factors represented in uncleaned data, subject dependency, and erroneous beat segmentation are regarded. The dataset is cleaned by a two-stage clustering approach. Rather than complete single–lead ECG signal reconstruction, a beat-based PPG-to-single-lead-ECG (PPG2ECG) conversion is introduced for providing a simple lightweight model that meets the computational capabilities of wearable devices. In addition, peak-to-peak segmentation is employed for alleviating errors in PPG onset detection. Furthermore, subject-dependent training is highlighted as a critical factor in training procedures because most existing work includes different beats/signals from the same subject's record in both training and testing sets. So, we provide a completely subject-independent model where the testing subjects' records are hidden in the training stage entirely, i.e., a subject record appears once either in the training or testing set, but testing beats/signals belong to records that never appear in the training set. The proposed deep learning model is designed for providing efficient feature extraction that attains high reconstruction quality over subject-independent scenarios. The achieved performance is about 0.92 for the correlation coefficient and 0.0086 for the mean square error for the dataset extracted/cleaned from the MIMIC II dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-core crosstalk (XT), caused by closely spaced cores, is the principal challenging issue of implementing multicore fiber (MCF)-based optical networks as it limits the network performance severely. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate using bipolar M-ary pulse position modulation (PPM) signaling in conjunction with the code-interleaving (CI) technique to address the inter-core XT problem in MCF-based optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) passive optical networks (PONs) with spectral-amplitude coding employed as the coding scheme. The bit error rate of the proposed network is derived based on an accurate analysis for the statistics of the decision random variables, i.e., mean and variance. The analysis accounts for inter-core XT, optical beat noise, and receiver noise. In addition, a comparison between the performance of core-multiplexed OCDMA PON adopting the newly proposed techniques, namely, unipolar on-off keying (OOK) with CI and bipolar 2-PPM with CI and that adopting unipolar OOK without CI, is presented under both data rate and average photons per bit constraints. The obtained results show that bipolar 2-PPM and CI are capable of reducing the inter-core XT impact on the performance of MCF-based OCDMA PONs. Furthermore, bipolar 2-PPM with CI outperforms other schemes in terms of the number of supportable users and energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]