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Background The piriformis muscle is normally involved in piriformis syndrome and can be treated with botulinum neurotoxin using several different injection methods. However, definitive injection guidelines for the muscle have not been reported previously. Aims This study aimed to determine the ideal area for injections based on the intramuscular nerve distribution as obtained using a modified Sihler's staining technique. Materials and methods A modified Sihler's method was applied to the piriformis muscle in 15 specimens. The intramuscular arborization areas were identified based on two anatomical landmarks: (a) the lateral border of the sacrum bone and (b) the greater trochanter. Results The nerve entry point for both piriformis muscles was found in the area between the lateral border of the sacrum and one-fifth of the distance toward the greater trochanter. The intramuscular nerve distribution for the piriformis muscle had the largest arborization patterns between one-fifth and two-fifths of the distance from the sacrum to the greater trochanter. The piriformis muscle was tendinous from two-fifths of the distance to the greater trochanter. Discussion This study has yielded suggested optimal injection locations for the piriformis muscle relative to external anatomical landmarks. Conclusion Clinicians can use these guidelines to ensure the effectiveness of not only botulinum neurotoxin injections but also other agents such as steroids, anesthetics, and normal saline. These guidelines will also help to avoid adverse outcomes of injection treatments.

Abstract. Background: Youth suicides have diverse characteristics according to the young people's developmental stages. Warning signs and communication of suicidal intent can be vague among early adolescents, while mental health problems may be more evidently related to suicidal ideation in older adolescents. Understanding the developmental characteristics of youth suicide is necessary for effective suicide prevention. Aims: We explored the differences between children and adolescents who died by suicide and the characteristics of these young people as observed by their school teachers. Method: We analyzed teachers' mandatory postmortem reports of suicides among 308 Korean students. We compared: suicide-related information including personal, familial, and school factors; stressful life events; and participation in interventions among elementary, middle, and high school students who died by suicide. We also assessed the distribution of student suicides per month. Results: Suicide among elementary school students increased during school vacations, and suicide among middle and high school students increased during the school semester. According to the teachers' reports, elementary school students who died by suicide were more extroverted and had better academic achievements than their high school peers, and had significantly lower levels of substance/tobacco use. Elementary school students who died by suicide showed significantly less academic stress and use of external professional help than did other groups. Limitations: Because this research is based on mandatory teacher reports, the subjective opinions of teachers may have affected the reliability of the data. Suicide by out-of-school youth was not included. Conclusion: School-based suicide prevention should be implemented in accordance with young people's developmental characteristics.

OBJECTIVE We aimed to investigate the influence of area-level factors on adolescent suicide and to determine which variables differ according to age and sex. METHODS We selected variables that were available for collection through an online database from 2005 to 2015 in the Korean Statistical Information Service and the Korea Labor Institute. We used administrative districts of Korea in 2017 for geographical classification. We examined the relationships between regional suicide rates and area-level variables in male and female subjects aged 10-14 years and 15-19 years. In addition, we analyzed area-level variables in adolescents aged 15-19 years according to sex. RESULTS Our findings indicated that several area-level variables affected adolescent suicide rates, varying according to age and sex. Economic problems were shown to be more associated with suicide in male adolescents than in female adolescents. On the other hand, social fragmentation and health services were shown to be more associated with suicide in females. CONCLUSION Suicide in adolescents was attributable to area-level factors such as economic status, social fragmentation, and community health services. By identifying area-level variables affecting adolescent suicide rates, we will be able to contribute to implement mental health policies related to adolescent suicide.

A teacher as a suicide prevention gatekeeper has an important role in identifying suicide risks and warning signs in students. After a student's suicide, teachers in Korea have to write a student suicide case report based on their direct and indirect observations. In particular, the section 'characteristic of student suicide' of this report contains valuable information about the suicide; however, it is unstructured, and thus cannot be analyzed using conventional statistical methods. We aimed to identify the characteristics of observed Korean students, who have committed suicide, using text mining techniques as well as to improve our understanding of suicidal behaviors in the school contexts. Therefore, a series of text mining techniques: topic analysis, word correlation, and word frequency analysis, in three problem categories: health, school, and family problems, were used to analyze the characteristics of student suicides. Topic analysis showed that only 30% of the student suicide case reports identified problematic student characteristics related to suicide. Correlations between words showed that words in one problem category were often correlated with words in other problem categories. Frequency word analysis showed that the three problem categories varied across gender and school levels. These results provide interesting insights into the characteristics of suicides among Korean students and important implications for suicide intervention in the education field.

The primary purpose was to examine the relationship between the muscle architectural characteristics of short and long-distance cyclist—including muscle thickness, fascicle angle, and fascicle length—of the anterior thigh and posterior leg and its impact in 20-s cycling power. The secondary purpose was to clarify the muscle variables that predict the cycling power by using ultrasonography to measure the muscle architectural characteristics. Twenty-four varsity cyclists participated in this study, of whom 12 were short-distance cyclists and 12 were long-distance cyclists. B-mode ultrasonography was used to measure muscle architecture parameters. A cycle ergometer was used to measure the cycling power. The rectus femoris, vastus medialis, and medial head of gastrocnemius were significantly thicker in short-distance cyclists than in long-distance cyclists at every site (p

Introduction This study proposes an ideal botulinum toxin injection point of the trapezius muscle for shoulder line contouring, pain management, and functional impairment. This study describes the intramuscular nerve branching in the trapezius muscle, providing essential information for botulinum neurotoxin injection. Method A modified Sihler's method was performed on the trapezius muscles (16 specimens). The intramuscular arborization areas were elucidated regarding the external occipital protuberance superiorly, spinous process of the 12th thoracic vertebra inferiorly and acromion of the scapula. Result The intramuscular neural distribution for the superior, middle, and inferior regions of the trapezius muscle had the greatest arborized patterns in the horizontal 1/5-2/5 and vertical 2/10-4/10 sections, the horizontal 1/5-3/5 and vertical 4/10-5/10 sections, and the horizontal 1/5-2/5 and vertical 5/10-7/10 sections, respectively. Discussion We propose that BoNT treatments should be directed to the horizontal 1/5-2/5 and vertical 2/10-4/10 sections of the superior trapezius, the horizontal 1/5-3/5 and vertical 4/10-5/10 sections of the middle trapezius and the horizontal 1/5-2/5 and vertical 5/10-7/10 sections of the inferior trapezius. Additionally, injective treatment at the horizontal 2/5-3/5 and vertical 2/10-4/10 nerve entry points should be avoided to prevent nerve trunk damage causing paralysis. According to our guidelines, clinicians can ensure minimal dose injections and fewer adverse effects in botulinum neurotoxin injective treatment.

Background We investigated the characteristics of adolescents who committed suicide in South Korea, and how these characteristics differed by gender. Method Data from middle and high school students who committed suicide between 2014 and 2016 were analyzed. We evaluated differences in suicide method and place, personal characteristics, and school life characteristics by gender using the Chi square test and t test. Results Jumping from a high place was the most common suicide method for both male and female students. A significantly greater proportion of female adolescents had experienced depressive symptoms, previous self-injury, previous suicide attempts, and had problems with school attendance and peers. Additionally, they were more likely to be classified as high risk according to a school-based mental health screening test and to utilize professional mental health treatment services. Conclusion Our results demonstrate that adolescents who committed suicide exhibited gender differences in personal characteristics and school life. These characteristics might aid in the development of adolescent suicide policies and intervention programs. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13034-019-0274-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Contents of student suicide case report.

Sensory prediction errors are thought to update memories in motor 1 adaptation, but the role of performance errors is largely unknown. To dissociate these errors, we manipulated visual feedback during fast shooting movements under visuomotor rotation. Participants were instructed to strategically correct for performance errors by shooting to a neighboring target in one of four conditions: following the movement onset, the main target, the neighboring target, both targets, or none of the targets disappeared. Participants in all conditions experienced a drift away from the main target following the strategy. In conditions where the main target was shown, participants often tried to minimize performance errors caused by the drift by generating corrective movements. However, despite differences in performance during adaptation between conditions, memory decay in a delayed washout block was indistinguishable between conditions. Our results thus suggest that, in visuomotor adaptation, sensory predictions errors, but not performance errors, update the slow, temporally stable, component of motor memory.

A simple, sensitive, and rapid HPLC method was developed to analyze bakuchiol and two furocoumarins (psoralen and angelicin) simultaneously in bakuchiol extracts from Psoralea corylifolia seeds. The analysis was performed within 30 min on a phenyl-hexyl column using gradient elution with a mobile phase composed of water and methanol with UV detection at 260 nm for bakuchiol and 246 nm for psoralen and angelicin. The method was validated with respect to linearity (r2 > 0.99 for all components), accuracy (>95% for all components), and precision (

This paper challenges the problem of estimating the original red-green-blue (RGB) image from a black-and-white (B&W) halftone image with homogeneously distributed dot patterns. To achieve this goal, training RGB images are converted into color-embedded gray images using the conventional reversible color to gray conversion method, and then converted into halftone images using error diffusion in order to produce the corresponding B&W halftone images. The proposed method is composed of two processing steps: (1) restoring the color-embedded gray image from an input B&W halftone image using a sparse linear representation between the image patch pairs obtained from the images and (2) restoring the original colors from the color-embedded gray image using the reversible color to gray conversion and linear color mapping methods. The proposed method successfully demonstrates the recovery of colors similar to the originals. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods. It is suggested that our method is not only successfully applied for the color recovery of the B&W halftone image, but that it can also be extended to various applications including color restoration of printed image, hardcopy data hiding, and halftone color compression.

To improve the quality of images created by a medical imaging device, the present study developed a system that converts the histogram of the images in real time in GPU, which is high-speed graphic parallel processor. Unlike general images, medical images are high-resolution and thus fine difference in a contrast value to an image can result in different information for a clinical purpose. Therefore, it is important to provide various contrast values to images. In this study, CUDA program of parallel processing was designed to process histogram and extension functions in real time, and then the contrast values to images were converted by change of histogram. In the experiment, various histogram functions were applied to x-ray images imported from DR device with a developed CUDA program.

What we see does not totally rely on the external source, rather we actively interpret visual objects through moving our eye and establish possible hypothesis. It is a controversial how global percept can be achieved from the local information. In this paper, we investigate the perceptual construction (or reconstruction) from local information. Using a computational method, so-called Label Consistent K-Singular Value Decomposition, we tried to estimate perceptual states of ambiguous figure.

In SDN, a network can be controlled using in-band or out-of-band control networks. Most of current research for SDN focuses on an out-of-band network. In this network, the controller is directly connected to every router or switch in one-to-one manner. However, out-of-band networks are expensive to build due to the requirement of a separate network and cannot provide integration with previous network infrastructure such as legacy, DSL, and WSN, etc. Also, this network may not be feasible in realistic scenarios. To solve the above problem, SDN is required to be implemented for an in-band network. Because control and data traffics share the same network links, fast recovery is one of important problems in SDN. In this paper, we propose a fast recovery scheme for in-band OpenFlow networks. We design a detour planning to reduce the control message overhead. To evaluate performance of proposed scheme, we have developed laboratory scale in-band SDN testbed. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme reduces control overhead and guarantees the network QoS.

A comparative study of a cued face search task is presented in this paper. Human participants and a computer model carried out a task in which they were required to locate a color-cued target face. Human-generated eye fixations and scanpaths were compared with those generated by the computational model. Throughout the comparison, we considered the similarities and dissimilarities between the two systems’ performances. Their results show that the eye fixations in a valid cue search are highly correlated with the computer-generated fixation points in a valid cue search but not to those in random and invalid cue searches. Moreover, the comparison between human- and computer-generated scanpaths showed that the scanpath that links the fixation points is not randomly generated. Our results imply that eye movement is accomplished not only by cue-driven activation, but also by a spatial strategy.

Within a smart space where users are provided with proactive services and enhanced interaction experiences, context-awareness is one of the fundamental requirements. Upon representing and deriving higher-level contextual knowledge from sensory observations, especially where the target environment involves physical spaces and objects, their spatial characteristics are the major elements for monitoring and understanding meaningful contexts and their changes. This paper outlines our context representation and reasoning approach based on spatial objects, along with a layered knowledge model for contextual knowledgebase and the reasoning process for higher-level context generation.

This study proposes MFER design, an international standard for saving measured vital signs while simultaneously monitoring, for health care. The proposed method does not record vital signs as a single file, but rather, after setting header information on vital signs, it reads the measured signs in regular intervals, which are shown in a screen and saved along with header information. Shorter the interval of saving, more similar it becomes to real time monitoring. After measurement is complete, the file fragments are aggregated into a single file, including the header information. MFER constructed in this study in real time monitoring design shows that it can be efficiently used in monitoring and saving of vital signs for health care.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is an IP mobility protocol. In a PMIPv6 domain, local mobility anchor is involved in control as well as data communication. To ease the load on a mobility anchor and avoid single point of failure, the PMIPv6 standard provides the opportunity of having multiple mobility anchors. In this paper, we propose a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based solution to provide load balancing among mobility anchors, in a SDN based PMIPv6 domain. In the proposed solution, a mobility controller performs acts as a central control entity, and performs load monitoring on the mobility anchors. On detecting the load crossing over a threshold for a certain mobility anchor, the controller moves some traffic from highly loaded mobility anchor to relatively less loaded mobility anchor. Analytical model and primitive performance evaluation of the proposed solution is presented in this paper, which demonstrates 5% and 40% improvement in uplink and downlink traffic disruption periods, respectively

Directional antennas offer many potential advantages for wireless networks such as increased network capacity, extended transmission range and reduced energy consumption. Exploiting these advantages requires new protocols and mechanisms at various communication layers to intelligently control the directional antenna system. With directional antennas, many trivial mechanisms, such as neighbor discovery, become challenging since communicating parties must agree on where and when to point their directional beams to communicate. In this paper, we propose a fully directional neighbor discovery protocol called Sectored-Antenna Neighbor Discovery (SAND) protocol. SAND is designed for sectored-antennas, a low-cost and simple realization of directional antennas, that utilize multiple limited beamwidth antennas. Unlike many proposed directional neighbor discovery protocols, SAND depends neither on omnidirectional antennas nor on time synchronization. SAND performs neighbor discovery in a serialized fashion allowing individual nodes to discover all potential neighbors within a predetermined time. SAND guarantees the discovery of the best sector combination at both ends of a link, resulting in more robust and higher quality links between nodes. Finally, SAND reliably gathers the neighborhood information in a centralized location, if needed, to be used by centralized networking protocols. The effectiveness of SAND has been assessed via simulation studies and real hardware implementation.

The question of whether Posner's beam is the same as Treisman's glue is addressed to construct a computational model that integrates both target and cue information. The cueing and conjunction search tasks are conducted to analyze a common process that may be underlying the tasks. The dynamic interaction between target and cue information produces attentional benefit- and cost-based in the cueing task. Furthermore, the search order for target candidates in a conjunction search task is determined through the integration of target and cue information, which is basically the same as in the cueing task. Our simulations suggest that consistency (or validity) is considered as a computational process that may be commonly involved in the both tasks.