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Kazunori Shinto,1 Akihito Minamide,1 Hiroshi Hashizume,1 Hiroyuki Oka,2 Ko Matsudaira,2 Hiroki Iwahashi,1 Yuyu Ishimoto,1 Masatoshi Teraguchi,1 Ryohei Kagotani,1 Yoshiki Asai,1 Shigeyuki Muraki,3 Toru Akune,4 Sakae Tanaka,5 Hiroshi Kawaguchi,6 Kozo Nakamura,7 Munehito Yoshida,1,8 Noriko Yoshimura,3,* Hiroshi Yamada1,* 1Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Wakayama Medical University, Wakayama City, Wakayama, Japan; 2Department of Medical Research and Management for Musculoskeletal Pain, 22nd Century Medical and Research Center, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan; 3Department of Preventive Medicine for Locomotive Organ Disorders, 22nd Century Medical and Research Center, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan; 4National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Tokorozawa City, Saitama, Japan; 5Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan; 6Tokyo Neurological Center, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan; 7Towa Hospital, Adachi-ku, Tokyo, Japan; 8Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Sumiya Orthopaedic Hospital, Wakayama City, Wakayama, Japan*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Hiroshi HashizumeDepartment of Orthopaedic Surgery, Wakayama Medical University, Wakayama City, 811-1 Kimiidera, Wakayama City, Wakayama 641-8510, JapanTel +81-73-441-0645Fax +81-73-448-3008Email hashizum@wakayama-med.ac.jpIntroduction: Facet effusion represents a magnetic resonance imaging finding suggesting accumulation of fluid in the facet joint, potentially predictive of lumbar spondylolisthesis and low back pain. However, its prevalence and epidemiological characteristics in the general population remain unclear, because previous studies only included patients or volunteers. The aim of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of facet effusion in the general population and to describe its potential relationship with spondylolisthesis and low back pain.Material and methods: Our study enrolled 808 participants from the Wakayama Spine Study who underwent magnetic resonance imaging investigations in supine position. Facet effusion was defined as a measurable, curvilinear, high-intensity signal within the facet joint, closely matching that of cerebrospinal fluid on the axial T2 images. We used standing lateral radiographs to diagnose L4 spondylolisthesis.Results: We found that the prevalence of facet effusion in the lumbar spine was 34.3%, which did not differ significantly between men and women (p=0.13) and did not tend to increase with age, either in men (p=0.81) or in women (p=0.65). Additionally, we found no significant association between facet effusion and low back pain (odds ratio, 1.04–1.49; 95% confidence interval, 0.57–2.64; p=0.17–0.85), or between facet effusion and L4 spondylolisthesis (odds ratio, 1.55; 95% confidence interval, 0.80–2.86; p=0.17). In a subset of participants with L4 spondylolisthesis, we also noted that facet effusion was not significantly associated with low back pain (odds ratio, 1.26; 95% confidence interval, 0.37–4.27; p=0.70).Discussion: This is the first study of facet effusion employing a population-based cohort, and the findings are thus expected to accurately describe the relationship between facet effusion and low back pain in the general population. We are planning a follow-up survey of the Wakayama Spine Study cohort to clarify the natural history of facet effusion and its relationship with clinical symptoms.Keywords: lumbar spine, facet effusion, low back pain, spondylolisthesis, epidemiology

Citrus Greening Disease or Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most serious citrus diseases in the world. There are no effective methods to cure this disease, and major countermeasures include detection of initial detection and cutting down  infected trees. Thus, HLB delivers serious impact to the agricultural economy.It is well known that an HLB infected tree shows specific symptoms like micronutrient deficiency. We revealed that iron (Fe) content of citrus leaves showing symptoms for HLB were decreased compared to non-infected leaves (Pustika et al., 2008, Masaoka et al., 2011), and the activity of Fe(III) chelate reductase in roost was reduced for HLB-infected citrus trees.In this research we tried to evaluate the effect of Fe application for recovery of infected trees. Fe additives were applied to HLB-infected citrus trees and the density of the HLB bacterium was evaluated using PCR. In some infected trees, the HLB bacterium became undetectable after treatment. This result suggests that Fe nutrient affects the ecosystems of the HLB bacterium.

The programmability and texture support of consumer graphics accelerators have drawn a lot of attention from visualization researchers, resultingin some very important advances in interactive volume data visualization. For many applications, scientists can now perform routine data visualization and analysis tasks on their desktop PC with a consumer graphics card that was designed mainly for playing video games. This paper presents several representative hardware-accelerated algorithms that have been introduced recently to address the problems of classification, illumination, non-photorealistic rendering, decoding, and image compositing in volume data visualization.

To seek a low-cost, extensible solution for the large-scale data visualization problem, a visual computing system is designed as a result of a collaboration between industry and government research laboratories in Japan, also with participation by researchers in U.S. This scalable system is a commodity PC cluster equipped with the VolumePro 500 volume graphics cards and a specially designed image compositing hardware. Our performance study shows such a system is capable of interactive rendering 5123 and 10243 volume data and highly scalable. In particular, with such a system, simulation and visualization can be performed concurrently which allows scientists to monitor and tune their simulations on the fly. In this paper, both the system and hardware designs are presented.

This article provides research on age-related body composition and density in Japanese youth. The authors found that body density was lowest in 11-year-old males, fat percentage in males was highest at 11 and lowest at 14 years; highest body fat for females was at 16 years, and lowest at 11 years; only 6.8% of males and 3.1% of females were obese; variance of fat-free mass explained 60% of male variance and 26% of female variance.

Body fat mass and various physiological features were taken from a wide cross-section of Japanese men and women. Fat mass was seen to increase for men around 20 years of age and continue to increase until age 50, while for women fat mass began to accumulate after 30 and continue until 50.