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Anterior nasal septum abscess is not a rare clinical disease entity. In terms of the etiologies of the disease, bacteria are obviously more common than fungi. Fungal culture and pathological examination are essential for diagnosis of a fungal abscess of the anterior nasal septum and the basis of prescription of antifungal agents. We report a 57-year-old male patient who came to our outpatient clinic due to refractory nasal congestion for 3 weeks despite receiving treatments by a local medical doctor. Radical surgery with postoperative adjuvant radiotherapy for the right buccal cancer was carried out 14 years ago. The patient has diabetes mellitus and the blood sugar level has been well controlled by oral hypoglycemic agents over the past several years. Computed tomography revealed an abscess in the anterior septum along with rhinosinusitis. Incision and drainage of the nasal septum abscess and functional endoscopic sinus surgery were carried out. Fungal culture and pathological examination confirmed a fungal abscess in the anterior nasal septum and fungal ball rhinosinusitis. Antibiotics and an antifungal agent were given, and the postoperative course was uneventful. A dialectical argument was made regarding the causal relationship between the fungal abscess of the anterior nasal septum and maxillary fungal ball sinusitis. A literature review of the previous case reports was carried out to elucidate the immune status of patients of this disease. In order to reach a rapid establishment of a fungal abscess of the anterior nasal septum, clinicians should keep this disease in mind and remain vigilant. An immuno-compromised status is more commonly found in patients with fungal abscess of the anterior nasal septum and is another important characteristic of this disease. Prompt diagnosis and effective treatment are equally important in patients with lower immune status of this kind, and the latter is based on the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater image recognition is crucial for underwater detection applications. Fish classification has been one of the emerging research areas in recent years. Existing image classification models usually classify data collected from terrestrial environments. However, existing image classification models trained with terrestrial data are unsuitable for underwater images, as identifying underwater data is challenging due to their incomplete and noisy features. To address this, we propose a cross-modal augmentation via fusion (CMAF) framework for acoustic-based fish image classification. Our approach involves separating the process into two branches: visual modality and sonar signal modality, where the latter provides a complementary character feature. We augment the visual modality, design an attention-based fusion module, and adopt a masking-based training strategy with a mask-based focal loss to improve the learning of local features and address the class imbalance problem. Our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/WilkinsYang/CMAF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The mainstay of first-line treatment of parotid tumors is adequate surgical removal. The present study was conducted to compare the differences between parotidectomy with postauricular incision (PI) and modified Blair incision (MBI). Data Sources: A systematic search of PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library was performed. Methods: The data of interest and study characteristics were extracted from the included studies. Statistical analysis was performed with Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software (version 3; BioStat, Englewood, NJ). Dichotomous data and continuous data were analyzed by calculating the risk difference and the mean difference with the 95% confidence interval respectively. Results: Four retrospective studies were included in the present meta-analysis. The pooled results revealed that the cosmetic satisfaction score was higher in the PI group (MD = 2.67; 95% CI, 2.12 to 3.23) and that intraoperative blood loss was lower in the PI group (MD = −55.35; 95% CI, −100.33 to −10.36). The operative duration (MD = −5.15; 95% CI, −24.06 to 13.75), tumor size (MD = −.07; 95% CI, −.27 to.13) and incidences of common postoperative complications were comparable between the two groups. Conclusions: According to these findings, the use of PI in parotidectomies may be one of the options for improving cosmetic outcomes. This technique may be considered if oncological safety can be secured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]