| Background: Patients with idiopathic scoliosis are exposed to approximately 25 radiographic examinations of their spine throughout the clinical follow-up using the Cobb angle. Several non-invasive and radiation-free methods have been proposed to measure scoliotic deformities, including the scoliometer. Objectives: To measure the intra-and interrater reliability of the scoliometer measurements, to assess the correlation of the values obtained by the scoliometer measurements with the Cobb angles obtained by radiography, and to assess the sensitivity and specificity of the scoliometer measurements for the different diagnostic criteria for the referral of idiopathic scoliosis. Method: Sixty-four patients were selected for the study: half with idiopathic scoliosis and half without. The 17 levels of the spine of each volunteer were measured with a scoliometer in the forward bending position. The measurements were performed three times on 42 volunteers by two different raters to obtain data for calculating the reliability values. Anteroposterior radiographs were taken to determine the Cobb angles, which were then compared with the highest trunk rotation value. Sensitivity and specificity were evaluated using radiograph criteria for referral: a Cobb angle of 10° and axial trunk rotation values between 5° and 10°. Results: Excellent intrarater reliability values and very good interrater reliability values were obtained. The correlation between the scoliometer measurements and radiograph analyses was considered good (r=0.7, p<0.05). The highest sensitivity value was for a trunk rotation of 5° at 87%. Conclusions: The scoliometer measurements showed a good correlation with the radiographic measurements.Keywords: physical therapy; scoliometer; scoliosis; spine; evaluation. HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLECoelho DM, Bonagamba GH, Oliveira AS. Scoliometer measurements of patients with idiopathic scoliosis. Braz J Phys Ther.

Background: An important parameter in cross-cultural adaptations, and concurrent validity are the relationships between the performance

Background:The scoliometer was developed to analyze the axial rotation of the trunk in patients with idiopathic scoliosis. However, there is

Objective: This study aimed to examine the prevalence of myofascial dysfunction in patients with low back pain, which is the area most frequently afflicted, and to quantify the pain threshold for these evaluations using an algometer. Method: We evaluated 70 patients with a history of chronic low back pain in search of trigger points that would elicit the patient's pain. The muscles tested were the quadratus lumborum, iliopsoas, gluteus maximus, medius, minimus, and piriformis. The prevalence of myofascial dysfunction was determined by the percentage of patients with trigger points. The pain threshold was determined by the average of three assessments of pressure for each trigger point. Results: The results showed that 90% of patients had myofascial dysfunction, 76% of whom had trigger points in the quadratus lumborum, 69% in the gluteus medius, 56% in the piriformis, 40% in the gluteus minimus, 31% in the iliopsoas, and 29% in the gluteus maximus. The pressure pain threshold of the quadratus lumborum was 1.71 kg/cm 2 , 2.39 kg/cm 2 for the gluteus medius, 2.34 kg/cm 2 for the piriformis, 2.58 kg/cm 2 for the gluteus minimus, 2.11 kg/cm 2 for the iliopsoas and 2.19 kg/cm 2 for the gluteus maximus. Conclusion: Our data demonstrate the high prevalence of this disorder and suggest that it deserves specific attention in the treatment of low back pain in patients with chronic pain.

The incidence of traumatic injuries of the upper limbs in a tertiary hospital has a wide variety. This is why the creation of a unified database becomes important-to know the patients' profile. Objective: This study sought to determine the profile of patients with traumatic injuries of the upper limbs, treated by Physical Therapy in Rehabilitation Center of the Clinics Hospital of Ribeirão Preto. Method: Two hundred and twenty-three patient records were evaluated (58 women and 116 men). They had an average age of 34.54 (± 19.05) years and were referred by the orthopedic clinic of this hospital. Results: Of the cases studied, wrist and hand injuries had the highest incidence (60.99%), followed by injuries of the shoulder (20.63%), elbow (12.55%), arm (3.59%) and forearm (2.24%). In injuries of wrist and hand, the trauma mechanism with the highest percentage was the motorcycle accident, associated with multiple handbone fractures. Falling down, motorcycle accidents, and falling off a ladder were the mechanisms of injury correlated with proximal humerus fractures, shoulder dislocations, and broken scapulas, respectively. Conclusion: The incidence of injury, trauma mechanism, and characteristics of the population was verified and further improvements in protocols for specific disorders and prevention can be made.

Texture mapping of 3D models using multiple images often results in textured meshes with unappealing visual artifacts known as texture seams. These artifacts can be more or less visible, depending on the color similarity between the used images. The main goal of this work is to produce textured meshes free of texture seams through a process of color correcting all images of the scene. To accomplish this goal, we propose two contributions to the state-of-the-art of color correction: a pairwise-based methodology, capable of color correcting multiple images from the same scene; the application of 3D information from the scene, namely meshes and point clouds, to build a filtering procedure, in order to produce a more reliable spatial registration between images, thereby increasing the robustness of the color correction procedure. We also present a texture mapping pipeline that receives uncorrected images, an untextured mesh, and point clouds as inputs, producing a final textured mesh and color corrected images as output. Results include a comparison with four other color correction approaches. These show that the proposed approach outperforms all others, both in qualitative and quantitative metrics. The proposed approach enhances the visual quality of textured meshes by eliminating most of the texture seams.

Background: Although photogrammetry is a widespread technique in the health field, despite of the methodological efforts distortions

Autonomous driving in urban environments requires intelligent systems that are able to deal with complex and unpredictable scenarios. Traditional modular approaches focus on dividing the driving task into standard modules, and then use rule-based methods to connect those different modules. As such, these approaches require a significant effort to design architectures that combine all system components, and are often prone to error propagation throughout the pipeline. Recently, end-to-end autonomous driving systems have formulated the autonomous driving problem as an end-to-end learning process, with the goal of developing a policy that transforms sensory data into vehicle control commands. Despite promising results, the majority of end-to-end works in autonomous driving focus on simple driving tasks, such as lane-following, which do not fully capture the intricacies of driving in urban environments. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a detailed comparison between end-to-end autonomous driving systems that tackle urban environments. This analysis comprises two stages: a) a description of the main characteristics of the successful end-to-end approaches in urban environments; b) a quantitative comparison based on two CARLA simulator benchmarks (CoRL2017 and NoCrash). Beyond providing a detailed overview of the existent approaches, we conclude this work with the most promising aspects of end-to-end autonomous driving approaches suitable for urban environments.INDEX TERMS autonomous driving, end-to-end, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, urban environments.