Hyaluronic acid (HA) is one of the essential components of extracellular matrix, which plays a predominant role in tissue morphogenesis, cell migration, differentiation, and adhesion. Bone allografts are frequently used to repair and reconstruct bone defects. In this study, two cavities of 3 mm diameter and depth have been created in the right tibia of 30 mature rabbits in accordance with the principles of general surgery. One of the cavities in the tibia is filled with HA and bone graft and the other is filled with only spongiosal bone graft, for the purpose of control. On the 20th, 30th, and 40th days, rabbits have been sacrificed in equal numbers and defective regions have been extracted. The Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to the data obtained in the result of histopathologic survey of specimens. In conclusion, the cavities that have been filled with HA and bone graft have shown higher scores than the control group during every period of the study.

No abstract

Treatments with bismuth-containing quadruple therapy (QT), sequential therapy (ST), or concomitant therapy (CT) have been proposed as empirical first-line regimens for Helicobacter pylori. We compared the efficacy and tolerability of 10 days bismuth-containing quadruple QT, 10 days ST, and 10 days CT with as first-line treatments for H. pylori in a randomized crossover study. The subjects were randomly divided into three groups. The first 130 patients were treated with rabeprazole, bismuth potassium citrate, metronidazole, and tetracycline for 10 days. The second 130 patients in the sequential group were treated with rabeprazole and amoxicillin for 5 days, and then rabeprazole, clarithromycin, and metronidazole for an additional 5 days. The last 130 patients in the concomitant group were treated with rabeprazole, amoxicillin, clarithromycin, and metronidazole for 10 days. H. pylori eradication was confirmed by urea breath test at 6 weeks. The primary outcome was eradication rates of first-line treatment by intention to treat and per protocol (PP) analyzes. There was no difference between the average ages and the male/female ratio of the groups. The PP analysis was performed on 121, 119, and 118 patients in the QT, ST, and CT groups, respectively. In the PP analysis, the successful eradication 94.2% (114/121), 95.0% (113/119), and 95.8% (113/118) the QT, ST, and CT groups, respectively. There was no significant difference among the three groups (p = 0.86). 10 days QT, ST, and CT are highly effective as empirical first-line therapies for H. pylori in the region with high clarithromycin resistance.

No abstract

A novel method to detect human falls in depth videos is presented in this paper. A fast and robust shape sequence descriptor, namely the Silhouette Orientation Volume (SOV), is used to represent actions and classify falls. The SOV descriptor provides high classification accuracy even with a combination of simple associated models, such as Bag-of-Words and the Naïve Bayes classifier. Experiments on the public SDU-Fall dataset show that this new approach achieves up to 91.89% fall detection accuracy with a single-view depth camera. The classification rate is about 5% higher than the results reported in the literature. An overall accuracy of 89.63% was obtained for the six-class action recognition, which is about 25% higher than the state of the art. Moreover, a perfect silhouette-based action recognition rate of 100% is achieved on the Weizmann action dataset.

Our results revealed that there was no change in the LA mechanical reservoir functions, but improved conduit function and impaired contractility functions early and in the mid-term after percutaneous closure of ASD and decreased AEMD only in the mid-term.

Long-term systemic use of corticosteroids causes osteoporosis and increased risk of fracture. However, the effect of short-term use of corticosteroids on bone healing is not well defined. The aim of the present study was to test the influence of short-term systemic corticosteroid therapy on bone healing. Standardized bone defects (2 mm diameter) were formed in the middle of the femur in 40 male rats. Rats were divided into two groups; control group (n = 20) and prednisone-treated group (n = 20). Subcutaneous injection of either sterile normal saline (control) or 0.020 mg kg(-1) dose of prednisone was administered just before surgery and thereafter daily for 3 days. Histopathological cross sections were taken 1, 2, 3 and 4 weeks after surgery. There was no statistically significant difference between the prednisone group and the control group. No inhibitory effects were seen following short-term corticosteroid treatment.

The extremity preservation rate was related to the time delay between the onset of symptoms and surgical intervention.