Epidemiologic data regarding pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) have relied on registries from Western countries. We assessed the current status of PAH in the Korean population. The Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) claim database, which comprises nationwide medical insurance data of Koreans from 2008–2016, was assessed to determine the current status of PAH. Overall, 1,307 patients were newly diagnosed with PAH from 2008–2016 (0.0005%, annual incidence: 4.84 patients/1 million people/year). The mean age at diagnosis was 44±13 years (range 18–65) and patients were mostly women (n = 906, 69.3%). Cases of idiopathic PAH (51.6%) accounted for the largest proportion, followed by acquired PAH (APAH) associated with congenital heart disease (25.8%) and APAH with connective tissue disease (17.2%). Overall, 807 (61.7%) patients received a single PAH-specific treatment based on their last prescription, of which bosentan (50.6%) was the most frequently used. Only 240 (18.4%) patients received combination therapy, with the bosentan-beraprost combination (32.9%) being the most common. During the mean follow-up of 1.9 years, the 1-, 2-, 3-, and 5-year estimated survival rates were 85%, 62%, 54%, and 46%, respectively. The prevalence and incidence of PAH in the Korean population is currently comparable with that in previous registries. The 5-year survival rate was slightly higher in the Korean population than previously reported.
SummaryIdentification and tracking of dendritic spine morphology from two-dimensional time-lapsed images plays an important role in neurobiological research. Such analysis can enable us to derive a correlation between morphological characteristics and molecular mechanism of dendritic spine development and remodelling. Moreover, Neuronal morphology of hippocampal Cornu Ammonis 1 region is critical for understanding the Alzheimer's disease. Therefore, we need to extract and trace the dendritic spines accurately for examining their development and remodelling processes, which are related to functions of hippocampal Cornu Ammonis 1. There are some problems to be solved in related researches. Noise due to the properties of optical microscopes makes it difficult to identify and trace dendritic spines accurately. To solve these problems, in this paper we present a local spine detection technique minimizing noise influence in two-dimensional optical microscopy images. Also, we suggest an efficient mapping method for tracking the dynamics of dendritic spines to measure their morphological changes quantitatively. First, to utilize structural feature of spines, which are small protrusions of tree-like dendrites, we extract the tips of each dendritic branch and use this position as an initial contour position for a deformable model-based segmentation. We then use a geodesic active contour model to detect the spines accurately. Secondly, we apply an optical flow method, which takes into account both structure and movement of objects, to map every time-series image frame. Proposed method provides accurate measurements of dendritic spine length, volume, shape classification for time-lapse images of dendrites of hippocampal neurons. We compared the proposed Correspondence to: Myoung-Hee Kim, Medical
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