The objective of this study was to compare the safety and efficacy of 0.2% hyaluronic acid (HA) topical gel and dexamethasone topical ointment in the treatment of recurrent aphthous ulcers (RAU) in children. This retrospective observational study included 104 patients who had more than two episodes of oral aphthous ulcers per year and were treated with HA (n=52) or dexamethasone (n=52) from August 15, 2014 to September 3, 2018. Therapy efficacy was evaluated based on the ulcer size and pain score before versus 7 days after either therapy. The paired t-test, chi-squared test, and independent t-test were utilized for statistical analyses. There was no significant difference in ulcer size or pain score between the HA and dexamethasone groups, on day 1 or day 7. Both treatments were tolerated well and no side effects were reported. No significant differences in body temperature, respiration rate, pulse, or systolic/diastolic blood pressure were observed between the start (day 1) and end of treatment (day 7), for either treatment. HA and dexamethasone showed similar efficacy in reducing ulcer size and pain scores, and were tolerated equally well in children with RAU. Future high-quality studies with larger numbers of patients are needed to confirm our findings.
Low‐cost global positioning system (GPS) receivers installed in most vehicles and smart devices typically display tens of meters of error in their location data. A large amount of research effort has been made to increase the positioning accuracy of GPS receivers mostly by reducing errors with the help of auxiliary devices and/or methodologies such as differential GPSs, assisted GPSs, real‐time kinematic positioning, computer vision, etc, which result in a certain amount of cost increase. In this paper, we propose a new cooperative vehicular localization scheme based on vehicle‐to‐vehicle communication. The proposed scheme first estimates the distances between neighboring vehicles using the weighted least square of double difference scheme and uses a novel machine learning technique called constrained self‐organizing map (C‐SOM) with a set of adjusted GPS fixes to generate the final estimates of GPS locations with considerably lower errors. We also propose a new method of presenting training samples to address the issue of convergence failure that arises from the constraints imposed on the inter‐vehicular distances. We present simulation results that demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme over both the conventional SOM and the distributed location estimate algorithm.
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