One of the most common complications of diabetes is diabetic foot ulcer. Diabetic ulcers do not heal easily due to diabetic neuropathy and reduced blood flow, and nonhealing ulcers may progress to gangrene, which necessitates amputation of the patient's foot. This study attempted to develop a new cell-based therapy for nonhealing diabetic ulcers using a full-thickness skin defect in a rat model of type 2 diabetes and obesity. Allogeneic adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) were harvested from the inguinal fat of normal rats, and ASC sheets were created using cell sheet technology and transplanted into full-thickness skin defects in Zucker diabetic fatty rats. The results indicate that the transplantation of ASC sheets combined with artificial skin accelerated wound healing and vascularization, with significant differences observed 2 weeks after treatment. The ASC sheets secreted large amounts of several angiogenic growth factors in vitro, and transplanted ASCs were observed in perivascular regions and incorporated into the newly constructed vessel structures in vivo. These results suggest that ASC sheets accelerate wound healing both directly and indirectly in this diabetic wound-healing model. In conclusion, allogeneic ASC sheets exhibit potential as a new therapeutic strategy for the treatment of diabetic ulcers.

ÐThis paper describes a new method to recover a drawing order of a handwritten script from a static 2D image. The script should be written in a single stroke and may include double-traced lines. After the script is scanned in and preprocessed, we apply our recovery method which consists of two phases. In the first phase, we globally analyze the graph constructed from the skeletal image and label the graph by determining the types of each edge. In the second phase, we trace the graph from the start vertex to the end vertex using the labeling information. This method does not enumerate the possible cases, for example, by solving the traveling salesman problem and, therefore, does not cause a combinatorial explosion even if the script is very complex. By recovering a drawing order of a handwritten script, the temporal information can be recovered from a static 2D image. Hence, this method will be used as a bridge from the offline handwriting character recognition problem to the online one.

Therapeutic, III.

Various brain regions were associated with each component of the CDT. These results suggest that an assessment of these components is useful for the detection of localization of brain damage.

Purpose To evaluate pineal volume in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD), patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and healthy control subjects and to correlate the findings with results of cognitive testing and brain parenchymal volumes. Materials and Methods The ethics committee approved this retrospective study. The participants included 63 patients with AD, 33 patients with MCI, and 24 healthy control subjects. There were 36 men and 84 women, with a mean age (±standard deviation) of 76.7 years ± 7.6. The pineal gland volume and pineal parenchymal volume were measured by using three-dimensional volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (T1-weighted magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo sequence; spatial resolution, 0.9 × 0.98 × 0.98 mm). With age and total intracranial volume as covariates, analysis of covariance with the Bonferroni post hoc test was performed to compare the pineal volume among the AD, MCI, and control groups. Multiple regression analyses were used to identify predictor variables associated with pineal volume. Results The mean pineal gland volume in patients with AD (72.3 mm ± 5.4; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 61.5 mm, 83.1 mm) was significantly smaller than that in control subjects (102.1 mm ± 9.0; 95% CI: 84.4 mm, 119.9 mm) (P = .019). The mean pineal parenchymal volume in patients with AD (63.8 mm ± 4.2; 95% CI: 55.4 mm, 72.1 mm) was significantly smaller than that in patients with MCI (81.7 mm ± 5.8; 95% CI: 70.3 mm, 93.1 mm; P = .044) and control subjects (89.1 mm ± 6.9; 95% CI: 75.4 mm, 102.9 mm; P = .009). Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the Mini-Mental State Examination score and total intracranial volume were significant independent predictors of both pineal gland volume and pineal parenchymal volume (P < .001). Conclusion Pineal volume reduction showed correlation with cognitive decline and thus might be useful to predict cognitive decline in patients with AD. RSNA, 2017.