BioMed research international
-
The aim of this paper was to develop a computer assisted tissue classification (granulation, necrotic, and slough) scheme for chronic wound (CW) evaluation using medical image processing and statistical machine learning techniques. The red-green-blue (RGB) wound images grabbed by normal digital camera were first transformed into HSI (hue, saturation, and intensity) color space and subsequently the "S" component of HSI color channels was selected as it provided higher contrast. Wound areas from 6 different types of CW were segmented from whole images using fuzzy divergence based thresholding by minimizing edge ambiguity. ⋯ The performance of the wound area segmentation protocol was further validated by ground truth images labeled by clinical experts. It was observed that SVM with 3rd order polynomial kernel provided the highest accuracies, that is, 86.94%, 90.47%, and 75.53%, for classifying granulation, slough, and necrotic tissues, respectively. The proposed automated tissue classification technique achieved the highest overall accuracy, that is, 87.61%, with highest kappa statistic value (0.793).
-
Apoptosis associates with secondary brain injury after traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study posits that serum leukocyte apoptosis levels in acute TBI are predictive of outcome. ⋯ There are varying degrees of apoptosis in patients following TBI and in healthy individuals. Such differential expression suggests that apoptosis in different leukocyte subsets plays an important role in outcome following injury.
-
MIDAS is a valid and reliable short questionnaire for assessment of headache related disability. Linguistic validation of Persian MIDAS and assessment of psychometric properties between tension type headache (TTH) and migraine were the aims of this study. ⋯ Persian MIDAS is a valid and reliable questionnaire for migraine and TTH that can differentiate between episodic headache and chronic headache.
-
A new method for feedback on the quality of chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Quality of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) improves through the use of CPR feedback devices. Most feedback devices integrate the acceleration twice to estimate compression depth. However, they use additional sensors or processing techniques to compensate for large displacement drifts caused by integration. ⋯ For 3 s analysis intervals the 95% levels of agreement between the method and the gold standard were within -1.64-1.67 min(-1) and -1.69-1.72 mm, respectively. Accurate feedback on chest compression rate and depth is feasible applying spectral techniques to the acceleration. The method avoids additional techniques to compensate for the integration displacement drift, improving accuracy, and simplifying current accelerometer-based devices.
-
The strategy to treat asymptomatic angiographic vasospasm following subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is controversial. In this study we review our consecutive vasospasm series and discuss an adequate treatment strategy for asymptomatic vasospasm. ⋯ Prophylactic IA injection of vasodilator in cases of asymptomatic vasospasm can produce symptomatic vasospasm.