BioMed research international
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To investigate whether P. acnes could induce disc degeneration and Modic changes when inoculated into the discs of rabbits. ⋯ Compared to S. aureus, the pathological change caused by P. acnes would be considered as Modic-I change and disc degeneration rather than a discitis.
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Background. Surgical treatment of proximal humeral fractures (PHF) in osteoporotic bone of elderly patients is challenging. The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate the clinical and radiological outcome after percutaneous reduction and internal fixation of osteoporotic PHF in geriatric patients using the semirigid Humerusblock device. ⋯ In those patients other treatment strategies should be considered. Study design. Therapeutic retrospective case series (evidence-based medicine (EBM) level IV).
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The aim of this study was to directly compare the clinical outcomes of posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) and minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (MIS-TLIF) in three-level lumbar spinal stenosis. This retrospective study involved a total of 60 patients with three-level degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis who underwent MIS-TLIF or PLIF from January 2010 to February 2012. Back and leg visual analog scale (VAS), Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), and Short Form-36 (SF-36) scale were used to assess the pain, disability, and health status before surgery and postoperatively. ⋯ However, significantly less blood loss and shorter hospital stay were observed in MIS-TLIF group (P < 0.05). Moreover, patients undergoing MIS-TLIF had significantly lower back VAS than those in PLIF group at 6-month follow-up (P < 0.05). Compared with PLIF, MIS-TLIF might be a prior option because of noninferior efficacy as well as merits of less blood loss and quicker recovery in treating three-level lumbar spinal stenosis.
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Background. Nosocomial pneumonia due to carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (CRGNB) is a growing concern because treatment options are limited and the mortality rate is high. The effect of tigecycline (TGC) on nosocomial pneumonia due to CRGNB in patients who have received inappropriate initial empiric antibiotic treatment (IIAT) is unclear. ⋯ High-dose TGC therapy had a higher clinical success rate [65.0% (13/20) versus 18.2% (2/11), P = 0.023] and a lower ICU mortality rate [30.0% (6/20) versus 72.7% (8/11), P = 0.031] than the standard-dose therapy. Conclusions. TGC, especially a high-dose regimen, might be a justifiable option for critically ill patients with nosocomial pneumonia due to CRGNB who have received IIAT when the options for these patients are limited.
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The state-of-the-art methods for protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction are primarily based on kernel methods, and their performances strongly depend on the handcraft features. In this paper, we tackle PPI extraction by using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and propose a shortest dependency path based CNN (sdpCNN) model. ⋯ We performed experiments on standard Aimed and BioInfer datasets, and the experimental results demonstrated that our approach outperformed state-of-the-art kernel based methods. In particular, by tracking the sdpCNN model, we find that sdpCNN could extract key features automatically and it is verified that pretrained word embedding is crucial in PPI task.