Reflections on the Michigan splint and other intraocclusal devices

It seems obvious in retrospect that the treatment of disorders by interocclusal devices followed two paths: stabilization splints and functional orthopedic appliances. The dividing line between them is not always clear. Both have some function related to the position of the mandible. They may not differ significantly in their control of occlusal stability (e.g., telescoping devices anchored to stabilization splints). The stabilization splint, as well as other conservative measures, will play an increasing role in accepted therapy for TMD. The use of anterior repositioning devices for TMD, including MPD syndrome, will decrease. Research may provide answers that allow them to be used more specifically and predictably. Perhaps there will be but little change in their use where there is an association of TMD and Class II malocclusion. There will be an increase in the use of interocclusal devices for the treatment of snoring and obstructive apnea. Some additional directions seem to have emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s: In the absence of pain and significant debilitation, treatment for TMD, if any, is to be reversible. Prevention or aggravation of TMD should be practiced to the extent possible during dental procedures. One long-term, well-designed, prospective study indicated that the incidence and severity of TMD could be reduced by appropriate occlusal adjustment. There is a small, but nevertheless important minority of patients with TMD who progress to persistent pain and/or dysfunction. Initial management of the vast majority of patents with TMD should be use of noninvasive reversible therapies. Surgery is indicated in only a relatively small percentage of cases of TMD. Research on interocclusal devices should not terminate simply because they are in part dental devices (i.e., biomechanical forms of treatment). The diagnosis and treatment of TMD has been called a dilemma, especially for those patients with chronic pain for whom no treatment has been effective. However, it would be ill-advised to abandon what treatment is already known to be effective by allowing those few but psychosocially important patients with chronic pain to determine what should be done for the vast majority of patients with TMD: reversible forms of treatment, including physiotherapy, pharmacologicals, and the stabilization occlusal bite plane splint.     

Equivalent refractive index of MQW waveguides

In this paper, we have proposed some new numerical and semi-analytical methods for developing an equivalent three-layer model of an MQW waveguide. The waveguiding properties like effective index, field distribution, and fractional power within the core of the waveguide of these equivalent structures are compared with those of previously reported equivalent methods. These results are also compared with the results obtained from the exact multilayer analysis of the MQW waveguide. The waveguiding properties are accurately predicted by the semi-analytical method using variational analysis, and the computational effort is significantly reduced. The use of the three-layer equivalent is illustrated in obtaining an estimation of the waveguide losses and is used to study the effect of nonlinearity     

Fibular shortening in poliomyelitis

We have determined the nucleotide and encoded amino acid sequences of the capsid, membrane precursor, membrane, envelope, and nonstructural NS1 protein genes of a dengue-2 virus (D2-04) isolated from a patient in Hainan, China. The sequenced region contains a gene organization similar to that of other flaviviruses. The overall amino acid sequence similarity between D2-04 and other dengue-2 viruses is greater than 92%, whereas that between D2-04 and members of the other dengue serotypes is about 65%.     

Priority-based joint EDF–RM scheduling algorithm for individual real-time task on distributed systems

The Journal of Supercomputing - Multiple tasks arrive in the distributed systems that can be executed in either parallel or sequential manner. Before the execution, tasks are scheduled prioritywise...     

Classification of hyperspectral remote sensing image via rotation-invariant local binary pattern-based weighted generalized closest neighbor

The Journal of Supercomputing - In this article, the authors suggested a rotation-invariant local binary pattern-based weighted generalized closest neighbor (RILBP-WGCN) method for HSI...     

Distributed and incremental travelling salesman algorithm on time-evolving graphs

The Journal of Supercomputing - Travelling salesman problem (TSP) is a graph problem that has been widely used in many applications, especially for transportation and logistics. Because TSP is a NP...     

A novel hybrid deep learning method with cuckoo search algorithm for classification of arrhythmia disease using ECG signals

Neural Computing and Applications - This work presents an efficient hybridized approach for the classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) samples into crucial arrhythmia classes to detect heartbeat...     

Robust pose invariant face recognition using coupled latent space discriminant analysis

We propose a novel pose-invariant face recognition approach which we call Discriminant Multiple Coupled Latent Subspace framework. It finds the sets of projection directions for different poses such that the projected images of the same subject in different poses are maximally correlated in the latent space. Discriminant analysis with artificially simulated pose errors in the latent space makes it robust to small pose errors caused due to a subject’s incorrect pose estimation. We do a comparative analysis of three popular latent space learning approaches: Partial Least Squares (PLSs), Bilinear Model (BLM) and Canonical Correlational Analysis (CCA) in the proposed coupled latent subspace framework. We experimentally demonstrate that using more than two poses simultaneously with CCA results in better performance. We report state-of-the-art results for pose-invariant face recognition on CMU PIE and FERET and comparable results on MultiPIE when using only four fiducial points for alignment and intensity features.