Vogel McCullough (quilttwine79)

This paper represents an unsupervised approach to detect the positions of S1, S2 heart sound events in a Phonocardiogram (PCG) recording. Insufficiency of correctly annotated heart sound database drives us to investigate unsupervised techniques. Gammatone filter bank features are used to characterize the spectral pattern of fundamental heart sound events from noise contaminated PCG data. Selleck 17-DMAG An unsupervised spectral clustering technique is employed for segmentation of S1/S2 and non-S1/S2 heart sound events. A Feature winning score is computed to identify the S1/S2 and non-S1/S2 frames. Finally, time based threshold is applied to detect the accurate positions of S1 and S2 heart sounds. The performance of spectral clustering is compared with other clustering methods. The proposed method offers a maximum F1-score of 98% and 92.5% for normal and abnormal PCG data respectively on 2016 PhysioNet/CinC challenge dataset. The heart sound annotation algorithm provided by PhysioNet has been used as the ground truth after hand correction. Hypophosphatasia (HPP) is the rare, inherited, metabolic bone disease characterized by low activity of the tissue-nonspecific isoenzyme of alkaline phosphatase (TNSALP) leading to excess extracellular inorganic pyrophosphate (PPi) and pyridoxal 5'-phosphate (PLP). Asfotase alfa is the human recombinant enzyme-replacement therapy that replaces deficient TNSALP. However, there is limited information concerning the appropriate dose of asfotase alfa for adult patients with pediatric-onset HPP. Thus, we evaluated the pharmacodynamics and safety/tolerability of different doses of asfotase alfa in such patients. This 13-week, Phase 2a, open-label study enrolled adults (aged ≥18years) with pediatric-onset HPP. They were randomized 111 to receive a single subcutaneous dose of asfotase alfa (0.5, 2.0, or 3.0mg/kg) at Week 1, then 3 times per week (ie, 1.5, 6.0, or 9.0mg/kg/wk) starting at Week 3 for 7weeks. Key outcome measures included change from Baseline to before the third dose during Week 9 (trough) in plasma 1. Clinicaltrials.gov identifier NCT02797821.Osteocytes can resorb as well as replace bone adjacent to the expansive lacunar-canalicular system (LCS). Suppressed LCS remodeling decreases bone fracture toughness, but it is unclear how altered LCS remodeling impacts bone quality. The first goal of this review is to assess how LCS remodeling impacts LCS morphology as well as the composition and mechanical properties of surrounding bone tissue. The second goal is to compare tools available for the assessment of bone quality at length-scales that are physiologically-relevant to LCS remodeling. We find that changes to LCS morphology occur in response to a variety of physiological conditions and diseases and can be classified in two general phenotypes. In the 'aging phenotype', seen in aging and in some disuse models, the LCS is truncated and osteocytes apoptosis is increased. In the 'osteocytic osteolysis' phenotype, which is adaptive in some physiological settings and possibly maladaptive in others, the LCS enlarges and osteocytes generally maintain viability. Bone composition and mechanical properties vary near the osteocyte and change with at least some conditions that alter LCS morphology. However, few studies have evaluated bone composition and mechanical properties close to the LCS and so the impacts of LCS remodeling phenotypes on bone tissue quality are still undetermined. We summarize the current understanding of how LCS remodeling impacts LCS morphology, tissue-scale bone composition and mechanical properties, and whole-bone material properties. Tools are compared for assessing tissue-scale bone properties, as well as the resolution, advantages, and limitations of these techniques.The aim of this study was to investigate if the distribution of subchondral volumetric bone mineral density (vBMD) from peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) is related to