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International Journal of Surgery Case... Jun 2024Pierre Robin Sequence (PRS) is a rare and complex condition that often necessitates the collaboration of a full medical team from various disciplines to save the lives...
INTRODUCTION AND IMPORTANCE
Pierre Robin Sequence (PRS) is a rare and complex condition that often necessitates the collaboration of a full medical team from various disciplines to save the lives of babies with this genetic mutation, characterized by three clinical manifestations: glossoptosis, micrognathia, and cleft palate. Treatment primarily involves freeing upper airway obstructions and enhancing nutrition to allow the babies to lead a normal life. The lip-tongue adhesion procedure has been identified in medical literature as the recommended approach to addressing the issues associated with Pierre Robin sequence, and this method was successfully adopted in this case.
CASE PRESENTATION
2.5 kg, a newborn male baby with an abnormal position of the tongue and the inability to breastfeed and feed normally, without any medical, family, or social history. Following an examination, it was discovered that the baby had a posterior position of the tongue, micrognathia, and a cleft palate, leading to a diagnosis of Pierre Robin Sequence (Figs. 1, 2). Preparations for the baby's surgery have commenced. The baby was solely fed intravenously and provided with an oxygen mask for 25 days until all necessary consultations were completed and the baby's readiness for surgery and general anesthesia was confirmed. The surgical plan involved attaching the tongue to the lower lip to enhance the tongue's muscular strength, addressing the posterior position issue, and delaying the palate repair until the age of 1.5 years.
CLINICAL DISCUSSION
PRS is a clinical entity characterized by the triad of mandibular hypoplasia (small jaw), glossoptosis (hypotonic, retracted tongue) and respiratory obstruction that require a multidisciplinary team for initial evaluation and management and maintenance care. TLA is a simple and effective procedure for increasing the cross-sectional area of oropharyngeal port.
CONCLUSION
Handling airway obstruction in Pierre Robin Sequence involves various factors, and there is no universal treatment that can address all cases. Appropriate airway management strategies and feeding programs are essential for each individual with PRS. Our review highlights that TLA is a straightforward surgical procedure with minimal or no short-term complications. TLA should be considered as the primary surgical intervention when relief is needed.
PubMed: 38936141
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijscr.2024.109932 -
Marine Pollution Bulletin Jun 2024This study provided a systematic investigation of microplastics in Hong Kong's surface marine waters during the pandemic from 2019 to 2021. Microplastics (2.07 ± 4.00...
This study provided a systematic investigation of microplastics in Hong Kong's surface marine waters during the pandemic from 2019 to 2021. Microplastics (2.07 ± 4.00 particles/m) exhibited significant temporal variations with higher abundance in the wet season, without a consistent trend after the mandatory mask-wearing requirement was announced. The impact of pandemic restrictions on microplastic distribution was found to be relatively minor. However, significant correlations between microplastic abundances and rainfall highlighted the substantial contribution of local emissions through surface runoff. Notably, sites in closer proximity to the Pearl River Delta exhibited higher microplastic abundances, indicating their association with emission sources. The influence of rainfall and adverse weather on marine microplastic loads demonstrated different sensitivities among various locations but can generally last for one month. These results revealed the impact of seasonal rainfall on coastal microplastics and emphasized the need for efforts to reduce microplastic discharge from land-based sources.
PubMed: 38936000
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2024.116635 -
Nano Letters Jun 2024Magnetic topological materials with coexisting magnetism and nontrivial band structures exhibit many novel quantum phenomena, including the quantum anomalous Hall...
Magnetic topological materials with coexisting magnetism and nontrivial band structures exhibit many novel quantum phenomena, including the quantum anomalous Hall effect, the axion insulator state, and the Weyl semimetal phase. As a stoichiometric layered antiferromagnetic topological insulator, thin films of MnBiTe show fascinating even-odd layer-dependent physics. In this work, we fabricate a series of thin-flake MnBiTe devices using stencil masks and observe the Chern insulator state at high magnetic fields. Upon magnetic field training, a large exchange bias effect is observed in odd but not in even septuple layer (SL) devices. Through theoretical calculations, we attribute the even-odd layer-dependent exchange bias effect to the contrasting surface and bulk magnetic properties of MnBiTe devices. Our findings reveal the microscopic magnetic configuration of MnBiTe thin flakes and highlight the challenges in replicating the zero magnetic field quantum anomalous Hall effect in odd SL MnBiTe devices.
PubMed: 38935843
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.4c01597 -
PloS One 2024Analysis of stable isotopes in consumers is used commonly to study their ecological and/or environmental niche. There is, however, considerable debate regarding how...
Analysis of stable isotopes in consumers is used commonly to study their ecological and/or environmental niche. There is, however, considerable debate regarding how isotopic values relate to diet and how other sources of variation confound this link, which can undermine the utility. From the analysis of a simple, but general, model of isotopic incorporation in consumer organisms, we examine the relationship between isotopic variance among individuals, and diet variability within a consumer population. We show that variance in consumer isotope values is directly proportional to variation in diet (through Simpson indices), to the number of isotopically distinct food sources in the diet, and to the baseline variation within and among the isotope values of the food sources. Additionally, when considering temporal diet variation within a consumer we identify the interplay between diet turnover rates and tissue turnover rates that controls the sensitivity of stable isotopes to detect diet variation. Our work demonstrates that variation in the stable isotope values of consumers reflect variation in their diet. This relationship, however, can be confounded with other factors to the extent that they may mask the signal coming from diet. We show how simple quantitative corrections can recover a direct 1:1 correlation in some situations, and in others we can adjust our interpretation in light of the new understanding arising from our models. Our framework provides guidance for the design and analysis of empirical studies where the goal is to infer niche width from stable isotope data.
Topics: Diet; Animals; Carbon Isotopes; Isotopes
PubMed: 38935686
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301900 -
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis... Jun 2024Segmenting unknown or anomalous object instances is a critical task in autonomous driving applications, and it is approached traditionally as a per-pixel classification...
Segmenting unknown or anomalous object instances is a critical task in autonomous driving applications, and it is approached traditionally as a per-pixel classification problem. However, reasoning individually about each pixel without considering their contextual semantics results in high uncertainty around the objects' boundaries and numerous false positives. We propose a paradigm change by shifting from a per-pixel classification to a mask classification. Our mask-based method, Mask2Anomaly, demonstrates the feasibility of integrating a mask-classification architecture to jointly address anomaly segmentation, open-set semantic segmentation, and open-set panoptic segmentation. Mask2Anomaly includes several technical novelties that are designed to improve the detection of anomalies/unknown objects: i) a global masked attention module to focus individually on the foreground and background regions; ii) a mask contrastive learning that maximizes the margin between an anomaly and known classes; iii) a mask refinement solution to reduce false positives; and iv) a novel approach to mine unknown instances based on the mask- architecture properties. By comprehensive qualitative and qualitative evaluation, we show Mask2Anomaly achieves new state-of-the-art results across the benchmarks of anomaly segmentation, open-set semantic segmentation, and open-set panoptic segmentation. The code and pre-trained models are available: https://github.com/shyam671/Mask2Anomaly-Unmasking-Anomalies-in-Road-Scene-Segmentation/tree/main.
PubMed: 38935478
DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3419055 -
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis... Jun 2024The U-Net-like coarse-to-fine network design is currently the dominant choice for dense prediction tasks. Although this design can often achieve competitive performance,...
The U-Net-like coarse-to-fine network design is currently the dominant choice for dense prediction tasks. Although this design can often achieve competitive performance, it suffers from some inherent limitations, such as training error propagation from low to high resolution and the dependency on the deeper and heavier backbones. To design an effective network that performs better, we instead propose Recurrent Multiscale Feature Modulation (R-MSFM), a new lightweight network design for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. R-MSFM extracts per-pixel features, builds a multiscale feature modulation module, and performs recurrent depth refinement through a parameter-shared decoder at a fixed resolution. This network design enables our R-MSFM to maintain a more lightweight architecture and fundamentally avoid error propagation caused by the coarse-to-fine design. Furthermore, we introduce the mask geometry consistency loss to facilitate our R-MSFM for geometry consistent depth learning. This loss penalizes the inconsistency of the estimated depths between adjacent views within the nonoccluded and nonstationary regions. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed R-MSFM both at model size and inference speed, and show state-of-the-art results on two datasets: KITTI and Make3D. The code is available at https://github.com/jsczzzk/R-MSFM.
PubMed: 38935477
DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3420165 -
Cognitive Research: Principles and... Jun 2024The presence of face masks can significantly impact processes related to trait impressions from faces. In the present research, we focused on trait impressions from...
The presence of face masks can significantly impact processes related to trait impressions from faces. In the present research, we focused on trait impressions from faces either wearing a mask or not by addressing how contextual factors may shape such inferences. In Study 1, we compared trait impressions from faces in a phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in which wearing masks was a normative behavior (T1) with those assessed one year later when wearing masks was far less common (T2). Results at T2 showed a reduced positivity in the trait impressions elicited by faces covered by a mask. In Study 2, it was found that trait impressions from faces were modulated by the background visual context in which the target face was embedded so that faces wearing a mask elicited more positive traits when superimposed on an indoor rather than outdoor visual context. Overall, the present studies indicate that wearing face masks may affect trait impressions from faces, but also that such impressions are highly flexible and can significantly fluctuate across time and space.
Topics: Humans; Masks; Female; Male; COVID-19; Adult; Young Adult; Facial Recognition; Social Perception; Facial Expression
PubMed: 38935222
DOI: 10.1186/s41235-024-00570-w -
Indian Journal of Public Health Oct 2023The augmentation of precautionary behaviors through the application of health belief model (HBM) constructs could help in curbing the current pandemic.
BACKGROUND
The augmentation of precautionary behaviors through the application of health belief model (HBM) constructs could help in curbing the current pandemic.
OBJECTIVES
The objectives are to assess adherence to CAB and to evaluate its predictors using the constructs of HBM among COVID-19 vaccinees in Himachal Pradesh.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
A cross-sectional study using a telephone survey, with two-step stratified random sampling, was employed to acquire a sample of 441 respondents from Himachal Pradesh. Formal interviews were conducted using pretested, structured, self-administered questionnaires.
RESULTS
The mean age of respondents was 32.16 years (standard deviation = 12.77; range = 18-78 years). Maximum adherence was seen for wearing masks at 83% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 79.3%-86.3%), followed by maintenance of respiratory hygiene at 72.3% (95% CI 68%-78.4%). Nearly 42.2% (95% CI 37.6%-47.8%) conformed to social distancing norms. We observed minimum adherence for handwashing practices of 12.9% (95% CI 10%-16.3.0%). On bivariate analyses, except for perceived severity, all HBM constructs were significantly associated with CAB. However, after adjusting for gender, age, education, area of residence, and reduced income in multivariate analysis, perceived susceptibility, perceived barriers, and exposure to cues to action remained significant predictors of CAB.
CONCLUSIONS
The study highlights the empirical evidence of the application of HBM constructs to enhance behavioral adherence to COVID-19 precautionary measures.
Topics: Humans; COVID-19; India; Adult; Cross-Sectional Studies; Male; Female; Middle Aged; Health Belief Model; Adolescent; Young Adult; Aged; SARS-CoV-2; Health Behavior; Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; Socioeconomic Factors; Hand Disinfection
PubMed: 38934832
DOI: 10.4103/ijph.ijph_1525_22 -
Indian Journal of Public Health Oct 2023National Strategic Plan to End tuberculosis (TB) in India 2020-2025 aims to prevent the emergence of TB in susceptible populations. Airborne infection control (AIC)...
BACKGROUND
National Strategic Plan to End tuberculosis (TB) in India 2020-2025 aims to prevent the emergence of TB in susceptible populations. Airborne infection control (AIC) practices in high-risk settings like homes for the aged (HFA) will be essential to achieve this.
OBJECTIVE
The objective is to assess the AIC practices (AICPs) in HFA in the Kollam district in Kerala, India.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
A mixed method approach was used. the study was done in five HFA s in a southern district of Kerala to find AICPs. Using purposive sampling, in-depth interviews was conducted among inmates with recent respiratory infection and administrators. Environmental measures were assessed using an observation checklist.
RESULTS
Ventilation was inadequate in 25%-40% of HFA. Air change per hour and distance between beds were less. Very few inmates were aware of the need for proper ventilation and personal hygiene. Wearing masks and hand hygiene was not practiced. Administrators faced shortages of space, funds, and human resources for caring for hospitalized inmates, and psychiatric and terminally ill patients.
CONCLUSIONS
There is a need to train the staff and inmates on AIC. Infrastructural improvements, like the use of partition screens in the short term and the creation of model airborne infection control HFA in the long run, with a collaborative effort from health professionals and architects, are needed for TB elimination efforts to succeed.
Topics: Humans; India; Ventilation; Infection Control; Tuberculosis; Homes for the Aged; Interviews as Topic; Male
PubMed: 38934828
DOI: 10.4103/ijph.ijph_912_22 -
Indian Journal of Dental Research :... Jan 2024This case report presents a rare combination of congenital anomalies in an otherwise healthy male infant born at 36 weeks. The infant was diagnosed with congenital...
RATIONALE
This case report presents a rare combination of congenital anomalies in an otherwise healthy male infant born at 36 weeks. The infant was diagnosed with congenital maxillomandibular synechia, ectrodactyly, and ankyloglossia superior syndrome (ASS).
PATIENT CONCERNS
Inability to open the mouth completely, feeding challenges, and a cleft palate. The infant was stabilized through successful positive pressure ventilation via a face mask at birth and enteral feeding was initiated via a feeding gastrostomy.
EXAMINATION
Diagnostic tests revealed a midline palatal cleft, hypoplastic jaws, persistent metopic suture, and a bony fusion at the midline.
TREATMENT
Sectioning of the bony spur along the midline and achieving a mouth opening of 2 cm post-manipulation. The patient is under follow-up, with future treatment plans including cleft palate correction at 12 months and potential frontomandibular and lower jaw advancement depending on growth trajectories.
TAKEAWAY LESSONS
This case underscores the complexity of managing multiple congenital anomalies and the need for individualized treatment plans.
Topics: Humans; Male; Cleft Palate; Tongue; Palate, Hard; Infant, Newborn; Abnormalities, Multiple; Maxilla; Ankyloglossia; Jaw Abnormalities; Mandible
PubMed: 38934763
DOI: 10.4103/ijdr.ijdr_961_23