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Preliminary Comparison of Assessment Methods for the Trunk Flexion-Extension Movement in the Lumbar Vertebrae Instability Patient
No full textThe paper compares three assessment methods for the measurement of the trunk range of motion (ROM) in flexion-extension movements of subjects suspected of lumbar vertebrae instability (LVI). For five male adults affected by low-back pain and with morpho-dynamic prescription for suspected LVI, ROM was computed: from the analysis of morpho-dynamic radiographs, according to the definition proposed by i) Kapandji and ii) Yang et al.; from the analysis of the flexion-extension movement captured with an optoelectronic acquisition system iii) as the maximum angular stroke in transductors’ displacement, according to a specifically designed custom protocol. Data obtained from optoelectronic acquisitions result comparable with literature values, suggesting the suitability of optoelectronic systems as non-invasive measurement tool for the trunk ROM assessing, to support the physician in the LVI diagnosis
Biventricular Tako-Tsubo cardiomyopathy: Usefulness of 2D speckle tracking strain echocardiography
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Trunk Flexion-Extension in Healthy Subjects: Preliminary Analysis of Movement Profiles
No full textThe importance of investigating trunk flexion-extension movements to assess the subject’s health state is well established in clinical practice. Several diagnostic tools are currently available, which mainly ground on subjective evaluations, or quantitative but invasive methods (e.g. radiography). Because of technological constraints, non-invasive instruments, like optoelectronic acquisition systems with passive skin optical markers, still provide data affected by not-negligible artefacts. Besides, an effective analysis should involve movements performed by the subject at a self-imposed velocity, introducing potential inter-and intra-subject variability in data. This paper presents the preliminary analysis of the movement profile of passive skin optical markers during a trunk flexion-extension task, based on a parametric identification process. According to the Asymmetric Gaussian Functions (AGFs) optimization strategy, an optimization procedure for the fitting of markers’ spatial displacement with different Gaussian functions is proposed and applied to a dataset of 29 healthy subjects, for 59 exercises. With the primary aim of investigating strength points and limits of single-and multi-components AGFs models as fitting functions, a descriptive statistical analysis is performed for both the methods on the fitting performance in different conditions, and for the single-component AGF case, on the estimated parametric coefficients as well
Reverse platypnoea-orthodeoxia syndrome in association with an ascending aortic aneurysm: a case report
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A case of iatrogenic severe mitral regurgitation
No full textBromocriptine and cabergoline, ergot derived dopamine receptor agonists used to treat Parkinson's disease and prolactinomas, have been associated with increased risk of cardiac valve disease. Here we present a case of iatrogenic symptomatic severe mitral regurgitation due to these drugs
Functional analysis of the trunk flexion-extension through Gaussian functions fitting of the movement profile
No full textA healthy mobility of the trunk plays a fundamental role in the activities of daily living. The flexion-extension movement is one of the main tasks evaluated in clinical practice to assess the functionality of the spine. Nevertheless, no fully shared methods are currently available for the clinician to perform quantitative evaluations on the movement quality. In this paper, the trunk flexion-extension task performed by 36 healthy adult subjects, for a total of 104 acquisitions, was acquired with an optoelectronic system of 8 cameras and 32 skin passive optical markers. The absolute displacement of the subject's seventh thoracic vertebra (T7) was fitted with an asymmetric Gaussian function, comparing the performance of four alternative cost functions in the optimization process. A set of descriptive parameters for the quantitative evaluation of the profile, suitable for the everyday use in the clinical practice, was designed and applied on the current dataset. Statistical analysis was performed on residuals of the fitting process, coefficients of the optimal fitting functions and proposed descriptive parameters, outlining a preliminary description of the trunk flexion-extension movement in the healthy adult
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