1,720,959 research outputs found
Compliant design for intrinsic safety: general issues and preliminary design
No full textWe describe some initial results of a project aiming at the development of a programmable compliance, inherently safe robot arm for applications in anthropic environments. In order to obtain safety in spite of worst-case situations (such as unexpected delays in teleoperation, or even controller failure), we propose an approach to achieving the compliance by mechanical rather than by control design. We first describe some of the control problems encountered in a typical, large, possibly unknown mechanical compliance, and present the result that shows the possibility to cope with these uncertainties in an adaptive way. Next, we describe the initial development of a new prototype arm under construction in our laboratory. The arm is designed to achieve arbitrary position tracking in 3D with controlled effective compliance at the joint
Predictive factors of tempomandibular joint involvement in 350 patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis
No full textPredictive factors of tmj involvement in 230 consecutive jia patients regularly screened from 2000 to 2014 in a single pediatric rheumatology centre
No full textBackground: Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) has been shown to involve frequently the temporo-mandibular joint (TMJ). An important prognostic aspect is to diagnose and treat it promptly.
Objectives: To evaluate in a consecutive JIA patients (pts) cohort, regularly screened from year 2000 to 2014, the predictive factors of the TMJ involvement.
Methods: 230 consecutive pts (152 females, 78 males) affected by JIA according to ILAR classification, 164 oligoarthritis, 4 polyarthritis rheumatoid factor (RF) +, 34 polyarthritis RF-, 22 systemic onset JIA (soJIA), 4 enthesitis-related arthritis (ERA) HLA B27+, and 2 psoriatic arthritis were included in a retrospective evaluation. Mean disease onset age was 6.5 yrs (range 1-16), mean disease duration 12.7 yrs (range 0.2-46.2).
We analyzed the correlation between TMJ involvement with the following items: ILAR categories, age at onset, gender, pattern of articular involvement (large joints, small ones, hips, cervical spine).
Results: 88/230 patients (38.3%), 36.8% of females and 41% of males showed a clinical TMJ involvement. Mean age at onset (or diagnosis) of TMJ involvement was 8.3 yrs. 62/88 pts (70.5%) had a bilateral clinical signs of condylar alteration.
The involvement of TMJ was observed in 38.3% of the whole population (54.5% of oligoarthritis, 27.3% polyarthritis RF negative, 2.3% polyarthritis RF positive, 9.1% soJIA, 4.5% ERA and 2.3% juvenile psoriatic arthritis)
3 cases (2 females and 1 male) presented with an involvement of TMJ at the diagnosis of JIA.
The rate of TMJ involvement was higher in the pts with an early onset of the disease (52.3% in the 0-6 yrs group, vs 36.4% in 7-12 yrs group and 11.3% in 13-16 yrs group).
In 56/88 pts (63.3%) TMJ disease was associated with an involvement of large joints, in 4/88 (4.54%) with small joints, in 24/88 (27.7%) with hips and in 18/88 (20.45%) with cervical spine.
Conclusions: An early onset of JIA, the oligoarticular ILAR category and a pattern of large joints involvement seem correlated with a higher rate of TMJ disease. Predictive factors of TMJ involvement should be confirmed in a larger JIA population and may be useful for clinicians to adopt appropriate prevention strategies of TMJ disease
Can ultrasound be useful in detection of inactive disease in patients affected by jia? An observational case-control study of 128 subjects
No full textBackground: Musculoskeletal Ultrasound (MSUS) is commonly used to detect synovial inflammation in adults affected by inflammatory rheumatisms. MSUS in children is nowadays still a challenge. For this reason MSUS in JIA is still seldom known and used by pediatric rheumatologists.
Objectives: To study if grey scale (GSUS) and Power Doppler Ultrasound (PDUS) can better identify subclinical synovitis than physical examination and could be added to Wallace criteria of inactive disease (ID) to better identify JIA patients (pts) on Clinical Remission (CR).
Methods: 100 consecutive pts with JIA (age 18mo-25yrs) according to ILAR classification, with ID according to Wallace criteria, and 28 healthy controls were submitted to the MSUS of 42 joints (MCPs, PIPs, wrists, elbows, shoulders, hips, knees, ankles and MTPs). MSUS was performed immediately after clinical evaluation, by 3 trained sonographers (ODL, VR, AS), blinded to clinical findings, who recorded synovial hyperplasia, joint effusion and PDUS. Apparatus used: GE Logiq P5 with an 8-12MHz linear probe and Esaote MyLab 70 with a 6-18MHz linear probe. Intraobserver and interobserver reproducibility of US was assessed. In each joint, synovial hyperplasia/joint effusion were graded as follows: 0=absent, 1=mild, 2=moderate and 3=marked. PDUS was graded as follows: 0=absent, 1=presence of single vessel dot, 2=presence of confluent vessel dots in less than half of the synovial area and 3=presence of confluent vessel dots in more than half of the synovial area. A joint with US synovitis was defined as a joint in which any of the 3 US abnormalities was detectable. PDUS was considered positive in the presence of vessel dots on PDUS images only out of growing cartilage and if it was not a bone nutrition vessel. The US examination technique as well as the definitions and scoring of US features were based on published guidelines provided by the OMERACT in adults.
Results: MSUS revealed the presence of 1 or more alterations of the synovial structures (effusion, hyperplasia or positive PDUS) in 23 out of 100 pts who satisfied the clinical criteria of ID according to Wallace definition (23%). 9 pts (39% out of 23 active pts & 9% out of all 100 pts) have only one joint involved. The other 14 pts (61% out of 23 active pts & 14% out of all 100 pts) presented US activity in more than one joint. 43 of the 4200 examined joints were active at US (1,02%). In 17 of these 43 joints (39%) US revealed joint effusion, hyperplasia and PDUS. In 29 joints (67%) there were only two of these US features. No abnormalities were found in healthy controls.
Conclusions: Our data confirm the usefulness of US in pediatric joint examination to identify active joints in JIA pts, to set up an appropriate treatment and to define inactive disease in a more accurate way than referring only to Wallace criteria. Further studies are needed to understand if these findings are related to a greater frequency of relapses
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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