bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Retrospective analysis of a concurrent series of microscopic versus endoscopic transsphenoidal surgeries for Knosp Grades 0–2 nonfunctioning pituitary macroadenomas at a single institution
Authors: Dallapiazza Robert , Bond Aaron E. , Grober Yuval , Louis Robert G. , Payne Spencer C. , Oldfield Edward H. , Jane John A. 
Published: July 2014

Object
The object of this study was to compare surgical outcomes and complications in a contemporaneous series of patients undergoing either microscopic or endoscopic transsphenoidal surgery for nonfunctioning pituitary macroadenomas without imaging evidence of cavernous sinus invasion.

Methods
This is a retrospective analysis of a prospectively collected database from a single institution. Data were collected from patients whose surgery had occurred in the period from June 2010 to January 2013. Patients who underwent microscopic or endoscopic surgery for Knosp Grade 0, 1, or 2 nonfunctioning pituitary macroadenomas were included in the study. Patients who had clinically secreting or Knosp Grade 3 or 4 tumors and patients who were undergoing revision surgery were excluded from analysis. Eligible patient records were analyzed for outcomes and complications. Statistical analyses were performed on tumor volume, intraoperative factors, postoperative complications, and degree of resection on 1-year postoperative MRI. The results were used to compare the outcomes after microscopic and endoscopic approaches.

Results
Forty-three patients underwent microscopic transsphenoidal surgery, and 56 underwent endoscopic transsphenoidal surgery. There were no statistical differences in the intraoperative extent of resection or endocrinological complications. There were significantly more intraoperative CSF leaks in the endoscopic group (58% vs 16%); however, there was no difference in the incidence of postoperative CSF rhinorrhea (12% microscopic vs 7% endoscopic). Length of hospitalization was significantly shorter in patients undergoing an endoscopic approach (3.0 days vs 2.4 days). Two-month follow-up imaging was available in 95% of patients, and 75% of patients had 1-year follow-up imaging. At 2 months postprocedure, there was no evidence of residual tumor in 79% (31 of 39) and 85% (47 of 55) of patients in the microscopic and endoscopic groups, respectively. At 1 year postprocedure, 83% (25 of 30) of patients in the microscopic group had no evidence of residual tumor and 82% (36 of 44) of those in the endoscopic group had no evidence of residual tumor.

Conclusions
The microscopic and endoscopic techniques provide similar outcomes in the surgical treatment of Knosp Grades 0–2 nonfunctioning pituitary macroadenomas.
Real-time functional mapping: potential tool for improving language outcome in pediatric epilepsy surgery
Authors: Korostenskaja Milena , Chen Po-Ching , Salinas Christine M. , Westerveld Michael , Brunner Peter , Schalk Gerwin , Cook Jane C. , Baumgartner James , Lee Ki H. 
Published: July 2014

Accurate language localization expands surgical treatment options for epilepsy patients and reduces the risk of postsurgery language deficits. Electrical cortical stimulation mapping (ESM) is considered to be the clinical gold standard for language localization. While ESM affords clinically valuable results, it can be poorly tolerated by children, requires active participation and compliance, carries a risk of inducing seizures, is highly time consuming, and is labor intensive. Given these limitations, alternative and/or complementary functional localization methods such as analysis of electrocorticographic (ECoG) activity in high gamma frequency band in real time are needed to precisely identify eloquent cortex in children.
In this case report, the authors examined 1) the use of real-time functional mapping (RTFM) for language localization in a high gamma frequency band derived from ECoG to guide surgery in an epileptic pediatric patient and 2) the relationship of RTFM mapping results to postsurgical language outcomes. The authors found that RTFM demonstrated relatively high sensitivity (75%) and high specificity (90%) when compared with ESM in a “next-neighbor” analysis. While overlapping with ESM in the superior temporal region, RTFM showed a few other areas of activation related to expressive language function, areas that were eventually resected during the surgery. The authors speculate that this resection may be associated with observed postsurgical expressive language deficits. With additional validation in more subjects, this finding would suggest that surgical planning and associated assessment of the risk/benefit ratio would benefit from information provided by RTFM mapping.
Risk factors for delayed infections after spinal fusion and instrumentation in patients with scoliosis
Authors: Shen Jianxiong , Liang Jinqian , Yu Haiquan , Qiu Guixing , Xue Xuhong , Li Zheng 
Published: July 2014

Object
There are limited published data about the risk factors for the development of delayed infections after spinal fusion and instrumentation in the population with scoliosis. The objective of this study was to evaluate the predictive factors of development of delayed infections in patients with scoliosis who underwent surgical treatment.

Methods
A total of 17 patients with scoliosis and delayed infections were identified from 3463 patients with scoliosis who received surgical treatment. The control group was composed of 85 patients with scoliosis without infections, matched for sex, age, approximate date of surgery, and diagnosis. These 2 groups were compared for demographic distribution and clinical data to investigate the predictive factors of delayed infections.

Results
The overall incidence rate of delayed infections was 0.49%. The variables of age, body mass index, and number of levels fused were similar between the 2 groups. The average primary curve magnitude for the delayed infection and control (uninfected) groups was 80.4° ± 27.0° (range 47°–135°) and 66.3° ± 11.6° (range 42°–95°), respectively (p = 0.001). Operation time in the group with delayed infections was 384.7 ± 115.9 minutes versus 254.4 ± 79.2 minutes in the control group (p = 0.000), and estimated blood loss was 1342.2 ± 707.2 ml versus 833.9 ± 235.6 ml (p = 0.000) in these 2 groups, respectively. The perioperative mean red blood cell transfusion requirement in the delayed infection group was significantly higher than that found in patients without infections (2.8 ± 2.3 units/patient versus 1.1 ± 1.6 units/patient, respectively; p = 0.000). Logistic regression analysis showed that operation time and allogenic blood transfusion were the 2 independent predictors of delayed infections (odds ratio [OR] 1.021, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.010–1.033, and OR 1.546, 95% CI 1.048–2.278, respectively).

Conclusions
The occurrence of a delayed infection in patients with scoliosis who undergo surgical treatment is most likely multifactorial and is related to surgical time and the use of allogenic blood transfusion.
Injuries of cattle and buffaloes during transportation and slaughter at Chittagong city corporation of Bangladesh
Authors: Kober AKMH , Bari MS , Rakib MR , Ali MS 
Published: July 2014

The study was conducted to ascertain the injuries of cattle and buffaloes at selected livestock markets of Bangladesh during transportation and slaughter. A total of 290 (212 cattle and 78 water buffalo) at Sagorica cattle market and 57 (24 cattle and 33 buffalo) at Fringibazar and Pahartali slaughter houses of Chittagong were examined during the period from January to April 2013. The frequency of different injuries during handling, transportation and slaughtering were assessed. The data of different type of injuries (e.g. abrasion, laceration, bleeding, swelling, scarification and wound) were collected from the market and slaughter houses by using visual observation and palpation method. The frequency of abrasion, laceration, bleeding, swelling and scarification of cattle were 73, 45, 4, 3, 67 and 87%, and of buffaloes were 71, 9, 23 nd 41%, respectively. All the injuries were higher in Haryana than Rajasthani, Shahiwal and Exotic non descriptive cattle breeds. The tail injury in cattle and buffaloes was 65 and 23%, respectively. In the slaughter house, the frequency of abrasion, laceration, penetration and scarification were 79, 75, 8, 75 in cattle, and 85, 70, 0 and 67% in buffaloes, respectively. From these findings it could be concluded that proper handling and care should be taken to avoid different injuries of cattle and buffaloes during transportation and slaughter.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/bjas.v43i1.19389 Bang. J. Anim. Sci. 2014. 43 (1): 74-77
Sea wave modelling for motion control applications
Authors: Shameem B M , Anantha Subramanian V 
Published: July 2014

The modelling of sea environment is important in designing an effective motion control system for any marine vehicle. Inadequate representation of the components of a typical random sea might lead to poor performance of the control system. A multiple output system such as the one having components of wave elevation and slope, facilitates designing the control system taking into account the different degrees of freedom. The method of modelling the sea environment presented here, provides the basis for the design of motion control systems for multiple degree of freedom cases, which give rise to excitation forces and moments acting on the marine vehicle. The method used here models the sea environment using Gaussian white noise and shaping filter to generate a multiple output form of the random sea state. In the first step a given standard wave spectrum is approximated using a rational polynomial, the coefficients of the polynomial are obtained by least square fitting method to best match the spectrum. The established rational polynomial is then decomposed to get the transfer function of the shaping filter. The wave slope spectrum is similarly approximated using the same rational polynomial. The transfer functions of the two components of amplitude and slope, representing the filters are combined to generate a state space form. Using the white noise as input, the state space form obtains the wave elevation and slope as outputs. By performing spectral analysis using Welch method, the quality of the obtained output is checked against the targetted spectrum. The application of the simulated wave slope spectrum in a closed loop state space model is demonstrated as applied to the roll stabilization characteristics of a stationary ship using a passive tank.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/jname.v11i1.17768
Chinese Scholarship and the Interpretation and Translation of the Qur'an
Authors: Ming Ma Zhan 
Published: July 2014

The Qur'an has, for obvious reasons, been of the greatest interest to Chinese Muslims from the arrival of Islam on the shores of China to the current day. Over 20 Chinese translations of the Qur'an have been produced throughout the history of Chinese Islam, some with simple marginalia to help non-Arabic speaking Chinese Muslims interpret the meanings of the verses. Furthermore, Chinese translations of some Arabic tafāsīr have recently appeared, such as the Mukhtasar tafsīr Ibn Kathīr, and for the first time in the history of China, a tafsīr mūjiz li'l-Qurʾān in Chinese has been prepared by a group of Muslim scholars. This article aims to present an introduction to the work of Chinese scholars in commentating on the Qur'an in general, and to discuss the aforementioned tafsīr mūjiz li'l-Qurʾān in some detail, focussing on the methodological aspects that distinguish it from other translations. The introduction presents a brief history of the translation of the Qur'an in China. Part One discusses the efforts of Chinese scholars to provide commentary on the meanings of the Qur'an, and gives examples of their strengths and weaknesses. Part Two presents the authors of the tafsīr and discusses the reasons for its production, and its methodology, giving examples which illustrate its strengths. Finally, the conclusion summarises the major points discussed in the article, and its recommendations.
Lung Registration Using Automatically Detected Landmarks
Authors: Rühaak J. , Werner R. , Handels H. , Modersitzki J. , Polzin T. 
Published: July 2014

SummaryObjectives: Accurate registration of lung CT images is inevitable for numerous clinical applications. Usually, nonlinear intensity-based methods are used. Their accuracy is typically evaluated using corresponding anatomical points (landmarks; e.g. bifurcations of bronchial and vessel trees) annotated by medical experts in the images to register. As image registration can be interpreted as correspond ence finding problem, these corresponding landmarks can also be used in feature-based registration techniques. Recently, approaches for automated identification of such landmark correspondences in lung CT images have been presented. In this work, a novel combination of variational nonlinear intensity-based registration with an approach for automated landmark correspond ence detection in lung CT pairs is presented and evaluated.Methods: The main blocks of the proposed hybrid intensity- and feature-based registration scheme are a two-step landmark correspondence detection and the so-called CoLD (Combining Landmarks and Distance Measures) framework. The landmark correspondence identification starts with feature detection in one image followed by a blockmatching-based transfer of the features to the other image. The established correspond ences are used to compute a thin-plate spline (TPS) transformation. Within CoLD, the TPS transformation is improved by minimization of an objective function consisting of a Normalized Gradient Field distance measure and a curvature regularizer; the landmark correspondences are guaranteed to be preserved by optimization on the kernel of the discretized landmark constraints.Results: Based on ten publicly available end-inspiration/expiration CT scan pairs with anatomical landmark sets annotated by medical experts from the DIR-Lab database, it is shown that the hybrid registration approach is superior in terms of accuracy: The mean distance of expert landmarks is decreased from 8.46 mm before to 1.15 mm after registration, outperforming both the TPS transformation (1.68 mm) and a nonlinear registration without usage of automatically detected landmarks (2.44 mm). The improvement is statistically significant in eight of ten datasets in comparison to TPS and in nine of ten datasets in comparison to the intensity-based registration. Furthermore, CoLD globally estimates the breathing-induced lung volume change well and results in smooth and physiologically plausible motion fields of the lungs.Conclusions: We demonstrated that our novel landmark-based registration pipeline outperforms both TPS and the underlying nonlinear intensity-based registration without landmark usage. This highlights the potential of automatic landmark correspondence detection for improvement of lung CT registration accuracy.
Prioritising Lexical Patterns to Increase Axiomatisation in Biomedical Ontologies
Authors: Fernández-Breis J. T. , Stevens R. , Mikroyannidi E. , Quesada-Martínez M. 
Published: July 2014

SummaryIntroduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems”.Objectives: In previous work, we have defined methods for the extraction of lexical patterns from labels as an initial step towards semi-automatic ontology enrichment methods. Our previous findings revealed that many biomedical ontologies could benefit from enrichment methods using lexical patterns as a starting point. Here, we aim to identify which lexical patterns are appropriate for ontology enrichment, driving its analysis by metrics to prioritised the patterns.Methods: We propose metrics for suggesting which lexical regularities should be the starting point to enrich complex ontologies. Our method determines the relevance of a lexical pattern by measuring its locality in the ontology, that is, the distance between the classes associated with the pattern, and the distribution of the pattern in a certain module of the ontology. The methods have been applied to four significant biomedical ontologies including the Gene Ontology and SNOMED CT.Results: The metrics provide information about the engineering of the ontologies and the relevance of the patterns. Our method enables the suggestion of links between classes that are not made explicit in the ontology. We propose a prioritisation of the lexical patterns found in the analysed ontologies.Conclusions: The locality and distribution of lexical patterns offer insights into the further engineering of the ontology. Developers can use this information to improve the axiomatisation of their ontologies.
Computerized Diagnosis of Respira tory Disorders
Authors: Saraclar M. , Kahya Y. P. , Sen I. 
Published: July 2014

SummaryIntroduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Biosignal Interpretation: Advanced Methods for Studying Cardiovascular and Respiratory Systems”.Objectives: This work proposes an algorithm for diagnostic classification of multi-channel respiratory sounds.Methods: 14-channel respiratory sounds are modeled assuming a 250-point second order vector autoregressive (VAR) process, and the estimated model parameters are used to feed a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Both a three-class classifier (healthy, bronchi ectasis and interstitial pulmonary disease) and a binary classifier (healthy versus pathological) are considered.Results: In the binary scheme, the sensitivity and specificity for both classes are 85% ± 8.2%. In the three-class classification scheme, the healthy recall (95% ± 5%) and the interstitial pulmonary disease recall and precision (100% ± 0% both) are rather high. However, bronchiectasis recall is very low (30% ± 15.3%), resulting in poor healthy and bronchiectasis precision rates (76% ± 8.7% and 75% ± 25%, respectively). The main reason behind these poor rates is that the bronchiectasis is confused with the healthy case.Conclusions: The proposed method is promising, nevertheless, it should be improved such that other mathematical models, additional features, and/or other classifiers are to be experimented in future studies.
Research on General DEA Model Based on the Grey Linear Programming
Authors: Xia De Chang , Li Ben Tu , Wang Jin Ping , Shi Gui Ping 
Published: July 2014

Based on the traditional general DEA model, this paper proposed gray general DEA model which is based on the grey linear programming, and did some study. Then, we get the optimal solution of the gray general DEA by using a method of θ positioned programming solution. Thus, we can know the validity of decision-making unit of the gray general DEA.
Non-Uniform Probabilistically Quantized Distributed Consensus Applied on Sensors Network
Authors: Xu De Hong , Peng Huan Xin , Liu Bin 
Published: July 2014

In order to improve the accuracy of distributed consensus under digital communication, in the paper, assuming the initial states of nodes following uniform distribution, a non-uniform quantization scheme based on probabilistic quantization is proposed, and the entire data range is divided based on µ-law non-uniform quantization scheme. The quantization step-size near the average of initial states is smaller, and the corresponding quantization errors are smaller. Base on the proposed quantization scheme, a non-uniform probabilistically quantized distributed consensus algorithm is proposed. The performance and the mean square errors of the non-uniform probabilistically quantized distributed consensus algorithm is analyzed, by analyses and simulations, the results show the non-uniform probabilistically quantized distributed consensus can reach a consensus, and the mean square error is far smaller than that of probabilistically quantized distributed consensus.
Finite Element Method of Corner Joints in Steel-Framed Structures under Fire Conditions
Authors: Wang Yu , Liu Yong Jun , Ma Jun 
Published: July 2014

An improved component-based model has been developed which includes nonductile(brittle) components (bolts and welds) into a connection model with a reasonable assumption of their failure displacements, based on experimental tests.This model was created for a flexible end-plate connection, using the ABAQUS finite element code, in order to investigate its resistance and ductility at ambient and elevated temperatures. In the subsequent analyses, steel beams and columns are going to be simulated as finite shell/beam elements and the connection behaviour is to be represented by the simplified models. This sub-frame model will also be used for parametric studies to investigate restrained beam behaviour under fire attacks with particular emphasis on the role of the connections.
The Problems in the teaching and learning of Accounting as a vocational subject in Nigeria Secondary Schools
Authors: Ezeagba CE 
Published: July 2014

This study is designed to identify the problems facing the teaching and learning of Accounting as a vocational subject in secondary schools in Ondo State and to proffer solution. The study population was about 150 senior accounting teachers in those schools that registered students for accounting at the SSC Examination for at least the past five years. Samples of 50 senior accounting teachers, one teacher per school, were selected from eight out of the 18 local government areas. A questionnaire was used for data collection and was validated by experts. The split half reliability coefficients of the two scales in the questionnaire (I8-item problems and 12-item solutions) were 0.85 and 0.75 respectively. Data were analyzed using mean responses, independent t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Findings revealed that 14 out of the 18-items problems were identified and accepted. All the 12-item solution was also accepted. The hypothesis tested showed that there was a significant difference in the perception/rating of the problems by the accounting teachers in public and private schools (t = 2.51, df = 34, P<0.05); (2) There was no significant difference in the perception/rating of the problems by the accounting teachers in either boys, girls only or mixed school (F (2,51) = 0.0143, P < 0.05); (3) There was no significant difference in the perception/rating of the problems by the accounting teachers in the secondary schools in the various local government areas.
Information and Communication Technology as an effective tool in employment generation in the educational communication technology sector
Authors: Okechukwu EC , Chogozie-Okwum CC 
Published: July 2014

Information and communication technology is one of the fastest growing fields of human endeavours. ICTs sector is so robust and versatile that almost nothing can get done in this present time and age without integrating information and communication technology. It has been observed that ICTs have been successfully integrated in the fields of medicine, engineering, visual, theatre, and applied arts, music, finance, sales and marketing and educational technology, just to mention but a few. One benefit of information and communication technology is its ability to get tasks that hitherto would have taken more time to be completed, done in shortest available run-time. This reduced through-put increases efficiency, consequently saves man-power and conserves funds. Against this backdrop, it is seen that ICT contributes to economic growth by conserving resources. This paper examines concepts of information and communication technology, and the concepts of educational technology. It also looks at how ICTs are used in the educational technology sector, ICTs as a vehicle for economic growth and finally ICTs as a tool for employment generation in the educational technology sector.