Study Design. Retrospective analysis of kinetic magnetic resonance images (kMRIs).Objective. To define the prevalence of degenerative cervical spondylolisthesis in symptomatic patients and to analyze the motion characteristics and influence on the spinal canal at the affected level.Summary of Background Data. When compared to lumbar spondylolisthesis, there are few studies evaluating ...

Visual illusions have been used to explore implicit perception in neglect. Previous studies have highlighted differences between length and surface illusion perception in neglect, but much less is known about depth illusion perception. In the Ponzo illusion (a classic depth illusion), two converging oblique lines modulate the perceived length of ...

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of coherent light therapy from the red region of the electromagnetic spectrum on the tissue-healing process. This study analysed the effect of non-coherent light therapy (light-emitting diode-LED) with or without silver sulfadiazine (sulpha) on the healing process of third-degree burns. In this study, 72 ...

OBJECTIVE: High frequency oscillations (HFOs) are brief electroencephalographic events associated with epileptic activity, and likely representing biological markers of the epileptogenic zone. HFOs are usually detected with intracranial EEG and detection is influenced by contact size. The size of commercially available intracerebral electrodes varies widely. This study assesses HFO detection ...

OBJECTIVE: Sustained pattern stimulation in normal subjects induces adaptive changes in pattern electroretinogram (PERG), an effect that has been interpreted as a response of glial cells and retinal ganglion cells (RGC). The aim of this study was to compare the effect in normal subjects and in multiple sclerosis patients without ...

STUDY DESIGN:: Case-control study. OBJECTIVES:: The purpose of this study is to determine finger motion of patients with cervical myelopathy during finger tapping cycles. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA:: A major symptom of patients with compressive cervical myelopathy is finger clumsiness. Therefore, understanding finger motion is prerequisite to assessing the severity ...

ABSTRACT. Multichannel functional near-infrared spectroscopy measurements involve the placement of many probes on a subject's head. A stable close contact between the probe and head surface is essential. We propose a way to detect two types of problematic probe contacts from the measurement data: an unstable contact whose light transmission ...

ABSTRACT. Multichannel functional near-infrared spectroscopy measurements involve the placement of many probes on a subject's head. A stable close contact between the probe and head surface is essential. We propose a way to detect two types of problematic probe contacts from the measurement data: an unstable contact whose light transmission ...

Abstract The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that increasing the force applied on the skin by the Cutometer MP580 probe will result in a decrease in the skin elasticity measures. Specifically, this study assessed the probe intrinsic weight plus the addition of a light mass (10 g ...

Growing evidence suggests that spontaneous oscillatory low-frequency synchronization in the subthalamic nuclei (STN) may modulate motor performance in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). To explore this in more detail, 15 PD patients chronically implanted with deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes in both STN were stimulated bilaterally at 5, 10, 20, ...

Deficit in balance control is a common and often an initial disabling symptom of multiple sclerosis (MS). The purpose of this study was to investigate if a light finger touch contact with a stationary surface is effective in improving upright postural stability in MS. Eleven individuals with relapsing-remitting MS were ...

Essential tremor (ET) follows an autosomal dominant type of inheritance in the majority of patients, yet its genetic basis has not been identified. Its exact origin is still elusive, but coherence measurements between electromyography tremor bursts and electroencephalography unequivocally demonstrate a correlation. We tested these measurements in 37 healthy first-degree ...

PURPOSE. To evaluate a novel objective perimetry using multifocal chromatic pupil light reflex in normal participants and patients with photoreceptor dysfunction, and to relate this new technique with subjective dark-adapted chromatic Goldmann perimetry. METHODS. Thirty two eyes of 17 retinitis pigmentosa (RP) or cone-rod dystrophy patients and 20 eyes of ...

A variety of noises have been employed for decades in an effort to facilitate habituation, mask, or suppress tinnitus. Many of these sounds have reportedly provided benefit, but success has not been universal. More recently, musical stimuli have been added as a sound therapy component. The potential advantages of using ...

BACKGROUND: Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation (STN-DBS) represents a valid therapeutic option for advanced Parkinson's disease (PD), leading to a significant amelioration of motor fluctuations and levodopa-induced involuntary movements (IM). This study address the issue of whether stimulation frequency may influence the control of IM in STN-DBS treated patients, comparing ...

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Light-chain deposition disease (LCDD) is a rare condition characterised by deposition of monoclonal immunoglobulin light chains (LCs) in tissues, resulting in varying degrees of organ dysfunction. This study reports the characteristic clinical ocular findings seen in advanced LCDD upon development of ocular fundus changes. This is the first report ...

Depilation techniques have gain popularity in the last few decades. Nowadays there are available a wide variety of lasers as well as intense pulsed light for depilation. However, little is known about the long-term effects of these procedures when melanocytic nevi are affected by them. We report the cases of ...

Flashing lights (photopsia) and floaters are common visual phenomena and patients frequently present to hospital with these symptoms. This article provides a guide for the non-specialist to the different pathologies that may result in photopsia and floaters.

Efforts have been recently made to investigate simple, objective, accurate, and reproducible methods of clinical/noninvasive assessment of nonsegmental vitiligo. However, studies have mostly considered quantitative or semiquantitative parameters, almost neglecting the purely qualitative appearance of vitiligo lesions at a given moment and over time. The objective of this study was ...

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the role of visual information on gait control in people with Parkinson's disease as they crossed over obstacles. Twelve healthy individuals, and 12 patients with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease, walked at their preferred speeds along a walkway and stepped over ...

Tinnitus is strongly linked with the presence of damaged hearing. However, it is not known why tinnitus afflicts only some, and not all, hearing-impaired listeners. One possibility is that tinnitus patients have specific inner ear damage that triggers tinnitus. In this study, differences in cochlear function inferred from psychophysical measures ...

Processing of time in the millisecond range seems to depend on cerebellar function and it can be assessed by using the somatosensory temporal discrimination threshold testing. No studies have yet investigated this temporal discrimination task in patients with cerebellar atrophy. Eleven patients with degenerative cerebellar ataxia and 11 controls underwent ...

ABSTRACT Purpose: To document a novel NYX gene mutation in a patient with X-linked complete congenital stationary night blindness and to describe this patient's electroretinogram (ERG) characteristics. Methods: ERGs were recorded from a 17-year-old male with a previously unreported NYX mutation (819G > A) that results in a missense codon change (Trp237Ter). ...

During power grasp the number of local force maxima reflects either the central nervous system's preferential use of particular hand regions, or anatomical constraints, or both. Previously both biomodal and trimodal force maxima have been hypothesized for power grasp of a cylindrical handle. Here we measure the number of local ...

Current clinical evaluations often rely on static anatomic imaging modalities for diagnosis of mechanical low back pain, which provide anatomic snapshots and a surrogate analysis of a functional disease. Three dimensional in vivo motion is available with the use of digital fluoroscopy, which was used to capture kinematic data of ...

Objective  To develop fast and reliable testing routines for diagnosing retina and optic nerve diseases in canine cataract patients based on chromatic properties of the pupillary light reflex response. Procedures  Seventy-seven canine patients with a history of cataract and decreased vision (43 patients with cataracts and no evidence of retina ...

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs) and extended high-frequency (EHF) thresholds in a control group and in patients with normal hearing sensitivity in the conventional frequency range and reporting unilateral tinnitus. Material/Methods: Seventy patients were enrolled in the study: 47 patients with ...

OBJECTIVES:: The authors describe the localization and speech-understanding abilities of a patient fit with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) for whom acoustic low-frequency hearing was preserved in both cochleae. DESIGN:: Three signals were used in the localization experiments: low-pass, high-pass, and wideband noise. Speech understanding was assessed with the AzBio sentences ...

Photodermatoses are a group of skin diseases primarily caused by, or exacerbated by exposure to ultraviolet and or visible radiation. The effect of sunlight on skin depends on a number of factors including skin colour, skin phototype and the content and type of melanin in the skin. There are only ...

The biomechanical mechanisms that link foot structure to injuries of the musculoskeletal system during gait are not well understood. This study had two parts. The purpose of part one was to determine the relation between clinical rearfoot and forefoot angles and foot angles as they make contact with the ground. ...

The aim of the present study is to measure sound sensitivity of the saccule for low frequencies in a population of both young and adult prelingual deaf patients using cervical Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials (cVEMPs) and to correlate the findings obtained with the phonological features. The sensitivity of the saccule ...

Various methods of photodynamic therapy (PDT) for acne have been introduced. However, comparative studies among them are still needed. We performed this study to compare the effect of methyl aminolevulinate (MAL) PDT for acne between red light and intense pulsed light (IPL). Twenty patients were enrolled in this eight-week, prospective, ...

Purpose: Understanding motion characteristics of liver such as, interfractional and intrafractional motion variability, difference in motion within different locations in the organ, and their complex relationship with the breathing cycles are particularly important for image-guided liver SBRT. The purpose of this study was to investigate such motion characteristics based on ...

Purpose: To analyze prostate intrafraction motion using both non-gas-release (NGR) and gas-release (GR) rectal balloons and to evaluate the ability of GR rectal balloons to reduce prostate intrafraction motion.Methods: Twenty-nine patients with NGR rectal balloons and 29 patients with GR balloons were randomly selected from prostate patients treated with proton ...

PURPOSE: Using real-time electromagnetic (EM) transponder tracking data recorded by the Calypso 4D Localization System, we report inter- and intrafractional target motion of the prostate bed, describe a strategy to evaluate treatment adequacy in postprostatectomy patients receiving intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), and propose an adaptive workflow. METHODS AND MATERIALS: ...

Purpose:  To investigate the coexistence of ocular microvascular and systemic macrovascular abnormalities in early stage, newly diagnosed and previously untreated normal tension glaucoma patients (NTG). Methods:  Retinal vascular reactivity to flickering light was assessed in 19 NTG and 28 age-matched controls by means of dynamic retinal vessel analysis (IMEDOS GmbH, ...

OBJECTIVE: To verify that tinnitus itself could disturb speech perception and to evaluate the effects of masking noise on speech perception ability in the patients with normal hearing but unilateral chronic tinnitus using the hearing in noise test. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective, nonrandomized study. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Between June 2009 and ...

Background: Mechanical orthoses are used for standing and walking after neurological injury. Most orthoses such as the advanced reciprocating gait orthosis typically use solid ankle-foot orthoses.Objectives: The goal of this study was to test the effects of ankle dorsiflexion assistance in patients with spinal cord injury when ambulating with an ...

When people are shown a moving object that suddenly disappears and are instructed to locate its vanishing position, systematic errors in the direction of motion and in the direction of gravity are usually observed. Entitled, respectively, Representational Momentum (RepMo) and Representational Gravity, these phenomena seem to be influenced by low-level ...

To examine retinal structure and changes in photoreceptor intensity after dark adaptation in patients with complete congenital stationary night blindness and Oguchi disease. Prospective, observational case series. We recruited 3 patients with complete congenital stationary night blindness caused by mutations in GRM6, 2 brothers with Oguchi disease caused by mutations ...

A multimodal approach combining acoustics, intelligibility ratings, articulography and surface electromyography was used to examine the characteristics of dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP). CV syllables were studied by obtaining the slope of F2 transition during the diphthong, tongue-jaw kinematics during the release of the onset consonant, and the related ...

Light flashes (phosphenes) are reported by most of the astronauts during spaceflight and patients treated with radiotherapy for brain tumors. They are induced by cosmic ray traversals, but the target area is unknown. With a correlation analysis of the visual sensation and the position of the beam in patients treated ...

Virtual Reality (VR) simulators can offer alternatives for training procedures in the medical field. Most current VR simulators consider single-node contact for interacting with an object to convey displacement and force on a discrete mesh. However, a single-node contact does not closely simulate palpation, which requires a surface made of ...

A new low-cost system for rehabilitation of the impaired upper limb for stroke survivors is presented. A computer game was developed specifically for this purpose and the user's impaired upper extremity is tracked using a downward-pointed Kinect, an inexpensive motion capture system commercially available from Microsoft. A Kalman filter was ...

The development of sensitive, non-contact electric field sensors to measure weak bioelectric signals will be useful for the development of a number of unobtrusive health sensors. In this paper we summarize our recent work on a number of specific challenges in the development of non-contact ECG sensors. First, we considered ...

The perception of independently moving objects in the scene is an important capability for prosthetic vision, but is impeded by the limited resolution and dynamic range of current and near-term retinal prostheses. We propose a novel, biologically-inspired visual representation for prosthetic vision based on the recovery of time-to-contact (τ) with ...

The study sample consisting of 429 people (207 males, 222 females) of Han nationality in Shaanxi, China. Five types of tongue movements were investigated, including tongue rolling, tongue folding, tongue twisting, pointed tongue and clover-leaf tongue. The results revealed that the frequencies of tongue rolling, tongue folding, tongue twisting, pointed ...

A mild, micropapular eruption previously coined as "solar dermatitis" on the extensor of the forearm is a common form of photodermatitis in Taiwan. This study aimed to investigate the clinicopathologic findings of "solar dermatitis", the micropapular type of photodermatitis. We characterized the features of this photodermatitis by retrospectively reviewing and ...

Spontaneous swallowing is considered a reflexive, pharyngeal clearance mechanism. Reductions in spontaneous swallow frequency may be a sensitive index for dysphagia and related morbidities. This study evaluated an acoustic recording technique as a measure to estimate spontaneous swallow frequency. Initially, a multichannel physiologic (surface electromyography, swallow apnea, cervical auscultation) recording ...

The impact that vowels have on the variation across voice range profiles (VRPs) is studied along with three factors: fundamental frequency, singer's gender, and laryngeal vibratory mechanism used to sing. VRPs of 21 advanced singers were established by recording, in separate takes, vocal productions using laryngeal vibratory mechanisms M1 and ...