OBJECTIVE: To observe the effect of lumbar disc herniation treated with acupuncture at different time intervals. METHODS: A total of 180 patients of lumbar disc herniation were randomized into an observation group 1, an observation group 2 and an observation group 3, 60 cases in each one. All patients were treated with acupuncture at Jiaji L-L (EX-B 2), Huantiao (GB 30), Weizhong (BL 40), etc. And then KWD-808 electroacupuncture instrument was connected, time intervals of acupuncture were once every day, once every 2 days and once every 3 days, 3 weeks were provided. At 1-week, 2-week and 3-week treatment, the visual analogous scale (VAS) and Japanese Orthopedics Association (JOA) scale were observated, and the effects were evaluated. RESULTS: The effective rates in the observation group 1 and the observation group 2 were 96.7% (58/60) and 95.0% (57/60), there was no significant different between the two groups (>0.05), which were superior to 88.3% (53/60) in the observation group 3 (both <0.01). The VAS score in each group decreased to different degrees at 1-week, 2-week and 3-week treatment compared with those before treatment (all <0.01), there was no significant different between the observation group 1 and the observation group 2 (all >0.05) at 1-week, 2-week and 3-week treatment, however, they were significantly reduced compared with the observation group 3 (all <0.05). The JOA score in each group increased to different degrees at 1-week, 2-week and 3-week treatment compared with those before treatment (all <0.01), there was no significant different between the observation group 1 and the observation group 2 (all >0.05) at 1-week, 2-week and 3-week treatment, however, they were significantly increased compared with the observation group 3 at 3-week treatment (both <0.05). CONCLUSION Acupuncture once every day and once every 2 days in the treatment of lumbar disc herniation is equally effective, better than once every 3 days.
Acupuncture Points ; Electroacupuncture ; Humans ; Intervertebral Disc Displacement ; therapy ; Treatment Outcome

Objective To explore the semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm for long-tail endoscopic image classification with limited annotations. Method We explored semi-supervised long-tail endoscopic image classification in HyperKvasir, the largest gastrointestinal public dataset with 23 diverse classes. Semi-supervised learning algorithm FixMatch was applied based on consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling. After splitting the training dataset and the test dataset at a ratio of 4:1, we sampled 20%, 50%, and 100% labeled training data to test the classification with limited annotations. Results The classification performance was evaluated by micro-average and macro-average evaluation metrics, with the Mathews correlation coefficient (MCC) as the overall evaluation. SSL algorithm improved the classification performance, with MCC increasing from 0.8761 to 0.8850, from 0.8983 to 0.8994, and from 0.9075 to 0.9095 with 20%, 50%, and 100% ratio of labeled training data, respectively. With a 20% ratio of labeled training data, SSL improved both the micro-average and macro-average classification performance; while for the ratio of 50% and 100%, SSL improved the micro-average performance but hurt macro-average performance. Through analyzing the confusion matrix and labeling bias in each class, we found that the pseudo-based SSL algorithm exacerbated the classifier's preference for the head class, resulting in improved performance in the head class and degenerated performance in the tail class. Conclusion SSL can improve the classification performance for semi-supervised long-tail endoscopic image classification, especially when the labeled data is extremely limited, which may benefit the building of assisted diagnosis systems for low-volume hospitals. However, the pseudo-labeling strategy may amplify the effect of class imbalance, which hurts the classification performance for the tail class.
Supervised Machine Learning ; Algorithms