Recent advances in medical ultrasonic instrumentation are introduced in this review, including the progresses in transducer, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Future development is also discussed.
Equipment Design ; Image Enhancement ; instrumentation ; methods ; Imaging, Three-Dimensional ; instrumentation ; methods ; Transducers ; Ultrasonic Therapy ; instrumentation ; trends ; Ultrasonics ; Ultrasonography ; instrumentation ; trends

In vitro electrical neurophysiological and behavioural studies have shown that diabetes mellitus negatively affects hippocampal function. In this study, by using in vivo extracellular recording, the spontaneous neural activity was obtained from hippocampus of anaesthetized rats in both streptozotocin-induced diabetes group and normal control group. Temporal relationship between neuronal firing and slow oscillation (1-4 Hz) of local field potentials (LFPs) in hippocampus was analyzed using coherence and phase locking measurement. Lower coherence value (0.617+/-0.028) was observed in diabetic rats than that in control rats (0.730+/-0.024) (P=0.005). Furthermore, phase-locking measurement using von Mises fitting parameterized by a concentration parameter kappa showed a lower degree (kappa= 0.347+/-0.113) of temporal coordination between neuronal spiking and slow oscillation of LFPs in the hippocampus of diabetic rats than that of normal ones (kappa= 1.174+/-0.134) (P<0.001). Both approaches demonstrated that diabetes can indeed impair the temporal coordination between neuronal spiking and slow oscillation of population activity in hippocampus. This observed neural coordination impairment may serve as a network level mechanism for diabetes-induced memory deterioration.
Action Potentials ; Animals ; Diabetes Mellitus, Experimental ; physiopathology ; Hippocampus ; physiopathology ; Memory ; Oscillometry ; Rats

The motivation of the brain-computer interface (BCI) research and its potential applications are introduced in this paper. Some of the problems in BCI-based medical device developments are also discussed.
Artificial Intelligence ; Brain ; physiology ; Communication Aids for Disabled ; trends ; Electroencephalography ; instrumentation ; methods ; Evoked Potentials ; physiology ; Humans ; Neuromuscular Diseases ; rehabilitation ; Rehabilitation ; instrumentation ; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted ; User-Computer Interface

Neural network plasticity is fundamental for learning and memory. Its abnormal change underlies some neural diseases. Measurement of the plasticity of cortex can help understand the mechanism of plasticity, and provide a quantitative way to observe the neural process of natural aging and neurodegenerative diseases, which may lead to a new approach for evaluation of anti-aging drugs and new medical treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, a systematic method was established based on whisker pairing (WP) experiment to measure the network plasticity in the barrel cortex in rat. WP experiment is a classical experiment to study the effect of innocuous bias of the flow of sensory activity from the whiskers for certain periods in awake and behaving rats on the receptive field organization in S1 barrel cortex neurons. In the experiment, one pair of adjacent whiskers D2 and D3 remained intact while others were being trimmed throughout a certain period. After that, receptive fields of single cells in the contralateral barrel were analyzed by post-stimulus time histogram after certain days of WP and compared with the controls. In the control group, response magnitudes to surrounding whiskers D1 and D3 deflection were not significantly different. However, after WP, a bias occurred in response to paired surrounding whisker D3 relative to the opposite trimmed surrounding whisker D1. In this study, by comparing the bias degree in rats in different groups after WP, a quantitative method was established to compare cortical plasticity. Example of corical plasticity comparison between adolescent and mature rats was employed in this paper to illustrate our method. The key techniques of this method such as the identification of D2 barrels, supragranular (L2-3) and barrel layer (L4) in real-time were described in details. The feasibility of this approach was further verified by compendious report of results and our previous study regarding cortical plasticity comparison between adolescent and mature rats.
Animals ; Neuronal Plasticity ; Rats ; Somatosensory Cortex ; physiology ; Vibrissae

Sleep apnea (SA) detection method based on traditional machine learning needs a lot of efforts in feature engineering and classifier design. We constructed a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) model, which consists in four convolution layers, four pooling layers, two full connection layers and one classification layer. The automatic feature extraction and classification were realized by the structure of the proposed CNN model. The model was verified by the whole night single-channel sleep electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of 70 subjects from the Apnea-ECG dataset. Our results showed that the accuracy of per-segment SA detection was ranged from 80.1% to 88.0%, using the input signals of single-channel ECG signal, RR interval (RRI) sequence, R peak sequence and RRI sequence + R peak sequence respectively. These results indicated that the proposed CNN model was effective and can automatically extract and classify features from the original single-channel ECG signal or its derived signal RRI and R peak sequence. When the input signals were RRI sequence + R peak sequence, the CNN model achieved the best performance. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of per-segment SA detection were 88.0%, 85.1% and 89.9%, respectively. And the accuracy of per-recording SA diagnosis was 100%. These findings indicated that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy and robustness of SA detection and outperform the methods reported in recent years. The proposed CNN model can be applied to portable screening diagnosis equipment for SA with remote server.
Electrocardiography ; Humans ; Machine Learning ; Neural Networks, Computer ; Sensitivity and Specificity ; Sleep Apnea Syndromes/diagnosis*

Objective To explore the risk factors and awareness level of deep vein thrombosis(DVT)in elderly outpatients in Shanghai community hospitals.Methods A total of 710 elderly outpatients were subjected with random sampling from 10 community hospitals in Shanghai.Au-tar deep vein thrombosis risk assessment scale and venous thromboembolism(VTE)self-manage-ment ability related knowledge scale were used to conduct questionnaire investigation.The influ-encing factors for risk level of DVT and for VTE self-management ability score were analyzed in these patients.Results The high-risk DVT group had significantly larger proportions of aged 65 years,primary school education or below,chronic diseases,BMI≥28 kg/m2,and suburban resi-dents than the low-risk DVT patients(88.0％vs 50.9％,65.5％vs 26.5％,94.8％vs 86.2％,12.9％vs 5.2％,58.2％vs 43.9％,P＜0.01).Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that age,education level,chronic disease,multimorbidity,BMI and residential area were independent risk factors for risk level of DVT in the elderly outpatients in community hospitals(P＜0.05,P＜0.01).Hypertension,cerebral infarction,cerebral hemorrhage and malignant tumors were inde-pendent risk diseases of DVT in the patients with multimorbidity(P＜0.01).Age,education lev-el,chronic diseases,BMI,smoking,residential area and other factors were related to the score of VTE self-management(P＜0.05,P＜0.01).Conclusion General practitioners should pay close attention to the elderly outpatients in community hospitals,with characteristics of advanced age,obesity,lower education level,chronic disease,multimorbidity and living in suburban area,espe-cially those with multiple diseases.What's more,awareness of risk for DVT and self-management ability should be improved simultaneously.

Background: The aortic arch replacement and cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) are both associated with the early mortality after cardiothoracic surgery. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between CPB time and 90-day post-operative mortality in patients undergoing aortic arch surgery using the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique with selective ante-grade cerebral perfusion (SACP). Methods: We retrospectively reviewed data of 377 adult patients undergoing aortic arch surgery via FET with SACP from July 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018 at Beijing Anzhen Hospital. The baseline characteristics, intra-operative data, and post-operative data were collected. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were used to determine independent predictors of 90-day postoperative mortality. Results: The 90-day post-operative mortality was 13.53%. The 78.51% of patients were men. There were 318 (84.35%) type A aortic dissections and 28 (7.43%) aortic aneurysms. Among those, 264 (70.03%) were emergency operations. Median CPB time was 202.0 (176.0, 227.0) min. Multivariate Cox regression analysis revealed that CPB time was independently associated with 90-day post-operative mortality after adjusting confounding factors (hazard ratio: 1.21/10 min increase in CPB time, 95% confidence interval: 1.15–1.27, P < 0.001). Kaplan-Meier analysis based on CPB time tertiles revealed that the top tertile (median 236.0 min) was associated with reduced survival rate compared with middle and bottom tertiles (P < 0.001). Each sub-group analysis based on the complexity of the underlying disease process showed similar associations between CPB time and 90-day post-operative mortality. Conclusions CPB time remains a significant factor in determining 90-day post-operative mortality in patients undergoing aortic arch surgery using FET with SACP. Surgeons should be aware of the relationship between CPB time and 90-day post-operative mortality during operative procedures and avoid extended CPB time as far as possible.