Search

Scurvy, a condition caused by vitamin C deficiency, is rare, especially in high-income countries. Symptoms of scurvy are typically characterised by dermatological disorders such as poor wound healing and tooth loss, but there is not usually cardiac involvement. A case of reversible pulmonary hypertension and right-sided heart failure owing to scurvy in a 7-year-old boy with autism spectrum disorder is reported. He had a very restricted diet and presented with polyarthralgia, gingival hyperplasia with ecchymosis, and fatigue. His condition, including pulmonary hypertension and right-sided heart failure, completely resolved with vitamin C supplementation. Paediatricians should have a high index of suspicion for scurvy in children with nutritional selectivity and be aware that it can manifest with cardiac symptoms. Scurvy may be life-threatening if not treated, but the symptoms can improve rapidly with vitamin C supplementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic data generation is generally used in performance evaluation and function tests in data-intensive applications, as well as in various areas of data analytics, such as privacy-preserving data publishing (PPDP) and statistical disclosure limit/control. A significant amount of research has been conducted on tools and languages for data generation. However, existing tools and languages have been developed for specific purposes and are unsuitable for other domains. In this article, we propose a regular expression-based data generation language (DGL) for flexible big data generation. To achieve a general-purpose and powerful DGL, we enhanced the standard regular expressions to support the data domain, type/format inference, sequence and random generation, probability distributions, and resource reference. To efficiently implement the proposed language, we propose caching techniques for both the intermediate and database queries. We evaluated the proposed improvement experimentally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An 11-month-old male infant with ascending paralysis had an unremarkable initial cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis and imaging. Progressive neurological symptoms resulted in repeated CSF sampling, microscopy, and plasma microbial cell-free DNA next-generation sequencing analysis, that in combination with epidemiology, confirmed the diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Size-specific dose estimates (SSDEs) are dose indices that account for differences in body shape in computed tomography (CT) scans, allowing the evaluation of approximate absorbed doses in any cross section that could not be obtained with the volume CT dose index (CTDI vol ). When using automatic exposure control (AEC), CTDI vol is modulated in the body axis direction, but the value displayed after the examination is the mean CTDI vol for the entire scan, and it is expected that the SSDE value will change depending on which value is used in the calculation. In this study, using a human body phantom, we examined the influence of whether the mean CTDI vol or the modulation value for each slice is used to calculate the SSDE on local organ dose evaluation. A program to calculate water equivalent diameter according to the procedure in the American Association of Physicists in Medicine Report No. 220 was developed and compared. As a result, SSDE calculated using the mean CTDI vol (local-SSDE mean ) overestimated organ doses in the lung region by 18%-56% compared with those calculated by a web system for evaluating CT exposure doses (WAZA-ARIv2, Japan). In contrast, local-SSDE modulated , which was calculated using the modulated value of the CTDI vol , was able to estimate the organ dose with a relative error of 10%-13%. The average local-SSDE over the entire body axis direction was not significantly different between the two methods, regardless of which method was used for CTDI vol . If the mean CTDI vol is stored in the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) header tag (0018, 9345) of the CT image and the modulated CTDI vol value is not available for each slice, the calculated local SSDE will contain many errors and will not correctly reflect the organ doses at the scan region. In such cases, it is available to use the method of evaluating local organ doses by multiplying the SSDE, which is the average of the SSDE for the entire scan, by a factor for each organ.