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To enhance the accuracy of predicting stone-free rates after retrograde intrarenal surgery, we devised a novel approach to assess the renal infundibulopelvic angle. We conducted a retrospective review of patient records for those who underwent retrograde intrarenal surgery for renal stones between April 2018 and August 2019. Patient demographics, stone characteristics, and perioperative data were recorded. Subsequently, we introduced a modified angle measurement called the pelvic stone angle and evaluated its predictive performance for stone-free rates by comparing it with the traditional method in scoring systems. A total of 43 individuals were included in this study. Notable differences in stone burden and Hounsfield unit measurements were found between stone-free and non-stone-free patients. The pelvic stone angle demonstrated a good model fit when used in scoring systems, performing equally well as the conventional approach. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the R.I.R.S. scoring system using the pelvic stone angle and the conventional approach did not show a significant difference. In conclusion, the predictive ability of the pelvic stone angle for stone-free rates was comparable to the old measurement method. Moreover, scoring systems using the pelvic stone angle exhibited a better model fit than those using the conventional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of the study is to evaluate the three stone scoring systems (S.T.O.N.E nephrolithometry scoring system (STONE), Guy's stone score (GSS) and Seoul National University Renal Stone Complexity (S-ReSC)) for the stone-free rate (SFR) of mini-PCNL. We retrospectively analyzed 72 patients who received mini-PCNL from February 2018 to October 2020. The SFR, complication rates, hospitalization days and recurrence rates were analyzed using three stone scoring systems. The result showed statistical significance in the association between scoring system and stone-free (STONE: OR 95%CI 0.409 (0.221–0.759), p = 0.0045; S-ReSC OR 95%CI 0.633 (0.401–0.999), p = 0.0497), but not GSS (OR 95%CI 0.776 (0.397–1.516), p = 0.4581). After adjusting the potential confounding factors, the area under curve (AUC) of STONE, GSS, and S-ReSC was 0.86, 0.78, and 0.81, respectively, and Akaike information criterion (AIC) of STONE, GSS, and S-ReSC was 64.65, 74.89, and 69.92, respectively. The accuracy rate of STONE, GSS, and S-ReSC was 0.81, 0.75, and 0.79, respectively. There was no statistically difference of predicting stone recurrence (p = 0.46, 0.53, 0.86), complications (p = 0.74, 0.51, 0.16) and hospitalization days (p = 0.77, 0.86, 0.87) in STONE, GSS, and S-ReSC, respectively. In conclusion, both the STONE and S-ReSC stone scoring systems are viable for predicting the SFR following mini-PCNL, especially after variable adjustment with the STONE system demonstrating superiority over S-ReSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the effects of climate parameters on the number of urolithiasis treatments in our hospital and understand the effects of climate parameters on the prevalence of urolithiasis in southern Taiwan. We also look at trends associated with urolithiasis and treatments. Retrospectively reviewed the records of extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy (ESWL), ureteroscopy (URS), retrograde intrarenal surgery (RIRS), and percutaneous nephrolithotripsy (PCNL) performed in our hospital from January 2012 to December 2018. Climate data for were collected from Central Weather Bureau. The monthly meteorological data included average temperatures, humidity, rainfall, sunshine hours, atmospheric pressure, and wind speed. Monthly numbers of patients undergoing stone management was positively correlated to average temperature (r = 0.657), relative humidity (r = 0.234), monthly rainfall (r = 0.261) and monthly sunshine hours (r = 0.348), while it was negatively correlated to atmospheric pressure (r = − 0.522). The multivariate linear regression model demonstrated temperature (ß = 10.682, 95% CI 6.178–14.646, p < 0.001) and Relative humidity (ß = − 95% CI − 5.233- − 1.216, p = 0.002) to be independently related to numbers of stone treatment. The data also revealed a rising prevalence of urolithiasis with an associated increase in the number of interventions, with fewer ESWL (74.0–49.4%). Temperature and relative humidity are associated with monthly numbers of stone treatment. Ambient temperature is the most critical climate factor affecting the prevalence of symptomatic urolithiasis and intention of active stone removal in southern Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decomposition of Chinese characters is difficult and has been rarely investigated in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) technique to decompose a Chinese character into several graphical components without considering the strokes of the character or any semantic or phonetic properties of the components. Chinese characters can usually be represented as binary images. However, traditional NMF is only suitable for representing general gray-level or color images. To decompose a binary image using NMF, we force all of the elements of the two matrices (obtained by factorizing the binary image/matrix to be decomposed) as close to 0 or 1 as possible. As a result, a Chinese character can be efficiently decomposed into several components, where each component is semantically unreadable. Moreover, our NMF-based Chinese character decomposition method is suitable for applications in visual secret sharing by distributing the shares (different character components) among multiple parties, so that only when the parties are taken together with their respective shares can the secret (the original Chinese character(s)) be reconstructed. Experimental results have verified the decomposition performance and the feasibility of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]