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Purpose: To determine whether immediate implant placement and loading renders different outcomes from delayed loading with respect to midfacial mucosal level in the maxillary esthetic area. Materials and Methods: A literature search was conducted in four electronic databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and Cochrane), identifying eligible clinical studies published prior to December 2021. Only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing immediate implant placement with or without immediate loading in the maxillary esthetic zone with a mean follow-up of at least 12 months were selected for qualitative analysis and meta-analysis. The Cochrane Risk of Bias tool was adopted to assess the quality of the evidence. The heterogeneity between the pooled literature was analyzed through the chi-square test (P < .05) and quantified by the I2 index. A mixed-effects model was applied if it appeared that there was noteworthy heterogeneity; otherwise, a random-effects model was chosen. For continuous outcomes, the estimate of relative effect was presented to display the standardized mean differences (SMDs) and 95% CIs. For dichotomous variables, the Mantel-Haenszel statistical method was applied with effect sizes expressed as risk ratios (RRs) and 95% CIs. This study is registered on PROSPERO with number CRD42017078611. Results: Out of 5,553 records, 8 RCTs were involved, providing data for 324 immediately placed implants (immediate implants subjected to immediate loading [IPIL]: 163; immediate implants subjected to delayed loading [IPDL]: 161) that had been in function within 12 to 60 months. Meta-analyses revealed significantly lower midfacial mucosal level changes for IPIL compared with IPDL, pointing to 0.48 mm (95% CI: -0.84 to -0.12; P = .01), as well as more significant papillary recession after IPDL (SMD -0.16; 95% CI: -0.31 to 0.00; P = .04). The differences regarding implant survival and marginal bone loss between the two loading groups showed no statistical significance. The result of metaanalyses revealed similar plaque score (SMD 0.03; 95% CI: -0.22 to 0.29; P = .79) and probing depth (SMD -0.09; 95% CI: -0.23 to 0.05; P = .21) for IPIL and IPDL. On the other hand, IPIL induced a trend toward more bleeding on probing (SMD 0.22; 95% CI: 0.01 to 0.42; P = .04) and less change in facial ridge dimension (SMD 0.94; 95% CI: -1.49 to --0.39; P < .01). Conclusion: After a follow-up ranging from 12 to 60 months, midfacial mucosa level change was 0.48 mm lower following IPIL compared with IPDL. Immediate implant placement and loading is conducive to the preservation of physiologic soft and hard tissue architecture, appearing to offer considerable benefits in the anterior zone. In summary, IPIL should be considered in the esthetic zone if the primary implant stability permits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Titanium and its alloys have been widely employed as dental implant materials. However, polymicrobial infection is still one of the most common reasons for implant failure, which has already become a worldwide problem and poses a threat to human health. In this study, a titanium-based (Ti-based) superhydrophobic coating was effectively created by anodization followed by hydrophobic modification of 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorodecyltriethoxysilane (FAS), which shows a high water contact angle (WCA) of 159.9 ± 5.8° and a low water sliding angle (WSA) of 2.7 ± 2.2°. The thickness of the anodized samples is from 500 nm to 4 µm as the anodizing voltage increases. The Ti-based superhydrophobic coating demonstrated the existence of Ti, O, C, F, and Si elements, and the corresponding phase compositions are Ti and anatase. The results showed that the Ti-based superhydrophobic coating has good biocompatibility to co-culture with L929 cells for 1, 3, and 5 days. It was also proven that the as-prepared Ti-based superhydrophobic coating has enhanced antibacterial abilities against Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Porphyromonas gingivalis (P. gingivalis, P.g) after 4, 12, and 24 h. Moreover, the Ti-based superhydrophobic coating can significantly reduce platelet adhesion and activation. In addition, the Ti-based superhydrophobic coating also exhibits a considerable positive shift in the corrosion potential (Ecorr) and a decline of one order of magnitude in the corrosion current density (Jcorr), showing good anticorrosive properties. It was also found that the capsule around the Ti-based superhydrophobic coating was thinner than that of bare Ti after implantation for 7, 15, and 28 days, indicating its good biosafety. Therefore, the as-prepared Ti-based superhydrophobic coating can be a suitable candidate for Ti-based implants in dental applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A AgBr–Ag2MoO4 heterojunction with high inactivation of E. coli under visible-light illumination was constructed. The crystal structure, morphology, elemental composition, and optical properties were characterized by TEM, SEM, XRD, XPS and DRS. The photocatalytic inactivation of E. coli by AgBr, Ag2MoO4, and AgBr–Ag2MoO4 was investigated. The results indicate that AgBr–Ag2MoO4 shows the best disinfection activity compared to AgBr and Ag2MoO4, with the E. coli being almost completely inactivated after illumination for 80 min. In addition, the cell structure of the bacteria is destroyed after visible-light irradiation in the presence of the catalyst. The UV absorption detection confirms that the bacterial protein leak and the concentration of nucleic acid in the solution also increase with the increase of the reaction time, indicating that the integrity of the bacterial cell membrane is damaged. The detection of ROS scavengers indicates that the reactive species (h+, ˙OH, e− and ˙O2−) play an important role in the inactivation of bacteria. The EPR tests confirm that the amount of ˙OH is higher than that of ˙O2− during the illumination process, which is consistent with the results of the free-radical capture tests. The heterojunction of AgBr–Ag2MoO4 is beneficial for the separation of photogenerated electrons and holes during the illumination process, resulting in an improvement of the antibacterial properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the chemical compositions and antimicrobial activities of essential oil from Pterocarya stenoptera. The essential oil obtained by hydrodistillation from the dried leaves of P. stenoptera was analysed by GC–MS and 39 constituents accounting for the total 90.44% of the oil were identified. The main constituents were δ-cadinene (24.83%), caryophyllene oxide (9.10%), α-cadinol (7.48%) and β-elemene (6.24%). The antimicrobial activity of the oil was evaluated by disc diffusion and broth microdilution methods. The essential oil was found to show broad-spectrum antimicrobial activities against all the tested microorganisms. Bacillus subtilis was the most sensitive strain with the minimum inhibitory concentration of 0.23 mg/mL. The results suggested that the essential oil was a potential source of natural antimicrobials in food preservation and pharmaceutical industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a broad overview of some of the current research directions at the intersection of embedded systems and computer vision, in addition to introducing the papers appearing in this special issue. Work at this intersection is steadily growing in importance, especially in the context of autonomous and cyber-physical systems design. Vision-based perception is almost a mandatory component in any autonomous system, but also adds myriad challenges like, how to efficiently implement vision processing algorithms on resource-constrained embedded architectures, and how to verify the functional and timing correctness of these algorithms. Computer vision is also crucial in implementing various smart functionality like security, e.g., using facial recognition, or monitoring events or traffic patterns. Some of these applications are reviewed in this introductory article. The remaining articles featured in this special issue dive into more depth on a few of them.

This paper proposed a method of locating head-shoulder quickly and detecting with the fusion feature to solve the problems of pedestrian detection in video. It firstly selected the candidate pixel points in the foreground, for the pixel gradient direction of the top of the head had a fixed scope. Then it located the areas of human head-shoulder quickly by these points, which defined as the windows to be tested. Next, it extracted the HOG features and HSV features of the windows. Lastly, it trained the head-shoulder classifier by support vector machine (SVM). Experimental results show that based on the pixel gradient direction of the top of the head, the windows which contain head-shoulder can be located more quickly than the traditional method, sliding window, which improves the efficiency of the detection. Furthermore, the accuracy of detection is also improved by the fusion feature of HOG and HSV. Thus, the proposed method performs well and can help the subsequent analysis of the pedestrians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundSocial media is a powerful tool for the dissemination of health messages. However, few studies have focused on the factors that improve the influence of health messages on social media. ObjectiveTo explore the influence of goal-framing effects, information organizing, and the use of pictures or videos in health-promoting messages, we conducted a case study of Sina Weibo, a popular social media platform in China. MethodsLiterature review and expert discussion were used to determine the health themes of childhood obesity, smoking, and cancer. Web crawler technology was employed to capture data on health-promoting messages. We used the number of retweets, comments, and likes to evaluate the influence of a message. Statistical analysis was then conducted after manual coding. Specifically, binary logistic regression was used for the data analyses. ResultsWe crawled 20,799 Sina Weibo messages and selected 389 health-promoting messages for this study. Results indicated that the use of gain-framed messages could improve the influence of messages regarding childhood obesity (P