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Infection prevention and control (IPC) standards have a unique role in controlling infection transmission. In Saudi Arabia, every healthcare facility is required to establish an IPC program to identify and reduce the risk of infection acquisition and transmission. This study aimed to estimate adherence to IPC measures after the COVID-19 pandemic among healthcare workers (HCWs) in Najran City, Saudi Arabia. This cross-sectional study was conducted among HCWs in Najran City during the period of May to August 2023. A self-administered questionnaire was given to HCWs consisting of three parts: demographic data, profile of healthcare facility and healthcare professional regarding infection control, and questionnaire to assess the adherence of HCWs regarding infection control measures. The study recruited 580 HCWs, of whom 57.6% were males, and 46.6% were aged between 31 and 40 years. The overall mean adherence score was 103.2±9.71 out of 150 points. Accordingly, 88.4% were classified as having moderate adherence, 10.2% were good, and only 1.4% were classified as having poor adherence. Some of the factors associated with increased adherence to IPC measures, include being female, being a nurse, being a practitioner, working in the hospital emergency department, and having a recognized antimicrobial stewardship program team/unit at a healthcare facility. There was satisfactory adherence among HCWs regarding infection prevention and control measures. Being a female, a nurse, a practitioner, working in a hospital emergency department, being a staff of a non-MOH (Ministry of Health) hospital, and having a recognized antimicrobial stewardship program team/unit were identified as significant predictors of increased adherence. IPC measures can be optimized by setting up institutional IPC teams, necessary PPE, and periodic provision of IPC training.

While there are many useful studies on Indonesian native phonology and loanword phonology, none has yet explored Minangkabau loanword phonology in depth. Therefore, based on a list of 52 well-established native Indonesian loanwords elicited from 10 adult native speakers of Minangkabau and verified by native speakers and transcribed in IPA, and within the ambit of Optimality Theory, this paper aims to investigate the following research questions: What are the phonotactic repair strategies employed in Minangkabau to adapt these words? Why are they triggered? Are they phonologically or phonetically driven? And why? The study finds that the two observed repairs are consonantal debuccalization and consonantal deletion, which are both employed in order to fulfill the phonotactic conditions of Minangkabau. In Minangkabau, obstruent and liquid consonants are disallowed word-finally; as a result, word-final voiceless stops /p, t, k/ in native Indonesian words are debuccalized into the glottal stop /ʔ/, and the voiceless fricative /s/ into the glottal fricative /h/. However, unlike word-final obstruents, the word-final liquid consonants /r, l/ in native Indonesian words are adapted through deletion when entering Minangkabau. The results, moreover, show that that the above repair strategies are guided by phonology rather than phonetics; that is to say, among others, they are guided by coda restrictions in Minangkabau phonotactics in terms of word-final obstruent and liquid consonants. Finally, by presenting evidence from Minangkabau in favor of the phonological stance, it is believed that the paper contributes to the significant debate as to whether loanword adaptation is phonological or phonetic.

OBJECTIVES: Accurate estimation of unerupted permanent canines and premolars is a crucial step for effective orthodontic treatment planning during mixed dentition. This study aimed to evaluate the validity of Moyers’ charts and the Tanaka–Johnston equation in predicting tooth sizes in a sample of the Madina population in Saudi Arabia and propose a new regression equation. METHODS: Dental casts from 219 subjects (113 males and 106 females) were analyzed. Actual mesiodistal tooth widths were measured using digital calipers with an accuracy of 0.01 mm. Moyers’ and Tanaka–Johnston predictions were compared with actual measurements, and a new set of prediction equations was developed. RESULTS: Tanaka–Johnston predictions consistently overestimated the actual measurements, exhibiting a difference of 1.20 mm for maxillary canines and premolars and a difference of 1.25 mm for mandibular teeth. The Moyers chart showed gender-specific variations with males aligning with the 50th percentile and females aligning with the 65th percentile for upper arches and the 50th percentile for lower arches. Newly derived linear regression equations were established for predicting the sum of upper and lower canines and premolars for the Madina population. CONCLUSION: The study highlights limitations in the Moyers and Tanaka–Johnston methods used for the current sample as both methods overestimated tooth sizes. New regression equations were developed to offer a more accurate approach for predicting tooth sizes for the study sample.

The learning‐based multiview stereo (MVS) methods for three‐dimensional (3D) reconstruction generally use 3D volumes for depth inference. The quality of the reconstructed depth maps and the corresponding point clouds is directly influenced by the spatial resolution of the 3D volume. Consequently, these methods produce point clouds with sparse local regions because of the lack of the memory required to encode a high volume of information. Here, we apply the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module in MVS methods to obtain dense feature maps with multiscale, long‐range, contextual information using high receptive fields. For a given 3D volume with the same spatial resolution as that in the MVS methods, the dense feature maps from the ASPP module encoded with superior information can produce dense point clouds without a high memory footprint. Furthermore, we propose a 3D loss for training the MVS networks, which improves the predicted depth values by 24.44%. The ASPP module provides state‐of‐the‐art qualitative results by constructing relatively dense point clouds, which improves the DTU MVS dataset benchmarks by 2.25% compared with those achieved in the previous MVS methods.

Introduction: Healthcare professionals who are constantly working to treat the patients of Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) are at great risk. So the only method they can prevent themselves while working is the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The use of PPE has increased with the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). Aim: To evaluate the knowledge and practice of students of different healthcare specialties regarding the use of PPE. Materials and Methods: The present cross-sectional study was conducted from October 2020 to December 2020 on healthcare students of different healthcare specialties of Najran University, Saudi Arabia. Participants were asked questions about the practice and knowledge of PPE via an electronic link of a questionnaire. Collected data were statistically analysed for frequency and association of responses by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.0. Results: Total of 606 students (females were 122, males were 484) from different health specialities i.e., Medical (25.4%), Dental (42.1%), Pharmacy (11.2%), Nursing (13.4%) and Physiotherapy (7.9%) participated in this survey. Most of the participants (110 from the medical field, 142 from dental, 42 from pharmacy and 63 from nursing and 28 from physiotherapy) were familiar with the word PPE before this pandemic. There was a significant relationship (p-value

Virtual Reality (VR) contents include 360°×180° seamless panoramic videos, stitched from multiple overlapping video streams. Many commercial VR devices use a two-camera rig to capture VR content. These devices have increased radial distortion effects along the seams of the stitching boundary. Moreover, a fixed number of cameras in the camera rig makes the VR system non-scalable. Since the VR experience is directly related to the quality of VR content, it is desirable to create a VR framework that is scalable in terms of the number of cameras attached to the camera-rig and has better geometric and photometric quality. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end VR system for stitching full spherical content. The VR system is composed of camera rig calibration and stitching modules. The calibration module performs a geometric alignment of the camera rig. The stitching module transforms texture from the camera or video stream into the VR stream using lookup tables (LUTs) and blend masks (BMs). In this work, our main contribution is the improvement of stitching quality. First, we propose a feature preprocessing method that filters out inconsistent, error-prone features. Secondly, we propose a geometric alignment method that outperforms state-of-the-art VR stitching solutions. We tested our system on diverse image sets and obtained state-of-the-art geometric alignment. Moreover, we achieved real-time stitching of camera and video streams up to 120 fps at 4K resolution. After stitching, we encode VR content for IP multicasting.

This paper presents a keypoint detection method based on the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG). In contrast to the Difference of Gaussian (DoG)-based keypoint detection method used in Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), we focus on the LoG operator and its higher order derivatives. We provide mathematical analogies between higher order DoG (HDoG) and higher order LoG (HLoG) and experimental results to show the effectiveness of the proposed HLoG-based keypoint detection method. The performance of the HLoG is evaluated with four different tests: i) a repeatability test of the keypoints detected across images under various transformations, ii) image retrieval, iii) panorama stitching and iv) 3D reconstruction. The proposed HLoG method provides comparable performance to HDoG and the combination of HLoG and HDoG provides significant improvements in various keypoint-related computer vision problems.

Owing to its high accuracy, the radial basis function (RBF) is gaining popularity in function interpolation and for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). The implementation of RBF methods is independent of the locations of the points and the dimensionality of the problems. However, the stability and accuracy of RBF methods depend significantly on the shape parameter, which is mainly affected by the basis function and the node distribution. If the shape parameter has a small value, then the RBF becomes accurate but unstable. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to overcome the instability issue. Changing or expanding the radial basis function is one of the most commonly used approaches because it addresses the stability problem directly. However, the main issue with most of those approaches is that they require the optimization of additional parameters, such as the truncation order of the expansion, to obtain the desired accuracy. In this work, the Hermite polynomial is used to expand the RBF with respect to the shape parameter to determine a stable basis, even when the shape parameter approaches zero, and the approach does not require the optimization of any parameters. Furthermore, the Hermite polynomial properties enable the RBF to be evaluated stably even when the shape parameter equals zero. The proposed approach was benchmarked to test its reliability, and the obtained results indicate that the accuracy is independent of or weakly dependent on the shape parameter. However, the convergence depends on the order of the truncation of the expansion. Additionally, it is observed that the new approach improves accuracy and yields the accurate interpolation, derivative approximation, and PDE solution.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on the pediatric population worldwide. The consequences of the lockdown and the reallocation of hospital resources have caused notable changes in the presentation of pediatric orthopedic injuries. Through our use of patient records, we were able to display the epidemiological trends, as well as analyze the changes in the type and mechanism of various injuries. Our purpose is to further understand the considerable effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on pediatric orthopedic trauma and help guide the allocation of future healthcare resources. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study on pediatric patients admitted for any orthopedic injury over a 3-year period (September 2018 to August 2021) at a Midwest level 1 trauma center. Cases were stratified into two groups based on the United States' COVID-19 lockdown (19 March 2020): Pre-COVID-19 cases were any cases prior to the lockdown and Intra-COVID-19 which are cases following the lockdown. Numerical data and categorical variables were summarized and differences between the case groups were examined using either two-Proportion Z-Test, Independent Two-Sample t-test, Pearson's chi-squared, or Fisher's exact tests. Results: A total of 3179 pediatric orthopedic referrals occurred between the Pre-COVID-19 and Intra-COVID-19 study periods. We observed a general decrease in orthopedic injuries following the COVID-19 lockdowns with 1235 injuries compared to 1606 Pre-COVID-19. Patterns in the locations of injuries changed; notably, fractures of the humerus, tibia, and fibula decreased significantly (p < 0.05). Several mechanisms of injuries decreased significantly following the onset of COVID-19 including injuries caused by monkey bars, basketball, and automobiles (p < 0.01). There was a significant increase in the overall injury severity during the Intra-COVID-19 period (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Although there was a reduction in acute orthopedic trauma referrals, many injury mechanisms displayed similar trends regardless of restrictions. We clinically observed an overall increase in the severity of pediatric orthopedic injuries during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OBJECTIVES: Accurate estimation of unerupted permanent canines and premolars is a crucial step for effective orthodontic treatment planning during mixed dentition. This study aimed to evaluate the validity of Moyers' charts and the Tanaka–Johnston equation in predicting tooth sizes in a sample of the Madina population in Saudi Arabia and propose a new regression equation. METHODS: Dental casts from 219 subjects (113 males and 106 females) were analyzed. Actual mesiodistal tooth widths were measured using digital calipers with an accuracy of 0.01 mm. Moyers' and Tanaka–Johnston predictions were compared with actual measurements, and a new set of prediction equations was developed. RESULTS: Tanaka–Johnston predictions consistently overestimated the actual measurements, exhibiting a difference of 1.20 mm for maxillary canines and premolars and a difference of 1.25 mm for mandibular teeth. The Moyers chart showed gender-specific variations with males aligning with the 50th percentile and females aligning with the 65th percentile for upper arches and the 50th percentile for lower arches. Newly derived linear regression equations were established for predicting the sum of upper and lower canines and premolars for the Madina population. CONCLUSION: The study highlights limitations in the Moyers and Tanaka–Johnston methods used for the current sample as both methods overestimated tooth sizes. New regression equations were developed to offer a more accurate approach for predicting tooth sizes for the study sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infection prevention and control (IPC) standards have a unique role in controlling infection transmission. In Saudi Arabia, every healthcare facility is required to establish an IPC program to identify and reduce the risk of infection acquisition and transmission. This study aimed to estimate adherence to IPC measures after the COVID-19 pandemic among healthcare workers (HCWs) in Najran City, Saudi Arabia. This cross-sectional study was conducted among HCWs in Najran City during the period of May to August 2023. A self-administered questionnaire was given to HCWs consisting of three parts: demographic data, profile of healthcare facility and healthcare professional regarding infection control, and questionnaire to assess the adherence of HCWs regarding infection control measures. The study recruited 580 HCWs, of whom 57.6% were males, and 46.6% were aged between 31 and 40 years. The overall mean adherence score was 103.2±9.71 out of 150 points. Accordingly, 88.4% were classified as having moderate adherence, 10.2% were good, and only 1.4% were classified as having poor adherence. Some of the factors associated with increased adherence to IPC measures, include being female, being a nurse, being a practitioner, working in the hospital emergency department, and having a recognized antimicrobial stewardship program team/unit at a healthcare facility. There was satisfactory adherence among HCWs regarding infection prevention and control measures. Being a female, a nurse, a practitioner, working in a hospital emergency department, being a staff of a nonMOH (Ministry of Health) hospital, and having a recognized antimicrobial stewardship program team/ unit were identified as significant predictors of increased adherence. IPC measures can be optimized by setting up institutional IPC teams, necessary PPE, and periodic provision of IPC training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Respiratory therapy is a vital component of modern healthcare, encompassing a range of interventions aimed at improving respiratory function and quality of life for individuals with breathing disorders. Respiratory therapists play a pivotal role in assessing, diagnosing, and treating patients, employing a diverse skill set to optimize lung health and alleviate respiratory symptoms. This abstract provides an overview of the key roles and responsibilities of respiratory therapists, highlighting their contributions to patient care, disease management, and emergency response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Diabetes affects 422 million people worldwide, with the majority living in developing countries. Diabetes is currently one of the world's fourth leading causes of death. Global diabetes estimates for adults over the age of 18 The proportion of people over the age of 65 increased from 4.7% in 1980 to 8.5% in 2014. Diabetes can be controlled so that its consequences are minimized. Diabetic Retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness; this is due to long-term accumulation of damage to small blood vessels within the retina Diabetes is responsible for 2.6% of global blindness. Methods: In this cross - sectional study data was collected by the purposely constructed questionnaire. Questionnaire composed of the demographic items and items related to the awareness and knowledge about of diabetic retinopathy in diabetic patients Questionnaire was constructed after the series of discussions between the panel of experts this panel composed of from subject specialist, researcher, language expert. Cronbach alpha of the questionnaire was calculated. The study was conducted in the Aseer region of Saudi Arabia. Results: We have received 434 filled questionnaire so the response rate was 87%. Mean(SD) of the age was 37.8(9.6). 39.4% were females while 60.6% were male respondents.23.7% have HTN as an other chronic disease, 16.4% were smokers, 42.9% have DM duration less than 5 years, 26.3% have DM duration more than 15 years.28.6% have more than high school level of education. 70.3% have DM patients in family while 38.5% have more than 7 cumulative sugar level. Conclusion: The majority of patients get their information from their doctors. These findings highlight the importance of increasing diabetic retinopathy awareness among Saudi diabetics, as well as the importance of annual ophthalmic eye screening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]