INTRODUCTION Artificial disc arthroplasty, as a promising treatment for disc degenerative diseases, has been reported to restore normal disc height, preserve segmental motion and decrease adjacent level degeneration. Despite its encouraging short term outcomes, complications related to device and surgical procedure such as subsidence, dislocation and instability due to misalignment warrant furt...

Lumbar spondylolysis, a well known cause of low back pain, usually affects the pars interarticularis of a lower lumbar vertebra and rarely involves the articular processes. We report a rare case of bilateral spondylolysis of inferior articular processes of L4 vertebra that caused spinal canal stenosis with a significant segmental instability at L4/5 and scoliosis. A 31-year-old male who had suf...

BACKGROUND Postural rehabilitation emphasizing on motor control training of segmental spinal movements has been proposed to effectively reduce the scoliotic spinal deformities in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). However, information regarding the impairments of segmental spinal movement control involving segmental spinal stabilizers in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis remains limited. Exam...

BACKGROUND Although some investigators believe that the rate of postoperative instability is low after lumbar spinal stenosis surgery, the majority believe that postoperative instability usually develops. Decompression alone and decompression with fusion have been widely used for years in the surgical treatment of lumbar spinal stenosis. Nevertheless, in recent years several biomechanical studi...

This paper proposes an approach to detect social speech signals by computing segmental features using adaptation of segmental Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). This approach uses segmental HMMs and model adaptation techniques such as Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) and Maximum A Posterior (MAP) in order to acquire specific (or adapted) segmental HMMs that are fine-tuned to detect local r...

Low back pain (LBP) is a very common problem and lumbar segmental instability is one of the causes. It is important to investigate lumbar spine movement in order to understand instability better and as an aid to diagnosis. Digital videofluoroscopy provides a method of quantifying the motion of individual vertebrae, but due to the relatively poor image quality, it is difficult and time consuming...

Surprisingly, the contribution of defects in DNA replication to the determination of yeast life span has never been directly investigated. We show that a replicative yeast helicase/nuclease, encoded by DNA2 and a member of the same helicase subfamily as the RecQ helicases, is required for normal life span. All of the phenotypes of old wild-type cells, for example, extended cell cycle time, age-...

IMPORTANCE We report the first case to date of maternally transmitted infantile spinocerebellar ataxia type 7 (SCA7), in which a tract of (CAG)45 expands to lengths as large as (CAG)92-250. OBSERVATIONS A 38-year-old woman with classic SCA7 (and a son, who died at age 3 years) had pronounced cerebellar atrophy and a renal biopsy specimen that showed focal segmental glomerulosclerosis with abn...

There are several methods for analysing the behaviour of underground structures under different loading conditions. Most of these methods have many simplifications; therefore, in some cases, the results are too conservative and a very high safety factor, usually of more than 2 is needed. On the other hand, for stability analysis and the designing of support systems, these methods consider segme...