BACKGROUND AND AIMS Plaque border irregularity is a known imaging characteristic of vulnerable plaques, but its evaluation heavily relies on subjective evaluation and operator expertise. Aim of the present work is to propose a novel fractal-analysis based method for the quantification of atherosclerotic plaque border irregularity and assess its relation with cardiovascular risk factors. METHO...

Non-linear analysis of the electroencephalogram (EEG) background activity can help to obtain a better understanding of abnormal dynamics in the brain. The aim of this study was to analyze the regularity of the EEG time series of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients to test the hypothesis that the irregularity of the AD patients’ EEG is lower than that of age-matched controls. We recorded the EEG f...

BACKGROUND Even if atrial fibrillatory rate (AFR) has been related to clinical outcome in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), its relation with ventricular response has not been deeply studied. The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between AFR and RR series variability in patients with AF. METHODS Twenty-minute electrocardiograms in orthogonal leads were processed to extra...

This study examined changes in the dental arches that occur in untreated persons between late adolescence and the fifth or sixth decade of life. Longitudinal dental casts from 82 subjects were obtained as part of a recall study of subjects from the University of Michigan Elementary and Secondary School Growth Study. From the parent sample, three groups were identified. The untreated sample comp...

BACKGROUND Atrial fibrillation (AF) is often asymptomatic and undiagnosed until an ischaemic stroke occurs. An irregular pulse is a key manifestation of AF. We assessed whether pulse self-palpation is feasible in screening of AF. METHODS Altogether 205 residents of Lieto municipality aged ≥75 years were randomized in 2012 to receive brief education on pulse palpation focusing on evaluating rh...

OBJECTIVE Our aim was to determine the effect of prior transrectal biopsy on endorectal MRI and MR spectroscopic imaging findings in patients with organ-confined prostate cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS Endorectal MRI and MR spectroscopic imaging were performed in 43 patients with biopsy-proven prostate cancer before radical prostatectomy confirming organ-confined disease. For each sextant, two...

OBJECTIVE The first-night effect is a well-known phenomenon resulting from an individual's maladaptation to the unfamiliar environment of a sleep laboratory. However, there have been no direct reports of the effect of previous sleep patterns on the first-night effect. We aimed to investigate the effect the previous week's sleep pattern on the first-night effect. METHODS Twenty-four young, hea...

Cortical neurons of behaving animals generate irregular spike sequences. Recently, there has been a heated discussion about the origin of this irregularity. Softky and Koch (1993) pointed out the inability of standard single-neuron models to reproduce the irregularity of the observed spike sequences when the model parameters are chosen within a certain range that they consider to be plausible. ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to compare the precision of three-dimensional (3D) images acquired using iTero® (Align Technology Inc., San Jose, CA, USA) and Trios® (3Shape Dental Systems, Copenhagen, Denmark) digital intraoral scanners, and to evaluate the effects of the severity of tooth irregularities and scanning sequence on precision. METHODS Dental arch models were fabricated w...