No abstract

The popularity of clear overlay retainers (CORs) has increased recently because of their advantages such as better esthetics, cost effectiveness, easy fabrication, and good compliance. However, a deficiency in posterior occlusal settling is a reported limitation of CORs. The aim of this study was to evaluate the posterior occlusal contact changes in a new type of clear orthodontic retainer called Oral-treaper (OTP), which consists of three layers and has stronger mechanical characteristics than do conventional retainers. Three patients who completed fixed orthodontic treatment received OTP as a removable retainer. Cast models were fabricated after the removal of fixed appliances (T1) and after 4 to 11 months of using the retainers (T2). We evaluated all the cast models to compare the post-orthodontic settling pattern during the use of the OTPs. The depth of occlusal contacts was evaluated using color maps. The OTP did not prevent vertical settling in all patients but resulted in an improvement in posterior occlusal contact points.

No abstract

In intelligent video surveillance systems, the detected moving objects often contain shadows which may deteriorate the performance of object detections. Therefore, shadow detection and removal is an important step employed after foreground extraction. Since HSV color space gives a better separation of chromaticity and intensity, it has been commonly adopted to detect and remove shadow. However, almost all the HSV color space based methods use static thresholds to separate shadows from foreground. In this paper, a dynamic threshold based method is proposed. In the proposed approach, the threshold prediction model is first established by a statistical analysis tool and then the predicted dynamic thresholds are used for shadow detection. Experiments on a self-built dataset show that the proposed method can get better reliability and robustness than the traditional methods using static thresholds.

DNA replicase polymerase ε (POLE) is critical in proofreading and correcting errors of DNA replication. Low POLE expression plays a pivotal role in accumulation of mutations and onset of cancer, contributing to development and growth of tumor cells. The aim of this study is to reveal the survival, alternative genes and antitumoral immune activities in nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with low POLE expression and provide treatment strategies that can increase their survival rates. This study investigated the clinicopathologic parameters, various tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), endogenous retrovirus, molecular interactions and in vitro drug screen according to POLE mutation/expression in 168 and 1,019 NSCLC patients from the Konkuk University Medical Center (KUMC) and the Cancer Genome Atlas, respectively. We identified mutations of 75 genes in the sequencing panels, with POLE frame shift p.V1446fs being the most frequent (56.8%) in KUMC based on 170 targeted sequencing panels. Mutant and high expression of POLE correlated with favorable prognosis with increased TILs and tumor mutation burden, compared with wild type and low expression of POLE. We found specific molecular interactions associated with cell cycle and antigen presentation. An in vitro drug screen identified dasatinib that inhibited growth of the NSCLC cell line with low POLE expression. POLE could contribute to the future development of anticancer drugs for patients with NSCLC.