Background: Constraint-induced aphasia therapy (CIAT) has been reported as a short-term, intensive language training program for improving language function in patients with chronic aphasia. We report the recovery of language function in a patient with chronic aphasia who was evaluated in the baseline assessment as having reached a plateau. Case: The patient with subcortical aphasia was a 62-year-old, right-handed man. At 192 days after left putamen hemorrhage, he visited our hospital to begin CIAT. The patient's language and speech abilities were evaluated 1 month before and immediately before the start of CIAT. To evaluate the training effect, language function was assessed immediately after, 1 month after, 3 months after, and 6 months after the end of CIAT. The Western Aphasia Battery (WAB), the single-word-naming task in the Test of Lexical Processing in Aphasia (TLPA), and the Verbal Activity Log (VAL) were used to assess his language function and the amount of spoken language. From 1 month before CIAT to 6 months after CIAT, the WAB Aphasia Quotient increased by 6.1 points. Compared with before therapy, the errors of apraxia of speech in the TLPA disappeared from immediately after to 6 months after CIAT. Although the VAL score at 3 months after CIAT was higher than that before the start of CIAT, the score decreased after 6 months because of reduced opportunities for communication with friends. Discussion: CIAT improved the word-naming ability and amount of spontaneous, real-world spoken language in a patient with chronic aphasia.

In this study, an empirical approach toward visually convincing fracture animation is considered for entertainment purposes. We aim to achieve a real-time fracture animation where the user can directly specify the possible geometry of cracks, but the resulting geometry of fragments is realistic. Our procedure comprises four main tasks: generating a crack pattern on a two-dimensional object through the L-system and the Turtle graphics concept, detecting the shape of fragments by the angle-prioritized depth-first search (AP-DFS), and then classifying it by the compression and classification (CC) procedure, and finally generating three-dimensional objects by sweeping. In the first task, the L-system controls topological complexity, such as the number of branches and how frequent a specified pattern can appear, and the Turtle graphics parameters control geometric complexity, such as the distribution of cracks. A rigid body dynamics simulator has been developed, implementing the above procedure to prepare objects for fracture animation. Through the verification by the rigid body dynamics simulator, we confirmed that the developed application could be used for a new fracture animation procedure based on tailored crack patterns.

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