A clinical, cadaveric, biomechanical and radiological investigation of the pathogenesis of idiopathic scoliosis indicates that biplanar asymmetry is the essential lesion. Many normal children have coronal plane asymmetry (an inconsequential lateral curvature of the spine), and certainly all have vertebral body asymmetry in the transverse plane, but when median plane asymmetry (flattening or more usually reversal of the normal thoracic kyphosis at the apex of the scoliosis) is superimposed during growth, a progressive idiopathic scoliosis occurs. Idiopathic kyphoscoliosis cannot and does not exist, from the mildest cases in the community to the most severe cases in pathology museums. Median plane asymmetry is crucial for progression and the lateral profile of the spine must be carefully scrutinised. Increased anterior vertebral height at the apex of the curve with posterior end-plate irregularity characterises the median plane asymmetry and suggests that idiopathic scoliosis is the reverse of Scheuermann's disease.

The dynamical fluctuations in the rhythms of biological systems provide valuable information about the underlying functioning of these systems. During the past few decades analysis of cardiac function based on the heart rate variability (HRV; variation in R wave to R wave intervals) has attracted great attention, resulting in more than 17000-publications (PubMed list). However, it is still controversial about the underling mechanisms of HRV. In this study, we performed both linear (time domain and frequency domain) and nonlinear analysis of HRV data acquired from humans and animals to identify the relationship between HRV and heart rate (HR). The HRV data consists of the following groups: (a) human normal sinus rhythm (n = 72); (b) human congestive heart failure (n = 44); (c) rabbit sinoatrial node cells (SANC; n = 67); (d) conscious rat (n = 11). In both human and animal data at variant pathological conditions, both linear and nonlinear analysis techniques showed an inverse correlation between HRV and HR, supporting the concept that HRV is dependent on HR, and therefore, HRV cannot be used in an ordinary manner to analyse autonomic nerve activity of a heart.

Code cloning refers to the duplication of source code. It is the most common way of reusing source code in software development. If a bug is identified in one segment of code, all the similar segments need to be checked for the same bug. Consequently, this cloning process may lead to bug propagation that significantly affects the maintenance cost. By considering this problem, code clone detection (CCD) appears as an active area of research. Consequently, there is a strong need to investigate the latest techniques, trends, and tools in the domain of CCD. Therefore, in this paper, we comprehensively inspect the latest tools and techniques utilized for the detection of code clones. Particularly, a systematic literature review (SLR) is performed to select and investigate 54 studies pertaining to CCD. Consequently, six categories are defined to incorporate the selected studies as per relevance, i.e., textual approaches (12), lexical approaches (8), treebased approaches (3), metric-based approaches (7), semantic approaches (7), and hybrid approaches (17). We identified and analyzed 26 CCD tools, i.e., 13 existing and 13 proposed/developed. Moreover, 62 opensource subject systems whose source code is utilized for the CCD are presented. It is concluded that there exist several studies to detect type1, type2, type3, and type4 clones individually. However, there is a need to develop novel approaches with complete tool support in order to detect all four types of clones collectively. Furthermore, it is also required to introduce more approaches to simplify the development of a program dependency graph (PDG) while dealing with the detection of the type4 clones.INDEX TERMS CCD, SLR, code clone detection, CCD tools, code clone types.

Abstract. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a well-known technique of artificial intelligence to extract the elements of concerns from raw plain text information. It can be utilized to process the early software requirements in order to achieve the goals like requirement prioritization and classification (functional and non-functional). To the best of our knowledge, no research work is available yet to examine and summarize the utilization of NLP in the domain of Software Requirement Engineering (SRE). Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the applications of NLP in the context of SRE. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is carried out to select 27 studies published during 2002-2016. Consequently, 6 NLP techniques and 14 existing tools are identified. Furthermore, 9 tools and 2 algorithms, proposed by the researchers, are presented. It has been concluded that the NLP techniques and tools are highly supportive to accelerate the SRE process. However, some manual operations are still required on initial plain text software requirements before applying the desired NLP techniques.

Five cases of septic sacroiliitis diagnosed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are presented. Imaging was performed between 2 and 14 days after onset of symptoms and consisted of varying combinations of coronal short tau inversion recovery (STIR), axial T2-weighted spin echo (SE), and coronal and axial pre- and postcontrast T1-weighted SE scans. Abnormalities included demonstration of sacroiliac joint effusions, bone oedema and adjacent inflammation as high signal on STIR and T2-weighted SE scans, and identification of abscesses in two cases as rim-enhancing lesions anterior to the joint on gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted SE scans. The role of MRI and other forms of imaging in septic sacroiliitis is discussed.