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Background Due to the lack of further studies on the influence of age factors on plantar fasciitis, this study evaluates the characteristic observation points of magnetic resonance imaging in various age cohorts of patients with plantar fasciitis to help diagnosis. Methods A retrospective analysis of 160 cases of plantar fasciitis patients and normal subjects (who have the disease unrelated to plantar fasciitis) who have undergone an MRI examination in our institution. The two groups were separately divided into young adult subjects (36 to 44 years old), middle age adult subjects (45 to 59 years old), and older adult subjects (60 to 79 years old). Data was gathered regarding plantar fascia thickness, the coronal length of the plantar fascia at the calcaneal origin, the signal intensity of plantar fascia and surrounding structures, and the presence or absence of plantar calcaneal spurs, all of which were assessed objectively by the investigators. Results There were statistical differences in the thickness of plantar fascia between two groups of three age cohorts (Older adult patients: 0.59 ± 0.09 cm; Middle age adult patients: 0.49 ± 0.09 cm; Young adult patients: 0.47 ± 0.05 cm) (all p < 0.001). In addition, there were also statistical differences in the high signal intensity changes of the plantar fascia and surrounding soft tissues between two groups of three age cohorts (all p < 0.001). In older adult plantar fasciitis patients, with regard to plantar calcaneal spur discovery, there was a statistical difference between the two groups (Chi-square = 12.799. df = 1. p < 0.001). Conclusion In plantar fasciitis cases where a diagnosis is difficult, abnormalities in the soft tissue surrounding the plantar fascia in patients of low age are noteworthy. In older adult patients, the discovery of plantar calcaneal spurs with abnormal thickening of plantar fascia deserves attention, and abnormal MRI findings are more manifest. But the final diagnosis should be based on the medical history. Level of Evidence Level 3.

Sound source localization and detection (SSLD) is a joint task of identifying the presence of individual sound events and locating the sound sources in space. However, due to the diversity of sound events and the variability of sound source location, SSLD becomes a tough task. In this paper, we propose a SSLD method based on a multi-scale densely connection (MDC) mechanism and a residual attention (RA) mechanism. We design a MDC block to integrate the information from a very local to exponentially enlarged receptive field within the block. We also explored three kinds of RA blocks that can facilitate the conductivity of information flow among different layers by continuously adding feature maps from the previous layers to the next layer. In order to recalibrate the feature maps after convolutional operation, we design a dual-path attention (DPA) unit that is largely embodied in MDC and RA blocks. We firstly verified the effectiveness of the MDC block, RA block, and DPA unit, respectively. We then compared our proposed method with another four methods on the development dataset; finally, with SELDnet and SELD-TCN on another five datasets, experimental results show the generalization of our proposed method.

Objective: Due to the different force exerted during the posterior malleolus fracture (PMF), the difference in sagittal angle (SA) between the fracture fragments may affect ankle stability. But this aspect is less well studied and the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between SA and the stability of PMF. Methods:The imaging data of 120 patients with PMFs from January 2014 to November 2022 were collected retrospectively and reconstructed. We first measured SA, posterior fragment area (PFA) and fragment area ratio (FAR), reanalyzing the correlation of SA with PFA and FAR, respectively. To better describe the morphological characteristics of the fracture fragments, we further measured the fragment width diameter ratio (FWR), the fragment length ratio (FLR), fragment height (FH), contact area (CA), and finally carried these data into the regression model of SA versus FAR to conduct the intermediary role.Results: SA was negatively correlated with PFA(s) (r = À0.583, P < 0.001), with regression equation s = À0.063SA + 3.066; SA was negatively correlated with FAR (r = À0.204, P < 0.05), with regression equation FAR = À0.002SA + 0.198; A significant correlation was found between FWR, FLR, FH, CA and SA (P < 0.05), as well as between FWR, FLR, FH and FAR (P < 0.05); Further intermediary role analysis showed that FWR, FLR, FH had a partial intermediary role between SA and FAR. Conclusions:As SA increased, PFA and FAR decreased, so the larger the SA was due to the effect of vertical shear force, reflecting higher ankle stability, meanwhile, FWR, FLR and FH should also be considered on the fixation method of fracture fragments.

BackgroundPrevious studies have studied more factors on the ankle stability of the posterior ankle fracture, which is related to a stereostructure of the fracture fragment. Previous studies have shown that the ankle stability may be affected by the sagittal surface of the fracture block, with less research in this field. The aim of this study was to explore the influence of the sagittal angle(SA) on ankle joint stability by scanning and reconstructing three types of posterior malleolus fractures(PMFs) with different sagittal angle (SA).MethodsThe CT data of 87 patients with PMFs were collected retrospectively and reconstructed. PMFs were divided into three types: posterolateral-oblique type (type I), medial-extension type (type II) and small-shell type (type III).The collected sagittal angle data were statistically analyzed with the posterior fragment area, fragment area ratio (FAR), fragment transverse diameter ratio (FWR), fragment length ratio (FLR), fragment height (FH), and contact area (CA).Results(1)SA was positively correlated with posterior fragment area(r = 0.804,P < 0.01),with regression equation s = 0.085*SA + 0.34;(2)SA was positively correlated with FAR(r = 0.392,P < 0.01),with regression equation FAR = 0.004*SA + 0.092;(3)SA was positively correlated with FWR(r = 0.261,P < 0.05), with regression equation FWR = 0.03*SA + 0.4624;(4)SA was positively correlated with FLR(r = 0.481,P < 0.01), with regression equation FLR = 0.05*SA + 0.209;(5) SA was positively correlated with CA (r = 0.474, P < 0.01),with regression equation CA = 7.942*SA + 160.866;(6)SA was positively correlated with FH(r = 0.474,P < 0.01), with regression equation FH = 0.046*SA + 1.406.ConclusionThe sagittal angle was positively correlated with posterolateral-oblique type (type I) of Posterior malleolus fractures, and SA could be considered to reflect the ankle joint stability of PMFs.Level of evidence: Level III, retrospective comparative study.