Background Although Epicutaneo cava catheters (ECCs) are being routinely used for intravenous access for long-term parenteral nutrition and prolonged medication administration in neonates, ECC use can be associated with rare but acute life-threatening events such as pleural effusion (PE). It is important to identify and maintain the ECC tip in a central location for preventing complications. Recently, intracavitary electrocardiogram (IC-ECG) has been developed for the real-time monitoring and verification of ECC tip position. Objective To investigate the causes and preventive measures of ECC-related PE in neonates. D-Lin-MC3-DMA Methods This prospective cohort study was conducted between January 2013 and December 2017. We observed and analyzed the clinical characteristics and causes of ECC-related PE. From January to December 2017, all ECCs were guided by IC-ECG. The incidence of ECC-related PE and first-attempt success rates were analyzed before and after the introduction of IC-ECG. Additionally, the sensitivity and speciates, IC-ECG is a reliable positioning method for ECCs with superior sensitivity and specificity.Background Despite the pandemic, data are limited regarding COVID-19 infection in pregnant women and newborns. This report aimed to bring new information about presentation that could modify precautionary measures for infants born of mothers with a remote history of COVID-19. Methods We report two infants with possible maternofetal transmission, and four mothers without immunologic reactions. Data were collected from the patient files. Results One mother exhibited infection signs 10 days before uncomplicated delivery, with negative RT-PCR and no antibody detection thereafter. Another mother exhibited infection 6 weeks pre-delivery, confirmed by nasopharyngeal swab testing with positive RT-PCR, and positive antibody detection (IgM and IgG). Both newborns were asymptomatic but tested positive for nasopharyngeal and stool RT-PCR at 1 and 3 days of age for the first one and at 1 day of age for stool analysis for the second one. Two additional mothers exhibited infection confirmed by positive RT-PCR testing at 28- and 31-days pre-delivery but did not present detectable antibody reaction at the time of delivery. Conclusion These observations raise concerns regarding contamination risk by asymptomatic newborns and the efficacy of immunologic reactions in pregnant mothers, questioning the reliability of antibody testing during pregnancy.Chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) is considered to be an autoimmune disorder (type I and type II) in 50% of all cases. However, autoreactive T cells and their proximity with activated mast cells in the skin of CSU patients are believed to be the primary event in mast cell degranulation. The finding of anti-FcɛRIα on mast cells or IgE autoantibodies against thyroid antigens should be considered to be a consequence of the auto-reactive T cells’ recognition of the above-mentioned antigens. Our recent finding of increased Th17 and IL-17 expression in both CD4+ T cells and mast cells in the skin of severe CSU patients is supportive for the major role that T cells perform in the pathogenesis of CSU. Supporting this are numerous previous reports in which increased serum IL-17 was found to be in association with CSU disease severity. The beneficial effect of anti-IL-17A (secukinumab) in CSU patients in whom high dose anti-histamines, recurrent course of steroids and omalizumab fail to achieve a reasonable response should be investigated as a new therapeutic strategy in future studies with a large cohort of patients.Pattern recognition has shown remarkable success in decoding motor information from electromyogram (EMG) signals. To decrease the computational complexity in EMG pattern recognition, it may be useful to reduce the dimensionality of the model input. This paper investigates the effect of reducing the dimensionality of EMG features in a regression-based motion intent estimation model. Ten able-bodied subjects participated in this analytic study. EMG signals from the right forearm and angle of the left wrist in three degrees of freedom (DoF) were measured, concurrently. The TD features were extracted from eight EMG channels, resulting in a total of 32 features. Three dimensionality reduction methods including principal component analysis (PCA), non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF), and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) were applied to the EMG features. Reducing the dimension of the EMG features below a certain threshold degraded the performance of the EMG pattern recognition model. Otherwise, dimensionality reduction did not change the performance. These thresholds for the PCA, NNMF, and CCA methods were 25, 26, and 13, respectively. Based on the results, CCA substantially outperformed PCA and NNMF, as it allowed a significant reduction of the EMG features size, from 32 to 13, with no adverse impact on the performance.This study aims to make a phantom to verify dose distribution and compare two techniques of radiation therapy, including 3D conventional radiotherapy (3D-CRT) and modulated photon radiotherapy (IMRT). For treatment of brain cancer, physicians have to prescribe radiation therapy to involved patients so that organs at risk receive unwanted dose causing them to be damaged. To know precise dose delivered into them and evaluate treatment-planning system (TPs), it is necessary to do dosimetry in the phantom owing to difficulties of dosimetry in human. It is important to make a phantom with characteristics similar to humans and ability to compute dose and dose distribution in desired organs and tissue. Thus, there is possibility to compute dose in different parts, including doses delivered in ears, eyes, stem brain and optic nerve. Furthermore, this phantom has to provide this opportunity to investigate whether some techniques of radiation therapy such as 3D-CRT or IMRT depend on the size or location of tumors. To this end, a low workload, easy-to-set-up, lightweight, and transportable phantom was designed, and made from Polylactic acid (PLA) in dimensions 23×24×32 cm3. The phantom consists of brain, tumors in different dimeters, including 2, 4, 6 cm and also parts for eyes and ears to locate TLDs. Head, brain and tumors are able to open so that they can be filled with polymer gel dosimetry making possible record dose distribution in three-dimensions (3D) and sharp dose gradients.