Validation of Sagittal age-adjusted Score in Predicting Proximal Junctional Kyphosis/Failure and Clinical Outcomes Following Adult Spinal Deformity Surgery.

Study Design: Retrospective study.

Objectives: To validate the sagittal age-adjusted score (SAAS) in predicting proximal junctional kyphosis/failure (PJK/F) and good clinical outcomes following adult spinal deformity (ASD) surgery.

Summary Of Background Data: SAAS is a relatively new assessment system that incorporates age-adjusted sagittal parameters of pelvic incidence (PI) - lumbar lordosis (LL), pelvic tilt (PT), and T1 pelvic angle (TPA) to predict the PJK/F.

Projecting the planned trajectory of a Level-2 automated vehicle in the windshield: Effects on human drivers' take-over response to silent failures.

To enhance the take-over performance by human drivers of Level-2 automated vehicles (AV), we developed a design concept that presents the AV's planned trajectory as augmented reality in the windshield. We hypothesized that, even when the AV does not release a take-over request before a potential crash (i.e.

Usability enhancement based on usability heuristics: An examination of the underlying mechanism utilizing the psychological-refractory-period paradigm.

User Interface (UI) design practices often abide by popular usability heuristics such as Nielsen's (1994) "10 usability heuristics for user interface design" or Gerhardt-Powals' (1996) cognitive engineering principles. To examine the underlying mechanism of user performance enhancement by following some of these usability heuristics, we compared user performance between two device conditions: one representing design practices following two selected sets of usability heuristics (experimental condition) and the other without following them (control condition). As a research framework, we adopted the psychological-refractory-period (PRP) paradigm along with the locus-of-slack logic, a well-established dual-task paradigm for examining the nature of cognitive benefits caused by experimental manipulations.

Electrophysiological examination of response-related interference while dual-tasking: is it motoric or attentional?

The possibility that interference between motor responses contributes to dual-task costs has long been neglected, yet is supported by several recent studies. There are two competing hypotheses regarding this response-related interference. The motor-bottleneck hypothesis asserts that the motor stage of Task 1 triggers a refractory period that delays the motor stage of Task 2.

Effect of Sub- and Super-critical Water Treatment on Physicochemical Properties of Porcine Skin.

Super- and sub-critical water treatments have been of interest as novel methods for protein hydrolysis. In the present study, we studied the effect of sub-critical water (Sub-H2O, 300℃, 80 bar) treatment as well as super-critical water (Super-H2O, 400℃, 280 bar) treatment on the physicochemical properties of porcine skin (PS), which has abundant collagen. Porcine skin was subjected to pre-thermal treatment by immersion in water at 70℃, and then treated with sub- or super-critical water.

Effects of Concentration and Reaction Time of Trypsin, Pepsin, and Chymotrypsin on the Hydrolysis Efficiency of Porcine Placenta.

This study investigated the effects of three proteases (trypsin, pepsin and chymotrypsin) on the hydrolysis efficiency of porcine placenta and the molecular weight (Mw) distributions of the placental hydrolysates. Because placenta was made up of insoluble collagen, the placenta was gelatinized by applying thermal treatment at 90 ℃ for 1 h and used as the sample. The placental hydrolyzing activities of the enzymes at varying concentrations and incubation times were determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) and gel permeation chromatography (GPC).