Publications by authors named "N Brouwer"
While active back-support exoskeletons can reduce mechanical loading of the spine, current designs include only one pair of actuated hip joints combined with a rigid structure between the pelvis and trunk attachments, restricting lumbar flexion and consequently intended lifting behavior. This study presents a novel active exoskeleton including actuated lumbar and hip joints as well as subject-specific exoskeleton control based on a real-time active low-back moment estimation. We evaluated the effect of exoskeleton support with different lumbar-to-hip (L/H) support ratios on spine loading, lumbar kinematics, and back muscle electromyography (EMG).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To reveal clinical findings related to metastatic conjunctival melanoma.
Methods: 10 ophthalmic oncology centres (9 countries and 4 continents) shared data to create a large clinical case series. The main outcome measures were the incidence and cumulative risk of systemic metastasis, study mortality rates and Kaplan-Meier patient mortality after developing conjunctival melanoma metastasis.
Article Synopsis
- The study examines the effectiveness of reference intervals (RIs) in clinical decision-making while accounting for analytical biases in Dutch laboratories for three different measurements: creatinine, hemoglobin, and ferritin.
- Data was collected from quality assessments and reported RIs, which were compared to harmonized RIs to evaluate their consistency with analytical bias.
- Results indicated a lack of consistency in routinely used RIs and their analytical bias, highlighting that adopting harmonized RIs could improve inter-laboratory decision-making and reduce misinterpretations in patient diagnoses.
Article Synopsis
- Lymph node metastases are important for understanding colorectal cancer, and the study looks at how two features, extranodal extension and tumor deposits, affect patient outcomes.
- The research included 20 studies with over 7,700 cases to compare how these two features relate to survival after treatment.
- Results suggest that having tumor deposits usually leads to worse survival rates compared to having extranodal extension, but further studies are needed to confirm these findings.