Superior effect of mini-implant anchorage in the treatment of skeletal class II malocclusion.

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of mini-implant (MI) anchorage versus conventional anchorage for the treatment of skeletal class II malocclusion.

Materials And Methods: The study was conducted on 64 patients with skeletal class II malocclusion. The patients were divided into two groups: 1) 32 patients underwent conventional anchorage, and 2) 32 patients underwent MI anchorage.

Formation and conversion of high-peak-power structured beams by an Nd:YVO/Cr:YAG laser subject to tight-focusing off-axis pumping.

A compact Nd:YVO/Cr:YAG passively Q-switched laser in a near-hemispherical resonator is exploited to realize high-peak-power pulsed beams with high spatial degrees of freedom. Beneficial from the advantages of strong intracavity beam focusing as well as the point-like excitation condition for the proposed cavity design, various high-order structured pulses as coherent superpositions of multiple degenerate eigenmodes are stably generated under different off-axis pump schemes. Besides, by employing external-cavity astigmatic mode conversion (AMC), the oval-shaped and chessboard-like structured pulses under on-axis and 1D off-axis pumping are transformed into exotic modes with polygonal and figure-eight-shaped envelopes to further enrich the spatial complexity of the generated fields.

Using 320-slice computed tomography to preoperatively investigate the leg perforator arterial system and design a perforator flap for patients with a soft-tissue defect in the leg.

Purpose: To investigate the leg perforator arterial system, identify the perforator flap's pedicle artery and its projected cutaneous point using a 320-slice computed tomography (CT 320) scanner.

Methods: A total of 24 patients with leg soft-tissue defects unilaterally underwent 320-slice CT angiography scanning (CTA 320) with 47 legs. The used method enabled investigation of the perforator arteries originating from the tibial, peroneal arteries, perforator flap's pedicle artery and its projected cutaneous point.

Spatial prediction of groundwater salinity in multiple aquifers of the Mekong Delta region using explainable machine learning models.

Groundwater salinization is a prevalent issue in coastal regions, yet accurately predicting and understanding its causal factors remains challenging due to the complexity of the groundwater system. Therefore, this study predicted groundwater salinity in multi-layered aquifers spanning the entire Mekong Delta (MD) region using machine learning (ML) models based on an in situ dataset and using three indicators (Cl, pH, and HCO). We applied nine different decision tree-based models and evaluated their prediction performances.