Background: With rising life expectancy, partial edentulism has increased, particularly in developing nations where economic constraints, limited awareness, and inadequate dental care exacerbate the burden on aging populations. Patients with fewer than 20 teeth often experience a reduction in Oral Health-Related Quality of Life (OHRQoL), emphasizing the need for effective tooth replacement. Removable partial dentures (RPDs) are versatile, cost-effective solutions for partial tooth loss, including metal clasp-retained RPDs (MC-RPDs), thermoplastic resin RPDs (TR-RPDs), and cast partial dentures (CPDs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Alkaptonuria is a rare metabolic disorder that follows an autosomal recessive genetic inheritance pattern. It is distinguished by the buildup of homogentisic acid in tissues due to deficient homogentisic acid oxidase enzyme activity. The excess homogentisic acid is expelled through urine, darkening it on oxidation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph
September 2023
The Morse-Smale complex is a well studied topological structure that represents the gradient flow behavior between critical points of a scalar function. It supports multi-scale topological analysis and visualization of feature-rich scientific data. Several parallel algorithms have been proposed towards the fast computation of the 3D Morse-Smale complex.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) is a promising technique for absolute quantification of minimal residual disease (MRD) in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), but there is no comprehensive quality assurance program to enable its application in clinical laboratories. Current guidelines for real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) assays targeting immunoglobulin/T-cell receptor (Ig/TCR) gene rearrangements needed adaptation for ddPCR to cover droplet generation, intraassay variation, and interassay variation in the absence of standard curves.
Methods: Six qPCR MRD assays for Ig/TCR gene rearrangements and a standard albumin control gene assay were migrated to a ddPCR platform and used to test 82 remission samples from 6 patients with ALL.