Effects of exercise therapy on pain and disability in patients with non-specific neck pain: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses have only focused on patients with chronic non-specific neck pain (NNP), analyzing exercise therapy (ET) only as therapeutic exercise. Therefore, it is necessary to comprehensively review the effects of ET through a meta-analysis comprising a wide range of ETs that are not limited to therapeutic exercise.

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the effects of ET on pain and disability in patients with NNP.

Contrast-dependent saturation adjustment for outdoor image enhancement.

Outdoor images captured in bad-weather conditions usually have poor intensity contrast and color saturation since the light arriving at the camera is severely scattered or attenuated. The task of improving image quality in poor conditions remains a challenge. Existing methods of image quality improvement are usually effective for a small group of images but often fail to produce satisfactory results for a broader variety of images.

Hyperspectral face recognition using improved inter-channel alignment based on qualitative prediction models.

A fundamental limitation of hyperspectral imaging is the inter-band misalignment correlated with subject motion during data acquisition. One way of resolving this problem is to assess the alignment quality of hyperspectral image cubes derived from the state-of-the-art alignment methods. In this paper, we present an automatic selection framework for the optimal alignment method to improve the performance of face recognition.

Tensile Characterization of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes with Helical Structural Defects.

Recently, evidence was presented that certain single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) possess helical defective traces, exhibiting distinct cleaved lines, yet their mechanical characterization remains a challenge. On the basis of the spiral growth model of SWNTs, here we present atomic details of helical defects and investigate how the tensile behaviors of SWNTs change with their presence using molecular dynamics simulations. SWNTs have exhibited substantially lower tensile strength and strain than theoretical results obtained from a seamless tubular structure, whose physical origin cannot be explained either by any known SWNT defects so far.

Reduced-order spectral data modeling based on local proper orthogonal decomposition.

Spectral imaging typically generates a large amount of high-dimensional data that are acquired in different sub-bands for each spatial location of interest. The high dimensionality of spectral data imposes limitations on numerical analysis. As such, there is an emerging demand for robust data compression techniques with loss of less relevant information to manage real spectral data.

The effect of phenylephrine on the onset time of rocuronium.

Background: Several studies have demonstrated that ephedrine shortens the onset time of muscle relaxants, and it does so probably by increasing the cardiac output. However, elevation of the systemic blood pressure through α adrenergic stimulation via ephedrine may affect the onset of muscle relaxants during the induction of anesthesia. We investigated the effect of phenylephrine, which is a selective α-1 agonist, on the onset time of rocuronium and the intubating conditions in adults after the administration of propofol.