Treatment of 35 cases of leukoplakia vulvae with helium-neon laser radiation at acupuncture points.
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Acupuncture Therapy↗
Biomedical subjects
L Guan
Publications and source records attributed to L Guan.
Automated percutaneous lumbar discectomy: a prospective multi-institutional study.
PURPOSE: A prospective study in 10 independent hospitals from 1992 to 1994 evaluated automated percutaneous lumbar discectomy (APLD) with a newly designed percutaneous instrument. MATERIALS AND METHODS: One thousand five hundred eighty-two APLD procedures were performed in 1,525 patients with disc herniation or back pain. Mean follow-up after APLD was 18.3 months. Follow-up of at least 1 year was available in 1,474 patients. One thousand two hundred eighty-nine patients had sciatic pain and 185 had back pain only. Eight hundred twenty-two patients had symptoms for less than 2 years, 652 for more than 2 years. One thousand two hundred sixty-two patients were older than 60 years, 212 were younger than 60 years. Nine hundred fifty patients had disc protrusion, and 357 had sequestration. Forty-eight patients had disc or longitudinal ligament calcification. Twenty-two had previous surgical discectomy. All discectomies were done with use of a straight needle with the patient in the lateral decubitus position. RESULTS: Success rate (measured by Hijikata's criteria) was 83% at 1 year. Success was significantly greater for protrusion versus sequestration (86% vs 72%, P < .001); for back pain alone versus leg and back pain (89% vs 80%, P < .005); for duration of symptoms less than 2 years versus more than 2 years (85% vs 79%, P < .005); and for age younger than 60 years versus older than 60 years (84% vs 76%, P < .01). Among postsurgical patients, success rate was 77% (17 of 22 patients). The only complication was discitis (0.06%, nine patients). Technical success at L5-S1 was 99% (795 of 800). CONCLUSION: APLD with Teng's instrument has excellent results. Indications may include back pain alone. A straight needle can be used at L5-S1 in most patients, with proper positioning.
Diskectomy, Percutaneous↗
An automated form of video image analysis applied to classification of movement disorders.
Video image analysis is able to provide quantitative data on postural and movement abnormalities and thus has an important application in neurological diagnosis and management. The conventional techniques require patients to be videotaped while wearing markers in a highly structured laboratory environment. This restricts the utility of video in routine clinical practise. We have begun development of intelligent software which aims to provide a more flexible system able to quantify human posture and movement directly from whole-body images without markers and in an unstructured environment. The steps involved are to extract complete human profiles from video frames, to fit skeletal frameworks to the profiles and derive joint angles and swing distances. By this means a given posture is reduced to a set of basic parameters that can provide input to a neural network classifier. To test the system's performance we videotaped patients with dopa-responsive Parkinsonism and age-matched normals during several gait cycles, to yield 61 patient and 49 normal postures. These postures were reduced to their basic parameters and fed to the neural network classifier in various combinations. The optimal parameter sets (consisting of both swing distances and joint angles) yielded successful classification of normals and patients with an accuracy above 90%. This result demonstrated the feasibility of the approach. The technique has the potential to guide clinicians on the relative sensitivity of specific postural/gait features in diagnosis. Future studies will aim to improve the robustness of the system in providing accurate parameter estimates from subjects wearing a range of clothing, and to further improve discrimination by incorporating more stages of the gait cycle into the analysis.
Algorithms↗