ABSTRACT Objectives (1) To assess the effectiveness of the Orthognathic Quality of Life Questionnaire (OQLQ) and the Child Oral Health Impact Profile (COHIP) to detect differences in Oral Health-Related Quality of Life (OHRQoL) between pediatric patients with dentofacial deformities and controls. (2) To assess for correlations between scores from the OQLQ and COHIP domains with the type and severity of the skeletal mal-relationship. (3) To assess if the COHIP and OQLQ were identifying unique or overlapping OHRQoL concerns. Materials and Methods Subjects were under age 18, presented with a dentofacial deformity, and completed both surveys. Matched controls completed the same. Severity for conditions was recorded via overjet, overbite, and ANB values and subjects were classified as skeletal Class I, II, or III. Results Enrollment yielded 30 subjects and 31 controls. For the OQLQ, significant differences between subjects and controls were found for the Facial Esthetics domain, Oral Function domain, and total score. For the COHIP, significant differences were found for the Social/Emotional Well-Being and Self-Image domains plus total score. There were no significant correlations between the severity of the condition as measured by overjet and reported OHRQoL for any domains. Conclusions The OQLQ and COHIP are effective at detecting significant OHRQoL differences between pediatric patients with dentofacial deformities and controls. Although there is some overlap in the results, the instruments appear to identify different OHRQoL concerns.
Autonomous vehicles are, in contrast to classical automated guided vehicles (AGVs), less predictable in their behavior and drive time. Therefore, the issue of how to efficiently control these vehicles arises, because autonomous agents need to be coordinated and not controlled, to give autonomous behaviors and actions space. The scientific contribution of this paper is a novel approach, based on prioritized planning to target this issue as well as an open source framework for evaluation and comparison. Prioritized planning has the disadvantage of being neither optimal nor complete, however, it has the advantage of being computationally feasible. This work utilizes prioritized planning to significantly increase the set of feasible scenarios through collision prevention: by locally finding alternative routes and adding them to the search graph. The paper clearly formulates the extensions needed and delineates the approach's limits, as it is neither optimal nor complete. More importantly, however, our method calculates routes for each vehicle with inter-vehicle synchronization, enabling vehicles to execute the plan in a distributed fashion without centralized control, thereby allowing autonomous behavior. Finally, results are verified by comparing our Multi Robot Router (MRR) proposed in this work to classical approaches. The software developed as well as the test sets are publicly available for ROS and the simulation environment.
Abstract – The objective of this study was to compare the impact energy absorption of three mouthguard materials in three environments. Thirty specimens with 12.7 cm × 12.7 cm × 4 mm dimensions were prepared for each material: ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA, T&S Dental and Plastics), Pro‐form™ (Dental Resources Inc), and PolyShok™ (Sportsguard Laboratories). Ten specimens of each material were conditioned for 1 h at 37°C in three environments: dry (ambient) condition, deionized water and artificial saliva. Specimens were impacted at 20 mph by a 0.5‐inch diameter indenter containing a force transducer (Dynatup Model 9250 HV, Instron Corp), based upon ASTM Standard D3763. Energy absorption was determined from the area under the force–time curve during impact (approximately 5 or 7 ms depending on the material). Groups were compared using anova and the Tukey test. Energy absorption values, normalized to specimen thickness (mean ± SD in J mm −1 ), were: (i) Dry: EVA 4.73 ± 0.27, Pro‐form™ 3.55 ± 0.25, PolyShok™ 6.32 ± 0.24; (ii) DI water: EVA 4.82 ± 0.40, Pro‐form™ 3.78 ± 0.33, PolyShok™ 5.87 ± 0.38; (iii) Artificial saliva: EVA 5.63 ± 0.49, Pro‐form™ 4.01 ± 0.54, PolyShok™ 6.37 ± 0.55. PolyShok™ was the most energy‐absorbent material in all three environments. EVA was significantly more impact resistant than Pro‐form™ in all three environments. EVA and Pro‐form™ performed significantly better after saliva conditioning than dry or water conditioned, but PolyShok™ did not show any difference in energy absorption when conditioned in any of the three environments. Characteristic deformation patterns from impact loading were observed with an SEM for each material. The superior energy absorption for PolyShok™ is attributed to the polyurethane additive.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether the mucosal alterations of the dorsal rat tongue produced by Candida albicans infection were reversible upon treatment with the antifungal drug ketoconazole. Following experimentally‐produced infection, 17 rats showed clinical evidence of persistent lesions over a period of 20 weeks. Eight of these animals were then treated with ketoconazole daily for 2 weeks (20 mg/kg/day). Appropriate non‐infected controls and ketoconazole‐only controls were also maintained. Five weeks after the ketoconazole treatment, all animals were killed and the dorsal tongues evaluated clinically and histologically. Control groups showed no abnormalities. Of the 8 animals in the treated‐lesion group, all showed lesional resolution, while only 2 of the 9 animals in the untreated‐lesion group showed resolution of their lesions (p=0.002). These findings indicate that the epithelial changes produced by this candidal isolate for this period of time are reversible.
In this work, the real-time optimal trajectory planning, together with a cascaded tracking controller, is presented for a three-dimensional (3D) gantry crane in an environment with static obstacles and a dynamically moving target considering dynamic constraints and control input limits. State-of-the-art trajectory optimization-based approaches require long computation times and cannot quickly respond to changes in the target state. The focus of this paper lies on a novel trajectory planning algorithm, which consists of two steps. First, an offline trajectory planner is implemented to compute a time-optimal, collision-free, and dynamically feasible trajectory database that connects all possible initial states of the gantry crane from a predefined starting subspace to the target states in a target subspace. Second, based on linear constrained quadratic programming, the online trajectory replanner makes use of this trajectory database to generate an optimal trajectory in real time that accounts for all changes in the target state. Additionally, a trajectory tracking controller is developed to take into account the dynamic constraints of the gantry crane and to compensate for possible model inaccuracies, disturbances, and other non-modeled effects. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed trajectory (re)planning algorithm and the control concept.
