Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) is a kind of common and harmful systemic sleep disorder. SAS patients have significant iconography changes in brain structure and function, and electroencephalogram (EEG) is the most intuitive parameter to describe the sleep process which can reflect the electrical activity and function of brain tissues. Based on the non-stationary and nonlinear characteristics of EEG, this paper analyzes the correlation dimension of sleep EEG in patients with SAS. Six SAS patients were classed as SAS group and six healthy persons were classified into a control group. The results showed that the correlation dimension of sleep EEG in the SAS group and the control group decreased gradually with the deepening of sleep, and then increased to the level of awake and light sleep stage with rapid eye movement (REM). The correlation dimension of SAS group was significantly lower than that of control group (P<0.01) throughout all the stages. The results suggested that there were significant nonlinear dynamic differences between the EEG signals of SAS patients and of healthy people, which provided a new direction for the study of the physiological mechanism and automatic detection of SAS.
Objective To investigate the safety and efficacy of preoperative ultra-short-course chemotherapy combined with surgical treatment of chest wall tuberculosis. Methods The clinical data of 216 patients with chest wall tuberculosis from January 2013 to June 2016 in our hospital were retrospectively analyzed, including 121 males and 95 females with an average age of 35±15 years (range, 4-74 years). Results All patients were treated with anti-tuberculosis drugs for 17.0±11.3 days preoperatively, including 12.5±5.0 days in simple chest wall tuberculosis and 19.4±12.3 days in combined chest wall tuberculosis. The postoperative recurrence rate of chest wall tuberculosis was 3.7%, which was close to or lower than that of routine preoperative antituberculous therapy in patients with ultra-short-course anti-tuberculosis treatment before surgery. Conclusion Preoperative ultra-short-course chemotherapy combined with surgical treatment for chest wall tuberculosis will not increase the recurrence rate of chest wall tuberculosis, and can effectively shorten the hospital stay. Timely adjustment of anti-tuberculosis chemotherapy based on thorough debridement, postoperative drugs, not the preoperative drugs, is the key to reinforce the surgical outcome.
A great number of studies have demonstrated the structural and functional abnormalities in chronic schizophrenia (SZ) patients. However, few studies analyzed the differences between first-episode, drug-naive SZ (FESZ) patients and normal controls (NCs). In this study, we recruited 44 FESZ patients and 56 NCs, and acquired their multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, including structural and resting-state functional MRI data. We calculated gray matter volume (GMV), regional homogeneity (ReHo), amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF), and degree centrality (DC) of 90 brain regions, basing on an automated anatomical labeling (AAL) atlas. We then applied these features into support vector machine (SVM) combined with recursive feature elimination (RFE) to discriminate FESZ patients from NCs. Our results showed that the classifier using the combination of ReHo and ALFF as input features achieved the best performance (an accuracy of 96.97%). Moreover, the most discriminative features for classification were predominantly located in the frontal lobe. Our findings may provide potential information for understanding the neuropathological mechanism of SZ and facilitate the development of biomarkers for computer-aided diagnosis of SZ patients.