BACKGROUND Despite widespread use of steroids to treat sacroiliac joint (SIJ) pain, their duration of pain reduction is short. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) can potentially enhance tissue healing and may have a longer-lasting effect on pain. OBJECTIVES To assess the efficacy and safety of PRP compared with methylprednisolone in ultrasound-guided SIJ injection for low back pain. STUDY DESIGN Pr...

Ex vivo photographic temperature mapping of bipolar radiofrequency (RF) lesions in animal tissue is performed over a wide range of electrode tip spacings, tip lengths, tip diameters, tip temperatures, and lesion times. In vivo temperature measurements collected during clinical treatment of sacroiliac joint (SIJ) pain corroborate those collected ex vivo. Generation of a "strip lesion" connecting...

BACKGROUND The fusion of the pelvic joints in patients with severe pelvic girdle pain (PGP) is a controversial and insufficiently studied procedure. The aims of this study were to evaluate physical function and pain after sacroiliac joint (SIJ) fusion. METHODS A single-subject research design study with repeated measurements was conducted; pre-operatively and at 3, 6 and 12 months post-operat...

Gout is clinically characterized by episodes of monoarthritis, which not only typically affects the peripheral joints but also occasionally affect the axial joint, such as the sacroiliac joint (SIJ), and often mimics spondyloarthritis (SpA). Two cases of gout mimicking SpA are presented in the current paper. One patient was a 32-year-old man with a history of asymmetrical oligoarthritis of ankl...

OBJECTIVE To study the relationship between inflammatory and structural lesions in the sacroiliac joints (SIJs) on MRI and spinal progression observed on conventional radiographs in patients with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). METHODS One hundred and ten patients who fulfilled the ASAS axSpA criteria were enrolled. All underwent SIJ MRI at baseline and lumbar spine radiographs at baseline a...

A hierarchical framework is proposed to address the issues of modeling different type of words in keyword spotting (KWS). Keyword models are built at various levels according to the availability of training set resources for each individual word. The proposed approach improves the performance of KWS even when no training speech is available for the keywords. It also suggests an easier way to co...

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The paper focuses on specification and utilization of manipulation skills to facilitate programming of bimanual manipulation tasks. Manipulation skills are actions to reach predefined goals. They constitute an interface between lowlevel constraint-based task specification and high level symbolic task planning. The task of the robot can be decomposed into subtasks that can be resolved using mani...