Dual-task paradigms have been increasingly used to assess the interaction between cognitive demands and the control of balance and gait. The interaction between functional and cognitive demands can alter movement patterns and increase knee instability in individuals with knee conditions, such as knee anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury or osteoarthritis (OA). However, there is no consensus on the effects of dual-task on gait mechanics and balance in those individuals. This systematic scoping review aims to examine the impact of dual-task gait and standing balance on motor and cognitive performance in individuals with knee OA or ACL injury. A comprehensive search of MEDLINE, PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE electronic databases up until December 2019 was carried out. Inclusion criteria was limited to include dual-task studies that combined cognitive tasks performed simultaneously with gait or standing balance in individuals with knee OA or ACL injuries. In total, fifteen studies met the inclusion criteria, nine articles examined dual-task effects on balance, and six articles reported the effects of dual-task on gait. The total number of individuals included was 230 individuals with ACL injuries, and 168 individuals with knee OA. A decline in gait and balance performance during dual-task testing is present among individuals with ACL injury and/or ACL reconstruction and knee OA. Further research is required, but dual taking assessment could potentially be used to identify individuals at risk of falling or further injury and could be used to develop targeted rehabilitation protocols. A variety of outcome measures have been used across the studies included, making comparisons difficult. The authors, therefore, recommend developing a standardized set of biomechanical balance variables.

Diseases such as osteoarthritis (OA) are commonly characterized at the molecular scale by gene expression and subsequent protein production; likewise, the effects of pharmaceutical interventions are typically characterized by the effects of molecular interactions. However, these phenomena are usually preceded by numerous precursor steps, many of which involve significant ion influx or efflux. As a consequence, rapid assessment of cell electrophysiology could play a significant role in unravelling the mechanisms underlying drug interactions and progression of diseases, such as OA. In this study, we used dielectrophoresis (DEP), a technique that allows rapid, label-free determination of the dielectric parameters to assess the role of potassium ions on the dielectric characteristics of chondrocytes, and to investigate the electrophysiological differences between healthy chondrocytes and those from an in vitro arthritic disease model. Our results showed that DEP was able to detect a significant decrease in membrane conductance (6191 ± 738 vs. 8571 ± 1010 S/m²), membrane capacitance (10.3 ± 1.47 vs. 14.5 ± 0.01 mF/m²), and whole cell capacitance (5.4 ± 0.7 vs. 7.5 ± 0.3 pF) following inhibition of potassium channels using 10 mM tetraethyl ammonium, compared to untreated healthy chondrocytes. Moreover, cells from the OA model had a different response to DEP force in comparison to healthy cells; this was seen in terms of both a decreased membrane conductivity (782 S/m² vs. 1139 S/m²) and a higher whole cell capacitance (9.58 ± 3.4 vs. 3.7 ± 1.3 pF). The results show that DEP offers a high throughput method, capable of detecting changes in membrane electrophysiological properties and differences between disease states.

Perthes disease is a condition that affects walking patterns in young children due to poor blood circulation in the hip joint. Understanding the gait strategies of affected children is of great importance for an objective assessment and better management of this condition. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the current literature to identify gait compensation patterns in non-operative children with Perthes disease. Methods: A systematic electronic search was performed using MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, BIOSIS, and the Cochrane Library to identify studies published from inception up until December 2023. An adapted Downs and Black checklist was utilised to assess methodological quality and project risk of bias. Percentage agreement and nominal kappa statistics with bootstrapped bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were used. Result: A comprehensive literature search revealed 277 citations for review, of which 210 studies entered full-text screening. In total, eight studies met the inclusion criteria for quality assessment by two independent reviewers. The results revealed variations in data quality, with scores ranging from 12 to 17 due to missing information related to subject characteristics, biomechanical model, and power calculation. Conclusions: This review reveals common compensation strategies associated with walking among non-operative children with Perthes disease such as Trendelenburg gait due to weakness of the hip abductor muscle.

Background: Noninvasive transdermal insulin delivery using ultrasound technology has gained attention for improving the glycemic control of insulin-dependent patients. Methods: Indirect functional comparison and evaluation of insulin dosage, between noninvasive ultrasound-mediated transdermal delivery and needle injection methods, was achieved utilizing in vivo blood glucose measurements of temporary hyperglycemic rabbits. Nine rabbits were divided into three groups: (i) untreated control, (ii) subcutaneous injection and (iii) ultrasound-mediated transdermal delivery. Animals were anesthetized using a combination of ketamine hydrochloride and sodium xylazine to produce temporary hyperglycemic rabbits during the experiments. The rabbits in the control group did not receive insulin, while the animals in the ultrasound group received insulin transdermally for 10 min utilizing a customized single-element piston-shaped ultrasound transducer operated by multi-frequency electrical signals from 100 to 200 kHz. Rabbits in the direct subcutaneous injection group were anesthetized and injected with 0.25 units/kg of insulin. Results: With an initial blood glucose baseline level of 228.7 ± 13.1 (mg/dL) for all rabbits, the in vivo results of control group showed an increase above the baseline by 129.7 ± 27.3 (mg/dL) at the end of the in vivo experimental period (80 min). However, the ultrasound-mediated delivery and subcutaneous injection groups showed noticeable statistically significant percentage reductions in blood glucose levels by 43.9 ± 5.4 and 42.7 ± 6.6, respectively, compared to the control group by the end of the in vivo experiments. Conclusions: In vivo glucose response results confirmed that piston-shaped ultrasound transducers achieved indirectly similar insulin dosage delivery by ultrasound energy for tested animals with no statistically significant differences once compared to the results of the subcutaneous needle injection group.

Background: Accurate classification of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) subtypes from peripheral blood smear (PBS) images using deep learning may support automated image-based analysis of this blood malignancy. Methods: We developed a custom lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify white blood cells into four subtypes: Benign, Early Pre-B ALL, Pre-B ALL, and Pro-B ALL. We assessed performance using accuracy, ROC curves, and explainability techniques, including upsampled feature map activations, occlusion sensitivity, and SHAP-style explanation overlays, comparing original (Non-segmented) and HSV-Segmented images. To mitigate patient-level data leakage without explicit patient identifiers, we further used unsupervised K-means clustering of HSV color histograms to group 3256 images into 89 “proxy-patient” clusters. Consequently, we implemented rigorous subject-level grouped 5-fold cross-validation and Hold-Out protocols alongside standard image-level evaluations. Results: Under standard image-level evaluation, the model achieved 98.8% accuracy on non-segmented images and 91.3% on segmented images. Crucially, this performance advantage was maintained under strict subject-level cross-validation (97.9% vs. 89.7%), confirming the robustness of the findings against data leakage. Explainability visualizations demonstrated that HSV segmentation discarded vital contextual morphological cues, increasing confusion between closely related subtypes. Conclusions: A lightweight CNN can accurately classify ALL subtypes directly from raw PBS images. The evaluated HSV segmentation degraded performance by removing contextual information. This study underscores the necessity of subject-level evaluation in medical imaging and indicates that mandatory preprocessing should be empirically justified rather than assumed beneficial.