Evaluation of a new intraoral paralleling device for creating guiding planes: A pilot study

Aim: The aim of the study was to assess the accuracy of a new intraoral paralleling device for creating proximal guiding planes for removable partial dental prostheses. Methods and Materials: Thirty gypsum casts were divided into two groups in which the proximal surfaces of selected teeth were prepared using either a surveying device (Group 1) or the new ParalAB paralleling device (Group 2). In each cast guiding planes were prepared on the distal surface of the maxillary left canine (A), on the mesial and distal surfaces of the maxillary left second molar (B and C), and on the distal surface of the maxillary right canine (D). Each prepared surface formed an angle related to the occlusal plane that was measured five times and averaged by one operator using a tridimensional coordinate machine. Results: The mean guiding plane angles (± standard deviation) for the prepared surfaces were A=91.82° (±0.48°, B=90.47° (±0.47°, C=90.21° (±0.76°, and D=90.50° (±0.73°) for the dental surveyor (Group 1) and A=92.18° (±0.87°), B=90.90° (±0.85°), C=90.07° (±0.92°), and D=90.66° (±0.76°) for the ParalAB paralleling device (Group 2). A two-way ANOVA, Tukey's, and Levène's tests (at p<0.05) revealed statistically significant differences among surfaces prepared by both groups and that one surface Conclusions: The ParalAB device was able to prepare parallel surfaces and despite significant difference between groups, the ParalAB presented a small deviation from absolute parallelism and can be considered a valid method to transfer guide plans in the fabrication of removable partial dentures. Clinical Significance: The preparation of suitable guiding planes on abutment teeth during the fabrication of removable partial dentures is dependent on the ability of the operator and requires considerable chair time. When multiple teeth are involved, achieving parallelism between abutment surfaces can be technically challenging, especially in posterior regions of the mouth. The ParalAB prototype intraoral paralleling device can aid the clinician during the preparation of accurate guiding planes with a minimum degree of occlusal divergence. © 2010 Seer Publishing LLC.

From Connecting Hindus to Uniting Global Hinduism: History and Guiding Principles of Hinduism Today

Hinduism Today is a quarterly magazine that appears in roughly 15.000 copies, shipped to nearly 60 countries worldwide. The majority of readers are Hindus in diverse diaspora countries, mainly Singapur, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad und the USA. Its editors are monks of Kauai Adheenam, belonging to the Śaiva Siddhānta Church, situated in Kauai, Hawai’i, USA. One of the magazine’s declared goals is to foster global Hindu solidarity and educate Hindus worldwide about their religion. In this paper, I want to take a look at the history of this magazine in connection with the Śaiva Siddhānta Church, and at the development of the expressed aims behind its publication. For this, I draw on fieldwork done in Kauai in January, 2014. After a brief introduction to some theoretical and methodological preliminaries of my work, I shall, give an overview of the history of the Śaiva Siddhānta Church, founded by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Following this, I will deal in more detail with the origins and development of the magazine and the websites connected with it. I will focus especially on the role the magazine was intended to play for global Hindu diasporas. A fourth chapter will analyze the modes of definition employed in order to depict Hinduism as a unified global religion. In conclusion, I shall briefly reflect upon the specific agenda of “Global Hinduism” and the strategies of positioning as followed by the publishers of Hinduism Today.

Quinine doped hybrid sol-gel coatings for wave guiding and optical applications

Pure and quinine doped silica coatings have been prepared over sodalime glasses. The coatings were consolidated at low temperature (range 60-180 A degrees C) preserving optical activity of quinine molecule. We designed a device to test the guiding properties of the coatings. We confirmed with this device that light injected in pure silica coatings is guided over distances of meters while quinine presence induces isotropic photoluminescence. With the combined use of both type of coatings, it is possible to design light guiding devices and illuminate regions in glass elements without electronic circuits.

The framework for post-accident preparedness in Europe. The IRPA guiding principles for stakeholder engagement

To provide public and private actors at local, regional, national and European levels with methodologies to: – Create the conditions for them to gradually appropriate the problematic of long term rehabilitation following a situation of long‐lasting radioactive contamination; – Develop in their context appropriate means and tools for rehabilitation strategies; – Foster innovation and experimentation at territorial and national levels.

Guiding functional connectivity estimation by structural connectivity in MEG: an application to discrimination of mild cognitive impaired conditions

Whole brain resting state connectivity is a promising biomarker that might help to obtain an early diagnosis in many neurological diseases, such as dementia. Inferring resting-state connectivity is often based on correlations, which are sensitive to indirect connections, leading to an inaccurate representation of the real backbone of the network. The precision matrix is a better representation for whole brain connectivity, as it considers only direct connections. The network structure can be estimated using the graphical lasso (GL), which achieves sparsity through l1-regularization on the precision matrix. In this paper, we propose a structural connectivity adaptive version of the GL, where weaker anatomical connections are represented as stronger penalties on the corre- sponding functional connections. We applied beamformer source reconstruction to the resting state MEG record- ings of 81 subjects, where 29 were healthy controls, 22 were single-domain amnestic Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI), and 30 were multiple-domain amnestic MCI. An atlas-based anatomical parcellation of 66 regions was ob- tained for each subject, and time series were assigned to each of the regions. The fiber densities between the re- gions, obtained with deterministic tractography from diffusion-weighted MRI, were used to define the anatomical connectivity. Precision matrices were obtained with the region specific time series in five different frequency bands. We compared our method with the traditional GL and a functional adaptive version of the GL, in terms of log-likelihood and classification accuracies between the three groups. We conclude that introduc- ing an anatomical prior improves the expressivity of the model and, in most cases, leads to a better classification between groups.