This article uses metric and nonmetric dental data to test the "two-layer" or immigration hypothesis whereby Southeast Asia was initially occupied by an "Australo-Melanesian" population that later underwent substantial genetic admixture with East Asian immigrants associated with the spread of agriculture from the Neolithic period onwards. We examined teeth from 4,002 individuals comprising 42 prehistoric and historic samples from East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Melanesia. For the odontometric analysis, dental size proportions were compared using factor analysis and Q-mode correlation coefficients, and overall tooth size was also compared between population samples. Nonmetric population affinities were estimated by Smith's distances, using the frequencies of 16 tooth traits. The results of both the metric and nonmetric analyses demonstrate close affinities between recent Australo-Melanesian samples and samples representing early Southeast Asia, such as the Early to Middle Holocene series from Vietnam, Malaysia, and Flores. In contrast, the dental characteristics of most modern Southeast Asians exhibit a mixture of traits associated with East Asians and Australo-Melanesians, suggesting that these populations were genetically influenced by immigrants from East Asia. East Asian metric and/or nonmetric traits are also found in some prehistoric samples from Southeast Asia such as Ban Kao (Thailand), implying that immigration probably began in the early Neolithic. Much clearer influence of East Asian immigration was found in Early Metal Age Vietnamese and Sulawesi samples. Although the results of this study are consistent with the immigration hypothesis, analysis of additional Neolithic samples is needed to determine the exact timing of population dispersals into Southeast Asia.
Catheter angiography is traditionally used to determine renal arterial anatomy in live renal donors. Three-dimensional (3D) contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRA) has been suggested as a noninvasive replacement. We assessed the possibility of using MRA in live renal donors in Malaysia.
Tibial nerve is a branch of the sciatic nerve and it is the main nerve innervating the muscles of the back of the leg. The tibial nerve divides into medial and lateral plantar nerves. The level of division may be important for surgical purpose. The main aim of the present study was to observe the exact level of division of the tibial nerve and discuss its clinical implications.
Sexually mature males of Bactrocera papayae are strongly attracted to and consume methyl eugenol (ME). Upon consumption, ME is biotransformed to two phenylpropanoids, 2-allyl-4,5-dimethoxyphenol (DMP) and (E)-coniferyl alcohol (CF), that are transported in the hemolymph, sequestered and stored in the rectal glands, and subsequently released as sex and aggregation pheromones during courtship. To date, very little work on the ultrastructure and anatomy of the rectal gland has been done, and the accumulation of phenylpropanoids in the rectal glands of males has not been observed visually. Our objectives are to describe the anatomy and fine structures of the rectal glands of males and females and to observe the accumulation of autofluorescent compounds in the rectal glands of males. The rectal glands of males and females have four rectal papillae with each papilla attached to a rectal pad. The rectal pads protrude from the rectal gland as the only surfaces of the gland that are not surrounded by muscles. The rectal papillae of ME-fed males had oil droplets and autofluorescent compounds that were absent from those of ME-deprived males. The autofluorescent compounds accumulated in the rectal sac, which is an evagination that is not found in rectal glands of females. The accumulation of these compounds increased with time and reached maximum at a day post-ME feeding and decreased thereafter. This trend is similar to the accumulation pattern of phenylpropanoids, CF and DMP in the rectal gland.
In this paper, 3-D discrete Hartley transform is applied for the compression of two medical modalities, namely, magnetic resonance images and X-ray angiograms and the performance results are compared with those of 3-D discrete cosine and Fourier transforms using the parameters such as PSNR and bit rate. It is shown that the 3-D discrete Hartley transform is better than the other two transforms for magnetic resonance brain images whereas for the X-ray angiograms, the 3-D discrete cosine transform is found to be superior.
Image segmentation of medical images is a challenging problem with several still not totally solved issues, such as noise interference and image artifacts. Region-based and histogram-based segmentation methods have been widely used in image segmentation. Problems arise when we use these methods, such as the selection of a suitable threshold value for the histogram-based method and the over-segmentation followed by the time-consuming merge processing in the region-based algorithm. To provide an efficient approach that not only produce better results, but also maintain low computational complexity, a new region dividing based technique is developed for image segmentation, which combines the advantages of both regions-based and histogram-based methods. The proposed method is applied to the challenging applications: Gray matter (GM), White matter (WM) and cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF) segmentation in brain MR Images. The method is evaluated on both simulated and real data, and compared with other segmentation techniques. The obtained results have demonstrated its improved performance and robustness.
The purpose of this study was to observe effects of wearing textured insoles and clinical compression socks on organisation of lower limb interceptive actions in developing athletes of different skill levels in association football. Six advanced learners and six completely novice football players (15.4±0.9years) performed 20 instep kicks with maximum velocity, in four randomly organised insoles and socks conditions, (a) Smooth Socks with Smooth Insoles (SSSI); (b) Smooth Socks with Textured Insoles (SSTI); (c) Compression Socks with Smooth Insoles (CSSI) and (d), Compression Socks with Textured Insoles (CSTI). Reflective markers were placed on key anatomical locations and the ball to facilitate three-dimensional (3D) movement recording and analysis. Data on 3D kinematic variables and initial ball velocity were analysed using one-way mixed model ANOVAs. Results revealed that wearing textured and compression materials enhanced performance in key variables, such as the maximum velocity of the instep kick and increased initial ball velocity, among advanced learners compared to the use of non-textured and compression materials. Adding texture to football boot insoles appeared to interact with compression materials to improve kicking performance, captured by these important measures. This improvement in kicking performance is likely to have occurred through enhanced somatosensory system feedback utilised for foot placement and movement organisation of the lower limbs. Data suggested that advanced learners were better at harnessing the augmented feedback information from compression and texture to regulate emerging movement patterns compared to novices.
Mobile implementation is a current trend in biometric design. This paper proposes a new approach to palm print recognition, in which smart phones are used to capture palm print images at a distance. A touchless system was developed because of public demand for privacy and sanitation. Robust hand tracking, image enhancement, and fast computation processing algorithms are required for effective touchless and mobile-based recognition. In this project, hand tracking and the region of interest (ROI) extraction method were discussed. A sliding neighborhood operation with local histogram equalization, followed by a local adaptive thresholding or LHEAT approach, was proposed in the image enhancement stage to manage low-quality palm print images. To accelerate the recognition process, a new classifier, improved fuzzy-based k nearest centroid neighbor (IFkNCN), was implemented. By removing outliers and reducing the amount of training data, this classifier exhibited faster computation. Our experimental results demonstrate that a touchless palm print system using LHEAT and IFkNCN achieves a promising recognition rate of 98.64%.
We present a robot that enables high-content studies of alert adult Drosophila by combining operations including gentle picking; translations and rotations; characterizations of fly phenotypes and behaviors; microdissection; or release. To illustrate, we assessed fly morphology, tracked odor-evoked locomotion, sorted flies by sex, and dissected the cuticle to image neural activity. The robot's tireless capacity for precise manipulations enables a scalable platform for screening flies' complex attributes and behavioral patterns.
The rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae is a serious pathogen that jeopardises the world's most important food-security crop. Ten common Malaysian rice varieties were examined for their morphological, physiological and genomic responses to this rice blast pathogen. qPCR quantification was used to assess the growth of the pathogen population in resistant and susceptible rice varieties. The chlorophyll content and photosynthesis were also measured to further understand the disruptive effects that M. oryzae has on infected plants of these varieties. Real-time PCR was used to explore the differential expression of eight blast resistance genes among the ten local varieties. Blast disease has destructive effects on the growth of rice, and the findings of our study provide evidence that the Pikh, Pi9, Pi21, and Osw45 genes are involved in defence responses in the leaves of Malaysian rice at 31 h after inoculation with M. oryzae pathotype P7.2. Both the chlorophyll content and photosynthesis were reduced, but the levels of Pikh gene expression remained constant in susceptible varieties, with a developed pathogen population and mild or severe symptoms. The Pi9, Pi21, and Osw45 genes, however, were simultaneously upregulated in infected rice plants. Therefore, the presence of the Pikh, Pi9, Pi21, and Osw45 genes in the germplasm is useful for improving the resistance of rice varieties.
The practicality of biometrics of seafood cannot be overemphasized, particularly for competent authorities of the shrimp industry. However, there is a paucity of relevant literature on the relationship between biometric and physicochemical indices of freshly harvested shrimp. This work therefore investigated the relationship between biometric (standard length (SL), total weight (TW) and condition factor (CF)) and physicochemical (moisture content, pH, titratable acidity, water activity, water retention index, colour values and fracturability) characteristics of freshly harvested Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) obtained from three different farms. The relationships between these parameters were determined using correlation and regression analyses.
Sundapolystoma chalconotae. n. g., n. sp. (Polystomatidae, Polystomatinae) is proposed for a new polystomatid from the urinary bladder of Rana chalconota (Schlegel) in Peninsular Malaysia. This is the first species of polystomatid to be described from the amphibians of Peninsular Malaysia and the second for the Southeast Asian region. This new genus, as exemplified by S. chalconotae, differs from other polystomatids, and in particular Parapolystoma Ozaki, 1935 (P. bulliense (Johnston, 1912) Ozaki, 1935 and P. johnstoni Pichelin, 1995), in having a tubular uterus and a single diffuse testis. P. crooki Vande Vusse, 1976 is similar to S. chalconotae in having a similar type of uterus and testis, and is re-assigned as Sundapolystoma crooki (Vande Vusse, 1976) n. comb. S. chalconotae differs from S. crooki in having anchors with a longer outer root rather than a longer inner root and 7-8 genital spines compared to 9-13 in S. crooki.
We redescribe the camallanid nematode Serpinema octorugatum (Baylis, 1933) from the box turtle Cuora amboinensis (Daudin) collected in Malaysia. In this redescription, we amend the original description by noting that there are only four cephalic papillae and that there are five pairs of post-anal papillae, and propose that the name of this species be corrected from S. octorugatus to S. octorugatum. Additionally, we removed the tissues overlying the buccal capsule and have used SEM studies to show that the peribuccal shields extend laterally from the buccal capsule, forming a surface possibly used in muscle attachment. Furthermore, we show that the supposedly non-cuticularised cylinder connecting the buccal capsule to the oesophagus in the Camallanidae is part of the buccal capsule and is, therefore, likely to be cuticularised. We also examine morphological measurements of taxonomic interest for correlations with total body length and find that many characters traditionally used for inter- and intra-specific comparisons are correlated with total body length in adult female worms. This suggests that comparisons between samples of adult female worms that do not account for the potential effect of total body length may be misleading. However, we show that some features of taxonomic interest are not correlated with total body length.
We describe Onchocerca dewittei japonica n. subsp. from the Japanese wild boar, Sus scrofa leucomystax, in Oita, Kyushu Island, where all seven animals examined were found to be infected. This study began with efforts to identify the causative species in a recent case of zoonotic onchocerciasis. Compared with Onchocerca dewittei dewittei from Sus scrofa jubatus in Malaysia, which was reexamined here, our new subspecies has much greater space between the ridges on the females. In addition, its microfilariae (from uteri) are shorter (192-210 microns compared with 228-247 microns), and only the posterior third of the microfilarial body is coiled, instead of the entire body. The Onchocerca species parasitic in suids (these two subspecies and O. ramachandrini from the warthog in the Ethiopian region) form a group sharing several characters. Among the most unusual characters are the body swellings (a specialized apparatus for mating, known in only a few other genera). In addition, longitudinal cuticular crests were found on males of both subspecies from wild boar and on females of O. ramachandrini.
OBJECTIVE: To find out the incidence and type of external laryngeal nerves during operations on the thyroid, and to assess the role of a nerve stimulator in detecting them.
DESIGN: Prospective, non-randomised study.
SETTING: Teaching hospital, Malaysia.
SUBJECTS: 317 patients who had 447 dissections between early January 1998 and late November 1999.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:
Number and type of nerves crossing the cricothyroid space, and the usefulness of the nerve stimulator in finding them.
RESULTS: The nerve stimulator was used in 206/447 dissections (46%). 392 external laryngeal nerves were seen (88%), of which 196/206 (95%) were detected with the stimulator. However, without the stimulator 196 nerves were detected out of 241 dissections (81%). The stimulator detected 47 (23%) Type I nerves (nerve > 1 cm from the upper edge of superior pole); 86 (42%) Type IIa nerves (nerve < 1 cm from the upper edge of superior pole); and 63 (31%) Type IIb nerves (nerve below upper edge of superior pole). 10 nerves were not detected. When the stimulator was not used the corresponding figures were 32 (13%), 113 (47%), and 51 (21%), and 45 nerves were not seen. If the nerve cannot be found we recommend dissection of capsule close to the medial border of the upper pole of the thyroid to avoid injury to the nerve.
CONCLUSION: Although the use of the nerve stimulator seems desirable, it confers no added advantage in finding the nerve. In the event of uncertainty about whether a structure is the nerve, the stimulator may help to confirm it. However, exposure of the cricothyroid space is most important for good exposure in searching for the external laryngeal nerve.
This study aims to evaluate the bone mineral densities and hip axis lengths of women in the local population. 227 normal Singapore women of ages 20 to 70 years had evaluation of their bone mineral densities (BMDs) by means of dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). The trend of BMDs at the left femoral neck and the lumbar spine remains fairly constant with increasing age until the 45-49 years age-band, beyond which there is a consistent decline. The mean hip axis length is 10.3 cm with a standard deviation of 0.6 cm. In general, the bone mineral densities in the femoral neck and lumbar spine as measured by DXA and the hip axis length of the local population is lower than corresponding figures reported in the Western population.
Our objective was to establish thyroid volume by sonography in Brazilian schoolchildren and to correlate thyroid volume with anthropometric characteristics.
Cephalometric data from 105 female subjects (35 Chinese, 35 Malay and 35 Indian) with good occlusion and aesthetic pleasing facial profiles (determined by a trained clinician and endorsed by the lay public) were analysed using the Steiner analysis. Statistical analysis of the data showed that while the cephalometric ideals of the Chinese and the Malay ethnic groups were rather similar, cephalometric differences existed between the Chinese and Indians as well as the Malays and Indians. Compared to the Chinese and Malays, the Indians appeared to have less prognathic mandibles and maxillae, less protrusive and proclined upper and lower incisors and also less protrusive upper and lower lips. These differences demonstrate intrinsic ethnic differences and emphasize the need to treat patients of different ethnic groups using cephalometric norms which are peculiar to their own group.
Three millilitres of plain 0.5% bupivacaine were injected intrathecally at two different spinal interspaces (L2/3 and L4/5) and at two different speeds (15 and 30 sec) in four groups of ten patients. Injection at L2/3 over 15 sec produced a significantly higher mean maximum spread of analgesia (T6.4) when compared to injection at L4-5 over 15 sec (T10.3) (P < 0.05). Over the same interspace L2/3, injection over 15 sec also produced a higher level of spread as compared to the 30 sec group (p < 0.05). At 15 min there was a greater fall in blood pressure in the L2/3 15 sec group when compared to the other groups (p < 0.01). There was a further decrease in the blood pressure in L2/3 15 sec and L4/5 30 sec groups after 30 minutes of blockade (p < 0.01). Therefore close monitoring of cardiovascular parameters must be continued for at least 30 min in spinal anaesthesia with bupivacaine.
A prospective study was carried out on 50 patients who had their fetal weight estimated by 3 clinicians of different seniority and compared to the ultrasound estimated fetal weights using 3 different formulas. All the patients delivered within 24 hours of their clinical and ultrasound estimates. A wide range of birth-weights (1,800-4,500 g) was estimated among the 3 different races (Malay, Chinese and Indians). The results showed that there was no significant difference in birth-weight estimation amongst the 3 clinicians as well as between the 3 ultrasound formulas used. There was however significant difference between these 2 groups when compared with the actual birthweight with clinical estimation being superior to ultrasound estimation in our population. This level of significance did not extend beyond 4,000 g fetal weight (actual) thus making both clinical and ultrasound estimation of fetal weight equally accurate after 4,000 g. This has important implications for developing countries where there is a lack of technologically advanced ultrasound machines capable of doing sophisticated functions like fetal weight estimations but has experienced clinicians who could perform this function equally well if not better.