The Interval Between Staged Bilateral Total Knee Arthroplasties Does Not Affect Early Complications of the Second Knee or Long-term Function of the First and Second Knees

Background: This study explored the optimal time interval between staged bilateral total knee arthroplasty (BTKA) to minimise early complications of the second TKA and maximise long-term function of the first and second knees.Methods: We retrospectively reviewed 266 patients who underwent staged BTKA between 2010 and 2015. Groups 1–4 had time intervals between BTKAs of 1–6, 6–12, 12–18, and 18–24 months, respectively. Demographics, postoperative complications within 90 days of the second TKA, Knee Society Score (KSS), and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index (WOMAC) score were compared among the groups.Results: In total, 54, 96, 75, and 41 patients were assigned to groups 1–4, respectively. Although group 1 had the highest overall complication rate (11.11%), there was no significant difference in the complication rate among the four groups. Also, no significant differences were found among the four groups in functional and patient-reported outcomes, in either the first or second knee at 5 years postoperatively, including KSS-knee, KSS-function, WOMAC-pain, WOMAC-stiffness, and WOMAC-physical function. The interval between BTKA did not influence complications or the function of the second knee. The TKA type (posterior-stabilised vs. medial-pivot) and age did not correlate significantly with any scores.Conclusions: There was no group difference in early complications of the second TKA, and postoperative function was equivalent between the two knees and did not vary by the interval between surgeries. Our results can help surgeons discuss the timing of the second TKA with patients, which should be based on their own preferences. If patients cannot tolerate severe symptoms in the contralateral knee after the first TKA, the second TKA should be performed as early as possible.

Fundamental relations and identities of fuzzy hyperalgebras

Inspired by fuzzy hyperalgebras and fuzzy polynomial function (term function), some homomorphism properties of fundamental relation on fuzzy hyperalgebras are conveyed. The obtained relations of fuzzy hyperalgebra are utilized for certain applications, i.e., biological phenomena and genetics along with some elucidatory examples presenting various aspects of fuzzy hyperalgebras. Then, by considering the definition of identities (weak and strong) as a class of fuzzy polynomial function, the smallest equivalence relation (fundamental relation) is obtained which is an important tool for fuzzy hyperalgebraic systems. Through the characterization of these equivalence relations of a fuzzy hyperalgebra, we assign the smallest equivalence relation α i 1 i 2 ∗ on a fuzzy hyperalgebra via identities where the factor hyperalgebra is a universal algebra. We extend and improve the identities on fuzzy hyperalgebras and characterize the smallest equivalence relation α J ∗ on the set of strong identities.

A New Citation Recommendation Strategy Based on Term Functions in Related Studies Section

Purpose Researchers frequently encounter the following problems when writing scientific articles: (1) Selecting appropriate citations to support the research idea is challenging. (2) The literature review is not conducted extensively, which leads to working on a research problem that others have well addressed. This study focuses on citation recommendation in the related studies section by applying the term function of a citation context, potentially improving the efficiency of writing a literature review. Design/methodology/approach We present nine term functions with three newly created and six identified from existing literature. Using these term functions as labels, we annotate 531 research papers in three topics to evaluate our proposed recommendation strategy. BM25 and Word2vec with VSM are implemented as the baseline models for the recommendation. Then the term function information is applied to enhance the performance. Findings The experiments show that the term function-based methods outperform the baseline methods regarding the recall, precision, and F1-score measurement, demonstrating that term functions are useful in identifying valuable citations. Research limitations The dataset is insufficient due to the complexity of annotating citation functions for paragraphs in the related studies section. More recent deep learning models should be performed to future validate the proposed approach. Practical implications The citation recommendation strategy can be helpful for valuable citation discovery, semantic scientific retrieval, and automatic literature review generation. Originality/value The proposed citation function-based citation recommendation can generate intuitive explanations of the results for users, improving the transparency, persuasiveness, and effectiveness of recommender systems.