Comparison of endoscopic tympanoplasty to microscopic tympanoplasty in anterior tympanic membrane perforation

Objective:Tympanoplasty aims to eradicate lesions and restore middle ear function in chronic otitis media.This study was conducted to compare the surgical and functional outcomes of endoscopic tympanoplasty(ET)and microscopic tympanoplasty(MT)in anterior tympanic membrane perforation.Methods:The clinical data of 42 patients undergoing tympanoplasty with anterior quadrants tympanic membrane perforation between January 2018 and July 2019 were retrospectively analyzed.Patients were classified into the ET group(n?22)or the MT group(n?20).Patients’demographics,clinical characteristics,surgical and functional outcomes were assessed between the two groups.Results:External auditory canal widening was not necessary in the ET group and was performed in 55.0%of patients in the MT group.The operation time of the ET group was significantly shorter than that of the MT group(61.23±11.48 min vs.78.65±11.79 min,p=0.034).The pain scale score of the ET group at 24 hours after surgery was significantly lower than that of the MT group(0.86±0.64 vs.2.40±1.14,p=0.029).The grafting success rate was 95.5%(21/22)in the ET group and 95.0%(19/20)in the MT group.In the ET group,the pre-and postoperative air-bone gap were 35.60±8.43 dB and 18.79±5.80 dB,respectively,which was a significant improvement(p=0.016).The respective values in the MT group(33.33±7.88 dB and 19.58±6.24 dB)also represented a significant improvement(p=0.004).Conclusion:ET is more beneficial for patients with anterior tympanic membrane perforations,which helps minimize the surgical trauma and reduces operation time and postoperative pain.

Experimental study on seismic behavior of mid-rise RC shear wall with concealed truss

In this paper,mid-rise shear wall with concealed truss was proposed.This new composite shear wall includes two kinds of composition:one is the composition of two bearing systems,including truss and shear wall,and the other is the composition of two materials,including steel and concrete.Therefore,it is a double composite shear wall.The experimental study on the seismic behavior of six 1/3 scale mid-rise shear walls,including an ordinary mid-rise shear wall,a mid-rise shear wall with steel frame,and four mid-rise shear wall with concealed truss made of different materials,was studied.Based on the experimental study,the stiffness and its attenuation,bearing capacity,ductility,hysteretic property,energy dissipation,and failure phenomena of each shear wall were contrastively analyzed.The formulas of bearing capacity and stiffness were established.The results obtained from the formulas and those from experiment are in good agreement.Some suggestions for seismic design of shear wall are given in this paper.The experimental results show that the seismic behavior of the mid-rise shear wall with steel frame and that of every truss with different materials is obviously improved.

A superlinear numerical scheme for multi-term fractional nonlinear ordinary differential equations

In this paper,we present a superlinear numerical method for multi-term fractional nonlinear ordinary differential equations(MTFNODEs).First,the presented problem is equivalently transformed into its integral form with multi-term Riemann-Liouville integrals.Second,the compound product trapezoidal rule is used to approximate the fractional integrals.Then,the unconditional stability and convergence with the order 1+αN−1−αN−2 of the proposed scheme are strictly established,whereαN−1 andαN−2 are the maximum and the second maximum fractional indexes in the considered MTFNODEs,respectively.Finally,two numerical examples are provided to support the theoretical results.

A superlinear convergence scheme for nonlinear fractional differential equations and its fast implement

In this paper,we first construct an efficient scheme for nonlinear Caputo fractional differential equations with the initial value and the fractional degree 0<α<1.Then,the unconditional stability and the superlinear convergence with the order 1+αof the proposed scheme are strictly proved and discussed.Due to the nonlocal property of fractional operators,the new scheme is time-consuming for long-time simulations.Thus,a fast implement of the proposed scheme is presented based on the sum-of-exponentials(SOE)approximation for the kernel tα−1 on the interval[h,T]in the Riemann-Liouville integral,where h is the stepsize.Some numerical experiments are provided to support the theoretical results of the new scheme and demonstrate the computational performance of its fast implement.