Low-power laser therapy for carpal tunnel syndrome:effective optical power

Low-power laser therapy has been used for the non-surgical treatment of mild to moderate carpal tunnel syndrome,although its efficacy has been a long-standing controversy.The laser parameters in low-power laser therapy are closely related to the laser effect on human tissue.To evaluate the efficacy of low-power laser therapy,laser parameters should be accurately measured and controlled,which has been ignored in previous clinical trials.Here,we report the measurement of the effective optical power of low-power laser therapy for carpal tunnel syndrome.By monitoring the backside reflection and scattering laser power from human skin at the wrist,the effective laser power can be inferred.Using clinical measurements from 30 cases,we found that the effective laser power differed significantly among cases,with the measured laser reflection coefficient ranging from 1.8% to 54%.The reflection coefficient for 36.7% of these 30 cases was in the range of 10–20%,but for 16.7% of cases,it was higher than 40%.Consequently,monitoring the effective optical power during laser irradiation is necessary for the laser therapy of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Minimizing the Risk of Absolute Ruin Under a Diffusion Approximation Model with Reinsurance and Investment

This paper studies the optimization problem with both investment and proportional reinsurance control under the assumption that the surplus process of an insurance entity is represented by a pure diffusion process.The company can buy proportional reinsurance and invest its surplus into a Black-Scholes risky asset and a risk free asset without restrictions.The authors define absolute ruin as that the liminf of the surplus process is negative infinity and propose absolute ruin minimization as the optimization scenario.Applying the HJB method the authors obtain explicit expressions for the minimal absolute ruin function and the associated optimal investment strategy.The authors find that the minimal absolute ruin function here is convex,but not S-shaped investigated by Luo and Taksar(2011).And finally,from behavioral finance point of view,the authors come to the conclusion:It is the restrictions on investment that results in the kink of minimal absolute ruin function.

Decay of Correlations for Fibonacci Unimodal Interval Maps

We consider a class of generalized Fibonacci unimodal maps for which the central return times {Sn} satisfy that sn= sn-1 ＋ ksh-2 for some k≥ 1. We show that such a unimodal map admits a unique absolutely continuous invariant probability with exactly stretched exponential decay of correlations if its critical order lies in （1, k ＋ 1）.

Strongly enhanced quadrupole deformation in a class of N≈Z nuclei driven by large-scale clustering?

The formation of large size clusters,and/or their relative motion as a possible excitation mode,are suggested to be closely related to the origin of deformation in specific cases,namely the case of two doubly-magic clusters or two clusters with nearby characterization.New lifetime data in N=Z^(76)Sr and^(80)Zr leading to large B(E2)values are reproduced consistently and well within this approach,along with data for a few neighboring N≈Znuclei.These results are compared to previous studies of^(32)S and^(20)Ne and all of them support the ideas of the large-scale cluster approach.