Subjective assessment of sensory function and oral function decline in older adults

by Tetsuo Ichikawa, Tomoya Koda, Mio Kitamura, Takahiro Kishimoto, Takashi Matsuda, Takaharu Goto, Masayuki Domichi, Akiko Suganuma, Shinji Fujiwara, Yasuhiko Shirayama, Kazuhiko Kotani, Naoki Sakane

Sensory decline in older adults significantly affects quality of life and contributes to cognitive decline, depression, falls, and injuries. Although several studies exist in this area, most were focused on individual senses, with few being conducted on comprehensive assessments of all five senses. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between subjective sensory assessment and oral function, to developing health strategies. This study was conducted as part of the Mima-SONGS Study for examining relationships between oral, cognitive, and physical functions, social factors, nutrition, and health, in older adults living in a mountainous region of Japan. The cohort included 62 participants (40 women and 22 men; mean age: 80.8 yrs.) as of December 2023. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing sensory perception and eating enjoyment rated on a four-point scale. Oral health was evaluated based on the conditions of remaining teeth, tongue coating, oral dryness, occlusal force, oral diadochokinesis, and repetitive salivary swallow test. Sensory assessments indicated minimal overall issues, with auditory problems scoring the highest and taste/tactile issues scoring the lowest. Males scored higher in hearing and maximum occlusal force. Eating enjoyment was generally high and negatively correlated with olfactory and taste problems. Subjective sensory issues were less strongly associated with oral function and age. Most older adults were not subjectively aware of sensory problems, especially olfaction, taste, and tactile problems. Subjective sensory problems showed a moderate but meaningful association with oral health conditions and age. The findings might be valuable data developing future support measures.

Deep generative abnormal lesion emphasization validated by nine radiologists and 1000 chest X-rays with lung nodules

by Shouhei Hanaoka, Yukihiro Nomura, Naoto Hayashi, Issei Sato, Soichiro Miki, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Hisaichi Shibata, Takahiro Nakao, Tomomi Takenaga, Hiroaki Koyama, Shinichi Cho, Noriko Kanemaru, Kotaro Fujimoto, Naoya Sakamoto, Tomoya Nishiyama, Hirotaka Matsuzaki, Nobutake Yamamichi, Osamu Abe

A general-purpose method of emphasizing abnormal lesions in chest radiographs, named EGGPALE (Extrapolative, Generative and General-Purpose Abnormal Lesion Emphasizer), is presented. The proposed EGGPALE method is composed of a flow-based generative model and L-infinity-distance-based extrapolation in a latent space. The flow-based model is trained using only normal chest radiographs, and an invertible mapping function from the image space to the latent space is determined. In the latent space, a given unseen image is extrapolated so that the image point moves away from the normal chest X-ray hyperplane. Finally, the moved point is mapped back to the image space and the corresponding emphasized image is created. The proposed method was evaluated by an image interpretation experiment with nine radiologists and 1,000 chest radiographs, of which positive suspected lung cancer cases and negative cases were validated by computed tomography examinations. The sensitivity of EGGPALE-processed images showed +0.0559 average improvement compared with that of the original images, with -0.0192 deterioration of average specificity. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the ensemble of nine radiologists showed a statistically significant improvement. From these results, the feasibility of EGGPALE for enhancing abnormal lesions was validated. Our code is available at https://github.com/utrad-ical/Eggpale.