Objectives: To determine the optimal medication for the treatment of renal colic using evidence based medicine (EBM) parameters (RR, ARR, NNT, NNH, ARI, RRI). Sample and Methodology: During 2010, an ITT study was conducted on 400 outpatients of the Sarajevo University Clinical Center Urology Clinic in order to investigate renal colic pain relief drugs. Each group consisting of 100 patients was administered either Metamizol amp. i.v., or Diclofenac amp. i.m., or Butylscopolamine amp. i.v., while 100 patients belonged to the placebo group that was given distilled water (aqua redestilata). All patients completed visual analogue pain scale (VAPS) from 0 to 10 prior to and after the treatment. Results: Using EBM parameters Diclofenac Na and Metamizol were shown to be the most efficient in the treatment of renal colic. In these two groups, relative risk (RR) was 21 and 8,5% respectively; Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) was 74 and 86% respectively, and Number Needed to Treat (NNT) was 1 for both groups, while chi-squared (X2) test has shown that there is no statistically significant difference between these two drugs when it comes to their effect. In the Butylscopolamine group, RR was 81; ARR 18%, while NNT was 5. With respect to side effects, only in his group it was shown that Relative Risk Increase (RRI) was 84, ARI 83%, while Number Needed to Harm (NNH) was 2. Conclusion: The most optimal medication for the treatment of renal colic according to EBM parameters is Diclofenac Na, followed by Metamizol. Butylscopolamine is not recommended for the treatment of renal colic.

A lot of research has been done on author classification using various methodologies. One of them is using artificial neural networks. It is common that the number of descriptors used for author classification exceeds two. In this paper we propose a means of using artificial neural network to classify the authors of texts using only two descriptors: the number of words in a paragraph and a number of characters per word in a paragraph. The approach taken uses committee machines based on ensemble averaging. The basic idea is to solve the complex computational task by dividing it into a number of computationally simple tasks and then combining the solution of these tasks. The high performance achieved is because the committee is much better than the single best constituent in the isolation. Our results show that with the above approach we succeeded to correctly classify the works of Leo Tolstoy and George Orwell.

We present a rectangle-based segmentation algorithm that sets up a graph and performs a graph cut to separate an object from the background. However, graph-based algorithms distribute the graph's nodes uniformly and equidistantly on the image. Then, a smoothness term is added to force the cut to prefer a particular shape. This strategy does not allow the cut to prefer a certain structure, especially when areas of the object are indistinguishable from the background. We solve this problem by referring to a rectangle shape of the object when sampling the graph nodes, i.e., the nodes are distributed non-uniformly and non-equidistantly on the image. This strategy can be useful, when areas of the object are indistinguishable from the background. For evaluation, we focus on vertebrae images from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets to support the time consuming manual slice-by-slice segmentation performed by physicians. The ground truth of the vertebrae boundaries were manually extracted by two clinical experts (neurological surgeons) with several years of experience in spine surgery and afterwards compared with the automatic segmentation results of the proposed scheme yielding an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 90.97±2.2%.

Suchey-Brooks method based on morphological features of pubic symphysis is a common method of age evaluation of human skeletal remains. The aim of the study was the classification of the examined samples into a particular phase according to Suchey-Brooks method, comparing the estimated age according to Suchey-Brooks with living age of the identified persons. The study was conducted on 120 pairs of pubic bones symphysis of male who disappeared from the area of north-west Bosnia during previous war, who were exhumed and the process of their identification was previously finished. The youngest person was 19 years old and the oldest 86. The study was retrospective, made by comparing the morphological characteristics of pubic symphysis pairs of the examined sample with Suchey-Brooks standards. The statistical analysis of data obtained by the survey showed that the smallest deviations from the average were in phase II by Suchey-Brooks, while the maximum deviation was in phase IV. The standard deviation generally increases from phase to phase, which is to be expected. The span of age obtained for Bosnian population is smaller at all stages in relation to Suchey Brooks-standards, as well as standard deviation, except in phases IV and VI. There was a significant difference noticed in phase V in the estimation of age between the original method and Bosnian population. In general, Suchey-Brooks method leads to underestimation of age, but the underestimation or overestimation in relation to the actual age is possible at each stage, which indicates the individual biological variation.

The  aim of this study was to compare the sociodemographic and clinical features of odon­togenic infections between hospitalized and non-hospitalized  children and to show what were the risk factors in children that could predict the course of odontogenic infection and indicate the need for hospital treatment. The design of our study was of the case-control type. The two study groups consisted of 70 inpatients and 35 outpatients with odontogenic infections who were treated at Department of Pediatric Dentistry and Department of Maxillofacial Surgery at Clinical Center in Kragujevac, Serbia. Clinical and sociodemographic data were col­lected retrospectively from patients' hospital re­cords. The following characteristics were signifi-cantly associated  with hospital treatment of chil-dren with acute odontogenic infection: li­ving in a village (OR =7.26,[1.43-36.96]), multi-spatial infection (OR =0.04, [0.00-0.91]), and affec­tion of upper face (OR = 0.01, [0.00-0.86]). Tooth extraction was important intervention in the treatment regimen and reduced frequency of hospitalization (OR=0.07, [0.01-0.70]). The dif­ferences between hospitalized and non-hospitali­zed children were not significant in regard to: ethnicity, employment of parents,  anatomical region of infection, side of the facial infection, source of infection (posterior or anterior deci­duous or permanent teeth), and treatment (drai­nage and incision, oral or parenteral antibiotics). In children with acute odontogenic infection it is necessary to do tooth extraction in timely manner, especially if the source of infection is tooth from upper jaw and if it is multi-spatial in­fection.

Renata Dobrila-Dintinjana1, Dragan Trivanovic2, Marijan Dintinjana3, Jelena Vukelic4 and Nenad Vanis5 1Department of Radiation Oncology, Clinical Hospital Center Rijeka, University of Rijeka, School of Medicine, 2General Hospital Pula, Department of Internal Medicine, 3Clinic of General Medicine Dr Dintinjana, 4Department of Speech and Hearing Disorders Diagnostics and Rehabilitation, Clinical Hospital Center Rijeka, 5Division for Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Clinical Center University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sarajevo, 1,2,3,4Croatia 5Bosnia and Herzegovina