Clinical evaluation of post-extraction site wound healing.

Science.gov (United States)

Adeyemo, Wasiu Lanre; Ladeinde, Akinola Ladipo; Ogunlewe, Mobolanle Olugbemiga

2006-07-01

The aim of this prospective study was to evaluate the clinical pattern of post-extraction wound healing with a view to identify the types, incidence, and pattern of healing complications following non-surgical tooth extraction. A total of 311 patients, who were referred for non-surgical (intra-alveolar) extractions, were included in the study. The relevant pre-operative information recorded for each patient included age and gender of the patient, indications for extraction, and tooth/teeth removed. Extractions were performed under local anesthesia with dental forceps, elevators, or both. Patients were evaluated on the third and seventh postoperative days for alveolus healing assessment. Data recorded were: biodata, day of presentation for alveolus healing assessment, day of onset of any symptoms, body temperature (degrees C) in cases of alveolus infection, and presence or absence of pain. Two hundred eighty-two patients (282) with 318 extraction sites were evaluated for alveolus healing. Healing was uneventful in 283 alveoli (89%), while 35 alveoli (11%) developed healing complications. These complications were: localized osteitis 26 (8.2%); acutely infected alveolus 5 (1.6%); and an acutely inflamed alveolus 4 (1.2%). Females developed more complications than males (p=0.003). Most complications were found in molars (60%) and premolars (37.1%). Localized osteitis caused severe pain in all cases, while infected and inflamed alveolus caused mild or no pain. Thirty patients (12%) among those without healing complications experienced mild pain. Most of the post-extraction alveoli healed uneventfully. Apart from alveolar osteitis (AO), post-extraction alveolus healing was also complicated by acutely infected alveoli and acutely inflamed alveoli. This study also demonstrated a painful alveolus is not necessarily a disturbance of post-extraction site wound healing; a thorough clinical examination must, therefore, be made to exclude any of the complications.

Clinical utility of curcumin extract.

Science.gov (United States)

Asher, Gary N; Spelman, Kevin

2013-01-01

Turmeric root has been used medicinally in China and India for thousands of years. The active components are thought to be the curcuminoids, primarily curcumin, which is commonly available worldwide as a standardized extract. This article reviews the pharmacology of curcuminoids, their use and efficacy, potential adverse effects, and dosage and standardization. Preclinical studies point to mechanisms of action that are predominantly anti-inflammatory and antineoplastic, while early human clinical trials suggest beneficial effects for dyspepsia, peptic ulcer, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, uveitis, orbital pseudotumor, and pancreatic cancer. Curcumin is well-tolerated; the most common side effects are nausea and diarrhea. Theoretical interactions exist due to purported effects on metabolic enzymes and transport proteins, but clinical reports do not support any meaningful interactions. Nonetheless, caution, especially with chemotherapy agents, is advised. Late-phase clinical trials are still needed to confirm most beneficial effects.

Seizure semiology inferred from clinical descriptions and from video recordings. How accurate are they?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Beniczky, Simona Alexandra; Fogarasi, András; Neufeld, Miri

2012-01-01

To assess how accurate the interpretation of seizure semiology is when inferred from witnessed seizure descriptions and from video recordings, five epileptologists analyzed 41 seizures from 30 consecutive patients who had clinical episodes in the epilepsy monitoring unit. For each clinical episode...... for the descriptions (k=0.67) and almost perfect for the video recordings (k=0.95). Video recordings significantly increase the accuracy of seizure interpretation....

Chemical techniques to extract organic fractions from fossil bones for accurate 14C dating

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Minami, Masayo; Muto, Hiroo; Nakamura, Toshio

2004-01-01

We examined different concentrations of HCl, such as 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 and 1.2 M, for decalcification of fossil bones and different times of 0.1 M NaOH treatment on collagens to determine the best conditions for purifying collagen through extraction of humic contaminants, and compared the alkali treatment method with the XAD-2 treatment method for several types of fossils. The yield of acid-insoluble bone fractions did not change over the range from 0.4 to 1.0 M HCl and decreased suddenly with 1.2 M HCl on decalcification, and the 14 C ages of the extracted gelatins from the five decalcified fractions were unchanged, suggesting that 14 C ages as those of the XAD-purified hydrolysates. The NaOH-treatment time should be less than several hours to avoid a loss of collagen. The fossil bones used are relatively well-preserved, but the alkali treatment could bring about a lot of loss of organic bone proteins for poorly-preserved bones. The XAD-2 treatment method is effective for accurate radiocarbon dating of fossil bones, if the XAD-2 resin is completely pre-cleaned

Comparing deep learning and concept extraction based methods for patient phenotyping from clinical narratives.

Science.gov (United States)

Gehrmann, Sebastian; Dernoncourt, Franck; Li, Yeran; Carlson, Eric T; Wu, Joy T; Welt, Jonathan; Foote, John; Moseley, Edward T; Grant, David W; Tyler, Patrick D; Celi, Leo A

2018-01-01

In secondary analysis of electronic health records, a crucial task consists in correctly identifying the patient cohort under investigation. In many cases, the most valuable and relevant information for an accurate classification of medical conditions exist only in clinical narratives. Therefore, it is necessary to use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract and evaluate these narratives. The most commonly used approach to this problem relies on extracting a number of clinician-defined medical concepts from text and using machine learning techniques to identify whether a particular patient has a certain condition. However, recent advances in deep learning and NLP enable models to learn a rich representation of (medical) language. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) for text classification can augment the existing techniques by leveraging the representation of language to learn which phrases in a text are relevant for a given medical condition. In this work, we compare concept extraction based methods with CNNs and other commonly used models in NLP in ten phenotyping tasks using 1,610 discharge summaries from the MIMIC-III database. We show that CNNs outperform concept extraction based methods in almost all of the tasks, with an improvement in F1-score of up to 26 and up to 7 percentage points in area under the ROC curve (AUC). We additionally assess the interpretability of both approaches by presenting and evaluating methods that calculate and extract the most salient phrases for a prediction. The results indicate that CNNs are a valid alternative to existing approaches in patient phenotyping and cohort identification, and should be further investigated. Moreover, the deep learning approach presented in this paper can be used to assist clinicians during chart review or support the extraction of billing codes from text by identifying and highlighting relevant phrases for various medical conditions.

Multistage feature extraction for accurate face alignment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Zuo, F.; With, de P.H.N.

2004-01-01

We propose a novel multistage facial feature extraction approach using a combination of 'global' and 'local' techniques. At the first stage, we use template matching, based on an Edge-Orientation-Map for fast feature position estimation. Using this result, a statistical framework applying the Active

Differential extraction of endogenous and exogenous 25-OH-vitamin D from serum makes the accurate quantification in liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry assays challenging.

Science.gov (United States)

Lankes, Ulrich; Elder, Peter A; Lewis, John G; George, Peter

2015-01-01

Extraction followed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis is the method of choice when it comes to the accurate quantification of 25-OH-vitamin D in blood samples. It is generally assumed that the addition of exogenous internal standard allows for the determination of the endogenous analyte concentration. In this study we investigated the extraction properties of endogenous and exogenous 25-OH-vitamin D. Eight samples were used for the evaluation of the extraction procedure and 59 patients' samples for a method comparison. The methanol-to-sample ratio (v/v) and the sample-to-hexane ratio (v/v) were varied and the LC-MS/MS signals of endogenous 25-OH-vitamin D3, spiked 25-OH-vitamin D2 and internal standard of the extracts recorded. The optimized 'in-house' LC-MS/MS assay was compared to two automated chemiluminescence immunoassays from DiaSorin and Abbott. Mathematical analysis of the data revealed a differential extraction of endogenous 25-OH-vitamin D3, spiked 25-OH-vitamin D2 and non-equilibrated internal standard. Exogenous 25-OH-vitamin D can be measured accurately if a definite methanol-to-sample ratio is used. Endogenous 25-OH-vitamin D is affected by critical quantification issues due to a differential slope in the extraction profile. The actual 25-OH-vitamin D concentration can be one-third above the measured extractable concentration. Results confirm that the 'in-house' LC-MS/MS assay provides reproducible 25-OH-vitamin D results. Discordant concentrations of 25-OH-vitamin D from LC-MS/MS assays can be caused by selection of suboptimal extraction conditions. Furthermore, a different sample pretreatment or solvent extraction system may result in a different dissociation and extraction yield of endogenous 25-OH-vitamin D and therefore contribute to variations of LC-MS/MS results. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.

ACE-I Angioedema: Accurate Clinical Diagnosis May Prevent Epinephrine-Induced Harm

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

R. Mason Curtis

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Upper airway angioedema is a life-threatening emergency department (ED presentation with increasing incidence. Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor induced angioedema (AAE is a non-mast cell mediated etiology of angioedema. Accurate diagnosis by clinical examination can optimize patient management and reduce morbidity from inappropriate treatment with epinephrine. The aim of this study is to describe the incidence of angioedema subtypes and the management of AAE. We evaluate the appropriateness of treatments and highlight preventable iatrogenic morbidity. Methods: We conducted a retrospective chart review of consecutive angioedema patients presenting to two tertiary care EDs between July 2007 and March 2012. Results: Of 1,702 medical records screened, 527 were included. The cause of angioedema was identified in 48.8% (n=257 of cases. The most common identifiable etiology was AAE (33.1%, n=85, with a 60.0% male predominance. The most common AAE management strategies included diphenhydramine (63.5%, n=54, corticosteroids (50.6%, n=43 and ranitidine (31.8%, n=27. Epinephrine was administered in 21.2% (n=18 of AAE patients, five of whom received repeated doses. Four AAE patients required admission (4.7% and one required endotracheal intubation. Epinephrine induced morbidity in two patients, causing myocardial ischemia or dysrhythmia shortly after administration. Conclusion: AAE is the most common identifiable etiology of angioedema and can be accurately diagnosed by physical examination. It is easily confused with anaphylaxis and mismanaged with antihistamines, corticosteroids and epinephrine. There is little physiologic rationale for epinephrine use in AAE and much risk. Improved clinical differentiation of mast cell and non-mast cell mediated angioedema can optimize patient management.

The current role of on-line extraction approaches in clinical and forensic toxicology.

Science.gov (United States)

Mueller, Daniel M

2014-08-01

In today's clinical and forensic toxicological laboratories, automation is of interest because of its ability to optimize processes, to reduce manual workload and handling errors and to minimize exposition to potentially infectious samples. Extraction is usually the most time-consuming step; therefore, automation of this step is reasonable. Currently, from the field of clinical and forensic toxicology, methods using the following on-line extraction techniques have been published: on-line solid-phase extraction, turbulent flow chromatography, solid-phase microextraction, microextraction by packed sorbent, single-drop microextraction and on-line desorption of dried blood spots. Most of these published methods are either single-analyte or multicomponent procedures; methods intended for systematic toxicological analysis are relatively scarce. However, the use of on-line extraction will certainly increase in the near future.

Automated Extraction of Substance Use Information from Clinical Texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Yan; Chen, Elizabeth S; Pakhomov, Serguei; Arsoniadis, Elliot; Carter, Elizabeth W; Lindemann, Elizabeth; Sarkar, Indra Neil; Melton, Genevieve B

2015-01-01

Within clinical discourse, social history (SH) includes important information about substance use (alcohol, drug, and nicotine use) as key risk factors for disease, disability, and mortality. In this study, we developed and evaluated a natural language processing (NLP) system for automated detection of substance use statements and extraction of substance use attributes (e.g., temporal and status) based on Stanford Typed Dependencies. The developed NLP system leveraged linguistic resources and domain knowledge from a multi-site social history study, Propbank and the MiPACQ corpus. The system attained F-scores of 89.8, 84.6 and 89.4 respectively for alcohol, drug, and nicotine use statement detection, as well as average F-scores of 82.1, 90.3, 80.8, 88.7, 96.6, and 74.5 respectively for extraction of attributes. Our results suggest that NLP systems can achieve good performance when augmented with linguistic resources and domain knowledge when applied to a wide breadth of substance use free text clinical notes.

Drug side effect extraction from clinical narratives of psychiatry and psychology patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Sohn, Sunghwan; Kocher, Jean-Pierre A; Chute, Christopher G; Savova, Guergana K

2011-12-01

To extract physician-asserted drug side effects from electronic medical record clinical narratives. Pattern matching rules were manually developed through examining keywords and expression patterns of side effects to discover an individual side effect and causative drug relationship. A combination of machine learning (C4.5) using side effect keyword features and pattern matching rules was used to extract sentences that contain side effect and causative drug pairs, enabling the system to discover most side effect occurrences. Our system was implemented as a module within the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System. The system was tested in the domain of psychiatry and psychology. The rule-based system extracting side effects and causative drugs produced an F score of 0.80 (0.55 excluding allergy section). The hybrid system identifying side effect sentences had an F score of 0.75 (0.56 excluding allergy section) but covered more side effect and causative drug pairs than individual side effect extraction. The rule-based system was able to identify most side effects expressed by clear indication words. More sophisticated semantic processing is required to handle complex side effect descriptions in the narrative. We demonstrated that our system can be trained to identify sentences with complex side effect descriptions that can be submitted to a human expert for further abstraction. Our system was able to extract most physician-asserted drug side effects. It can be used in either an automated mode for side effect extraction or semi-automated mode to identify side effect sentences that can significantly simplify abstraction by a human expert.

An Accurate CT Saturation Classification Using a Deep Learning Approach Based on Unsupervised Feature Extraction and Supervised Fine-Tuning Strategy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Muhammad Ali

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Current transformer (CT saturation is one of the significant problems for protection engineers. If CT saturation is not tackled properly, it can cause a disastrous effect on the stability of the power system, and may even create a complete blackout. To cope with CT saturation properly, an accurate detection or classification should be preceded. Recently, deep learning (DL methods have brought a subversive revolution in the field of artificial intelligence (AI. This paper presents a new DL classification method based on unsupervised feature extraction and supervised fine-tuning strategy to classify the saturated and unsaturated regions in case of CT saturation. In other words, if protection system is subjected to a CT saturation, proposed method will correctly classify the different levels of saturation with a high accuracy. Traditional AI methods are mostly based on supervised learning and rely heavily on human crafted features. This paper contributes to an unsupervised feature extraction, using autoencoders and deep neural networks (DNNs to extract features automatically without prior knowledge of optimal features. To validate the effectiveness of proposed method, a variety of simulation tests are conducted, and classification results are analyzed using standard classification metrics. Simulation results confirm that proposed method classifies the different levels of CT saturation with a remarkable accuracy and has unique feature extraction capabilities. Lastly, we provided a potential future research direction to conclude this paper.

Combined endeavor of Neutrosophic Set and Chan-Vese model to extract accurate liver image from CT scan.

Science.gov (United States)

Siri, Sangeeta K; Latte, Mrityunjaya V

2017-11-01

Many different diseases can occur in the liver, including infections such as hepatitis, cirrhosis, cancer and over effect of medication or toxins. The foremost stage for computer-aided diagnosis of liver is the identification of liver region. Liver segmentation algorithms extract liver image from scan images which helps in virtual surgery simulation, speedup the diagnosis, accurate investigation and surgery planning. The existing liver segmentation algorithms try to extort exact liver image from abdominal Computed Tomography (CT) scan images. It is an open problem because of ambiguous boundaries, large variation in intensity distribution, variability of liver geometry from patient to patient and presence of noise. A novel approach is proposed to meet challenges in extracting the exact liver image from abdominal CT scan images. The proposed approach consists of three phases: (1) Pre-processing (2) CT scan image transformation to Neutrosophic Set (NS) and (3) Post-processing. In pre-processing, the noise is removed by median filter. The "new structure" is designed to transform a CT scan image into neutrosophic domain which is expressed using three membership subset: True subset (T), False subset (F) and Indeterminacy subset (I). This transform approximately extracts the liver image structure. In post processing phase, morphological operation is performed on indeterminacy subset (I) and apply Chan-Vese (C-V) model with detection of initial contour within liver without user intervention. This resulted in liver boundary identification with high accuracy. Experiments show that, the proposed method is effective, robust and comparable with existing algorithm for liver segmentation of CT scan images. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Prevalence of vertical root fracture as the reason for tooth extraction in dental clinics.

Science.gov (United States)

Yoshino, Koichi; Ito, Koji; Kuroda, Masahiko; Sugihara, Naoki

2015-07-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence, by gender, of vertical root fracture (VRF) as the main reason for the extraction of permanent teeth in dental clinics in Tokyo. Participating dentists were requested to provide information about extractions of permanent teeth they had performed from 1 January 2013 to 30 June 2013. The main reasons for extraction were categorized as follows: VRF, caries (horizontal root fracture included), periodontal disease and others. At a total of 24 clinics, 736 teeth were extracted from 626 patients during the 6-month period. A total of 233 teeth were extracted by VRF (31.7%), and 93.6% of these were endodontically treated teeth. Among non-vital extracted teeth, 82.1% (179/218) had cast posts or screw posts. The percentage of extraction due to VRF was 29.4% in males and 34.7% in females. In females, the percentage of extractions due to VRF (34.7%) was higher than for periodontal disease (28.1%). In males, the percentage of extractions due to VRF increased with age (p < 0.05). The tooth types with the highest percentage of extractions due to VRF were the upper canine (46.7%), lower second premolar (48.0%) and lower first molar (50.0%) in males and the upper first premolar (43.3%), upper second premolar (44.4%), lower second premolar (53.8%) and lower first molar (54.5%) in females. These results indicate that we need to pay more attention to maintaining vital teeth while being aware of the particular tooth types in which VRF most frequently occurs.

Accurate determination of 3-alkyl-2-methoxypyrazines in wines by gas chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry following solid-phase extraction and dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Fontana, Ariel; Rodríguez, Isaac; Cela, Rafael

2017-09-15

A new reliable method for the determination 3-alkyl-2-methoxypyrazines (MPs) in wine samples based on the sequential combination of solid-phase extraction (SPE), dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) and gas chromatography (GC) quadrupole time-of-flight accurate tandem mass spectrometry (QTOF-MS/MS) is presented. Primary extraction of target analytes was carried out by using a reversed-phase Oasis HLB (200mg) SPE cartridge combined with acetonitrile as elution solvent. Afterwards, the SPE extract was submitted to DLLME concentration using 0.06mL carbon tetrachloride (CCl 4 ) as extractant. Under final working conditions, sample concentration factors above 379 times and limits of quantification (LOQs) between 0.3 and 2.1ngL -1 were achieved. Moreover, the overall extraction efficiency of the method was unaffected by the particular characteristics of each wine; thus, accurate results (relative recoveries from 84 to 108% for samples spiked at concentrations from 5 to 25ngL -1 ) were obtained using matrix-matched standards, without using standard additions over every sample. Highly selective chromatographic records were achieved considering a mass window of 5mDa, centered in the quantification product ion corresponding to each compound. Twelve commercial wines, elaborated with grapes from different varieties and geographical origins, were processed with the optimized method. The 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (IBMP) was determined at levels above the LOQs of the method in half of the samples. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

MedEx: a medication information extraction system for clinical narratives

Science.gov (United States)

Stenner, Shane P; Doan, Son; Johnson, Kevin B; Waitman, Lemuel R; Denny, Joshua C

2010-01-01

Medication information is one of the most important types of clinical data in electronic medical records. It is critical for healthcare safety and quality, as well as for clinical research that uses electronic medical record data. However, medication data are often recorded in clinical notes as free-text. As such, they are not accessible to other computerized applications that rely on coded data. We describe a new natural language processing system (MedEx), which extracts medication information from clinical notes. MedEx was initially developed using discharge summaries. An evaluation using a data set of 50 discharge summaries showed it performed well on identifying not only drug names (F-measure 93.2%), but also signature information, such as strength, route, and frequency, with F-measures of 94.5%, 93.9%, and 96.0% respectively. We then applied MedEx unchanged to outpatient clinic visit notes. It performed similarly with F-measures over 90% on a set of 25 clinic visit notes. PMID:20064797

[A clinical study of gelatamp colloidal silver gelatin sponge on preventing the complication of teeth extraction].

Science.gov (United States)

Cai, Yong-hai; Lu, Chang-shou

2008-10-01

To study the clinical effect of Gelatamp colloidal silver gelatin sponge on preventing the complication of teeth extraction. 672 teeth were divided into experimental group and control group semi-randomly. All teeth were extracted after local anesthesia and sockets were cleaned. Gelatamp colloidal silver gelatin sponge was implanted into socket in experimental group and nothing was implanted into alveolar socket in control group. The complication of teeth extraction was observed on 0.5 h, 2 d and 7 d after extraction. The incidence rate of complication was calculated. The incidence rate of complication of teeth extraction in experimental group was 7.72%, which was lower than that of control group (24.43%). There was significant difference in the incidence rates of complication between experimental group and control group (P colloidal silver gelatin sponge can prevent the occurrence of complication of teeth extraction, this can be used in clinic.

Antibacterial Activity of Rhodomyrtus tomentosa (Aiton Hassk. Leaf Extract against Clinical Isolates of Streptococcus pyogenes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Surasak Limsuwan

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Ethanol extract of Rhodomyrtus tomentosa (Aiton Hassk. leaf was evaluated for antibacterial activity against 47 clinical isolates of Streptococcus pyogenes. The extract exhibited good anti-S. pyogenes activity against all the tested isolates with similar minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC, 3.91–62.5 μg mL−1 and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC, 3.91–62.5 μg mL−1 ranges. No surviving cells were detected at 16 h after treatment with 8 × MIC of the extract. The extract-treated cells demonstrated no lysis and cytoplasmic leakage through the bacterial membrane. Electron micrographs further revealed that the extract did not cause any dramatic changes on the treated cells. Rhodomyrtone, an isolated compound, exhibited good anti-S. pyogenes activity (14 isolates, expressed very low MIC (0.39–1.56 μg mL−1 and MBC (0.39-1.56 μg mL−1 values. Rhodomyrtus tomentosa leaf extract and rhodomyrtone displayed promising antibacterial activity against clinical isolates of S. pyogenes.

Voxel-based registration of simulated and real patient CBCT data for accurate dental implant pose estimation

Science.gov (United States)

Moreira, António H. J.; Queirós, Sandro; Morais, Pedro; Rodrigues, Nuno F.; Correia, André Ricardo; Fernandes, Valter; Pinho, A. C. M.; Fonseca, Jaime C.; Vilaça, João. L.

2015-03-01

The success of dental implant-supported prosthesis is directly linked to the accuracy obtained during implant's pose estimation (position and orientation). Although traditional impression techniques and recent digital acquisition methods are acceptably accurate, a simultaneously fast, accurate and operator-independent methodology is still lacking. Hereto, an image-based framework is proposed to estimate the patient-specific implant's pose using cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) and prior knowledge of implanted model. The pose estimation is accomplished in a threestep approach: (1) a region-of-interest is extracted from the CBCT data using 2 operator-defined points at the implant's main axis; (2) a simulated CBCT volume of the known implanted model is generated through Feldkamp-Davis-Kress reconstruction and coarsely aligned to the defined axis; and (3) a voxel-based rigid registration is performed to optimally align both patient and simulated CBCT data, extracting the implant's pose from the optimal transformation. Three experiments were performed to evaluate the framework: (1) an in silico study using 48 implants distributed through 12 tridimensional synthetic mandibular models; (2) an in vitro study using an artificial mandible with 2 dental implants acquired with an i-CAT system; and (3) two clinical case studies. The results shown positional errors of 67+/-34μm and 108μm, and angular misfits of 0.15+/-0.08° and 1.4°, for experiment 1 and 2, respectively. Moreover, in experiment 3, visual assessment of clinical data results shown a coherent alignment of the reference implant. Overall, a novel image-based framework for implants' pose estimation from CBCT data was proposed, showing accurate results in agreement with dental prosthesis modelling requirements.

Accurate Modeling Method for Cu Interconnect

Science.gov (United States)

Yamada, Kenta; Kitahara, Hiroshi; Asai, Yoshihiko; Sakamoto, Hideo; Okada, Norio; Yasuda, Makoto; Oda, Noriaki; Sakurai, Michio; Hiroi, Masayuki; Takewaki, Toshiyuki; Ohnishi, Sadayuki; Iguchi, Manabu; Minda, Hiroyasu; Suzuki, Mieko

This paper proposes an accurate modeling method of the copper interconnect cross-section in which the width and thickness dependence on layout patterns and density caused by processes (CMP, etching, sputtering, lithography, and so on) are fully, incorporated and universally expressed. In addition, we have developed specific test patterns for the model parameters extraction, and an efficient extraction flow. We have extracted the model parameters for 0.15μm CMOS using this method and confirmed that 10%τpd error normally observed with conventional LPE (Layout Parameters Extraction) was completely dissolved. Moreover, it is verified that the model can be applied to more advanced technologies (90nm, 65nm and 55nm CMOS). Since the interconnect delay variations due to the processes constitute a significant part of what have conventionally been treated as random variations, use of the proposed model could enable one to greatly narrow the guardbands required to guarantee a desired yield, thereby facilitating design closure.

Automated, simple, and efficient influenza RNA extraction from clinical respiratory swabs using TruTip and epMotion.

Science.gov (United States)

Griesemer, Sara B; Holmberg, Rebecca; Cooney, Christopher G; Thakore, Nitu; Gindlesperger, Alissa; Knickerbocker, Christopher; Chandler, Darrell P; St George, Kirsten

2013-09-01

Rapid, simple and efficient influenza RNA purification from clinical samples is essential for sensitive molecular detection of influenza infection. Automation of the TruTip extraction method can increase sample throughput while maintaining performance. To automate TruTip influenza RNA extraction using an Eppendorf epMotion robotic liquid handler, and to compare its performance to the bioMerieux easyMAG and Qiagen QIAcube instruments. Extraction efficacy and reproducibility of the automated TruTip/epMotion protocol was assessed from influenza-negative respiratory samples spiked with influenza A and B viruses. Clinical extraction performance from 170 influenza A and B-positive respiratory swabs was also evaluated and compared using influenza A and B real-time RT-PCR assays. TruTip/epMotion extraction efficacy was 100% in influenza virus-spiked samples with at least 745 influenza A and 370 influenza B input gene copies per extraction, and exhibited high reproducibility over four log10 concentrations of virus (extraction were also positive following TruTip extraction. Overall Ct value differences obtained between TruTip/epMotion and easyMAG/QIAcube clinical extracts ranged from 1.24 to 1.91. Pairwise comparisons of Ct values showed a high correlation of the TruTip/epMotion protocol to the other methods (R2>0.90). The automated TruTip/epMotion protocol is a simple and rapid extraction method that reproducibly purifies influenza RNA from respiratory swabs, with comparable efficacy and efficiency to both the easyMAG and QIAcube instruments. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Analytical method comparisons for the accurate determination of PCBs in sediments

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Numata, M.; Yarita, T.; Aoyagi, Y.; Yamazaki, M.; Takatsu, A. [National Metrology Institute of Japan, Tsukuba (Japan)

2004-09-15

National Metrology Institute of Japan in National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (NMIJ/AIST) has been developing several matrix reference materials, for example, sediments, water and biological tissues, for the determinations of heavy metals and organometallic compounds. The matrix compositions of those certified reference materials (CRMs) are similar to compositions of actual samples, and those are useful for validating analytical procedures. ''Primary methods of measurements'' are essential to obtain accurate and SI-traceable certified values in the reference materials, because the methods have the highest quality of measurement. However, inappropriate analytical operations, such as incomplete extraction of analytes or crosscontamination during analytical procedures, will cause error of analytical results, even if one of the primary methods, isotope-dilution, is utilized. To avoid possible procedural bias for the certification of reference materials, we employ more than two analytical methods which have been optimized beforehand. Because the accurate determination of trace POPs in the environment is important to evaluate their risk, reliable CRMs are required by environmental chemists. Therefore, we have also been preparing matrix CRMs for the determination of POPs. To establish accurate analytical procedures for the certification of POPs, extraction is one of the critical steps as described above. In general, conventional extraction techniques for the determination of POPs, such as Soxhlet extraction (SOX) and saponification (SAP), have been characterized well, and introduced as official methods for environmental analysis. On the other hand, emerging techniques, such as microwave-assisted extraction (MAE), pressurized fluid extraction (PFE) and supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), give higher recovery yields of analytes with relatively short extraction time and small amount of solvent, by reasons of the high

Support patient search on pathology reports with interactive online learning based data extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Zheng, Shuai; Lu, James J; Appin, Christina; Brat, Daniel; Wang, Fusheng

2015-01-01

more accurate knowledge to support biomedical research and clinical diagnosis. IDEAL-X provides a bridge that takes advantage of online machine learning based data extraction and the knowledge from human's feedback. By combining iterative online learning and adaptive controlled vocabularies, IDEAL-X can deliver highly adaptive and accurate data extraction to support patient search.

Towards a more accurate extraction of the SPICE netlist from MAGIC based layouts

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Geronimo, G.D.

1998-08-01

The extraction of the SPICE netlist form MAGIC based layouts is investigated. It is assumed that the layout is fully coherent with the corresponding mask representation. The process of the extraction can be made in three steps: (1) extraction of .EXT file from layout, through MAGIC command extract; (2) extraction of the netlist from .EXT file through ext2spice extractor; and (3) correction of the netlist through ext2spice.corr program. Each of these steps introduces some approximations, most of which can be optimized, and some errors, most of which can be corrected. Aim of this work is the description of each step, of the approximations and errors on each step, and of the corresponding optimizations and corrections to be made in order to improve the accuracy of the extraction. The HP AMOS14TB 0.5 {micro}m process with linear capacitor and silicide block options and the corresponding SCN3MLC{_}SUBM.30.tech27 technology file will be used in the following examples.

Clinical and Microbial Evaluation of the Effects on Gingivitis of a Mouth Rinse Containing an Enteromorpha linza Extract

Science.gov (United States)

Cho, Han-Bin; Lee, Hee-Hyun; Lee, Ok-Hwan; Choi, Hyeon-Son; Choi, Jae-Suk

2011-01-01

Abstract Enteromorpha linza, a green alga, has been recognized as a potential source of natural antimicrobial and antifungal compounds. We previously reported that an E. linza extract strongly inhibited the growth of Prevotella intermedia and Porphyromonas gingivalis. The principal objective of this study was to evaluate the clinical effect of a mouth rinse containing the E. linza extract on gingivitis disease, as measured by the plaque index (PI), gingival index (GI), and bleeding on probing (BOP), and on two bacterial strains (P. intermedia and P. gingivalis), in comparison with Listerine® (Listerine-Korea, Seoul, Korea), which was used as a positive control. In total, 55 subjects were recruited into active participation in this clinical study. The PI, GI, BOP, and bacterial strains were then evaluated over a test period of 6 weeks. After 1, 2, 4, and 6 weeks, the same clinical indices were recorded, and the levels of P. intermedia and P. gingivalis were quantified via real-time polymerase chain reaction. At the end of the study, the group using the mouth rinse containing the E. linza extract evidenced significant reductions in the clinical indices (PI, GI, and BOP) and P. gingivalis compared with baseline values. Moreover, E. linza extract containing mouth rinse produced effects similar to those of Listerine. Overall, these results indicate that a mouth rinse containing E. linza extract significantly reduces plaque, improves the condition of gingival tissues, and reduces bleeding. Additionally, E. linza extract mouth rinse significantly inhibits P. gingivalis and P. intermedia. Thus, this clinical study demonstrated that the twice-daily use of an E. linza extract mouth rinse can inhibit and prevent gingivitis. PMID:22145775

Clinical Outcome And Arginine Serum of Acute Ischemic Stroke Patients Supplemented by Snakehead Fish Extract

Science.gov (United States)

Pudjonarko, Dwi; Retnaningsih; Abidin, Zainal

2018-02-01

Background: Levels of arginine associated with clinical outcome in acute ischemic stroke (AIS). Arginine is a protein needed to synthesis nitric oxide (NO), a potential vasodilator and antioxidant. Snakehead fish is a source of protein which has antioxidant activity. Snakehead fish contains mineral, vitamin, and amino acids. One of the amino acids that were found quite high in snakehead fish extract is arginine. The aim of this study was done to determine the effect of snakehead fish extracts (SFE) on serum arginin levels and clinical outcome of AIS patients. Methods: It was double-blind randomized pretest-posttest control group design, with. AIS patients were divided into two groups i.e. snakehead fish extracts (SFE) and control. SFE group were administered 15 grams SFE for 7 days . Arginine serum levels and clinical outcome (measured by National Institute of Health Stroke Scale = NIHSS) were measured before and after treatment, other related factors were also analyzed in Logistic regression. Results: A total of 42 subjects who were performed random allocation as SFE or control group. There was no differences in subject characteristics between the two groups. There was a differences Δ arginine serum levels between SFE and control (33.6±19.95 μmol/L 0.3±2.51 μmol/L pgender factor that affected on improvement of NIHSS (OR=7; p=0,01). Conclusion: There is Clinical outcome improvement and enhancement of arginine serum levels in AIS patient with snakehead fish extract supplementation.

Antioxidant activity of Matricaria chamomilla L. extract and clinical efficacy of cosmetic formulations containing this extract and its isolated compounds

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Ananda T. Nóbrega

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Topical application of antioxidants has proven to be effective in protecting the skin against oxidative damage. Matricaria chamomilla L. extract has been used in cosmetic formulations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antioxidant potential of chamomile extract as well as the clinical efficacy on skin hydration and mechanical properties of skin. The antioxidant activity of chamomile extract was evaluated by chemiluminescence (IC50 = 0.14 μg/mL. Stable formulations were supplemented with 0,5 cg/g α-bisabolol or cg/gwith 5,0 of Matricaria chamomile glycolic extract or with 0,01 cg/g of apigenin and applied on the volar forearm and face of 25 female subjects. Skin physiology was assessed before and after 2 hours (single application and after a 2- and 4-week period of daily application. After a single application, all formulations increased the stratum corneum water content but only α-bisabolol and chamomile extract formulations reduced TEWL. The formulation with chamomile extract has shown the most pronounced result in the reduction of TEWL (27%. However, after 2- and 4-week application, only the extract formulation increased stratum corneum water content compared with the vehicle. Chamomile extract was effective in neutralizing free radicals and therefore presents an interesting potential in cosmetic formulations for this purpose.

Development of a Post-Processing Algorithm for Accurate Human Skull Profile Extraction via Ultrasonic Phased Arrays

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Ansary, Mariam Luay Y.

Ultrasound Imaging has been favored by clinicians for its safety, affordability, accessibility, and speed compared to other imaging modalities. However, the trade-offs to these benefits are a relatively lower image quality and interpretability, which can be addressed by, for example, post-processing methods. One particularly difficult imaging case is associated with the presence of a barrier, such as a human skull, with significantly different acoustical properties than the brain tissue as the target medium. Some methods were proposed in the literature to account for this structure if the skull's geometry is known. Measuring the skull's geometry is therefore an important task that requires attention. In this work, a new edge detection method for accurate human skull profile extraction via post-processing of ultrasonic A-Scans is introduced. This method, referred to as the Selective Echo Extraction algorithm, SEE, processes each A-Scan separately and determines the outermost and innermost boundaries of the skull by means of adaptive filtering. The method can also be used to determine the average attenuation coefficient of the skull. When applied to simulated B-Mode images of the skull profile, promising results were obtained. The profiles obtained from the proposed process in simulations were found to be within 0.15lambda +/- 0.11lambda or 0.09 +/- 0.07mm from the actual profiles. Experiments were also performed to test SEE on skull mimicking phantoms with major acoustical properties similar to those of the actual human skull. With experimental data, the profiles obtained with the proposed process were within 0.32lambda +/- 0.25lambda or 0.19 +/- 0.15mm from the actual profile.

Highly accurate prediction of food challenge outcome using routinely available clinical data.

Science.gov (United States)

DunnGalvin, Audrey; Daly, Deirdre; Cullinane, Claire; Stenke, Emily; Keeton, Diane; Erlewyn-Lajeunesse, Mich; Roberts, Graham C; Lucas, Jane; Hourihane, Jonathan O'B

2011-03-01

Serum specific IgE or skin prick tests are less useful at levels below accepted decision points. We sought to develop and validate a model to predict food challenge outcome by using routinely collected data in a diverse sample of children considered suitable for food challenge. The proto-algorithm was generated by using a limited data set from 1 service (phase 1). We retrospectively applied, evaluated, and modified the initial model by using an extended data set in another center (phase 2). Finally, we prospectively validated the model in a blind study in a further group of children undergoing food challenge for peanut, milk, or egg in the second center (phase 3). Allergen-specific models were developed for peanut, egg, and milk. Phase 1 (N = 429) identified 5 clinical factors associated with diagnosis of food allergy by food challenge. In phase 2 (N = 289), we examined the predictive ability of 6 clinical factors: skin prick test, serum specific IgE, total IgE minus serum specific IgE, symptoms, sex, and age. In phase 3 (N = 70), 97% of cases were accurately predicted as positive and 94% as negative. Our model showed an advantage in clinical prediction compared with serum specific IgE only, skin prick test only, and serum specific IgE and skin prick test (92% accuracy vs 57%, and 81%, respectively). Our findings have implications for the improved delivery of food allergy-related health care, enhanced food allergy-related quality of life, and economized use of health service resources by decreasing the number of food challenges performed. Copyright © 2011 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

Riboflavin as an independent and accurate biomarker for adherence in a randomized double-blind and placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Ramanujam, V-M S; Nayeem, Fatima; Anderson, Karl E; Kuo, Yong-Fang; Chen, Nai-Wei; Ju, Hyunsu; Lu, Lee-Jane W

2017-09-01

Medication adherence is critical for success of clinical trials. To assess oral riboflavin is an adherence marker. Riboflavin was incorporated into active treatment and placebo pills for a clinical trial lasting for 2 years. The accuracy (area under the receiver operating curve) of urinary riboflavin was 0.91 as a binary classifier of adherence, and was similar or better than for two active study ingredients daidzein (0.92) and genistein (0.87) (all p Riboflavin is an accurate and useful biomarker for study pill ingestion.

Accurate, fully-automated NMR spectral profiling for metabolomics.

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Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Full Text Available Many diseases cause significant changes to the concentrations of small molecules (a.k.a. metabolites that appear in a person's biofluids, which means such diseases can often be readily detected from a person's "metabolic profile"-i.e., the list of concentrations of those metabolites. This information can be extracted from a biofluids Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR spectrum. However, due to its complexity, NMR spectral profiling has remained manual, resulting in slow, expensive and error-prone procedures that have hindered clinical and industrial adoption of metabolomics via NMR. This paper presents a system, BAYESIL, which can quickly, accurately, and autonomously produce a person's metabolic profile. Given a 1D 1H NMR spectrum of a complex biofluid (specifically serum or cerebrospinal fluid, BAYESIL can automatically determine the metabolic profile. This requires first performing several spectral processing steps, then matching the resulting spectrum against a reference compound library, which contains the "signatures" of each relevant metabolite. BAYESIL views spectral matching as an inference problem within a probabilistic graphical model that rapidly approximates the most probable metabolic profile. Our extensive studies on a diverse set of complex mixtures including real biological samples (serum and CSF, defined mixtures and realistic computer generated spectra; involving > 50 compounds, show that BAYESIL can autonomously find the concentration of NMR-detectable metabolites accurately (~ 90% correct identification and ~ 10% quantification error, in less than 5 minutes on a single CPU. These results demonstrate that BAYESIL is the first fully-automatic publicly-accessible system that provides quantitative NMR spectral profiling effectively-with an accuracy on these biofluids that meets or exceeds the performance of trained experts. We anticipate this tool will usher in high-throughput metabolomics and enable a wealth of new applications of

Accurate Identification of Fatty Liver Disease in Data Warehouse Utilizing Natural Language Processing.

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Redman, Joseph S; Natarajan, Yamini; Hou, Jason K; Wang, Jingqi; Hanif, Muzammil; Feng, Hua; Kramer, Jennifer R; Desiderio, Roxanne; Xu, Hua; El-Serag, Hashem B; Kanwal, Fasiha

2017-10-01

Natural language processing is a powerful technique of machine learning capable of maximizing data extraction from complex electronic medical records. We utilized this technique to develop algorithms capable of "reading" full-text radiology reports to accurately identify the presence of fatty liver disease. Abdominal ultrasound, computerized tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging reports were retrieved from the Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse from a random national sample of 652 patients. Radiographic fatty liver disease was determined by manual review by two physicians and verified with an expert radiologist. A split validation method was utilized for algorithm development. For all three imaging modalities, the algorithms could identify fatty liver disease with >90% recall and precision, with F-measures >90%. These algorithms could be used to rapidly screen patient records to establish a large cohort to facilitate epidemiological and clinical studies and examine the clinic course and outcomes of patients with radiographic hepatic steatosis.

Support patient search on pathology reports with interactive online learning based data extraction

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Shuai Zheng

2015-01-01

tests. Conclusions: Extracting data from pathology reports could enable more accurate knowledge to support biomedical research and clinical diagnosis. IDEAL-X provides a bridge that takes advantage of online machine learning based data extraction and the knowledge from human′s feedback. By combining iterative online learning and adaptive controlled vocabularies, IDEAL-X can deliver highly adaptive and accurate data extraction to support patient search.

The effectiveness of mangosteen rind extract as additional therapy on chronic periodontitis (Clinical trials

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Ina Hendiani

2017-03-01

Full Text Available ABSTRACT   Introduction: Periodontitis is an inflammatory disease that attacks the periodontal tissue comprises the gingiva, periodontal ligament, cementum and alveolar bone caused mainly by plaque bacteriophage or other specific dominant type of bacteria. The purpose of this study was to determine the therapeutic effect of clinical application of mangosteen peel extract gel as adjunctive therapy scaling and root planing in patients with chronic periodontitis. This research was expected to developed new treatment in the field of dentistry, particularly in periodontics, which can be used as supporting material for the treatment of chronic periodontitis. Methods: Quasi-experimental research, split mouth, with as many as 14 chronic periodontitis patients. Mangosteen rind was prepared to be formed into extract gel, dried at room temperature, then the dried samples were macerated by using ethanol, then evaporated and decanted for 3 days until obtained condensed extract. The samples were patients with chronic periodontitis in at least 2 teeth with pockets ≥ 5 mm. Clinical parameters of pocket depth, gingival bleeding, and clinical epithelial attachment level were measured at baseline and 1 month after treatment. Analysis of data using the t-test. Results: The comparison of average gap ratio of pockets depth, gingival index, gingival bleeding and epithelium attachment levels, before and after treatment showed significant differences, such as in the test and control sides. Conclusion: The mangosteen rind gel as adjunctive therapy for scaling and root planing is able to reduce pockets depth, gingival index, and gingival bleeding, and improve clinical epithelial attachment.

EXTRACT

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Pafilis, Evangelos; Buttigieg, Pier Luigi; Ferrell, Barbra

2016-01-01

The microbial and molecular ecology research communities have made substantial progress on developing standards for annotating samples with environment metadata. However, sample manual annotation is a highly labor intensive process and requires familiarity with the terminologies used. We have the...... and text-mining-assisted curation revealed that EXTRACT speeds up annotation by 15-25% and helps curators to detect terms that would otherwise have been missed.Database URL: https://extract.hcmr.gr/......., organism, tissue and disease terms. The evaluators in the BioCreative V Interactive Annotation Task found the system to be intuitive, useful, well documented and sufficiently accurate to be helpful in spotting relevant text passages and extracting organism and environment terms. Comparison of fully manual...

Simple and accurate measurement of carbamazepine in surface water by use of porous membrane-protected micro-solid-phase extraction coupled with isotope dilution mass spectrometry

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Teo, Hui Ling [Chemical Metrology Division, Applied Sciences Group, Health Sciences Authority, 1 Science Park Road, #01-05/06, The Capricorn, Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117528 (Singapore); Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117543 (Singapore); Wong, Lingkai [Chemical Metrology Division, Applied Sciences Group, Health Sciences Authority, 1 Science Park Road, #01-05/06, The Capricorn, Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117528 (Singapore); Liu, Qinde, E-mail: liu_qinde@hsa.gov.sg [Chemical Metrology Division, Applied Sciences Group, Health Sciences Authority, 1 Science Park Road, #01-05/06, The Capricorn, Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117528 (Singapore); Teo, Tang Lin; Lee, Tong Kooi [Chemical Metrology Division, Applied Sciences Group, Health Sciences Authority, 1 Science Park Road, #01-05/06, The Capricorn, Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117528 (Singapore); Lee, Hian Kee, E-mail: chmleehk@nus.edu.sg [Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117543 (Singapore)

2016-03-17

To achieve fast and accurate analysis of carbamazepine in surface water, we developed a novel porous membrane-protected micro-solid-phase extraction (μ-SPE) method, followed by liquid chromatography-isotope dilution tandem mass spectrometry (LC-IDMS/MS) analysis. The μ-SPE device (∼0.8 × 1 cm) was fabricated by heat-sealing edges of a polypropylene membrane sheet to devise a bag enclosing the sorbent. The analytes (both carbamazepine and isotope-labelled carbamazepine) were first extracted by μ-SPE device in the sample (10 mL) via agitation, then desorbed in an organic solvent (1 mL) via ultrasonication. Several parameters such as organic solvent for pre-conditioning of μ-SPE device, amount of sorbent, adsorption time, and desorption solvent and time were investigated to optimize the μ-SPE efficiency. The optimized method has limits of detection and quantitation estimated to be 0.5 ng L{sup −1} and 1.6 ng L{sup −1}, respectively. Surface water samples spiked with different amounts of carbamazepine (close to 20, 500, and 1600 ng L{sup −1}, respectively) were analysed for the validation of method precision and accuracy. Good precision was obtained as demonstrated by relative standard deviations of 0.7% for the samples with concentrations of 500 and 1600 ng kg{sup −1}, and 5.8% for the sample with concentration of 20 ng kg{sup −1}. Good accuracy was also demonstrated by the relative recoveries in the range of 96.7%–103.5% for all samples with uncertainties of 1.1%–5.4%. Owing to the same chemical properties of carbamazepine and isotope-labelled carbamazepine, the isotope ratio in the μ-SPE procedure was accurately controlled. The use of μ-SPE coupled with IDMS analysis significantly facilitated the fast and accurate measurement of carbamazepine in surface water. - Highlights: • μ-SPE coupled with IDMS for the measurement of carbamazepine. • The method is the first report of coupling μ-SPE with IDMS. • μ-SPE is fast, time

Developing an Intelligent Automatic Appendix Extraction Method from Ultrasonography Based on Fuzzy ART and Image Processing

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Kwang Baek Kim

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Ultrasound examination (US does a key role in the diagnosis and management of the patients with clinically suspected appendicitis which is the most common abdominal surgical emergency. Among the various sonographic findings of appendicitis, outer diameter of the appendix is most important. Therefore, clear delineation of the appendix on US images is essential. In this paper, we propose a new intelligent method to extract appendix automatically from abdominal sonographic images as a basic building block of developing such an intelligent tool for medical practitioners. Knowing that the appendix is located at the lower organ area below the bottom fascia line, we conduct a series of image processing techniques to find the fascia line correctly. And then we apply fuzzy ART learning algorithm to the organ area in order to extract appendix accurately. The experiment verifies that the proposed method is highly accurate (successful in 38 out of 40 cases in extracting appendix.

The effect of Zataria multiflora extract on the clinical endometritis and reproductive indices in lactating Holstein dairy cows.

Science.gov (United States)

Hajibemani, Abolfazl; Mirzaei, Abdolah; Rowshan Ghasrodashti, Abbas; Memarzadeh, Mohammad Reza

2016-01-01

In the present study, the effect of intrauterine infusion of Zataria multiflora extract on the clinical endometritis was investigated. Vaginal examination, transrectal palpation and ultrasonography were used to inspect the genital tract at 30-40 days in milk and two weeks later the same approach was applied. Cows with clinical endometritis were randomly divided into three treatment groups: Z. multiflora extract (n = 56), penicillin + streptomycin (pen + strep, n = 55), and placebo (n = 20). Cervical cytology, reagent strip test and cell counting by means of Neubauer hemocytometer were carried out in both examinations. Clinical cure rate of cows with endometritis of score 1 were 45.5, 34.5 and 53.6% in placebo, pen + strep and Z. multiflora , respectively. Clinical cure rate of cows with endometritis of score 2, 3 were 66.7, 84.6 and 56.0% in placebo, pen + strep and Z. multiflora , respectively. Overall, proportions of successfully treated cows were 55.0, 58.2 and 54.7% in placebo, pen + strep and Z. multiflora , respectively ( p > 0.05). In placebo, none of the parameters were significantly different between first and second examination, while we found the significant differences in percentage of neutrophils and leukocyte esterase activity in other groups ( p conception rate of cows was higher in Z. multiflora compared to other groups; however, this difference was not significant. In conclusion, pen + strep and Z. multiflora extract can be effective on the clinical endometritis and may improve reproductive performance. The extract of Z. multiflora can be useful as an alternative therapy for treatment of clinical endometritis in lactating dairy cows.

Fast and accurate edge orientation processing during object manipulation

Science.gov (United States)

Flanagan, J Randall; Johansson, Roland S

2018-01-01

Quickly and accurately extracting information about a touched object’s orientation is a critical aspect of dexterous object manipulation. However, the speed and acuity of tactile edge orientation processing with respect to the fingertips as reported in previous perceptual studies appear inadequate in these respects. Here we directly establish the tactile system’s capacity to process edge-orientation information during dexterous manipulation. Participants extracted tactile information about edge orientation very quickly, using it within 200 ms of first touching the object. Participants were also strikingly accurate. With edges spanning the entire fingertip, edge-orientation resolution was better than 3° in our object manipulation task, which is several times better than reported in previous perceptual studies. Performance remained impressive even with edges as short as 2 mm, consistent with our ability to precisely manipulate very small objects. Taken together, our results radically redefine the spatial processing capacity of the tactile system. PMID:29611804

The effect of Zataria multiflora extract on the clinical endometritis and reproductive indices in lactating Holstein dairy cows

OpenAIRE

Hajibemani, Abolfazl; Mirzaei, Abdolah; Rowshan Ghasrodashti, Abbas; Memarzadeh, Mohammad Reza

2016-01-01

In the present study, the effect of intrauterine infusion of Zataria multiflora extract on the clinical endometritis was investigated. Vaginal examination, transrectal palpation and ultrasonography were used to inspect the genital tract at 30-40 days in milk and two weeks later the same approach was applied. Cows with clinical endometritis were randomly divided into three treatment groups: Z. multiflora extract (n = 56), penicillin + streptomycin (pen + strep, n = 55), and placebo (n = 20). C...

Dental caries, restorations and extractions by dental caries in first permanent molars. Clinical and radiographic study

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Aguiar, Sandra Maria H.C. Avila de; Santos Pinto, Ruy dos

1996-01-01

This research analyse by clinical and radiographic study, dental caries, restorations and extractions in 1.600 first permanent molars, from 400 children, both sexes, aged 5 to 13 years old, assisted in the Children's Clinic, Faculdade de Odontologia de Aracatuba, UNESP, in 1994. (author)

Subclassification and Clinical Management of Extraction Sockets with Labial Dentoalveolar Dehiscence Defects.

Science.gov (United States)

Chu, Stephen J; Sarnachiaro, Guido O; Hochman, Mark N; Tarnow, Dennis P

2015-01-01

Immediate implant therapy involving implants placed into intact Type 1 extraction sockets has become a consistent clinical technique. The classification of Type 2 extraction sockets, where the mucosal tissues are present but there is a midfacial osseous dehiscence defect, has been described according to the extent of the buccal bone plate absence. The literature has offered different techniques in the treatment of Type 2 sockets; however, the extent of the defect has never been defined or delineated. In this article, the authors describe a subclassification of Type 2 sockets: Type 2A presents with a dehiscence defect roughly 5 mm to 6 mm from the free gingival margin (FGM) involving the coronal one-third of the labial bone plate; Type 2B presents with a dehiscence defect involving the middle one-third of the labial plate, approximately 7 mm to 9 mm from the FGM; and in Type 2C the dehiscence defect involves the apical one-third of the labial osseous plate roughly 10 mm or greater from the FGM. The authors also offer a protocol and technique employing immediate implant placement, guided bone regeneration, and bone graft containment with a custom two-piece healing abutment that can lead to consistent and satisfactory clinical outcomes in low-smile-line patients. The treatment protocol and sequence is outlined in a clinical case presentation involving a Type 2B socket.

Using digital photography in a clinical setting: a valid, accurate, and applicable method to assess food intake.

Science.gov (United States)

Winzer, Eva; Luger, Maria; Schindler, Karin

2018-06-01

Regular monitoring of food intake is hardly integrated in clinical routine. Therefore, the aim was to examine the validity, accuracy, and applicability of an appropriate and also quick and easy-to-use tool for recording food intake in a clinical setting. Two digital photography methods, the postMeal method with a picture after the meal, the pre-postMeal method with a picture before and after the meal, and the visual estimation method (plate diagram; PD) were compared against the reference method (weighed food records; WFR). A total of 420 dishes from lunch (7 weeks) were estimated with both photography methods and the visual method. Validity, applicability, accuracy, and precision of the estimation methods, and additionally food waste, macronutrient composition, and energy content were examined. Tests of validity revealed stronger correlations for photography methods (postMeal: r = 0.971, p < 0.001; pre-postMeal: r = 0.995, p < 0.001) compared to the visual estimation method (r = 0.810; p < 0.001). The pre-postMeal method showed smaller variability (bias < 1 g) and also smaller overestimation and underestimation. This method accurately and precisely estimated portion sizes in all food items. Furthermore, the total food waste was 22% for lunch over the study period. The highest food waste was observed in salads and the lowest in desserts. The pre-postMeal digital photography method is valid, accurate, and applicable in monitoring food intake in clinical setting, which enables a quantitative and qualitative dietary assessment. Thus, nutritional care might be initiated earlier. This method might be also advantageous for quantitative and qualitative evaluation of food waste, with a resultantly reduction in costs.

Comparative Antibacterial Efficacy of Vitellaria paradoxa (Shea Butter Tree Extracts Against Some Clinical Bacterial Isolates

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Kamoldeen Abiodun AJIJOLAKEWU

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The antibacterial activities of the ethanolic extracts of seed, leaf and stem bark of Vitellaria paradoxa were investigated. The extracts were tested against three clinical bacterial pathogens, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae using the agar diffusion and the broth dilution techniques. Ethanolic extracts of the plant parts showed activity against all the bacterial pathogens tested. At the highest extract concentration (200 mg/ml, the leaf extract exhibited the highest antimicrobial activity, while no activity was detected at the lowest concentration (3.13 mg/ml against the tested isolates. Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus were more susceptible to all extracts of V. paradoxa, while Klebsiella pneumoniae showed the least sensitivity. The efficacy of ethanolic extracts of Vitellaria paradoxa was compared to a commercial antibiotic streptomycin. There were differences in the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC of all the Vitellaria paradoxa ethanolic extracts with respect to the type of organism. All extracts exhibited bacteriostatic effects against the tested organisms at the experimented concentrations. Qualitative phytochemical screening of the extracts revealed the presence of saponins, tannins and alkaloids as the active principles of Vitellaria paradoxa's antimicrobial activity. V. paradoxa could be used as a potential source of antibiotic substance for a drug development.

Comparison of clinical parameters and environmental noise levels between regular surgery and piezosurgery for extraction of impacted third molars.

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, Hao-Hueng; Lee, Ming-Shu; Hsu, You-Chyun; Tsai, Shang-Jye; Lin, Chun-Pin

2015-10-01

Impacted third molars can be extracted by regular surgery or piezosurgery. The aim of this study was to compare clinical parameters and device-produced noise levels between regular surgery and piezosurgery for the extraction of impacted third molars. Twenty patients (18 women and 2 men, 17-29 years of age) with bilateral symmetrical impacted mandibular or maxillary third molars of the same level were included in this randomized crossover clinical trial. The 40 impacted third molars were divided into a control group (n = 20), in which the third molar was extracted by regular surgery using a high-speed handpiece and an elevator, and an experimental group (n = 20), in which the third molar was extracted by piezosurgery using a high-speed handpiece and a piezotome. The clinical parameters were evaluated by a self-reported questionnaire. The noise levels produced by the high-speed handpiece and piezotome were measured and compared between the experimental and control groups. Patients in the experimental group had a better feeling about tooth extraction and force delivery during extraction and less facial swelling than patients in the control group. However, there were no significant differences in noise-related disturbance, extraction period, degree of facial swelling, pain score, pain duration, any noise levels produced by the devices under different circumstances during tooth extraction between the control and experimental groups. The piezosurgery device produced noise levels similar to or lower than those of the high-speed drilling device. However, piezosurgery provides advantages of increased patient comfort during extraction of impacted third molars. Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Mechanomyographic Parameter Extraction Methods: An Appraisal for Clinical Applications

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Morufu Olusola Ibitoye

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The research conducted in the last three decades has collectively demonstrated that the skeletal muscle performance can be alternatively assessed by mechanomyographic signal (MMG parameters. Indices of muscle performance, not limited to force, power, work, endurance and the related physiological processes underlying muscle activities during contraction have been evaluated in the light of the signal features. As a non-stationary signal that reflects several distinctive patterns of muscle actions, the illustrations obtained from the literature support the reliability of MMG in the analysis of muscles under voluntary and stimulus evoked contractions. An appraisal of the standard practice including the measurement theories of the methods used to extract parameters of the signal is vital to the application of the signal during experimental and clinical practices, especially in areas where electromyograms are contraindicated or have limited application. As we highlight the underpinning technical guidelines and domains where each method is well-suited, the limitations of the methods are also presented to position the state of the art in MMG parameters extraction, thus providing the theoretical framework for improvement on the current practices to widen the opportunity for new insights and discoveries. Since the signal modality has not been widely deployed due partly to the limited information extractable from the signals when compared with other classical techniques used to assess muscle performance, this survey is particularly relevant to the projected future of MMG applications in the realm of musculoskeletal assessments and in the real time detection of muscle activity.

Crataegus special extract WS 1442: up-to-date review of experimental and clinical experiences.

Science.gov (United States)

Zorniak, M; Szydlo, B; Krzeminski, T F

2017-08-01

Extracts and tinctures made from Crataegus spp. (Hawthorn) have been used as cardioprotective remedies since ancient times. WS 1442 special extract, manufactured by Dr. W. Schwabe Pharmaceuticals©, made from Crataegus spp. Leaves and flowers is one of the most studied and popular of preparations received from Hawthorn. It is integral, and most important active component of such herbal drugs as Crataegutt® novo 450, and CardioMax®. This standardized extract contains 18.75% oligomeric procyanidins (OPC), which have beneficial cardioprotective values and play a role as free-radicals scavengers, that protect the ischemic heart tissue from neutrophile elastase action successions. Moreover, WS 1442 also carries proven vasorelaxant activity, via affecting eNOS synthase, and prevents ischemic heart tissue swelling by influence on calcium signaling pathways, and thus detain hyperpermeability of endothelium. Actions of WS 1442 special extract were investigated in in vitro as well as in vivo studies including large clinical trials. In this review authors present current state of knowledge about possible beneficial effects of WS 1442 special extract on cardiovascular system.

The anticaries effect of a food extract (shiitake) in a short-term clinical study

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lingström, P.; Zaura, E.; Hassan, H.; Buijs, M.J.; Hedelin, P.; Pratten, J.; Spratt, D.; Daglia, M.; Karbowiak, A.; Signoretto, C.; Rosema, M.; van der Weijden, F.; Wilson, M.

2012-01-01

The main objective was to investigate whether low-molecular-weight fraction of edible mushroom shiitake extract (Lentinus edodes) possesses caries-preventive properties. The study was designed as a double-blind, three-leg, cross-over, randomized, controlled clinical trial carried out on two series

Honeybee propolis extract in periodontal treatment: A clinical and microbiological study of propolis in periodontal treatment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amita Coutinho

2012-01-01

Conclusion: Subgingival irrigation with propolis extract as an adjuvant to periodontal treatment was more effective than scaling and root planing as assessed by clinical and microbiological parameters.

Comparison of clinical parameters and environmental noise levels between regular surgery and piezosurgery for extraction of impacted third molars

OpenAIRE

Chang, Hao-Hueng; Lee, Ming-Shu; Hsu, You-Chyun; Tsai, Shang-Jye; Lin, Chun-Pin

2015-01-01

Impacted third molars can be extracted by regular surgery or piezosurgery. The aim of this study was to compare clinical parameters and device-produced noise levels between regular surgery and piezosurgery for the extraction of impacted third molars. Methods: Twenty patients (18 women and 2 men, 17–29 years of age) with bilateral symmetrical impacted mandibular or maxillary third molars of the same level were included in this randomized crossover clinical trial. The 40 impacted third molar...

Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction and gas chromatography accurate mass spectrometry for extraction and non-targeted profiling of volatile and semi-volatile compounds in grape marc distillates.

Science.gov (United States)

Fontana, Ariel; Rodríguez, Isaac; Cela, Rafael

2018-04-20

The suitability of dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) and gas chromatography accurate mass spectrometry (GC-MS), based on a time-of-flight (TOF) MS analyzer and using electron ionization (EI), for the characterization of volatile and semi-volatile profiles of grape marc distillates (grappa) are evaluated. DLLME conditions are optimized with a selection of compounds, from different chemical families, present in the distillate spirit. Under final working conditions, 2.5 mL of sample and 0.5 mL of organic solvents are consumed in the sample preparation process. The absolute extraction efficiencies ranged from 30 to 100%, depending on the compound. For the same sample volume, DLLME provided higher responses than solid-phase microextraction (SPME) for most of the model compounds. The GC-EI-TOF-MS records of grappa samples were processed using a data mining non-targeted search algorithm. In this way, chromatographic peaks and accurate EI-MS spectra of sample components were linked. The identities of more than 140 of these components are proposed from comparison of their accurate spectra with those in a low resolution EI-MS database, accurate masses of most intense fragment ions of known structure, and available chromatographic retention index. The use of chromatographic and spectral data, associated to the set of components mined from different grappa samples, for multivariate analysis purposes is also illustrated in the study. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Clinical records anonymisation and text extraction (CRATE): an open-source software system.

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Cardinal, Rudolf N

2017-04-26

Electronic medical records contain information of value for research, but contain identifiable and often highly sensitive confidential information. Patient-identifiable information cannot in general be shared outside clinical care teams without explicit consent, but anonymisation/de-identification allows research uses of clinical data without explicit consent. This article presents CRATE (Clinical Records Anonymisation and Text Extraction), an open-source software system with separable functions: (1) it anonymises or de-identifies arbitrary relational databases, with sensitivity and precision similar to previous comparable systems; (2) it uses public secure cryptographic methods to map patient identifiers to research identifiers (pseudonyms); (3) it connects relational databases to external tools for natural language processing; (4) it provides a web front end for research and administrative functions; and (5) it supports a specific model through which patients may consent to be contacted about research. Creation and management of a research database from sensitive clinical records with secure pseudonym generation, full-text indexing, and a consent-to-contact process is possible and practical using entirely free and open-source software.

Antibacterial activity of crude extracts of Thai medicinal plants against clinical isolates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

OpenAIRE

Kitpipit, L.; Voravuthikunchai, S.

2005-01-01

Aqueous and ethanolic extracts of Acacia catechu, Garcinia mangostana, Impatiens balsamina, Peltophorum pterocarpum, Psidium guajava, Punica granatum, Quercus infectoria, Tamarindus indica, Uncaria gambir, Walsura robusta were primarily tested for their antibacterial activities against 35 clinical isolates of methicillin-resistant S. aureus and S. aureus ATCC 25923 using disc diffusion method (2.5 mg/disc). Almost all extracts, except Tamarindus indica exhibited antibacterial activity. Both a...

Bactericidal activities of GM flax seedcake extract on pathogenic bacteria clinical strains.

Science.gov (United States)

Zuk, Magdalena; Dorotkiewicz-Jach, Agata; Drulis-Kawa, Zuzanna; Arendt, Malgorzata; Kulma, Anna; Szopa, Jan

2014-07-29

The antibiotic resistance of pathogenic microorganisms is a worldwide problem. Each year several million people across the world acquire infections with bacteria that are antibiotic-resistant, which is costly in terms of human health. New antibiotics are extremely needed to overcome the current resistance problem. Transgenic flax plants overproducing compounds from phenylpropanoid pathway accumulate phenolic derivatives of potential antioxidative, and thus, antimicrobial activity. Alkali hydrolyzed seedcake extract containing coumaric acid, ferulic acid, caffeic acid, and lignan in high quantities was used as an assayed against pathogenic bacteria (commonly used model organisms and clinical strains). It was shown that the extract components had antibacterial activity, which might be useful as a prophylactic against bacterial infection. Bacteria topoisomerase II (gyrase) inhibition and genomic DNA disintegration are suggested to be the main reason for rendering antibacterial action. The data obtained strongly suggest that the seedcake extract preparation is a suitable candidate for antimicrobial action with a broad spectrum and partial selectivity. Such preparation can be applied in cases where there is a risk of multibacterial infection and excellent answer on global increase in multidrug resistance in pathogenic bacteria.

Multicenter, open-label, exploratory clinical trial with Rhodiola rosea extract in patients suffering from burnout symptoms

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Kasper S

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Siegfried Kasper,1 Angelika Dienel2 1Universitätsklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Medizinische Universität Wien, Wien, Austria; 2Dr Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Co. KG, Karlsruhe, Germany Purpose: This study is the first clinical trial aiming to explore the clinical outcomes in burnout patients treated with Rhodiola rosea. The reported capacity of R. rosea to strengthen the organism against stress and its good tolerability offer a promising approach in the treatment of stress-related burnout. The aim of the treatment was to increase stress resistance, thus addressing the source rather than the symptoms of the syndrome and preventing subsequent diseases associated with a history of burnout. The objective of the trial was to provide the exploratory data required for planning future randomized trials in burnout patients in order to investigate the clinical outcomes of treatment with R. rosea dry extract in this target group.Methods: The study was planned as an exploratory, open-label, multicenter, single-arm trial. A wide range of rating scales were assessed and evaluated in an exploratory data analysis to generate hypotheses regarding clinical courses and to provide a basis for the planning of subsequent studies. A total of 118 outpatients were enrolled. A daily dose of 400 mg R. rosea extract (WS® 1375, Rosalin was administered over 12 weeks. Clinical outcomes were assessed by the German version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory, Burnout Screening Scales I and II, Sheehan Disability Scale, Perceived Stress Questionnaire, Number Connection Test, Multidimensional Mood State Questionnaire, Numerical Analogue Scales for different stress symptoms and impairment of sexual life, Patient Sexual Function Questionnaire, and the Clinical Global Impression Scales. Results: The majority of the outcome measures showed clear improvement over time. Several parameters had already improved after 1 week of treatment and continued to improve further up to

Antibacterial activity of crude extracts of Thai medicinal plants against clinical isolates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kitpipit, L.

2005-08-01

Full Text Available Aqueous and ethanolic extracts of Acacia catechu, Garcinia mangostana, Impatiens balsamina, Peltophorum pterocarpum, Psidium guajava, Punica granatum, Quercus infectoria, Tamarindus indica, Uncaria gambir, Walsura robusta were primarily tested for their antibacterial activities against 35 clinical isolates of methicillin-resistant S. aureus and S. aureus ATCC 25923 using disc diffusion method (2.5 mg/disc. Almost all extracts, except Tamarindus indica exhibited antibacterial activity. Both aqueous and ethanolic extracts of Acacia catechu, Psidium guajava, Punica granatum, Quercus infectoria, and Uncaria gambir, and ethanolic extracts of Garcinia mangostana, Impatiens balsamina, Peltophorum pterocarpum, and Walsura robusta demonstrated inhibition zones, ranging from 6 to 22 mm. Determination of minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC and minimal bactericidal concentration (MBC values were performed using agar dilution method. The MIC/MBC values of aqueous extracts of Quercus infectoria against clinical isolates of MRSA and S. aureus were 0.2 to 0.4/0.4 to 1.6 and 0.2/1.6 mg/ ml, respectively. Ethanolic extracts of Garcinia mangostana, Punica granatum and Quercus infectoria were demonstrated to be the most effective. The MIC values against MRSA isolates and S. aureus ranged from 0.05 to 0.4 and 0.1, 0.2 to 0.4 and 0.1, 0.2 to 0.4 and 0.2 mg/ml, respectively. The MBC values against MRSA ranged from 0.1 to 0.4, 0.4 to 1.6, and 1.6 to 3.1 mg/ml and against S. aureus at 0.4, 3.2, and 1.6 mg/ml, respectively.

Improving patient safety through a clinical audit spiral: prevention of wrong tooth extraction in orthodontics.

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Anwar, H; Waring, D

2017-07-07

Introduction With an increasing demand to improve patient safety within the NHS, it is important to ensure that measures are undertaken to continually improve patient care. Wrong site surgery has been defined as a 'never event'. This article highlights the importance of preventing wrong tooth extraction within orthodontics through an audit spiral over five years investigating the accuracy and clarity of orthodontic extraction letters at the University Dental Hospital of Manchester.Aims To examine compliance with the standards for accuracy and clarity of extraction letters and the incidence of wrong tooth extractions, and to increase awareness of the errors that can occur with extraction letters and of the current guidelines.Method A retrospective audit was conducted examining extraction letters sent to clinicians outside the department.Results It can be seen there has been no occurrence of a wrong site tooth extraction. The initial audit highlighted issues in conformity, with it falling below expected standards. Cycle two generally demonstrated a further reduction in compliance. Cycle three appeared to result in an increase in levels of compliance. Cycles 4 and 5 have demonstrated gradual improvements. However, it is noteworthy that in all cycles the audit standards were still not achieved, with the exception of no incidences of the incorrect tooth being extracted.Conclusion This audit spiral demonstrates the importance of long term re-audit to aim to achieve excellence in clinical care. There has been a gradual increase in standards through each audit.

Accurate Extraction of Charge Carrier Mobility in 4-Probe Field-Effect Transistors

KAUST Repository

Choi, Hyun Ho; Rodionov, Yaroslav I.; Paterson, Alexandra F.; Panidi, Julianna; Saranin, Danila; Kharlamov, Nikolai; Didenko, Sergei I.; Anthopoulos, Thomas D.; Cho, Kilwon; Podzorov, Vitaly

2018-01-01

Charge carrier mobility is an important characteristic of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and other semiconductor devices. However, accurate mobility determination in FETs is frequently compromised by issues related to Schottky-barrier contact resistance, that can be efficiently addressed by measurements in 4-probe/Hall-bar contact geometry. Here, it is shown that this technique, widely used in materials science, can still lead to significant mobility overestimation due to longitudinal channel shunting caused by voltage probes in 4-probe structures. This effect is investigated numerically and experimentally in specially designed multiterminal OFETs based on optimized novel organic-semiconductor blends and bulk single crystals. Numerical simulations reveal that 4-probe FETs with long but narrow channels and wide voltage probes are especially prone to channel shunting, that can lead to mobilities overestimated by as much as 350%. In addition, the first Hall effect measurements in blended OFETs are reported and how Hall mobility can be affected by channel shunting is shown. As a solution to this problem, a numerical correction factor is introduced that can be used to obtain much more accurate experimental mobilities. This methodology is relevant to characterization of a variety of materials, including organic semiconductors, inorganic oxides, monolayer materials, as well as carbon nanotube and semiconductor nanocrystal arrays.

Accurate Extraction of Charge Carrier Mobility in 4-Probe Field-Effect Transistors

KAUST Repository

Choi, Hyun Ho

2018-04-30

Charge carrier mobility is an important characteristic of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and other semiconductor devices. However, accurate mobility determination in FETs is frequently compromised by issues related to Schottky-barrier contact resistance, that can be efficiently addressed by measurements in 4-probe/Hall-bar contact geometry. Here, it is shown that this technique, widely used in materials science, can still lead to significant mobility overestimation due to longitudinal channel shunting caused by voltage probes in 4-probe structures. This effect is investigated numerically and experimentally in specially designed multiterminal OFETs based on optimized novel organic-semiconductor blends and bulk single crystals. Numerical simulations reveal that 4-probe FETs with long but narrow channels and wide voltage probes are especially prone to channel shunting, that can lead to mobilities overestimated by as much as 350%. In addition, the first Hall effect measurements in blended OFETs are reported and how Hall mobility can be affected by channel shunting is shown. As a solution to this problem, a numerical correction factor is introduced that can be used to obtain much more accurate experimental mobilities. This methodology is relevant to characterization of a variety of materials, including organic semiconductors, inorganic oxides, monolayer materials, as well as carbon nanotube and semiconductor nanocrystal arrays.

Clinical evaluation of two-stage mandibular wisdom tooth extraction method to avoid mental nerve paresthesia

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nozoe, Etsuro; Nakamura, Yasunori; Okawachi, Takako; Ishihata, Kiyohide; Shinnakasu, Mana; Nakamura, Norifumi

2011-01-01

Clinical courses following two-stage mandibular wisdom tooth extraction (TMWTE) carried out for preventing postoperative mental nerve paresthesia (MNP) were analyzed. When panoramic X-ray showed overlapping of wisdom tooth root on the superior 1/2 or more of the mandibular canal, interruption of the white line of the superior wall of the canal, or diversion of the canal, CT examination was facilitated. In cases where contact between the tooth root and canal was demonstrated in CT examination, TMWTE was then selected after gaining the patient's consent. TMWTE consisted of removing more than a half of the tooth crown and tooth root extraction at the second step after 2-3 months. The clinical features of wisdom teeth extracted and postoperative courses including tooth movement and occurrence of MNP during two-stage MWTE were evaluated. TMWTE was carried out for 40 teeth among 811 wisdom teeth (4.9%) that were extracted from 2007 to 2009. Among them, complete procedures were accomplished in 39 teeth, and crown removal was performed insufficiently at the first-stage operation in one tooth. Tooth movement was detected in 37 of 40 cases (92.5%). No postoperative MNP was observed in cases in which complete two-stage MWTE was carried out, but one case with insufficient crown removal was complicated by postoperative MNP. Seven mild complications (dehiscence, cold sensitivity, etc.) were noted after the first-stage operation. Therefore, we conclude that TMWTE for high-risk cases assessed by X-ray findings is useful to avoid MNP after MWTE. (author)

Natural Arctium lappa fruit extract improves the clinical signs of aging skin.

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Knott, Anja; Reuschlein, Katja; Mielke, Heiko; Wensorra, Ursula; Mummert, Christopher; Koop, Urte; Kausch, Martina; Kolbe, Ludger; Peters, Nils; Stäb, Franz; Wenck, Horst; Gallinat, Stefan

2008-12-01

Subclinical, chronic tissue inflammation involving the generation of cytokines (e.g., interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha) might contribute to the cutaneous aging process. This study aims to screen for an active ingredient with anti-inflammatory (i.e., reduction of interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha) and matrix-stimulating efficacy which improves the clinical signs of skin aging in vivo. In vitro studies with pure Arctiin were performed investigating the inhibition of cytokine induction and stimulation of collagen neo-synthesis. In vivo home-in-use studies using an Arctium lappa fruit extract-containing formulation were carried out to determine procollagen and hyaluronan synthesis, hyaluronan synthase-2 gene expression, and reduction of wrinkle volume after treatment. In vitro studies on human dermal fibroblasts and monocyte-derived dendritic cells supplemented with pure Arctiin showed relative to untreated control cells a stimulation of collagen synthesis and a decrease in interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha concentration, respectively. In addition, topical in vivo application of an A. lappa fruit extract-containing formulation for 12 weeks significantly stimulated procollagen synthesis and increased hyaluronan synthase-2 expression as well as hyaluronan levels compared to vehicle-treated control areas. Similarly, after a 4-week treatment with an A. lappa fruit extract-containing formulation, wrinkle volume in the crow's feet area was significantly reduced as compared to treatment with the vehicle. Our data show that topical treatment with a natural A. lappa fruit extract significantly improves the metabolism of the dermal extracellular matrix and leads to a visible wrinkle reduction in vivo. In conclusion, A. lappa fruit extract represents a targeted means to regenerate dermal structures and, thus, offers an effective treatment option for mature skin.

Inhibitory effect of Allium sativum and Zingiber officinale extracts on clinically important drug resistant pathogenic bacteria

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Gull Iram

2012-04-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Herbs and spices are very important and useful as therapeutic agent against many pathological infections. Increasing multidrug resistance of pathogens forces to find alternative compounds for treatment of infectious diseases. Methods In the present study the antimicrobial potency of garlic and ginger has been investigated against eight local clinical bacterial isolates. Three types of extracts of each garlic and ginger including aqueous extract, methanol extract and ethanol extract had been assayed separately against drug resistant Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Shigella sonnei, Staphylococcusepidermidis and Salmonella typhi. The antibacterial activity was determined by disc diffusion method. Results All tested bacterial strains were most susceptible to the garlic aqueous extract and showed poor susceptibility to the ginger aqueous extract. The (minimum inhibitory concentration MIC of different bacterial species varied from 0.05 mg/ml to 1.0 mg/ml. Conclusion In the light of several socioeconomic factors of Pakistan mainly poverty and poor hygienic condition, present study encourages the use of spices as alternative or supplementary medicine to reduce the burden of high cost, side effects and progressively increasing drug resistance of pathogens.

Information Extraction for Clinical Data Mining: A Mammography Case Study.

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Nassif, Houssam; Woods, Ryan; Burnside, Elizabeth; Ayvaci, Mehmet; Shavlik, Jude; Page, David

2009-01-01

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in women between the ages of 15 and 54. During mammography screening, radiologists use a strict lexicon (BI-RADS) to describe and report their findings. Mammography records are then stored in a well-defined database format (NMD). Lately, researchers have applied data mining and machine learning techniques to these databases. They successfully built breast cancer classifiers that can help in early detection of malignancy. However, the validity of these models depends on the quality of the underlying databases. Unfortunately, most databases suffer from inconsistencies, missing data, inter-observer variability and inappropriate term usage. In addition, many databases are not compliant with the NMD format and/or solely consist of text reports. BI-RADS feature extraction from free text and consistency checks between recorded predictive variables and text reports are crucial to addressing this problem. We describe a general scheme for concept information retrieval from free text given a lexicon, and present a BI-RADS features extraction algorithm for clinical data mining. It consists of a syntax analyzer, a concept finder and a negation detector. The syntax analyzer preprocesses the input into individual sentences. The concept finder uses a semantic grammar based on the BI-RADS lexicon and the experts' input. It parses sentences detecting BI-RADS concepts. Once a concept is located, a lexical scanner checks for negation. Our method can handle multiple latent concepts within the text, filtering out ultrasound concepts. On our dataset, our algorithm achieves 97.7% precision, 95.5% recall and an F 1 -score of 0.97. It outperforms manual feature extraction at the 5% statistical significance level.

Extraction spectrophotometric analyzer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Batik, J.; Vitha, F.

1985-01-01

Automation is discussed of extraction spectrophotometric determination of uranium in a solution. Uranium is extracted from accompanying elements in an HCl medium with a solution of tributyl phosphate in benzene. The determination is performed by measuring absorbance at 655 nm in a single-phase ethanol-water-benzene-tributyl phosphate medium. The design is described of an analyzer consisting of an analytical unit and a control unit. The analyzer performance promises increased productivity of labour, improved operating and hygiene conditions, and mainly more accurate results of analyses. (J.C.)

Efficacy of fresh leaf extracts of Spondias mombin against some clinical bacterial isolates from typhoid patients

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Olukemi Aromolaran

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Objective: To evaluate the phytochemical properties and antibacterial activity of methanol, acetone, ethanol and aqueous extracts of fresh leaves of Spondias mombin (S. mombin on some clinical bacterial isolates. Methods: Clean and fresh leaves of S. mombin were collected in Ondo, Southwestern Nigeria. The leaves were blended, extracted with methanol, acetone, ethanol and water. The extracts were evaporated to dryness using rotary evaporator and tested for the presence of saponins, tannins, cardiac glycoside, terpenoids, flavonoids, reducing sugars, volatile oils, alkaloids and glycoside. The extract were tested against Gram-negative bacteria Klebsiella pneumonia, Serratia marcescens, Salmonella typhi and Enterobacter aerogens; Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus by observing the zones of inhibition using agar well diffusion assay. Results: The study showed that the leaves contained saponins, tannins, flavonoids, alkaloids and glycoside. All the solvent extracts showed activity against all the test bacteria. The methanol extract also showed the highest activity against Enterobacter aerogens, zone of diameter (15.00 依1.89 mm, while the ethanol extract showed the highest activity against Staphylococcus aureus with zone of diameter (12.50依1.50 mm. The acetone extract showed the highest activity against Salmonella typhi, zone of diameter (17.50依0.29 mm followed by methanol extract showing zone of diameter (15.67依1.01 mm. The acetone extract showed the highest activity against Klebsiella pneumonia (15.17依0.67 mm, while the aqueous extract shows the highest activity against Serratia marcescens (14.67依2.68 mm. The minimum inhibitory concentration of the leaf extracts ranged between 10-90 mg/mL. Conclusions: This study showed that the aqueous and organic solvents extract of fresh leaves of S. mombin has anti-microbial activity against all the tested organisms.

A NEW CLINICAL PREDICTION CRITERION ACCURATELY DETERMINES A SUBSET OF PATIENTS WITH BILATERAL PRIMARY ALDOSTERONISM BEFORE ADRENAL VENOUS SAMPLING.

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Kocjan, Tomaz; Janez, Andrej; Stankovic, Milenko; Vidmar, Gaj; Jensterle, Mojca

2016-05-01

Adrenal venous sampling (AVS) is the only available method to distinguish bilateral from unilateral primary aldosteronism (PA). AVS has several drawbacks, so it is reasonable to avoid this procedure when the results would not affect clinical management. Our objective was to identify a clinical criterion that can reliably predict nonlateralized AVS as a surrogate for bilateral PA that is not treated surgically. A retrospective diagnostic cross-sectional study conducted at Slovenian national endocrine referral center included 69 consecutive patients (mean age 56 ± 8 years, 21 females) with PA who underwent AVS. PA was confirmed with the saline infusion test (SIT). AVS was performed sequentially during continuous adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) infusion. The main outcome measures were variables associated with nonlateralized AVS to derive a clinical prediction rule. Sixty-seven (97%) patients had a successful AVS and were included in the statistical analysis. A total of 39 (58%) patients had nonlateralized AVS. The combined criterion of serum potassium ≥3.5 mmol/L, post-SIT aldosterone AVS. The best overall classification accuracy (50/67 = 75%) was achieved using the post-SIT aldosterone level AVS. Our clinical prediction criterion appears to accurately determine a subset of patients with bilateral PA who could avoid unnecessary AVS and immediately commence with medical treatment.

Modeling and prediction of extraction profile for microwave-assisted extraction based on absorbed microwave energy.

Science.gov (United States)

Chan, Chung-Hung; Yusoff, Rozita; Ngoh, Gek-Cheng

2013-09-01

A modeling technique based on absorbed microwave energy was proposed to model microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) of antioxidant compounds from cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) leaves. By adapting suitable extraction model at the basis of microwave energy absorbed during extraction, the model can be developed to predict extraction profile of MAE at various microwave irradiation power (100-600 W) and solvent loading (100-300 ml). Verification with experimental data confirmed that the prediction was accurate in capturing the extraction profile of MAE (R-square value greater than 0.87). Besides, the predicted yields from the model showed good agreement with the experimental results with less than 10% deviation observed. Furthermore, suitable extraction times to ensure high extraction yield at various MAE conditions can be estimated based on absorbed microwave energy. The estimation is feasible as more than 85% of active compounds can be extracted when compared with the conventional extraction technique. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Extraction efficiency of hydrophilic and lipophilic antioxidants from lyophilized foods using pressurized liquid extraction and manual extraction.

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Watanabe, Jun; Oki, Tomoyuki; Takebayashi, Jun; Takano-Ishikawa, Yuko

2014-09-01

The efficient extraction of antioxidants from food samples is necessary in order to accurately measure their antioxidant capacities. α-Tocopherol and gallic acid were spiked into samples of 5 lyophilized and pulverized vegetables and fruits (onion, cabbage, Satsuma mandarin orange, pumpkin, and spinach). The lipophilic and hydrophilic antioxidants in the samples were sequentially extracted with a mixed solvent of n-hexane and dichloromethane, and then with acetic acid-acidified aqueous methanol. Duplicate samples were extracted: one set was extracted using an automated pressurized liquid extraction apparatus, and the other set was extracted manually. Spiked α-tocopherol and gallic acid were recovered almost quantitatively in the extracted lipophilic and hydrophilic fractions, respectively, especially when pressurized liquid extraction was used. The expected increase in lipophilic oxygen radical absorbance capacity (L-ORAC) due to spiking with α-tocopherol, and the expected increase in 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical scavenging activities and total polyphenol content due to spiking with gallic acid, were all recovered in high yield. Relatively low recoveries, as reflected in the hydrophilic ORAC (H-ORAC) value, were obtained following spiking with gallic acid, suggesting an interaction between gallic acid and endogenous antioxidants. The H-ORAC values of gallic acid-spiked samples were almost the same as those of postadded (spiked) samples. These results clearly indicate that lipophilic and hydrophilic antioxidants are effectively extracted from lyophilized food, especially when pressurized liquid extraction is used. © 2014 Institute of Food Technologists®

Number of bodily symptoms predicts outcome more accurately than health anxiety in patients attending neurology, cardiology, and gastroenterology clinics.

Science.gov (United States)

Jackson, Judy; Fiddler, Maggie; Kapur, Navneet; Wells, Adrian; Tomenson, Barbara; Creed, Francis

2006-04-01

In consecutive new outpatients, we aimed to assess whether somatization and health anxiety predicted health care use and quality of life 6 months later in all patients or in those without demonstrable abnormalities. On the first clinic visit, participants completed the Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ), the Health Anxiety Questionnaire (HAQ), and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Outcome was assessed as: (a) the number of medical consultations over the subsequent 6 months, extracted from medical records, and (b) Short-Form Health Survey 36 (SF36) physical component score 6 months after index clinic visit. A total of 295 patients were recruited (77% response rate), and medical consultation data were available for 275. The number of bodily symptoms was associated with both outcomes in linear fashion (Psomatization and hypochondriasis.

An accurate determination of human grawth hormone content in different pituitary extracts, using a radioimmunoassay with polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis as a bound-free separation system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bartoline, P.; Assis, L.M. de; Scwarz, I.; Pieroni, R.R.

1977-01-01

Human growth hormone was extracted and purified according to the method of Roos et al. A first control of its purification and integrity was performed through molecular weight determination by gel filtration on Sephadex G-100 and on plyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). Its biological activity was confirmed by the growth promoted in non-hypophysectomized rats at plateau. The main object, however, was the setting up of an accurate, reproducible method that could furnish the more absolute and comparable value of rafioimmunoassayable HGH content in perfect agreement with the results obtained by other laboratories. This was accomplished through a radioimmunoassay system that uses HGH labelled with 125 I, where the separation of the bound from the free antigen is achieved on polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, by a modification introduced in the original method of Davis. The resulting values, extremely close to that stated by the KABI-Laboratories (Stockolm), through obtained in quite different conditions of incubation, antibody concentration and with no use of second antibody, represent a confident approach to a comparable measure of this hormone in extract, which can also be applied to plasma determinations [pt

Using text mining techniques to extract phenotypic information from the PhenoCHF corpus.

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Alnazzawi, Noha; Thompson, Paul; Batista-Navarro, Riza; Ananiadou, Sophia

2015-01-01

Phenotypic information locked away in unstructured narrative text presents significant barriers to information accessibility, both for clinical practitioners and for computerised applications used for clinical research purposes. Text mining (TM) techniques have previously been applied successfully to extract different types of information from text in the biomedical domain. They have the potential to be extended to allow the extraction of information relating to phenotypes from free text. To stimulate the development of TM systems that are able to extract phenotypic information from text, we have created a new corpus (PhenoCHF) that is annotated by domain experts with several types of phenotypic information relating to congestive heart failure. To ensure that systems developed using the corpus are robust to multiple text types, it integrates text from heterogeneous sources, i.e., electronic health records (EHRs) and scientific articles from the literature. We have developed several different phenotype extraction methods to demonstrate the utility of the corpus, and tested these methods on a further corpus, i.e., ShARe/CLEF 2013. Evaluation of our automated methods showed that PhenoCHF can facilitate the training of reliable phenotype extraction systems, which are robust to variations in text type. These results have been reinforced by evaluating our trained systems on the ShARe/CLEF corpus, which contains clinical records of various types. Like other studies within the biomedical domain, we found that solutions based on conditional random fields produced the best results, when coupled with a rich feature set. PhenoCHF is the first annotated corpus aimed at encoding detailed phenotypic information. The unique heterogeneous composition of the corpus has been shown to be advantageous in the training of systems that can accurately extract phenotypic information from a range of different text types. Although the scope of our annotation is currently limited to a single

Clinical effect observation of pranoprofen combined with deproteinized calf blood extract eye drops for moderate to severe dry eye

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Jing-Hua Qiu

2018-04-01

Full Text Available AIM: To explore clinical effect of pranoprofen combined with deproteinized calf blood extract eye drops for moderate to severe dry eye. METHODS: A total of 84 patients(132 eyeswho received treatment at the Zhengzhou Second Hospital were selected from January 2016 to January 2017. According to random number table method they were divided into control group 42 cases(68 eyesand observation group 42 cases(64 eyes, the control group using polyvinyl alcohol eye drops with pranoprofen, observation group with pranoprofen with deproteinized extract of calf blood eye drops. Subjective and objective scores before and after treatment were recorded. RESULTS: There was no statistically significant difference on the four objective indicators of pretreatment FL, BUT, SⅠt, and vision between the two groups(P>0.05. Dry eye symptom scores of the two groups decreased after treatment, both with significantly different(PPPPCONCLUSION: The clinical effect of praprofen on the treatment of moderate to severe dry eye with the deproteinized calf blood extract is better.

Clinical safety and efficacy of implantation of octacalcium phosphate collagen composites in tooth extraction sockets and cyst holes

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Tadashi Kawai

2016-09-01

Full Text Available It was demonstrated that octacalcium phosphate collagen composite achieved notable bone regeneration in bone defects in preclinical studies. On the basis of the research results, an investigator-initiated exploratory clinical trial was conducted after approval from a local Institutional Review Board. This clinical study was performed as a single-arm non-randomized intervention study. Octacalcium phosphate collagen composite was implanted into a total of 10 cases of alveolar bone defects after tooth extractions and cystectomy. Safety assessment was performed in terms of the clinical course and several consecutive laboratory examinations, and sequential radiographs were used for efficacy assessment. All participants uneventfully completed the clinical trial without major problems in their general condition. Postoperative wound swelling was observed, as also commonly seen in tooth extraction or cystectomy. Although no serious liver dysfunction, renal dysfunction, electrolyte imbalance, or abnormal urinalysis results were recognized, the number of white blood cells and C-reactive protein level temporarily increased after the operation. An increase in radiopacity in the octacalcium phosphate collagen composite–implanted site was observed in all cases. Finally, the border between the original bone and the octacalcium phosphate collagen composite–implanted site became indistinguishable. These results suggest that octacalcium phosphate collagen composite could be utilized safely in clinical situations in the future.

Feasibility of Automatic Extraction of Electronic Health Data to Evaluate a Status Epilepticus Clinical Protocol.

Science.gov (United States)

Hafeez, Baria; Paolicchi, Juliann; Pon, Steven; Howell, Joy D; Grinspan, Zachary M

2016-05-01

Status epilepticus is a common neurologic emergency in children. Pediatric medical centers often develop protocols to standardize care. Widespread adoption of electronic health records by hospitals affords the opportunity for clinicians to rapidly, and electronically evaluate protocol adherence. We reviewed the clinical data of a small sample of 7 children with status epilepticus, in order to (1) qualitatively determine the feasibility of automated data extraction and (2) demonstrate a timeline-style visualization of each patient's first 24 hours of care. Qualitatively, our observations indicate that most clinical data are well labeled in structured fields within the electronic health record, though some important information, particularly electroencephalography (EEG) data, may require manual abstraction. We conclude that a visualization that clarifies a patient's clinical course can be automatically created using the patient's electronic clinical data, supplemented with some manually abstracted data. Future work could use this timeline to evaluate adherence to status epilepticus clinical protocols. © The Author(s) 2015.

The effectiveness of mangosteen rind extract as additional therapy on chronic periodontitis (Clinical trials)

OpenAIRE

Ina Hendiani; Dede Hadidjah; Agus Susanto; Indra Mustika Setia Pribadi

2017-01-01

ABSTRACT   Introduction: Periodontitis is an inflammatory disease that attacks the periodontal tissue comprises the gingiva, periodontal ligament, cementum and alveolar bone caused mainly by plaque bacteriophage or other specific dominant type of bacteria. The purpose of this study was to determine the therapeutic effect of clinical application of mangosteen peel extract gel as adjunctive therapy scaling and root planing in patients with chronic periodontitis. This research was expect...

More accurate picture of human body organs

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kolar, J.

1985-01-01

Computerized tomography and nucler magnetic resonance tomography (NMRT) are revolutionary contributions to radiodiagnosis because they allow to obtain a more accurate image of human body organs. The principles are described of both methods. Attention is mainly devoted to NMRT which has clinically only been used for three years. It does not burden the organism with ionizing radiation. (Ha)

Incentives Increase Participation in Mass Dog Rabies Vaccination Clinics and Methods of Coverage Estimation Are Assessed to Be Accurate.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abel B Minyoo

2015-12-01

Full Text Available In this study we show that incentives (dog collars and owner wristbands are effective at increasing owner participation in mass dog rabies vaccination clinics and we conclude that household questionnaire surveys and the mark-re-sight (transect survey method for estimating post-vaccination coverage are accurate when all dogs, including puppies, are included. Incentives were distributed during central-point rabies vaccination clinics in northern Tanzania to quantify their effect on owner participation. In villages where incentives were handed out participation increased, with an average of 34 more dogs being vaccinated. Through economies of scale, this represents a reduction in the cost-per-dog of $0.47. This represents the price-threshold under which the cost of the incentive used must fall to be economically viable. Additionally, vaccination coverage levels were determined in ten villages through the gold-standard village-wide census technique, as well as through two cheaper and quicker methods (randomized household questionnaire and the transect survey. Cost data were also collected. Both non-gold standard methods were found to be accurate when puppies were included in the calculations, although the transect survey and the household questionnaire survey over- and under-estimated the coverage respectively. Given that additional demographic data can be collected through the household questionnaire survey, and that its estimate of coverage is more conservative, we recommend this method. Despite the use of incentives the average vaccination coverage was below the 70% threshold for eliminating rabies. We discuss the reasons and suggest solutions to improve coverage. Given recent international targets to eliminate rabies, this study provides valuable and timely data to help improve mass dog vaccination programs in Africa and elsewhere.

Incentives Increase Participation in Mass Dog Rabies Vaccination Clinics and Methods of Coverage Estimation Are Assessed to Be Accurate

Science.gov (United States)

Steinmetz, Melissa; Czupryna, Anna; Bigambo, Machunde; Mzimbiri, Imam; Powell, George; Gwakisa, Paul

2015-01-01

In this study we show that incentives (dog collars and owner wristbands) are effective at increasing owner participation in mass dog rabies vaccination clinics and we conclude that household questionnaire surveys and the mark-re-sight (transect survey) method for estimating post-vaccination coverage are accurate when all dogs, including puppies, are included. Incentives were distributed during central-point rabies vaccination clinics in northern Tanzania to quantify their effect on owner participation. In villages where incentives were handed out participation increased, with an average of 34 more dogs being vaccinated. Through economies of scale, this represents a reduction in the cost-per-dog of $0.47. This represents the price-threshold under which the cost of the incentive used must fall to be economically viable. Additionally, vaccination coverage levels were determined in ten villages through the gold-standard village-wide census technique, as well as through two cheaper and quicker methods (randomized household questionnaire and the transect survey). Cost data were also collected. Both non-gold standard methods were found to be accurate when puppies were included in the calculations, although the transect survey and the household questionnaire survey over- and under-estimated the coverage respectively. Given that additional demographic data can be collected through the household questionnaire survey, and that its estimate of coverage is more conservative, we recommend this method. Despite the use of incentives the average vaccination coverage was below the 70% threshold for eliminating rabies. We discuss the reasons and suggest solutions to improve coverage. Given recent international targets to eliminate rabies, this study provides valuable and timely data to help improve mass dog vaccination programs in Africa and elsewhere. PMID:26633821

[Pharmaceutical analysis and clinical efficacy of Kampo medicine, maoto, extract suppository against pediatric febrile symptoms].

Science.gov (United States)

Nishimura, Nobuhiro; Doi, Norio; Uemura, Tomochika; Taketani, Takeshi; Hayashi, George; Kasai, Takeshi; Kanai, Rie; Yamaguchi, Seiji; Iwamoto, Kikuo; Naora, Kohji

2009-06-01

A traditional Chinese herbal medicine, Kampo medicine, maoto, has been widely used in the treatment of febrile symptoms caused by viral infection. This herbal extract granule for oral use, however, is not well accepted by infants or young children due to its unpleasant taste and odor. Therefore, we prepared Kampo medicine, maoto, suppository and investigated the pharmaceutical and clinical efficacy of the suppository. Kampo medicine, maoto, granules were micro-pulverized and homogeneously dispersed into Hosco-H15 to prepare suppositories containing 0.25 to 1.0 g herbal extract by the conventional fusion method. Content of l-ephedrine, an index compound of Kampo medicine, maoto, in the extract granules and suppositories was determined by using a high performance liquid chromatographic method. Physicochemical experiments revealed that the suppository containing 0.5 g herbal extract had the most suitable melting point of 34 degrees C. Contents of l-ephedrine in the suppository were constant, 93-96% of those in the same amount of the extract granules in different three lots. Upper and lower portions of the suppository had the same content of l-ephedrine. The suppository maintained more than 95% of l-ephedrine content through 6 months at 4 degrees C, room temperature and 40 degrees C, although maldistribution of the extract constituent was observed after storage at 40 degrees C. The suppository was administered to 21 pediatric febrile patients at a dose of 1/3 to 2 full pieces depending on their body weight and physical status. Significant reduction (pchildren with viral febrile symptoms without any adverse effects.

Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry for fast and accurate identification of clinically relevant Aspergillus species.

Science.gov (United States)

Alanio, A; Beretti, J-L; Dauphin, B; Mellado, E; Quesne, G; Lacroix, C; Amara, A; Berche, P; Nassif, X; Bougnoux, M-E

2011-05-01

New Aspergillus species have recently been described with the use of multilocus sequencing in refractory cases of invasive aspergillosis. The classical phenotypic identification methods routinely used in clinical laboratories failed to identify them adequately. Some of these Aspergillus species have specific patterns of susceptibility to antifungal agents, and misidentification may lead to inappropriate therapy. We developed a matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry (MS)-based strategy to adequately identify Aspergillus species to the species level. A database including the reference spectra of 28 clinically relevant species from seven Aspergillus sections (five common and 23 unusual species) was engineered. The profiles of young and mature colonies were analysed for each reference strain, and species-specific spectral fingerprints were identified. The performance of the database was then tested on 124 clinical and 16 environmental isolates previously characterized by partial sequencing of the β-tubulin and calmodulin genes. One hundred and thirty-eight isolates of 140 (98.6%) were correctly identified. Two atypical isolates could not be identified, but no isolate was misidentified (specificity: 100%). The database, including species-specific spectral fingerprints of young and mature colonies of the reference strains, allowed identification regardless of the maturity of the clinical isolate. These results indicate that MALDI-TOF MS is a powerful tool for rapid and accurate identification of both common and unusual species of Aspergillus. It can give better results than morphological identification in clinical laboratories. © 2010 The Authors. Clinical Microbiology and Infection © 2010 European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

EXTRACT: interactive extraction of environment metadata and term suggestion for metagenomic sample annotation.

Science.gov (United States)

Pafilis, Evangelos; Buttigieg, Pier Luigi; Ferrell, Barbra; Pereira, Emiliano; Schnetzer, Julia; Arvanitidis, Christos; Jensen, Lars Juhl

2016-01-01

The microbial and molecular ecology research communities have made substantial progress on developing standards for annotating samples with environment metadata. However, sample manual annotation is a highly labor intensive process and requires familiarity with the terminologies used. We have therefore developed an interactive annotation tool, EXTRACT, which helps curators identify and extract standard-compliant terms for annotation of metagenomic records and other samples. Behind its web-based user interface, the system combines published methods for named entity recognition of environment, organism, tissue and disease terms. The evaluators in the BioCreative V Interactive Annotation Task found the system to be intuitive, useful, well documented and sufficiently accurate to be helpful in spotting relevant text passages and extracting organism and environment terms. Comparison of fully manual and text-mining-assisted curation revealed that EXTRACT speeds up annotation by 15-25% and helps curators to detect terms that would otherwise have been missed. Database URL: https://extract.hcmr.gr/. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

In-situ measurements of material thermal parameters for accurate LED lamp thermal modelling

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vellvehi, M.; Perpina, X.; Jorda, X.; Werkhoven, R.J.; Kunen, J.M.G.; Jakovenko, J.; Bancken, P.; Bolt, P.J.

2013-01-01

This work deals with the extraction of key thermal parameters for accurate thermal modelling of LED lamps: air exchange coefficient around the lamp, emissivity and thermal conductivity of all lamp parts. As a case study, an 8W retrofit lamp is presented. To assess simulation results, temperature is

High-throughput analysis of sulfatides in cerebrospinal fluid using automated extraction and UPLC-MS/MS.

Science.gov (United States)

Blomqvist, Maria; Borén, Jan; Zetterberg, Henrik; Blennow, Kaj; Månsson, Jan-Eric; Ståhlman, Marcus

2017-07-01

Sulfatides (STs) are a group of glycosphingolipids that are highly expressed in brain. Due to their importance for normal brain function and their potential involvement in neurological diseases, development of accurate and sensitive methods for their determination is needed. Here we describe a high-throughput oriented and quantitative method for the determination of STs in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). The STs were extracted using a fully automated liquid/liquid extraction method and quantified using ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry. With the high sensitivity of the developed method, quantification of 20 ST species from only 100 μl of CSF was performed. Validation of the method showed that the STs were extracted with high recovery (90%) and could be determined with low inter- and intra-day variation. Our method was applied to a patient cohort of subjects with an Alzheimer's disease biomarker profile. Although the total ST levels were unaltered compared with an age-matched control group, we show that the ratio of hydroxylated/nonhydroxylated STs was increased in the patient cohort. In conclusion, we believe that the fast, sensitive, and accurate method described in this study is a powerful new tool for the determination of STs in clinical as well as preclinical settings. Copyright © 2017 by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.

Evaluation of a simple protein extraction method for species identification of clinically relevant staphylococci by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry.

Science.gov (United States)

Matsuda, Naoto; Matsuda, Mari; Notake, Shigeyuki; Yokokawa, Hirohide; Kawamura, Yoshiaki; Hiramatsu, Keiichi; Kikuchi, Ken

2012-12-01

In clinical microbiology, bacterial identification is labor-intensive and time-consuming. A solution for this problem is the use of matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). In this study, we evaluated a modified protein extraction method of identification performed on target plates (on-plate extraction method) with MALDI-TOF (Bruker Microflex LT with Biotyper version 3.0) and compared it to 2 previously described methods: the direct colony method and a standard protein extraction method (standard extraction method). We evaluated the species of 273 clinical strains and 14 reference strains of staphylococci. All isolates were characterized using the superoxide dismutase A sequence as a reference. For the species identification, the on-plate, standard extraction, and direct colony methods identified 257 isolates (89.5%), 232 isolates (80.8%), and 173 isolates (60.2%), respectively, with statistically significant differences among the three methods (P extraction method is at least as good as standard extraction in identification rate and has the advantage of a shorter processing time.

New microwave-integrated Soxhlet extraction. An advantageous tool for the extraction of lipids from food products.

Science.gov (United States)

Virot, Matthieu; Tomao, Valérie; Colnagui, Giulio; Visinoni, Franco; Chemat, Farid

2007-12-07

A new process of Soxhlet extraction assisted by microwave was designed and developed. The process is performed in four steps, which ensures complete, rapid and accurate extraction of the samples. A second-order central composite design (CCD) has been used to investigate the performance of the new device. The results provided by analysis of variance and Pareto chart, indicated that the extraction time was the most important factor followed by the leaching time. The response surface methodology allowed us to determine optimal conditions for olive oil extraction: 13 min of extraction time, 17 min of leaching time, and 720 W of irradiation power. The proposed process is suitable for lipids determination from food. Microwave-integrated Soxhlet (MIS) extraction has been compared with a conventional technique, Soxhlet extraction, for the extraction of oil from olives (Aglandau, Vaucluse, France). The oils extracted by MIS for 32 min were quantitatively (yield) and qualitatively (fatty acid composition) similar to those obtained by conventional Soxhlet extraction for 8 h. MIS is a green technology and appears as a good alternative for the extraction of fat and oils from food products.

Extraction Socket Preservation Using Porcine-Derived Collagen Membrane Alone or Associated with Porcine-Derived Bone. Clinical Results of Randomized Controlled Study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Renzo Guarnieri

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Objectives: The aim of present randomized controlled clinical trial was to clinically evaluate hard tissue changes after extraction socket preservation procedures compared to natural spontaneous healing. Material and Methods: Thirty patients were enrolled in the present study and underwent single-tooth extraction in the premolar/molar areas. Ten sites were grafted with porcine-derived bone covered by collagen membrane, 10 covered by porcine-derived collagen membrane alone, and 10 underwent natural spontaneous healing. Vertical and horizontal bone changes after 3-month were evaluated at implant placement. Results: The vertical and horizontal bone changes at the extraction sockets treated with collagen membrane alone (vertical: -0.55 [SD 0.11] mm, and horizontal: -1.21 [SD 0.69] mm and collagen membrane plus porcine-derived bone (vertical: -0.37 [SD 0.7] mm, and horizontal: -0.91 [SD 0.53] mm were found significantly lower (P < 0.001, when compared to non-grafted sockets (vertical: -2.09 [SD 0.19] mm, and horizontal: -3.96 [SD 0.87] mm. In type 1 extraction sockets, in premolar sites, and in presence of vestibular bone thicknesses ≥ 1.5 mm, the use of collagen membrane alone revealed similar outcomes to those with additional graft material. Conclusions: At the re-entry surgery, extraction sockets grafted with porcine-derived bone and covered by collagen membrane, and extraction sockets covered by porcine-derived collagen membrane alone, showed significantly lower vertical and horizontal bone changes, compared to extraction sockets sites underwent natural spontaneous healing. However, a complete prevention of remodelling is not achievable, irrespective of the technique used.

Compact and Hybrid Feature Description for Building Extraction

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Z.; Liu, Y.; Hu, Y.; Li, P.; Ding, Y.

2017-05-01

Building extraction in aerial orthophotos is crucial for various applications. Currently, deep learning has been shown to be successful in addressing building extraction with high accuracy and high robustness. However, quite a large number of samples is required in training a classifier when using deep learning model. In order to realize accurate and semi-interactive labelling, the performance of feature description is crucial, as it has significant effect on the accuracy of classification. In this paper, we bring forward a compact and hybrid feature description method, in order to guarantees desirable classification accuracy of the corners on the building roof contours. The proposed descriptor is a hybrid description of an image patch constructed from 4 sets of binary intensity tests. Experiments show that benefiting from binary description and making full use of color channels, this descriptor is not only computationally frugal, but also accurate than SURF for building extraction.

Planimetric volumetry of the prostate: how accurate is it?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Aarnink, R. G.; Giesen, R. J.; de la Rosette, J. J.; Huynen, A. L.; Debruyne, F. M.; Wijkstra, H.

1995-01-01

Planimetric volumetry is used in clinical practice when accurate volume determination of the prostate is needed. The prostate volume is determined by discretization of the 3D prostate shape. The are of the prostate is calculated in consecutive ultrasonographic cross-sections. This area is multiplied

Massive clot formation after tooth extraction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Santosh Hunasgi

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Oral surgical procedures mainly tooth extraction can be related with an extended hemorrhage owed to the nature of the process resulting in an "open wound." The attempt of this paper is to present a case of massive postoperative clot formation after tooth extraction and highlight on the oral complications of surgical procedures. A 32-year-old male patient reported to the Dental Clinic for evaluation and extraction of grossly decayed 46. Clinical evaluation of 46 revealed root stumps. Extraction of the root stumps was performed, and it was uneventful. Hemostasis was achieved and postsurgical instructions were specified to the patient. The patient reported to the clinic, the very subsequent morning with a criticism of bleeding at the extraction site. On clinical examination, bleeding was noted from the socket in relation to 46. To control bleeding, oral hemostatic drugs Revici - E (Ethamsylate 500 mg was prescribed and bleeding was stopped in 2 h. However, a massive clot was formed at the extraction site. Further, this clot resolved on its own in 1-week time. Despite the fact that dental extraction is considered to be a minor surgical procedure, some cases may present with life-threatening complications including hemorrhage. Vigilant and significant history taking, physical and dental examinations prior to dental procedures are a must to avoid intraoperative and postoperative complications.

Discrete sensors distribution for accurate plantar pressure analyses.

Science.gov (United States)

Claverie, Laetitia; Ille, Anne; Moretto, Pierre

2016-12-01

The aim of this study was to determine the distribution of discrete sensors under the footprint for accurate plantar pressure analyses. For this purpose, two different sensor layouts have been tested and compared, to determine which was the most accurate to monitor plantar pressure with wireless devices in research and/or clinical practice. Ten healthy volunteers participated in the study (age range: 23-58 years). The barycenter of pressures (BoP) determined from the plantar pressure system (W-inshoe®) was compared to the center of pressures (CoP) determined from a force platform (AMTI) in the medial-lateral (ML) and anterior-posterior (AP) directions. Then, the vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) obtained from both W-inshoe® and force platform was compared for both layouts for each subject. The BoP and vGRF determined from the plantar pressure system data showed good correlation (SCC) with those determined from the force platform data, notably for the second sensor organization (ML SCC= 0.95; AP SCC=0.99; vGRF SCC=0.91). The study demonstrates that an adjusted placement of removable sensors is key to accurate plantar pressure analyses. These results are promising for a plantar pressure recording outside clinical or laboratory settings, for long time monitoring, real time feedback or for whatever activity requiring a low-cost system. Copyright © 2016 IPEM. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Enhancing Comparative Effectiveness Research With Automated Pediatric Pneumonia Detection in a Multi-Institutional Clinical Repository: A PHIS+ Pilot Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Meystre, Stephane; Gouripeddi, Ramkiran; Tieder, Joel; Simmons, Jeffrey; Srivastava, Rajendu; Shah, Samir

2017-05-15

Community-acquired pneumonia is a leading cause of pediatric morbidity. Administrative data are often used to conduct comparative effectiveness research (CER) with sufficient sample sizes to enhance detection of important outcomes. However, such studies are prone to misclassification errors because of the variable accuracy of discharge diagnosis codes. The aim of this study was to develop an automated, scalable, and accurate method to determine the presence or absence of pneumonia in children using chest imaging reports. The multi-institutional PHIS+ clinical repository was developed to support pediatric CER by expanding an administrative database of children's hospitals with detailed clinical data. To develop a scalable approach to find patients with bacterial pneumonia more accurately, we developed a Natural Language Processing (NLP) application to extract relevant information from chest diagnostic imaging reports. Domain experts established a reference standard by manually annotating 282 reports to train and then test the NLP application. Findings of pleural effusion, pulmonary infiltrate, and pneumonia were automatically extracted from the reports and then used to automatically classify whether a report was consistent with bacterial pneumonia. Compared with the annotated diagnostic imaging reports reference standard, the most accurate implementation of machine learning algorithms in our NLP application allowed extracting relevant findings with a sensitivity of .939 and a positive predictive value of .925. It allowed classifying reports with a sensitivity of .71, a positive predictive value of .86, and a specificity of .962. When compared with each of the domain experts manually annotating these reports, the NLP application allowed for significantly higher sensitivity (.71 vs .527) and similar positive predictive value and specificity . NLP-based pneumonia information extraction of pediatric diagnostic imaging reports performed better than domain experts in this

Improved Methods of Carnivore Faecal Sample Preservation, DNA Extraction and Quantification for Accurate Genotyping of Wild Tigers

Science.gov (United States)

Harika, Katakam; Mahla, Ranjeet Singh; Shivaji, Sisinthy

2012-01-01

Background Non-invasively collected samples allow a variety of genetic studies on endangered and elusive species. However due to low amplification success and high genotyping error rates fewer samples can be identified up to the individual level. Number of PCRs needed to obtain reliable genotypes also noticeably increase. Methods We developed a quantitative PCR assay to measure and grade amplifiable nuclear DNA in feline faecal extracts. We determined DNA degradation in experimentally aged faecal samples and tested a suite of pre-PCR protocols to considerably improve DNA retrieval. Results Average DNA concentrations of Grade I, II and III extracts were 982pg/µl, 9.5pg/µl and 0.4pg/µl respectively. Nearly 10% of extracts had no amplifiable DNA. Microsatellite PCR success and allelic dropout rates were 92% and 1.5% in Grade I, 79% and 5% in Grade II, and 54% and 16% in Grade III respectively. Our results on experimentally aged faecal samples showed that ageing has a significant effect on quantity and quality of amplifiable DNA (pDNA degradation occurs within 3 days of exposure to direct sunlight. DNA concentrations of Day 1 samples stored by ethanol and silica methods for a month varied significantly from fresh Day 1 extracts (p0.05). DNA concentrations of fresh tiger and leopard faecal extracts without addition of carrier RNA were 816.5pg/µl (±115.5) and 690.1pg/µl (±207.1), while concentrations with addition of carrier RNA were 49414.5pg/µl (±9370.6) and 20982.7pg/µl (±6835.8) respectively. Conclusions Our results indicate that carnivore faecal samples should be collected as freshly as possible, are better preserved by two-step method and should be extracted with addition of carrier RNA. We recommend quantification of template DNA as this facilitates several downstream protocols. PMID:23071624

A machine learning method for fast and accurate characterization of depth-of-interaction gamma cameras

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Pedemonte, Stefano; Pierce, Larry; Van Leemput, Koen

2017-01-01

to impose the depth-of-interaction in an experimental set-up. In this article we introduce a machine learning approach for extracting accurate forward models of gamma imaging devices from simple pencil-beam measurements, using a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique in combination with a finite...

Reaction Wheel Disturbance Model Extraction Software - RWDMES

Science.gov (United States)

Blaurock, Carl

2009-01-01

The RWDMES is a tool for modeling the disturbances imparted on spacecraft by spinning reaction wheels. Reaction wheels are usually the largest disturbance source on a precision pointing spacecraft, and can be the dominating source of pointing error. Accurate knowledge of the disturbance environment is critical to accurate prediction of the pointing performance. In the past, it has been difficult to extract an accurate wheel disturbance model since the forcing mechanisms are difficult to model physically, and the forcing amplitudes are filtered by the dynamics of the reaction wheel. RWDMES captures the wheel-induced disturbances using a hybrid physical/empirical model that is extracted directly from measured forcing data. The empirical models capture the tonal forces that occur at harmonics of the spin rate, and the broadband forces that arise from random effects. The empirical forcing functions are filtered by a physical model of the wheel structure that includes spin-rate-dependent moments (gyroscopic terms). The resulting hybrid model creates a highly accurate prediction of wheel-induced forces. It accounts for variation in disturbance frequency, as well as the shifts in structural amplification by the whirl modes, as the spin rate changes. This software provides a point-and-click environment for producing accurate models with minimal user effort. Where conventional approaches may take weeks to produce a model of variable quality, RWDMES can create a demonstrably high accuracy model in two hours. The software consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables the user to specify all analysis parameters, to evaluate analysis results and to iteratively refine the model. Underlying algorithms automatically extract disturbance harmonics, initialize and tune harmonic models, and initialize and tune broadband noise models. The component steps are described in the RWDMES user s guide and include: converting time domain data to waterfall PSDs (power spectral

Automatic segmentation of the bone and extraction of the bone-cartilage interface from magnetic resonance images of the knee

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fripp, Jurgen; Crozier, Stuart; Warfield, Simon K; Ourselin, Sebastien

2007-01-01

The accurate segmentation of the articular cartilages from magnetic resonance (MR) images of the knee is important for clinical studies and drug trials into conditions like osteoarthritis. Currently, segmentations are obtained using time-consuming manual or semi-automatic algorithms which have high inter- and intra-observer variabilities. This paper presents an important step towards obtaining automatic and accurate segmentations of the cartilages, namely an approach to automatically segment the bones and extract the bone-cartilage interfaces (BCI) in the knee. The segmentation is performed using three-dimensional active shape models, which are initialized using an affine registration to an atlas. The BCI are then extracted using image information and prior knowledge about the likelihood of each point belonging to the interface. The accuracy and robustness of the approach was experimentally validated using an MR database of fat suppressed spoiled gradient recall images. The (femur, tibia, patella) bone segmentation had a median Dice similarity coefficient of (0.96, 0.96, 0.89) and an average point-to-surface error of 0.16 mm on the BCI. The extracted BCI had a median surface overlap of 0.94 with the real interface, demonstrating its usefulness for subsequent cartilage segmentation or quantitative analysis

Automatic segmentation of the bone and extraction of the bone-cartilage interface from magnetic resonance images of the knee

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Fripp, Jurgen [BioMedIA Lab, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Level 20, 300 Adelaide street, Brisbane, QLD 4001 (Australia); Crozier, Stuart [School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072 (Australia); Warfield, Simon K [Computational Radiology Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Children' s Hospital Boston, 300 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 (United States); Ourselin, Sebastien [BioMedIA Lab, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Level 20, 300 Adelaide street, Brisbane, QLD 4001 (Australia)

2007-03-21

The accurate segmentation of the articular cartilages from magnetic resonance (MR) images of the knee is important for clinical studies and drug trials into conditions like osteoarthritis. Currently, segmentations are obtained using time-consuming manual or semi-automatic algorithms which have high inter- and intra-observer variabilities. This paper presents an important step towards obtaining automatic and accurate segmentations of the cartilages, namely an approach to automatically segment the bones and extract the bone-cartilage interfaces (BCI) in the knee. The segmentation is performed using three-dimensional active shape models, which are initialized using an affine registration to an atlas. The BCI are then extracted using image information and prior knowledge about the likelihood of each point belonging to the interface. The accuracy and robustness of the approach was experimentally validated using an MR database of fat suppressed spoiled gradient recall images. The (femur, tibia, patella) bone segmentation had a median Dice similarity coefficient of (0.96, 0.96, 0.89) and an average point-to-surface error of 0.16 mm on the BCI. The extracted BCI had a median surface overlap of 0.94 with the real interface, demonstrating its usefulness for subsequent cartilage segmentation or quantitative analysis.

The Use of TOC Reconciliation as a Means of Establishing the Degree to Which Chromatographic Screening of Plastic Material Extracts for Organic Extractables Is Complete.

Science.gov (United States)

Jenke, Dennis; Couch, Thomas R; Robinson, Sarah J; Volz, Trent J; Colton, Raymond H

2014-01-01

Extracts of plastic packaging, manufacturing, and delivery systems (or their materials of construction) are analyzed by chromatographic methods to establish the system's extractables profile. The testing strategy consists of multiple orthogonal chromatographic methods, for example, gas and liquid chromatography with multiple detection strategies. Although this orthogonal testing strategy is comprehensive, it is not necessarily complete and members of the extractables profile can elude detection and/or accurate identification/quantification. Because the chromatographic methods rarely indicate that some extractables have been missed, another means of assessing the completeness of the profiling activity must be established. If the extracts are aqueous and contain no organic additives (e.g., pH buffers), then they can be analyzed for their total organic carbon content (TOC). Additionally, the TOC of an extract can be calculated based on the extractables revealed by the screening analyses. The measured and calculated TOC can be reconciled to establish the completeness and accuracy of the extractables profile. If the reconciliation is poor, then the profile is either incomplete or inaccurate and additional testing is needed to establish the complete and accurate profile. Ten test materials and components of systems were extracted and their extracts characterized for organic extractables using typical screening procedures. Measured and calculated TOC was reconciled to establish the completeness of the revealed extractables profile. When the TOC reconciliation was incomplete, the profiling was augmented with additional analytical testing to reveal the missing members of the organic extractables profile. This process is illustrated via two case studies involving aqueous extracts of sterile filters. Plastic materials and systems used to manufacture, contain, store, and deliver pharmaceutical products are extracted and the extracts analyzed to establish the materials' (or

Automated Feature Extraction from Hyperspectral Imagery, Phase II

Data.gov (United States)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration — The proposed activities will result in the development of a novel hyperspectral feature-extraction toolkit that will provide a simple, automated, and accurate...

Automatic River Network Extraction from LIDAR Data

Science.gov (United States)

Maderal, E. N.; Valcarcel, N.; Delgado, J.; Sevilla, C.; Ojeda, J. C.

2016-06-01

National Geographic Institute of Spain (IGN-ES) has launched a new production system for automatic river network extraction for the Geospatial Reference Information (GRI) within hydrography theme. The goal is to get an accurate and updated river network, automatically extracted as possible. For this, IGN-ES has full LiDAR coverage for the whole Spanish territory with a density of 0.5 points per square meter. To implement this work, it has been validated the technical feasibility, developed a methodology to automate each production phase: hydrological terrain models generation with 2 meter grid size and river network extraction combining hydrographic criteria (topographic network) and hydrological criteria (flow accumulation river network), and finally the production was launched. The key points of this work has been managing a big data environment, more than 160,000 Lidar data files, the infrastructure to store (up to 40 Tb between results and intermediate files), and process; using local virtualization and the Amazon Web Service (AWS), which allowed to obtain this automatic production within 6 months, it also has been important the software stability (TerraScan-TerraSolid, GlobalMapper-Blue Marble , FME-Safe, ArcGIS-Esri) and finally, the human resources managing. The results of this production has been an accurate automatic river network extraction for the whole country with a significant improvement for the altimetric component of the 3D linear vector. This article presents the technical feasibility, the production methodology, the automatic river network extraction production and its advantages over traditional vector extraction systems.

AUTOMATIC RIVER NETWORK EXTRACTION FROM LIDAR DATA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

E. N. Maderal

2016-06-01

Full Text Available National Geographic Institute of Spain (IGN-ES has launched a new production system for automatic river network extraction for the Geospatial Reference Information (GRI within hydrography theme. The goal is to get an accurate and updated river network, automatically extracted as possible. For this, IGN-ES has full LiDAR coverage for the whole Spanish territory with a density of 0.5 points per square meter. To implement this work, it has been validated the technical feasibility, developed a methodology to automate each production phase: hydrological terrain models generation with 2 meter grid size and river network extraction combining hydrographic criteria (topographic network and hydrological criteria (flow accumulation river network, and finally the production was launched. The key points of this work has been managing a big data environment, more than 160,000 Lidar data files, the infrastructure to store (up to 40 Tb between results and intermediate files, and process; using local virtualization and the Amazon Web Service (AWS, which allowed to obtain this automatic production within 6 months, it also has been important the software stability (TerraScan-TerraSolid, GlobalMapper-Blue Marble , FME-Safe, ArcGIS-Esri and finally, the human resources managing. The results of this production has been an accurate automatic river network extraction for the whole country with a significant improvement for the altimetric component of the 3D linear vector. This article presents the technical feasibility, the production methodology, the automatic river network extraction production and its advantages over traditional vector extraction systems.

Using Best Practices to Extract, Organize, and Reuse Embedded Decision Support Content Knowledge Rules from Mature Clinical Systems.

Science.gov (United States)

DesAutels, Spencer J; Fox, Zachary E; Giuse, Dario A; Williams, Annette M; Kou, Qing-Hua; Weitkamp, Asli; Neal R, Patel; Bettinsoli Giuse, Nunzia

2016-01-01

Clinical decision support (CDS) knowledge, embedded over time in mature medical systems, presents an interesting and complex opportunity for information organization, maintenance, and reuse. To have a holistic view of all decision support requires an in-depth understanding of each clinical system as well as expert knowledge of the latest evidence. This approach to clinical decision support presents an opportunity to unify and externalize the knowledge within rules-based decision support. Driven by an institutional need to prioritize decision support content for migration to new clinical systems, the Center for Knowledge Management and Health Information Technology teams applied their unique expertise to extract content from individual systems, organize it through a single extensible schema, and present it for discovery and reuse through a newly created Clinical Support Knowledge Acquisition and Archival Tool (CS-KAAT). CS-KAAT can build and maintain the underlying knowledge infrastructure needed by clinical systems.

Using Best Practices to Extract, Organize, and Reuse Embedded Decision Support Content Knowledge Rules from Mature Clinical Systems

Science.gov (United States)

DesAutels, Spencer J.; Fox, Zachary E.; Giuse, Dario A.; Williams, Annette M.; Kou, Qing-hua; Weitkamp, Asli; Neal R, Patel; Bettinsoli Giuse, Nunzia

2016-01-01

Clinical decision support (CDS) knowledge, embedded over time in mature medical systems, presents an interesting and complex opportunity for information organization, maintenance, and reuse. To have a holistic view of all decision support requires an in-depth understanding of each clinical system as well as expert knowledge of the latest evidence. This approach to clinical decision support presents an opportunity to unify and externalize the knowledge within rules-based decision support. Driven by an institutional need to prioritize decision support content for migration to new clinical systems, the Center for Knowledge Management and Health Information Technology teams applied their unique expertise to extract content from individual systems, organize it through a single extensible schema, and present it for discovery and reuse through a newly created Clinical Support Knowledge Acquisition and Archival Tool (CS-KAAT). CS-KAAT can build and maintain the underlying knowledge infrastructure needed by clinical systems. PMID:28269846

Antibacterial Activity of Pinus pinaster Bark Extract and its Components Against Multidrug-resistant Clinical Isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii

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Mirna Ćurković-Perica

2015-07-01

Full Text Available The aim of this research was to test the antibacterial activity of Pinus pinaster aqueous bark extract (PABE and its basic components against multidrug-resistant isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii belonging to European clone I and II, isolated previously from the clinical outbreaks. The minimum bactericidal concentration of PABE against both clones of A. baumannii was 200 mg ml–1, while lower concentrations showed high antibacterial activity. After 24 h of treatment with 100, 50 or 10 mg ml–1 of extract, the reduction in the number of A. baumannii isolates belonging to European clone I and II was 85.8 ± 2.5 %, 78.5 ± 1.1 %, 66.3 ± 2.5 % and 90.2 ± 1.7 %, 78.6 ± 1.2 %, 69.8 ± 0.7 %, respectively. Several basic components: caffeic acid, catechin, epicatechin, gallic acid and vanillin, detected in the extract by high performance liquid chromatography, contributed to the antibacterial activity of the extract against both clones of A. baumannii. However, the antibacterial activity of extract was higher than that of each tested basic component suggesting that proanthocyanidins, which were present in quite a large amount in the extract, might have also contributed to the activity of the extract. Antibacterial activity of PABE against A. baumannii reveals that complex and inexpensive natural product might be useful in combat against naturally competent bacteria that easily acquire resistance against antibiotics.

PRE-CLINICAL EVALUATION OF EXTRACTS AND ESSENTIAL OILS FROM BETEL-LIKE SCENT PIPER SPECIES IDENTIFIED POTENTIAL CANCER TREATMENT.

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Sanubol, Arisa; Chaveerach, Arunrat; Tanee, Tawatchai; Sudmoon, Runglawan

2017-01-01

Nine Piper species with betel-like scents are sources of industrial and medicinal aromatic chemicals, but there is lack of information on cytotoxicity and genotoxicity for human safety, including how these plants impact human cervical cancer cell line. Plant leaves were extracted with hexane and hydro-distilled for essential oils. The extracts and oils were pre-clinically studied based on cyto - and genotoxicity using microculture tetrazolium (MTT) and comet assays. The crude extracts showed an IC 50 in leukocytes and HeLa cells of 58.59-97.31 mg/ml and 34.91-101.79 mg/ml, the LD 50 is higher than 5000 mg/kg. With lower values than the crude extracts, the essential oils showed an IC 50 in leukocytes and HeLa cells of 0.023-0.059 μg/ml and 0.025-0.043 μg/ml the LD 50 is less than 50 mg/kg. IC 50 values showed that the essential oils were highly toxic than the crude extracts. At the level of human genetic materials, the crude extracts of two species, including P. betloides and P. crocatum , showed a significant toxicity ( p Piper species showed insignificant toxicity in leukocytes. For HeLa cells, the eight-studied species showed significant toxicity in HeLa cells, whereas only P. submultinerve showed insignificant toxicity. The crude extracts and essential oils should be tested as putative cervical cancer treatments due to less toxicity in human normal cells.

Clinical Efficacy and Safety of Benjakul Remedy Extract for Treating Primary Osteoarthritis of Knee Compared with Diclofenac: Double Blind, Randomized Controlled Trial

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Patamaporn Rachawat

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Background. The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical efficacy and safety of Benjakul (BJK extract for treating primary osteoarthritis (OA of the knee compared with diclofenac. Methods. A phase 2, double blind, randomized, and controlled study was conducted. The BJK group received 300 mg of BJK extract per day, while another group received 75 mg of diclofenac per day. All patients were followed up at 14 and 28 days. The changing of visual analogue scale (VAS for pain, 100-meter walking times, the modified Thai WOMAC index scores, and the global assessment were evaluated for efficacy. For safety issue, clinical signs and symptoms, complete physical examination, and renal and liver function were evaluated. Results. 39 and 38 patients for BJK extract group and diclofenac group were evaluated. For efficacy, all patients from both groups reported a decrease in the VAS pain score and 100-meter walking times but only the diclofenac group showed significant reduction of both measurements when compared with day 0. The modified Thai WOMAC scores of both groups were significantly reduced from baseline. However, all efficacy outcomes were not significantly different for both groups. For safety outcomes, the patients from both groups had no severe adverse events reported and only BJK had no toxicity in renal and liver functions. Conclusions. The BJK remedy extract showed equal clinical efficacy in relieving symptoms of OA knee when compared with diclofenac.

Antiobesity Effect of Caraway Extract on Overweight and Obese Women: A Randomized, Triple-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial

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Mahnaz Kazemipoor

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Caraway (Carum carvi L., a potent medicinal plant, is traditionally used for treating obesity. This study investigates the weight-lowering effects of caraway extract (CE on physically active, overweight and obese women through a randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Seventy overweight and obese, healthy, aerobic-trained, adult females were randomly assigned to two groups (n=35 per group. Participants received either 30 mL/day of CE or placebo without changing their diet or physical activity. Subjects were examined at baseline and after 90 days for changes in body composition, anthropometric indices, and clinical and paraclinical variables. The treatment group, compared with placebo, showed a significant reduction of weight, body mass index, body fat percentage, and waist-to-hip ratio. No changes were observed in lipid profile, urine-specific gravity, and blood pressure of subjects. The results suggest that a dietary CE with no restriction in food intake, when combined with exercise, is of value in the management of obesity in women wishing to lower their weight, BMI, body fat percentage, and body size, with no clinical side effects. In conclusion, results of this study suggest a possible phytotherapeutic approach for caraway extract in the management of obesity. This trial is registered with NCT01833377.

Cross matching observations on toxicological and clinical data for the assessment of tolerability and safety of Ginkgo biloba leaf extract

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Heinonen, Tuula; Gaus, Wilhelm

2015-01-01

Highlights: • Cross-matching of toxicological, clinical and other data improves risk analysis. • Induction of drug metabolism is linked to increased cell proliferation. • Rodents and man have differences in metabolism of Ginkgo biloba. • Controlled clinical data did not reveal any serious or specific adverse drug reaction. • Cross-matching of various sources gives strong evidence that G. biloba is safe. - Abstract: Ginkgo biloba is one of the most widely used herbal remedies in Europe and the US. It may be purchased in different types of formulations, but most of the clinical studies have been performed with the controlled G. biloba extract EGb761 ® . Indications include Alzheimers disease, cardiovascular disease, dementia, memory loss, and cerebral ischemia. The pharmacological modes of action cover antioxidant effects, radical scavenging, inhibition of platelet activating factor, alterations in membrane fluidity (signal transduction), and inhibition of glucocorticoid synthesis. Due to the widespread and long-term use of G. biloba – about a million doses of EGb761 ® are sold per day – tolerability and safety are a crucial issue. Based on broad and long-term clinical use of G. biloba extracts, it is regarded as well tolerated in man. Cross matching, a tool we introduced, combines different fields of knowledge and types of data to a consolidated result. In this article, we combine toxicological and clinical data and utilize other sources of information to assess tolerability and safety of G. biloba. It is well known that because of biological differences between animals and man or even between animal species, animal experiments do not necessarily mimic the effects in humans. Therefore, for adequate risk assessment, the relevance of non-clinical toxicological findings should be correlated with human data. The cross matching of toxicological data and results from clinical studies is possible because many toxicological and clinical studies are available

Direct quantification of creatinine in human urine by using isotope dilution extractive electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Li Xue; Fang Xiaowei; Yu Zhiqiang; Sheng Guoying; Wu Minghong; Fu Jiamo; Chen Huanwen

2012-01-01

Highlights: ► High throughput analysis of urinary creatinine is achieved by using ID-EESI–MS/MS. ► Urine sample is directly analyzed and no sample pre-treatment is required. ► Accurate quantification is accomplished with isotope dilution technique. - Abstract: Urinary creatinine (CRE) is an important biomarker of renal function. Fast and accurate quantification of CRE in human urine is required by clinical research. By using isotope dilution extractive electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (EESI–MS/MS) a high throughput method for direct and accurate quantification of urinary CRE was developed in this study. Under optimized conditions, the method detection limit was lower than 50 μg L −1 . Over the concentration range investigated (0.05–10 mg L −1 ), the calibration curve was obtained with satisfactory linearity (R 2 = 0.9861), and the relative standard deviation (RSD) values for CRE and isotope-labeled CRE (CRE-d3) were 7.1–11.8% (n = 6) and 4.1–11.3% (n = 6), respectively. The isotope dilution EESI–MS/MS method was validated by analyzing six human urine samples, and the results were comparable with the conventional spectrophotometric method (based on the Jaffe reaction). Recoveries for individual urine samples were 85–111% and less than 0.3 min was taken for each measurement, indicating that the present isotope dilution EESI–MS/MS method is a promising strategy for the fast and accurate quantification of urinary CRE in clinical laboratories.

Machine-learned solutions for three stages of clinical information extraction: the state of the art at i2b2 2010.

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de Bruijn, Berry; Cherry, Colin; Kiritchenko, Svetlana; Martin, Joel; Zhu, Xiaodan

2011-01-01

As clinical text mining continues to mature, its potential as an enabling technology for innovations in patient care and clinical research is becoming a reality. A critical part of that process is rigid benchmark testing of natural language processing methods on realistic clinical narrative. In this paper, the authors describe the design and performance of three state-of-the-art text-mining applications from the National Research Council of Canada on evaluations within the 2010 i2b2 challenge. The three systems perform three key steps in clinical information extraction: (1) extraction of medical problems, tests, and treatments, from discharge summaries and progress notes; (2) classification of assertions made on the medical problems; (3) classification of relations between medical concepts. Machine learning systems performed these tasks using large-dimensional bags of features, as derived from both the text itself and from external sources: UMLS, cTAKES, and Medline. Performance was measured per subtask, using micro-averaged F-scores, as calculated by comparing system annotations with ground-truth annotations on a test set. The systems ranked high among all submitted systems in the competition, with the following F-scores: concept extraction 0.8523 (ranked first); assertion detection 0.9362 (ranked first); relationship detection 0.7313 (ranked second). For all tasks, we found that the introduction of a wide range of features was crucial to success. Importantly, our choice of machine learning algorithms allowed us to be versatile in our feature design, and to introduce a large number of features without overfitting and without encountering computing-resource bottlenecks.

Prospective clinical study comparing intraligamentary anesthesia and inferior alveolar nerve block for extraction of posterior mandibular teeth.

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Kämmerer, P W; Adubae, A; Buttchereit, I; Thiem, D G E; Daubländer, M; Frerich, B

2018-04-01

The aim of the study was to compare the efficacy of intraligamentary anesthesia (ILA) with conventional inferior alveolar nerve block (IANB) for extraction of mandibular posterior teeth. In a prospective clinical trial, a total of 301 mandibular posterior teeth were extracted in 266 patients. Randomization was conducted into those who received ILA (patients n = 98; teeth n = 105) and those who received IANB (patient n = 140; teeth n = 140). Twenty-eight patients were subjected to bilateral mandibular dental extractions and received both ILA und IANB (teeth n = 56 (ILA n = 28; IANB n = 28)). The primary objective was to evaluate the differences in pain during injection, in pain during tooth extraction (numeric rating scale (NRS)), and in anesthetic quality (complete/sufficient vs. insufficient/no effect). Differences in latency time, amount of anesthetic solution, need for second injection, and duration of local numbness as well as in the incidence of dry socket were assessed. ILA had significant lower pain of injection (p < 0.001), shorter latency time (p < 0.001), and shorter duration of local numbness (p < 0.001) and required lesser amount of local anesthetic solution (p < 0.001) together with a similar anesthetic quality (p = 0.082) compared to IANB. Concerning pain during extraction (p = 0.211), frequency of second injection (p = 0.197), and incidence of dry socket (p = 0.178), no significant differences were detected. ILA fulfills the requirements of a minimal invasive and patient-friendly local anesthetic technique. In accordance, it represents a safe and reliable alternative to IANB for extraction of mandibular posterior teeth. ILA can be recommended for routine dental extractions.

A Method for Extracting Suspected Parotid Lesions in CT Images using Feature-based Segmentation and Active Contours based on Stationary Wavelet Transform

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Wu, T. Y.; Lin, S. F.

2013-10-01

Automatic suspected lesion extraction is an important application in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). In this paper, we propose a method to automatically extract the suspected parotid regions for clinical evaluation in head and neck CT images. The suspected lesion tissues in low contrast tissue regions can be localized with feature-based segmentation (FBS) based on local texture features, and can be delineated with accuracy by modified active contour models (ACM). At first, stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is introduced. The derived wavelet coefficients are applied to derive the local features for FBS, and to generate enhanced energy maps for ACM computation. Geometric shape features (GSFs) are proposed to analyze each soft tissue region segmented by FBS; the regions with higher similarity GSFs with the lesions are extracted and the information is also applied as the initial conditions for fine delineation computation. Consequently, the suspected lesions can be automatically localized and accurately delineated for aiding clinical diagnosis. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing with the results outlined by clinical experts. The experiments on 20 pathological CT data sets show that the true-positive (TP) rate on recognizing parotid lesions is about 94%, and the dimension accuracy of delineation results can also approach over 93%.

Information extraction from multi-institutional radiology reports.

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Hassanpour, Saeed; Langlotz, Curtis P

2016-01-01

The radiology report is the most important source of clinical imaging information. It documents critical information about the patient's health and the radiologist's interpretation of medical findings. It also communicates information to the referring physicians and records that information for future clinical and research use. Although efforts to structure some radiology report information through predefined templates are beginning to bear fruit, a large portion of radiology report information is entered in free text. The free text format is a major obstacle for rapid extraction and subsequent use of information by clinicians, researchers, and healthcare information systems. This difficulty is due to the ambiguity and subtlety of natural language, complexity of described images, and variations among different radiologists and healthcare organizations. As a result, radiology reports are used only once by the clinician who ordered the study and rarely are used again for research and data mining. In this work, machine learning techniques and a large multi-institutional radiology report repository are used to extract the semantics of the radiology report and overcome the barriers to the re-use of radiology report information in clinical research and other healthcare applications. We describe a machine learning system to annotate radiology reports and extract report contents according to an information model. This information model covers the majority of clinically significant contents in radiology reports and is applicable to a wide variety of radiology study types. Our automated approach uses discriminative sequence classifiers for named-entity recognition to extract and organize clinically significant terms and phrases consistent with the information model. We evaluated our information extraction system on 150 radiology reports from three major healthcare organizations and compared its results to a commonly used non-machine learning information extraction method. We

Vaccine adverse event text mining system for extracting features from vaccine safety reports.

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Botsis, Taxiarchis; Buttolph, Thomas; Nguyen, Michael D; Winiecki, Scott; Woo, Emily Jane; Ball, Robert

2012-01-01

To develop and evaluate a text mining system for extracting key clinical features from vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) narratives to aid in the automated review of adverse event reports. Based upon clinical significance to VAERS reviewing physicians, we defined the primary (diagnosis and cause of death) and secondary features (eg, symptoms) for extraction. We built a novel vaccine adverse event text mining (VaeTM) system based on a semantic text mining strategy. The performance of VaeTM was evaluated using a total of 300 VAERS reports in three sequential evaluations of 100 reports each. Moreover, we evaluated the VaeTM contribution to case classification; an information retrieval-based approach was used for the identification of anaphylaxis cases in a set of reports and was compared with two other methods: a dedicated text classifier and an online tool. The performance metrics of VaeTM were text mining metrics: recall, precision and F-measure. We also conducted a qualitative difference analysis and calculated sensitivity and specificity for classification of anaphylaxis cases based on the above three approaches. VaeTM performed best in extracting diagnosis, second level diagnosis, drug, vaccine, and lot number features (lenient F-measure in the third evaluation: 0.897, 0.817, 0.858, 0.874, and 0.914, respectively). In terms of case classification, high sensitivity was achieved (83.1%); this was equal and better compared to the text classifier (83.1%) and the online tool (40.7%), respectively. Our VaeTM implementation of a semantic text mining strategy shows promise in providing accurate and efficient extraction of key features from VAERS narratives.

Finger vein extraction using gradient normalization and principal curvature

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Choi, Joon Hwan; Song, Wonseok; Kim, Taejeong; Lee, Seung-Rae; Kim, Hee Chan

2009-02-01

Finger vein authentication is a personal identification technology using finger vein images acquired by infrared imaging. It is one of the newest technologies in biometrics. Its main advantage over other biometrics is the low risk of forgery or theft, due to the fact that finger veins are not normally visible to others. Extracting finger vein patterns from infrared images is the most difficult part in finger vein authentication. Uneven illumination, varying tissues and bones, and changes in the physical conditions and the blood flow make the thickness and brightness of the same vein different in each acquisition. Accordingly, extracting finger veins at their accurate positions regardless of their thickness and brightness is necessary for accurate personal identification. For this purpose, we propose a new finger vein extraction method which is composed of gradient normalization, principal curvature calculation, and binarization. As local brightness variation has little effect on the curvature and as gradient normalization makes the curvature fairly uniform at vein pixels, our method effectively extracts finger vein patterns regardless of the vein thickness or brightness. In our experiment, the proposed method showed notable improvement as compared with the existing methods.

Evaluation of Antioxidant Activity and Growth Control Properties of Nonoscale Structure Produced from Aloe vera var. littoralis Extract on Clinical Isolates of Salmonella.

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Ranjbar, Reza; Arjomandzadegan, Mohammad; Hosseiny, Hossein

2017-07-31

The aim of the study was to examine antibacterial properties of microemulsion structure produced from Aloe vera var. littoralis extract as a new tool of nanoscale drug-like materials. Aloe vera var. littoralis ( A. littoralis ) extract was prepared by distillation method. A nonocarrier structure in the microemulsion system was prepared from the extract. Serial concentrations were prepared from 8 mg/mL extract and the nonocarrier containing 0.1 mg/mL pure extract and were evaluated by a disk diffusion method for 35 Salmonella clinical isolates. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) were determined by microbroth dilution assay using MTT (3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) method by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay(ELISA) Microplate Reader apparatus. Antioxidant activity of the extract was determined by measuring the ferric reducing ability of plasma (FRAP) assay. From 35 clinical isolates of Salmonella , 17 isolates-including resistant isolates of S.E.1103 and S.E.49-had a zone of inhibition (ZI) of 7 to 32 mm in 0.007 mg/mL of the extract. S.E.76 isolate exposed to 30 µg/mL ceftazidime disk had a ZI of 12 mm but had 10 mm in 7µg/mL of A. littoralis extract. The inhibitory effect of a nanocarrier at a concentration of 25 µg/mL by 20 mm ZI was comparable by the ceftazidime (30 µg/mL) effect. MIC 50 was 0.25 mg/mL and MBC 50 was 0.5 mg/mL by MTT method for the extract. It was shown that A.littoralis extract had antioxidant activity of 31.67 µM/mg that could be increased based on concentration. It was concluded that the nanocarrier had a significant effect on the studied isolates in comparison with ordinary antibiotics and had potential for use as a natural antioxidant and antimicrobial material in complementary medicine.

Real-time Accurate Surface Reconstruction Pipeline for Vision Guided Planetary Exploration Using Unmanned Ground and Aerial Vehicles

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Almeida, Eduardo DeBrito

2012-01-01

This report discusses work completed over the summer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology. A system is presented to guide ground or aerial unmanned robots using computer vision. The system performs accurate camera calibration, camera pose refinement and surface extraction from images collected by a camera mounted on the vehicle. The application motivating the research is planetary exploration and the vehicles are typically rovers or unmanned aerial vehicles. The information extracted from imagery is used primarily for navigation, as robot location is the same as the camera location and the surfaces represent the terrain that rovers traverse. The processed information must be very accurate and acquired very fast in order to be useful in practice. The main challenge being addressed by this project is to achieve high estimation accuracy and high computation speed simultaneously, a difficult task due to many technical reasons.

ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITIES OF DRIED LEAF EXTRACTS OF CARICA PAPAYA, PTEROCARPUS SOYAUXII, AND VERNONIA AMYGDALINA ON CLINICAL ISOLATES OF ESCHERICHIA COLI, KLEBSIELLA PNEUMONIAE, STAPHYLOCOCCUS AUREUS AND BACILLUS SUBTILIS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chima NGUMAH

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The antibacterial activities of cold and hot ethanol extracts of air-dried leaves of Carica papaya, Pterocarpus soyauxii, and Vernonia amygdalina on clinical isolates of Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis were investigated. The cup-plate agar method was used to determine bacterial susceptibility. All the plant extracts screened were potent on the entire clinical isolates tested. However, there was no significant difference in the inhibition zone diameters of the plant extracts screened (on all the test isolates. There was also no significant difference in the inhibition zone diameters between the cold and hot ethanol extracts of each plant. Phytochemical analysis revealed the presence of alkaloids, anthroquinone, flavonoids, saponins, steroids, tannins, terpenoids and glycosides in all leaf samples. The results obtained here reveal the antibacterial potentials of the leaf extracts of Carica papaya, Pterocarpus soyauxii, and Vernonia amygdalina, and suggests their possible exploitation for the development of novel herbal-based antimicrobials.

Parallel Key Frame Extraction for Surveillance Video Service in a Smart City.

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Zheng, Ran; Yao, Chuanwei; Jin, Hai; Zhu, Lei; Zhang, Qin; Deng, Wei

2015-01-01

Surveillance video service (SVS) is one of the most important services provided in a smart city. It is very important for the utilization of SVS to provide design efficient surveillance video analysis techniques. Key frame extraction is a simple yet effective technique to achieve this goal. In surveillance video applications, key frames are typically used to summarize important video content. It is very important and essential to extract key frames accurately and efficiently. A novel approach is proposed to extract key frames from traffic surveillance videos based on GPU (graphics processing units) to ensure high efficiency and accuracy. For the determination of key frames, motion is a more salient feature in presenting actions or events, especially in surveillance videos. The motion feature is extracted in GPU to reduce running time. It is also smoothed to reduce noise, and the frames with local maxima of motion information are selected as the final key frames. The experimental results show that this approach can extract key frames more accurately and efficiently compared with several other methods.

Parallel Key Frame Extraction for Surveillance Video Service in a Smart City.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ran Zheng

Full Text Available Surveillance video service (SVS is one of the most important services provided in a smart city. It is very important for the utilization of SVS to provide design efficient surveillance video analysis techniques. Key frame extraction is a simple yet effective technique to achieve this goal. In surveillance video applications, key frames are typically used to summarize important video content. It is very important and essential to extract key frames accurately and efficiently. A novel approach is proposed to extract key frames from traffic surveillance videos based on GPU (graphics processing units to ensure high efficiency and accuracy. For the determination of key frames, motion is a more salient feature in presenting actions or events, especially in surveillance videos. The motion feature is extracted in GPU to reduce running time. It is also smoothed to reduce noise, and the frames with local maxima of motion information are selected as the final key frames. The experimental results show that this approach can extract key frames more accurately and efficiently compared with several other methods.

Establishing Accurate and Sustainable Geospatial Reference Layers in Developing Countries

Science.gov (United States)

Seaman, V. Y.

2017-12-01

Accurate geospatial reference layers (settlement names & locations, administrative boundaries, and population) are not readily available for most developing countries. This critical information gap makes it challenging for governments to efficiently plan, allocate resources, and provide basic services. It also hampers international agencies' response to natural disasters, humanitarian crises, and other emergencies. The current work involves a recent successful effort, led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of Nigeria, to obtain such data. The data collection began in 2013, with local teams collecting names, coordinates, and administrative attributes for over 100,000 settlements using ODK-enabled smartphones. A settlement feature layer extracted from satellite imagery was used to ensure all settlements were included. Administrative boundaries (Ward, LGA) were created using the settlement attributes. These "new" boundary layers were much more accurate than existing shapefiles used by the government and international organizations. The resulting data sets helped Nigeria eradicate polio from all areas except in the extreme northeast, where security issues limited access and vaccination activities. In addition to the settlement and boundary layers, a GIS-based population model was developed, in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Flowminder), that used the extracted settlement areas and characteristics, along with targeted microcensus data. This model provides population and demographics estimates independent of census or other administrative data, at a resolution of 90 meters. These robust geospatial data layers found many other uses, including establishing catchment area settlements and populations for health facilities, validating denominators for population-based surveys, and applications across a variety of government sectors. Based on the success of the Nigeria effort, a partnership between DfID and the Bill & Melinda Gates

A Technique Using Calibrated Photography and Photoshop for Accurate Shade Analysis and Communication.

Science.gov (United States)

McLaren, Edward A; Figueira, Johan; Goldstein, Ronald E

2017-02-01

This article reviews the critical aspects of controlling the shade-taking environment and discusses various modalities introduced throughout the years to acquire and communicate shade information. Demonstrating a highly calibrated digital photographic technique for capturing shade information, this article shows how to use Photoshop® to standardize images and extract color information from the tooth and shade tab for use by a ceramist for an accurate shade-matching restoration.

Antimicrobial activity of extracts from macroalgae Ulva lactuca against clinically important Staphylococci is impacted by lunar phase of macroalgae harvest.

Science.gov (United States)

Deveau, A M; Miller-Hope, Z; Lloyd, E; Williams, B S; Bolduc, C; Meader, J M; Weiss, F; Burkholder, K M

2016-05-01

Staphylococcus aureus is a common human bacterial pathogen that causes skin and soft tissue infections. Methicillin-resistant Staph. aureus (MRSA) are increasingly drug-resistant, and thus there is great need for new therapeutics to treat Staph. aureus infections. Attention has focused on potential utility of natural products, such as extracts of marine macroalgae, as a source of novel antimicrobial compounds. The green macroalgae Ulva lactuca produces compounds inhibitory to human pathogens, although the effectiveness of U. lactuca extracts against clinically relevant strains of Staph. aureus is poorly understood. In addition, macroalgae produce secondary metabolites that may be influenced by exogenous factors including lunar phase, but whether lunar phase affects U. lactuca antimicrobial capacity is unknown. We sought to evaluate the antibacterial properties of U. lactuca extracts against medically important Staphylococci, and to determine the effect of lunar phase on antimicrobial activity. We report that U. lactuca methanolic extracts inhibit a range of Staphylococci, and that lunar phase of macrolagae harvest significantly impacts antimicrobial activity, suggesting that antimicrobial properties can be maximized by manipulating time of algal harvest. These findings provide useful parameters for future studies aimed at isolating and characterizing U. lactuca anti-Staphylococcal agents. The growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant human pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has intensified efforts towards discovery and development of novel therapeutics. Marine macroalgae like Ulva lactuca are increasingly recognized as potential sources of antimicrobials, but the efficacy of U. lactuca extracts against common, virulent strains of Staph. aureus is poorly understood. We demonstrate that U. lactuca methanolic extracts inhibit a variety of clinically relevant Staphylococcus strains, and that the antimicrobial activity can

The effect of a dentifrice containing Magnolia extract on established plaque and gingivitis in man: a six-month clinical study.

Science.gov (United States)

Hellström, M-K; Ramberg, P

2014-05-01

The aim was to evaluate the clinical effect of a dentifrice containing 0.3% Magnolia extract on dental plaque and gingivitis. The trial was a 6-month double-blind, stratified, randomized and 2-armed parallel group study. Forty-six subjects in the test group brushed their teeth with a dentifrice containing 0.3% Magnolia extract and 48 subjects in the control group brushed with a placebo dentifrice. Plaque and gingivitis were assessed at baseline, 3 and 6 months. There was a significantly larger gingivitis reduction in the Magnolia group than in the control group (0.26 ± 0.11 versus 0.11 ± 0.12) (P gingival units Gingival Index (GI score 0) in the Magnolia group than in the control group (149% versus 31%) and a larger reduction in inflamed gingival units (GI score 2/3) (60% versus 30%). Furthermore, at sites with similar amounts of plaque, less clinical signs of gingival inflammation were observed in the Magnolia group than in the control group. Six months' unsupervised use of a dentifrice containing 0.3% Magnolia extract resulted in significantly greater gingivitis reduction than a corresponding control dentifrice. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Efficacy of the Punica granatum peels aqueous extract for symptom management in ulcerative colitis patients. A randomized, placebo-controlled, clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Kamali, Mohammadali; Tavakoli, Hamid; Khodadoost, Mahmoud; Daghaghzadeh, Hamed; Kamalinejad, Mohammad; Gachkar, Latif; Mansourian, Marjan; Adibi, Payman

2015-08-01

To investigate the effects of the Punica granatum peel extract on symptoms of patients with ulcerative colitis (UC). Patients with UC were randomized to receive an aqueous extract of the P. granatum peel (6 g of dry peel/day) or placebo for four weeks complementary to standard medications. Symptoms were assessed using the Lichtiger Colitis Activity Index (LCAI) at baseline, week 4, and week 10 (follow-up). Clinical response was defined by ≥ 3 point decrease in LCAI. The LCAI score was similarly reduced in both the P. granatum (-1.68 ± 3.85, P = 0.019) and placebo groups (-1.39 ± 2.41, P = 0.002). Clinical response was higher with P. granatum compared with placebo at week 4 (41.4% vs. 18.2%, P = 0.055), but not at week 10 (48.3% vs. 36.4%, P = 0.441). The P. granatum peel extract seems effective in complementary management of UC. Further studies in a larger sample of patients are warranted. IRCT2014040617156N1. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Deformable meshes for medical image segmentation accurate automatic segmentation of anatomical structures

CERN Document Server

Kainmueller, Dagmar

2014-01-01

? Segmentation of anatomical structures in medical image data is an essential task in clinical practice. Dagmar Kainmueller introduces methods for accurate fully automatic segmentation of anatomical structures in 3D medical image data. The author's core methodological contribution is a novel deformation model that overcomes limitations of state-of-the-art Deformable Surface approaches, hence allowing for accurate segmentation of tip- and ridge-shaped features of anatomical structures. As for practical contributions, she proposes application-specific segmentation pipelines for a range of anatom

Direct quantification of creatinine in human urine by using isotope dilution extractive electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Li Xue [Institute of Environmental Pollution and Health, School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444 (China); Jiangxi Key Laboratory for Mass Spectrometry and Instrumentation, Applied Chemistry Department, East China Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330013 (China); Fang Xiaowei [Jiangxi Key Laboratory for Mass Spectrometry and Instrumentation, Applied Chemistry Department, East China Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330013 (China); Yu Zhiqiang; Sheng Guoying [Guangdong Key Laboratory of Environmental Protection and Resource Utilization, State Key Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510640 (China); Wu Minghong [Shanghai Applied Radiation Institute, School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444 (China); Fu Jiamo [Institute of Environmental Pollution and Health, School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444 (China); Guangdong Key Laboratory of Environmental Protection and Resource Utilization, State Key Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510640 (China); Chen Huanwen, E-mail: chw8868@gmail.com [Jiangxi Key Laboratory for Mass Spectrometry and Instrumentation, Applied Chemistry Department, East China Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330013 (China)

2012-10-20

Highlights: Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer High throughput analysis of urinary creatinine is achieved by using ID-EESI-MS/MS. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Urine sample is directly analyzed and no sample pre-treatment is required. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Accurate quantification is accomplished with isotope dilution technique. - Abstract: Urinary creatinine (CRE) is an important biomarker of renal function. Fast and accurate quantification of CRE in human urine is required by clinical research. By using isotope dilution extractive electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (EESI-MS/MS) a high throughput method for direct and accurate quantification of urinary CRE was developed in this study. Under optimized conditions, the method detection limit was lower than 50 {mu}g L{sup -1}. Over the concentration range investigated (0.05-10 mg L{sup -1}), the calibration curve was obtained with satisfactory linearity (R{sup 2} = 0.9861), and the relative standard deviation (RSD) values for CRE and isotope-labeled CRE (CRE-d3) were 7.1-11.8% (n = 6) and 4.1-11.3% (n = 6), respectively. The isotope dilution EESI-MS/MS method was validated by analyzing six human urine samples, and the results were comparable with the conventional spectrophotometric method (based on the Jaffe reaction). Recoveries for individual urine samples were 85-111% and less than 0.3 min was taken for each measurement, indicating that the present isotope dilution EESI-MS/MS method is a promising strategy for the fast and accurate quantification of urinary CRE in clinical laboratories.

The Anticaries Effect of a Food Extract (Shiitake in a Short-Term Clinical Study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peter Lingström

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The main objective was to investigate whether low-molecular-weight fraction of edible mushroom shiitake extract (Lentinus edodes possesses caries-preventive properties. The study was designed as a double-blind, three-leg, cross-over, randomized, controlled clinical trial carried out on two series of volunteers at the University of Gothenburg, and the Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam. Volunteers rinsed twice daily with a solution containing low-molecular-weight fraction of edible mushroom, placebo (negative control without active ingredients, or Meridol (positive control, AmF-SnF2 for two weeks, with a two-week washout period between each rinsing period. Changes in the acidogenicity of dental plaque before and after a sucrose challenge, shifts in microbial composition, and plaque scores were determined. Frequent rinses with shiitake reduced the metabolic activity of dental plaque. No reduction of plaque scores and no inhibition of the production of organic acids in plaque was found. Minor differences in microbial composition between test sessions were found. To conclude, the results indicate that shiitake extract has anticariogenic potential, but not to the same extent as the positive control.

The Anticaries Effect of a Food Extract (Shiitake) in a Short-Term Clinical Study

Science.gov (United States)

Lingström, Peter; Zaura, Egija; Hassan, Haidar; Buijs, Mark J.; Hedelin, Pamie; Pratten, Jonathan; Spratt, David; Daglia, Maria; Karbowiak, Aneta; Signoretto, Caterina; Rosema, Martijn; van der Weijden, Fridus; Wilson, Michael

2012-01-01

The main objective was to investigate whether low-molecular-weight fraction of edible mushroom shiitake extract (Lentinus edodes) possesses caries-preventive properties. The study was designed as a double-blind, three-leg, cross-over, randomized, controlled clinical trial carried out on two series of volunteers at the University of Gothenburg, and the Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam. Volunteers rinsed twice daily with a solution containing low-molecular-weight fraction of edible mushroom, placebo (negative control without active ingredients), or Meridol (positive control, AmF-SnF2) for two weeks, with a two-week washout period between each rinsing period. Changes in the acidogenicity of dental plaque before and after a sucrose challenge, shifts in microbial composition, and plaque scores were determined. Frequent rinses with shiitake reduced the metabolic activity of dental plaque. No reduction of plaque scores and no inhibition of the production of organic acids in plaque was found. Minor differences in microbial composition between test sessions were found. To conclude, the results indicate that shiitake extract has anticariogenic potential, but not to the same extent as the positive control. PMID:22500081

How Accurately Do Consecutive Cohort Audits Predict Phase III Multisite Clinical Trial Recruitment in Palliative Care?

Science.gov (United States)

McCaffrey, Nikki; Fazekas, Belinda; Cutri, Natalie; Currow, David C

2016-04-01

Audits have been proposed for estimating possible recruitment rates to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), but few studies have compared audit data with subsequent recruitment rates. To compare the accuracy of estimates of potential recruitment from a retrospective consecutive cohort audit of actual participating sites and recruitment to four Phase III multisite clinical RCTs. The proportion of potentially eligible study participants estimated from an inpatient chart review of people with life-limiting illnesses referred to six Australian specialist palliative care services was compared with recruitment data extracted from study prescreening information from three sites that participated fully in four Palliative Care Clinical Studies Collaborative RCTs. The predominant reasons for ineligibility in the audit and RCTs were analyzed. The audit overestimated the proportion of people referred to the palliative care services who could participate in the RCTs (pain 17.7% vs. 1.2%, delirium 5.8% vs. 0.6%, anorexia 5.1% vs. 0.8%, and bowel obstruction 2.8% vs. 0.5%). Approximately 2% of the referral base was potentially eligible for these effectiveness studies. Ineligibility for general criteria (language, cognition, and geographic proximity) varied between studies, whereas the reasons for exclusion were similar between the audit and pain and anorexia studies but not for delirium or bowel obstruction. The retrospective consecutive case note audit in participating sites did not predict realistic recruitment rates, mostly underestimating the impact of study-specific inclusion criteria. These findings have implications for the applicability of the results of RCTs. Prospective pilot studies are more likely to predict actual recruitment. Copyright © 2016 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Clinical Analysis of Analgesics and Steroids Use for Extraction of Teeth in Patients with Intellectual Disability Under General Anesthesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Maeda, Shigeru; Honda, Yuka; Tanimura, Hiroshi; Tomoyasu, Yumiko; Higuchi, Hitoshi; Murata, Naomichi; Egusa, Masahiko; Miyawaki, Takuya

2017-01-01

The extraction of lower wisdom teeth is often performed under general anesthesia in patients with intellectual disabilities. However, the choice of analgesics has not yet been investigated. To analyze the use of analgesics during general anesthesia for extraction including lower wisdom teeth in patients with intellectual disabilities. This research is a retrospective observational study. The study population was composed of all patients presenting for extraction of lower wisdom teeth under ambulatory general anesthesia in the clinic of Special Needs Dentistry in Okayama University Hospital from April 2011 to March 2016. The distribution of the combination of analgesics and the relationship between the use of analgesics and the type of extraction were investigated. One hundred and twelve cases were enrolled in this study. Intravenous injections of flurbiprofen, acetaminophen and betamethasone were used in 96 (85.7%), 12 (10.7%) and 26 cases (23.2%), respectively. Flurbiprofen is a non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Acetaminophen is an old analgesic, but an injection of acetaminophen is new, which was released in 2013 in Japan. And betamethasone is not an analgesic, but a steroid. Betamethasone was used in combination with other analgesics, and was used at a higher dose in a case in which four wisdom teeth were extracted. Flurbiprofen was the main analgesic used for extraction of wisdom teeth under general anesthesia in patients with intellectual disabilities. Betamethasone was used to support flurbiprofen or acetaminophen for extractions of multiple wisdom teeth, with the aim of controlling swelling rather than relieving pain.

AMID: Accurate Magnetic Indoor Localization Using Deep Learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Namkyoung Lee

2018-05-01

Full Text Available Geomagnetic-based indoor positioning has drawn a great attention from academia and industry due to its advantage of being operable without infrastructure support and its reliable signal characteristics. However, it must overcome the problems of ambiguity that originate with the nature of geomagnetic data. Most studies manage this problem by incorporating particle filters along with inertial sensors. However, they cannot yield reliable positioning results because the inertial sensors in smartphones cannot precisely predict the movement of users. There have been attempts to recognize the magnetic sequence pattern, but these attempts are proven only in a one-dimensional space, because magnetic intensity fluctuates severely with even a slight change of locations. This paper proposes accurate magnetic indoor localization using deep learning (AMID, an indoor positioning system that recognizes magnetic sequence patterns using a deep neural network. Features are extracted from magnetic sequences, and then the deep neural network is used for classifying the sequences by patterns that are generated by nearby magnetic landmarks. Locations are estimated by detecting the landmarks. AMID manifested the proposed features and deep learning as an outstanding classifier, revealing the potential of accurate magnetic positioning with smartphone sensors alone. The landmark detection accuracy was over 80% in a two-dimensional environment.

Three-dimensional multi-terminal superconductive integrated circuit inductance extraction

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fourie, Coenrad J; Wetzstein, Olaf; Kunert, Jürgen; Ortlepp, Thomas

2011-01-01

Accurate inductance calculations are critical for the design of both digital and analogue superconductive integrated circuits, and three-dimensional calculations are gaining importance with the advent of inductive biasing, inductive coupling and sky plane shielding for RSFQ cells. InductEx, an extraction programme based on the three-dimensional calculation software FastHenry, was proposed earlier. InductEx uses segmentation techniques designed to accurately model the geometries of superconductive integrated circuit structures. Inductance extraction for complex multi-terminal three-dimensional structures from current distributions calculated by FastHenry is discussed. Results for both a reflection plane modelling an infinite ground plane and a finite segmented ground plane that allows inductive elements to extend over holes in the ground plane are shown. Several SQUIDs were designed for and fabricated with IPHT's 1 kA cm −2 RSFQ1D niobium process. These SQUIDs implement a number of loop structures that span different layers, include vias, inductively coupled control lines and ground plane holes. We measured the loop inductance of these SQUIDs and show how the results are used to calibrate the layer parameters in InductEx and verify the extraction accuracy. We also show that, with proper modelling, FastHenry can be fast enough to be used for the extraction of typical RSFQ cell inductances.

Quantitative Structure-Relative Volatility Relationship Model for Extractive Distillation of Ethylbenzene/p-Xylene Mixtures: Application to Binary and Ternary Mixtures as Extractive Agents

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kang, Young-Mook; Oh, Kyunghwan; You, Hwan; No, Kyoung Tai [Bioinformatics and Molecular Design Research Center, Seoul (Korea, Republic of); Jeon, Yukwon; Shul, Yong-Gun; Hwang, Sung Bo; Shin, Hyun Kil; Kim, Min Sung; Kim, Namseok; Son, Hyoungjun [Yonsei University, Seoul (Korea, Republic of); Chu, Young Hwan [Sangji University, Wonju (Korea, Republic of); Cho, Kwang-Hwi [Soongsil University, Seoul (Korea, Republic of)

2016-04-15

Ethylbenzene (EB) and p-xylene (PX) are important chemicals for the production of industrial materials; accordingly, their efficient separation is desired, even though the difference in their boiling points is very small. This paper describes the efforts toward the identification of high-performance extractive agents for EB and PX separation by distillation. Most high-performance extractive agents contain halogen atoms, which present health hazards and are corrosive to distillation plates. To avoid this disadvantage of extractive agents, we developed a quantitative structure-relative volatility relationship (QSRVR) model for designing safe extractive agents. We have previously developed and reported QSRVR models for single extractive agents. In this study, we introduce extended QSRVR models for binary and ternary extractive agents. The QSRVR models accurately predict the relative volatilities of binary and ternary extractive agents. The service to predict the relative volatility for binary and ternary extractive agents is freely available from the Internet at http://qsrvr.o pengsi.org/.

Quantitative Structure-Relative Volatility Relationship Model for Extractive Distillation of Ethylbenzene/p-Xylene Mixtures: Application to Binary and Ternary Mixtures as Extractive Agents

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kang, Young-Mook; Oh, Kyunghwan; You, Hwan; No, Kyoung Tai; Jeon, Yukwon; Shul, Yong-Gun; Hwang, Sung Bo; Shin, Hyun Kil; Kim, Min Sung; Kim, Namseok; Son, Hyoungjun; Chu, Young Hwan; Cho, Kwang-Hwi

2016-01-01

Ethylbenzene (EB) and p-xylene (PX) are important chemicals for the production of industrial materials; accordingly, their efficient separation is desired, even though the difference in their boiling points is very small. This paper describes the efforts toward the identification of high-performance extractive agents for EB and PX separation by distillation. Most high-performance extractive agents contain halogen atoms, which present health hazards and are corrosive to distillation plates. To avoid this disadvantage of extractive agents, we developed a quantitative structure-relative volatility relationship (QSRVR) model for designing safe extractive agents. We have previously developed and reported QSRVR models for single extractive agents. In this study, we introduce extended QSRVR models for binary and ternary extractive agents. The QSRVR models accurately predict the relative volatilities of binary and ternary extractive agents. The service to predict the relative volatility for binary and ternary extractive agents is freely available from the Internet at http://qsrvr.o pengsi.org/.

EM simulation assisted parameter extraction for the modeling of transferred-substrate InP HBTs

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Johansen, Tom Keinicke; Weimann, Nils; Doerner, Ralf

2017-01-01

In this paper an electromagnetic (EM) simulation assisted parameters extraction procedure is demonstrated for accurate modeling of down-scaled transferred-substrate InP HBTs. The external parasitic network associated with via transitions and device electrodes is carefully extracted from calibrate...

Optimized digital feature extraction in the FERMI microsystem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Alexanian, H.; Appelquist, G.; Bailly, P.

1995-01-01

We describe the digital filter section of the FERMI readout microsystem. The filter section, consisting of two separate filter blocks, extracts the pulse amplitude and time information for the first-level trigger process and performs a highly accurate energy measurement for higher-level triggering and data readout purposes. An FIR-order statistic hybrid filter structure is used to improve the amplitude extraction performance. Using a training procedure the filters are optimized to produce a precise and accurate output in the presence of electronics and pile-up noise, sample timing jitter and the superposition of high-energy pulses. As the FERMI system resides inside the detector where accessibility is limited, the filter implementations are presented together with fault tolerance considerations. The filter section is modelled with the VHDL hardware descriptive language and the subsystems are further optimized to minimize the system latency and circuit area. ((orig.))

Skin tumor area extraction using an improved dynamic programming approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Abbas, Qaisar; Celebi, M E; Fondón García, Irene

2012-05-01

Border (B) description of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions is one of the most important tasks for the clinical diagnosis of dermoscopy images using the ABCD rule. For an accurate description of the border, there must be an effective skin tumor area extraction (STAE) method. However, this task is complicated due to uneven illumination, artifacts present in the lesions and smooth areas or fuzzy borders of the desired regions. In this paper, a novel STAE algorithm based on improved dynamic programming (IDP) is presented. The STAE technique consists of the following four steps: color space transform, pre-processing, rough tumor area detection and refinement of the segmented area. The procedure is performed in the CIE L(*) a(*) b(*) color space, which is approximately uniform and is therefore related to dermatologist's perception. After pre-processing the skin lesions to reduce artifacts, the DP algorithm is improved by introducing a local cost function, which is based on color and texture weights. The STAE method is tested on a total of 100 dermoscopic images. In order to compare the performance of STAE with other state-of-the-art algorithms, various statistical measures based on dermatologist-drawn borders are utilized as a ground truth. The proposed method outperforms the others with a sensitivity of 96.64%, a specificity of 98.14% and an error probability of 5.23%. The results demonstrate that this STAE method by IDP is an effective solution when compared with other state-of-the-art segmentation techniques. The proposed method can accurately extract tumor borders in dermoscopy images. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons A/S.

Extraction of ultrashort DNA molecules from herbarium specimens.

Science.gov (United States)

Gutaker, Rafal M; Reiter, Ella; Furtwängler, Anja; Schuenemann, Verena J; Burbano, Hernán A

2017-02-01

DNA extracted from herbarium specimens is highly fragmented; therefore, it is crucial to use extraction protocols that retrieve short DNA molecules. Improvements in extraction and DNA library preparation protocols for animal remains have allowed efficient retrieval of molecules shorter than 50 bp. Here, we applied these improvements to DNA extraction protocols for herbarium specimens and evaluated extraction performance by shotgun sequencing, which allows an accurate estimation of the distribution of DNA fragment lengths. Extraction with N-phenacylthiazolium bromide (PTB) buffer decreased median fragment length by 35% when compared with cetyl-trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB); modifying the binding conditions of DNA to silica allowed for an additional decrease of 10%. We did not observe a further decrease in length for single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) versus double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) library preparation methods. Our protocol enables the retrieval of ultrashort molecules from herbarium specimens, which will help to unlock the genetic information stored in herbaria.

Phytochemical, toxicological and antimicrobial evaluation of Lawsonia inermis extracts against clinical isolates of pathogenic bacteria.

Science.gov (United States)

Gull, Iram; Sohail, Maria; Aslam, Muhammad Shahbaz; Amin Athar, Muhammad

2013-12-01

The emerging resistance of pathogen against the currently available antimicrobial agents demands the search of new antimicrobial agents. The use of medicinal plants as natural substitute is the paramount area of research to overwhelm the drug resistance of infectious agents. Scientists have not made enough effort on the evaluation of safety of medicinal plant yet. In the present study antimicrobial activity of Lawsonia inermis is investigated against clinical isolates of seven bacteria including four Gram negative (Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi, Klebsiella spp., Shigella sonnei) and three Gram positive (Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis) using disc diffusion method. Four types of Lawsonia inermis extracts were prepared using methanol, chloroform, acetone and water as extraction solvents, while DMSO (Dimethyl sulfoxide) and water as dissolution solvents. The rate and extent of bacterial killing was estimated by time-kill kinetic assay at 1× MIC of each bacterial isolate. The overall safety of Lawsonia inermis extracts was assessed in mice. Lawsonia inermis displayed noteworthy antimicrobial activity against both gram positive and gram negative bacterial strains used in the study. The minimum value of MIC for different bacterial strains ranged from 2.31 mg/ml to 9.27 mg/ml. At 1x MIC of each bacterial isolate, 3log10 decrease in CFU was recorded after 6 hours of drug exposure and no growth was observed in almost all tested bacteria after 24 hours of exposure. No sign of toxidrome were observed during in vivo toxicity evaluation in mice at 300 mg/kg concentration. In conclusion, the present study provides the scientific rational for medicinal use of Lawsonia inermis. The use of Lawsonia inermis extracts is of great significance as substitute antimicrobial agent in therapeutics.

Eyeglasses Lens Contour Extraction from Facial Images Using an Efficient Shape Description

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Diana Borza

2013-10-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a system that automatically extracts the position of the eyeglasses and the accurate shape and size of the frame lenses in facial images. The novelty brought by this paper consists in three key contributions. The first one is an original model for representing the shape of the eyeglasses lens, using Fourier descriptors. The second one is a method for generating the search space starting from a finite, relatively small number of representative lens shapes based on Fourier morphing. Finally, we propose an accurate lens contour extraction algorithm using a multi-stage Monte Carlo sampling technique. Multiple experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Modelling and performance analysis of clinical pathways using the stochastic process algebra PEPA.

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Xian; Han, Rui; Guo, Yike; Bradley, Jeremy; Cox, Benita; Dickinson, Robert; Kitney, Richard

2012-01-01

Hospitals nowadays have to serve numerous patients with limited medical staff and equipment while maintaining healthcare quality. Clinical pathway informatics is regarded as an efficient way to solve a series of hospital challenges. To date, conventional research lacks a mathematical model to describe clinical pathways. Existing vague descriptions cannot fully capture the complexities accurately in clinical pathways and hinders the effective management and further optimization of clinical pathways. Given this motivation, this paper presents a clinical pathway management platform, the Imperial Clinical Pathway Analyzer (ICPA). By extending the stochastic model performance evaluation process algebra (PEPA), ICPA introduces a clinical-pathway-specific model: clinical pathway PEPA (CPP). ICPA can simulate stochastic behaviours of a clinical pathway by extracting information from public clinical databases and other related documents using CPP. Thus, the performance of this clinical pathway, including its throughput, resource utilisation and passage time can be quantitatively analysed. A typical clinical pathway on stroke extracted from a UK hospital is used to illustrate the effectiveness of ICPA. Three application scenarios are tested using ICPA: 1) redundant resources are identified and removed, thus the number of patients being served is maintained with less cost; 2) the patient passage time is estimated, providing the likelihood that patients can leave hospital within a specific period; 3) the maximum number of input patients are found, helping hospitals to decide whether they can serve more patients with the existing resource allocation. ICPA is an effective platform for clinical pathway management: 1) ICPA can describe a variety of components (state, activity, resource and constraints) in a clinical pathway, thus facilitating the proper understanding of complexities involved in it; 2) ICPA supports the performance analysis of clinical pathway, thereby assisting

Quartz fast component opticallystimulated luminescence: Towards routine extraction for dating applications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shen, Zhixiong; Lang, Andreas

2016-01-01

Using an uncontaminated fast component is a key for improving the reliability of quartz OSL dating for many deposits. So far no approach to extract the fast component of quartz OSL has routinely been adopted for dating practice. Key challenges for extracting fast components are (1) the difficulty of finding a unique solution in curve-fitting deconvolution of OSL decay curves and (2) the relatively poor dating precision when using experimental fast component extraction. Here, a simple mathematic solution for fast component extraction is presented that is not relying on curve-fitting deconvolution and can easily be adopted into routine dating practices. By using specifically selected data points from smoothed OSL decay curves, the precision of equivalent doses calculated using the extracted fast component can be improved over equivalent doses calculated using bulk OSL. The fast component extraction is tested on a group of age-constrained samples containing both insufficiently bleached and sufficiently bleached deposits. Fast component OSL ages are as accurate as bulk OSL ages for the sufficiently bleached deposits, but more accurate for samples where bulk OSL is affected by insufficient bleaching. We also demonstrate how using a curve smoothing procedure can improve dating precision in case of both sufficiently and insufficiently bleached deposits. - Highlights: • A simple mathematical method to extract quartz OSL fast component is presented. • The method can be adopted in D_e calculation programs for routine extraction. • The method leads to an increase in accuracy and precision of D_e. • The method works for relatively dim samples with low signal-to-noise ratios.

Clinical study of Atopic Dermatitis patient treated with Poison Extraction Method

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Park Chi-young

2007-06-01

Full Text Available Objectives : This study is desinged in order to evaluate the Poison extraction method for the Atopic dermatitis. Methods : The authors observed the two cases of Atopic dermatitis patients who previously used steroid-based ointment. for treating the Poison Extraction Method. Conclusions : 1. In case 1, the patient with mild case of Atopic dermatitis in face is treated with the Poison extraction method. Rash symptoms intensed for first few days. As sweating appeared in the local area from the seventh day, all the symptoms was disappeared rapidly. No recurrence was found. 2. In case 2, the patient with severe case of Atopic dermatitis in whole body is treated with the Poison extraction method. The symptoms intensed after two months and all the symptoms of itchiness, rash, scaly letter dissapeared in the third and fourth months. No recurrence was found. 3. In both cases of mild and severe cases of Atopic dermatitis. all the symptoms were disappeared and no recurrence was found with the Poison Extraction Method.

Adult orthodontic therapy: extraction versus non-extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Baumrind, S

1998-11-01

This study addresses the problem of randomization of subjects with respect to an irreversible aspect of treatment strategy, namely, the extraction of teeth. The investigation includes both prospective and retrospective components. The data presented focus on clinician decision-making. Of the 1321 potential subjects for whom records were taken, 250 met the inclusion criteria. Of these subjects, 82 declined to participate and 20 were dropped because of difficulty in obtaining five independent evaluations of their records within a reasonable time frame. Thus, the final sample contained 148 subjects. Approximately one-third of the subjects in the sample are adult, somewhat more than half are female, and Class I malocclusions outnumber Class II malocclusions by a count of 95 to 53. Patterns of agreement and disagreement among five clinicians include: a) agreement/disagreement on the primary decision whether or not to extract: the data reveal a strong tendency towards consensus among the clinicians; b) agreement/disagreement on extraction pattern in patients in whom the clinician believes that extraction is indicated: the clinicians tended strongly to agree on extraction pattern; c) agreement/disagreement on the need for adjunctive orthognathic surgery: decisions favoring surgery were more common and more 'definite' than 'probable' in the adult cohort than in the adolescent cohort but this tendency was not as strong as had been anticipated; d) agreement/disagreement concerning Angle classification: disagreements were more common than had been anticipated; and e) differences among the individual clinicians as to their ratios of extraction/non-extraction decisions: overall, clinicians opted for extraction less frequently in the adolescent cohort than in the adult cohort (55 vs. 66%). Because the data are drawn from actual clinical experience, the conclusions involve a number of assumptions and their generalizability should be evaluated.

Semantics-based information extraction for detecting economic events

NARCIS (Netherlands)

A.C. Hogenboom (Alexander); F. Frasincar (Flavius); K. Schouten (Kim); O. van der Meer

2013-01-01

textabstractAs today's financial markets are sensitive to breaking news on economic events, accurate and timely automatic identification of events in news items is crucial. Unstructured news items originating from many heterogeneous sources have to be mined in order to extract knowledge useful for

Oral administration of French maritime pine bark extract (Flavangenol® improves clinical symptoms in photoaged facial skin

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Furumura M

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Minao Furumura,1,2 Noriko Sato,1 Nobutaka Kusaba,3 Kinya Takagaki,3 Juichiro Nakayama11Department of Dermatology, Fukuoka University School of Medicine, Fukuoka, 2Department of Dermatology, Kurume University School of Medicine and Kurume University Institute of Cutaneous Cell Biology, Fukuoka, 3Toyo Shinyaku Co Ltd, Tosu City, Saga, JapanBackground: French maritime pine bark extract (PBE has gained popularity as a dietary supplement in the treatment of various diseases due to its polyphenol-rich ingredients. Oligometric proanthocyanidins (OPCs, a class of bioflavonoid complexes, are enriched in French maritime PBE and have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity. Previous studies have suggested that French maritime PBE helps reduce ultraviolet radiation damage to the skin and may protect human facial skin from symptoms of photoaging. To evaluate the clinical efficacy of French maritime PBE in the improvement of photodamaged facial skin, we conducted a randomized trial of oral supplementation with PBE.Methods: One hundred and twelve women with mild to moderate photoaging of the skin were randomized to either a 12-week open trial regimen of 100 mg PBE supplementation once daily or to a parallel-group trial regimen of 40 mg PBE supplementation once daily.Results: A significant decrease in clinical grading of skin photoaging scores was observed in both time courses of 100 mg daily and 40 mg daily PBE supplementation regimens. A significant reduction in the pigmentation of age spots was also demonstrated utilizing skin color measurements.Conclusion: Clinically significant improvement in photodamaged skin could be achieved with PBE. Our findings confirm the efficacy and safety of PBE.Keywords: polyphenols, pine bark extract, skin photoaging, antioxidants, antiaging

Multi-objective optimization of inverse planning for accurate radiotherapy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cao Ruifen; Pei Xi; Cheng Mengyun; Li Gui; Hu Liqin; Wu Yican; Jing Jia; Li Guoli

2011-01-01

The multi-objective optimization of inverse planning based on the Pareto solution set, according to the multi-objective character of inverse planning in accurate radiotherapy, was studied in this paper. Firstly, the clinical requirements of a treatment plan were transformed into a multi-objective optimization problem with multiple constraints. Then, the fast and elitist multi-objective Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) was introduced to optimize the problem. A clinical example was tested using this method. The results show that an obtained set of non-dominated solutions were uniformly distributed and the corresponding dose distribution of each solution not only approached the expected dose distribution, but also met the dose-volume constraints. It was indicated that the clinical requirements were better satisfied using the method and the planner could select the optimal treatment plan from the non-dominated solution set. (authors)

Accurate Fall Detection in a Top View Privacy Preserving Configuration.

Science.gov (United States)

Ricciuti, Manola; Spinsante, Susanna; Gambi, Ennio

2018-05-29

Fall detection is one of the most investigated themes in the research on assistive solutions for aged people. In particular, a false-alarm-free discrimination between falls and non-falls is indispensable, especially to assist elderly people living alone. Current technological solutions designed to monitor several types of activities in indoor environments can guarantee absolute privacy to the people that decide to rely on them. Devices integrating RGB and depth cameras, such as the Microsoft Kinect, can ensure privacy and anonymity, since the depth information is considered to extract only meaningful information from video streams. In this paper, we propose an accurate fall detection method investigating the depth frames of the human body using a single device in a top-view configuration, with the subjects located under the device inside a room. Features extracted from depth frames train a classifier based on a binary support vector machine learning algorithm. The dataset includes 32 falls and 8 activities considered for comparison, for a total of 800 sequences performed by 20 adults. The system showed an accuracy of 98.6% and only one false positive.

Can Measured Synergy Excitations Accurately Construct Unmeasured Muscle Excitations?

Science.gov (United States)

Bianco, Nicholas A; Patten, Carolynn; Fregly, Benjamin J

2018-01-01

Accurate prediction of muscle and joint contact forces during human movement could improve treatment planning for disorders such as osteoarthritis, stroke, Parkinson's disease, and cerebral palsy. Recent studies suggest that muscle synergies, a low-dimensional representation of a large set of muscle electromyographic (EMG) signals (henceforth called "muscle excitations"), may reduce the redundancy of muscle excitation solutions predicted by optimization methods. This study explores the feasibility of using muscle synergy information extracted from eight muscle EMG signals (henceforth called "included" muscle excitations) to accurately construct muscle excitations from up to 16 additional EMG signals (henceforth called "excluded" muscle excitations). Using treadmill walking data collected at multiple speeds from two subjects (one healthy, one poststroke), we performed muscle synergy analysis on all possible subsets of eight included muscle excitations and evaluated how well the calculated time-varying synergy excitations could construct the remaining excluded muscle excitations (henceforth called "synergy extrapolation"). We found that some, but not all, eight-muscle subsets yielded synergy excitations that achieved >90% extrapolation variance accounted for (VAF). Using the top 10% of subsets, we developed muscle selection heuristics to identify included muscle combinations whose synergy excitations achieved high extrapolation accuracy. For 3, 4, and 5 synergies, these heuristics yielded extrapolation VAF values approximately 5% lower than corresponding reconstruction VAF values for each associated eight-muscle subset. These results suggest that synergy excitations obtained from experimentally measured muscle excitations can accurately construct unmeasured muscle excitations, which could help limit muscle excitations predicted by muscle force optimizations.

Precise and accurate assay of pregnenolone and five other neurosteroids in monkey brain tissue by LC-MS/MS.

Science.gov (United States)

Dury, Alain Y; Ke, Yuyong; Labrie, Fernand

2016-09-01

A series of steroids present in the brain have been named "neurosteroids" following the possibility of their role in the central nervous system impairments such as anxiety disorders, depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), addiction, or even neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Study of their potential role requires a sensitive and accurate assay of their concentration in the monkey brain, the closest model to the human. We have thus developed a robust, precise and accurate liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for the assay of pregnenolone, pregnanolone, epipregnanolone, allopregnanolone, epiallopregnanolone, and androsterone in the cynomolgus monkey brain. The extraction method includes a thorough sample cleanup using protein precipitation and phospholipid removal, followed by hexane liquid-liquid extraction and a Girard T ketone-specific derivatization. This method opens the possibility of investigating the potential implication of these six steroids in the most suitable animal model for neurosteroid-related research. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Comparative analysis of extracted heights from topographic maps ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Topographic maps represent the three-dimensional landscape by providing relief information in the form of contours in addition to plan information on which natural and man-made landmarks are quite accurately represented. Height information, extractible from topographic maps, comes in handy for most land use planning.

Comparison of fastsure tb dna and mgit 960 for the detection of mycobacterium tuberculosis complex in clinical specimens

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hussain, A.; Mirza, I.A.; Abbasi, S.A.; Ali, S.; Zia, F.; Ahmed, Z.

2013-01-01

Objective: To compare the efficacy of Fastsure TB DNA with fully automated MGIT 960 method for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTB) in clinical specimens. Study Design: Comparative cross sectional study. Methodology: After decontamination procedure, the clinical specimens were subjected to DNA extraction and amplification. Extracted DNA was separated in a separate tube provided with fastsure TB DNA kit and was then inserted into the cartridge provided and results were observed within 30 minutes. For Processing in MGIT 960, OADC and PANTA were added to the clinical specimens after decontamination and then the tubes were processed in MGIT 960. Results: A total of 80 specimens were tested by both MGIT 960 and fastsure TB DNA. On MGIT 960 system, 57 specimens showed growth of MTB while 23 were negative. On Fastsure TB DNA, 47 Specimens were tested as positive and 33 specimens showed negative result. Sensitivity and specificity of Fastsure TB DNA method was calculated to be 82.45 % and 100 % respectively, while positive and negative predictive values were 100 % and 69.69 % respectively. Conclusion: Fast sure TB DNA is a rapid and accurate method for the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTB) from clinical specimens. (author)

[Extracting THz absorption coefficient spectrum based on accurate determination of sample thickness].

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Zhi; Zhang, Zhao-hui; Zhao, Xiao-yan; Su, Hai-xia; Yan, Fang

2012-04-01

Extracting absorption spectrum in THz band is one of the important aspects in THz applications. Sample's absorption coefficient has a complex nonlinear relationship with its thickness. However, as it is not convenient to measure the thickness directly, absorption spectrum is usually determined incorrectly. Based on the method proposed by Duvillaret which was used to precisely determine the thickness of LiNbO3, the approach to measuring the absorption coefficient spectra of glutamine and histidine in frequency range from 0.3 to 2.6 THz(1 THz = 10(12) Hz) was improved in this paper. In order to validate the correctness of this absorption spectrum, we designed a series of experiments to compare the linearity of absorption coefficient belonging to one kind amino acid in different concentrations. The results indicate that as agreed by Lambert-Beer's Law, absorption coefficient spectrum of amino acid from the improved algorithm performs better linearity with its concentration than that from the common algorithm, which can be the basis of quantitative analysis in further researches.

Bladder cancer treatment response assessment with radiomic, clinical, and radiologist semantic features

Science.gov (United States)

Gordon, Marshall N.; Cha, Kenny H.; Hadjiiski, Lubomir M.; Chan, Heang-Ping; Cohan, Richard H.; Caoili, Elaine M.; Paramagul, Chintana; Alva, Ajjai; Weizer, Alon Z.

2018-02-01

We are developing a decision support system for assisting clinicians in assessment of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy for bladder cancer. Accurate treatment response assessment is crucial for identifying responders and improving quality of life for non-responders. An objective machine learning decision support system may help reduce variability and inaccuracy in treatment response assessment. We developed a predictive model to assess the likelihood that a patient will respond based on image and clinical features. With IRB approval, we retrospectively collected a data set of pre- and post- treatment CT scans along with clinical information from surgical pathology from 98 patients. A linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier was used to predict the likelihood that a patient would respond to treatment based on radiomic features extracted from CT urography (CTU), a radiologist's semantic feature, and a clinical feature extracted from surgical and pathology reports. The classification accuracy was evaluated using the area under the ROC curve (AUC) with a leave-one-case-out cross validation. The classification accuracy was compared for the systems based on radiomic features, clinical feature, and radiologist's semantic feature. For the system based on only radiomic features the AUC was 0.75. With the addition of clinical information from examination under anesthesia (EUA) the AUC was improved to 0.78. Our study demonstrated the potential of designing a decision support system to assist in treatment response assessment. The combination of clinical features, radiologist semantic features and CTU radiomic features improved the performance of the classifier and the accuracy of treatment response assessment.

Antimicrobial effect of hydroalcoholic extract of saturega multica and zinc oxide namoparticle on coagulase gene expression on clinical and standard samples of MRSA (Methicilin resistant staph aureus

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F Moridikia

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Background & aim: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA as nosocomial pathogens have been causing severe and deadly diseases around the world.  Coagulase is an important virulence factor for this bacterium and exisist in all staphylococcus aureus isolates. In recent years, studies carried out into the effects of medicinal plants, nanoparticles against bacteria and pathogenic bacteria’s expression genes. The aim of this study was to investigate the antimicrobial effect of satureja mutica hydroalcoholic extract, zinc oxide nanoparticle, and zinc complex on the coagulase gene expression in clinical and standard isolates of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA Methods: In the present quasi-experimental study, using micro dilution and MTT, the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC of hydro-alcoholic extracts of satureja mutica and zinc oxide nanoparticles were tested against MRSA strains. By polymerase chain reaction ((RT- PCR coa gene expression in satureja mutica extract and zinc oxide nanoparticles treated were qualitatively evaluated. Data were analyzed using statistical tests Results: The MIC of hydro alcoholic extract of Satureja mutica  for standard strains and clinical S. aureus  were 3000 and 1500 µg/ml respectively, whereas, the MIC  of nanoparticle zinc oxide on Standards and clinical isolates  were 40 and 20 µg/ml.The hydro alcoholic extract of Satureja mutica on MIC concentration has significant inhibitory effect on coagulase gene expression but no effect was seen for clinical and standard MRSA. Conclusion: The results show a decline in the coa gene expression in vitro by RT- PCR method using satureja mutica  , but no effect on gene expression Housekeeping arc C. An inhibitory effect was observed on bacterial growth by zinc oxide nanoparticles, but no inhibitory effect on gene expression was seen.

Comparison of manual methods of extracting genomic DNA from dried blood spots collected on different cards: implications for clinical practice.

Science.gov (United States)

Molteni, C G; Terranova, L; Zampiero, A; Galeone, C; Principi, N; Esposito, S

2013-01-01

Isolating genomic DNA from blood samples is essential when studying the associations between genetic variants and susceptibility to a given clinical condition, or its severity. This study of three extraction techniques and two types of commercially available cards involved 219 children attending our outpatient pediatric clinic for follow-up laboratory tests after they had been hospitalised. An aliquot of venous blood was drawn into plastic tubes without additives and, after several inversions, 80 microL were put on circles of common paper cards and Whatman FTA-treated cards. Three extraction methods were compared: the Qiagen Investigator, Gensolve, and Masterpure. The best method in terms of final DNA yield was Masterpure, which led to a significantly higher yield regardless of the type of card (p less than 0.001), followed by Qiagen Investigator and Gensolve. Masterpure was also the best in terms of price, seemed to be simple and reliable, and required less hands-on time than other techniques. These conclusions support the use of Masterpure in studies that evaluate the associations between genetic variants and the severity or prevalence of infectious diseases.

Skeleton extraction based on the topology and Snakes model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yuanxue Cai

Full Text Available A new skeleton line extraction method based on topology and flux is proposed by analyzing the distribution characteristics of the gradient vector field in the Snakes model. The distribution characteristics of the skeleton line are accurately obtained by calculating the eigenvalues of the critical points and the flux of the gradient vector field. Then the skeleton lines can be effectively extracted. The results also show that there is no need for the pretreatment or binarization of the target image. The skeleton lines of complex gray images such as optical interference patterns can be effectively extracted by using this method. Compared to traditional methods, this method has many advantages, such as high extraction accuracy and fast processing speed. Keywords: Skeleton, Snakes model, Topology, Photoelasticity image

A simple but accurate procedure for solving the five-parameter model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mares, Oana; Paulescu, Marius; Badescu, Viorel

2015-01-01

Highlights: • A new procedure for extracting the parameters of the one-diode model is proposed. • Only the basic information listed in the datasheet of PV modules are required. • Results demonstrate a simple, robust and accurate procedure. - Abstract: The current–voltage characteristic of a photovoltaic module is typically evaluated by using a model based on the solar cell equivalent circuit. The complexity of the procedure applied for extracting the model parameters depends on data available in manufacture’s datasheet. Since the datasheet is not detailed enough, simplified models have to be used in many cases. This paper proposes a new procedure for extracting the parameters of the one-diode model in standard test conditions, using only the basic data listed by all manufactures in datasheet (short circuit current, open circuit voltage and maximum power point). The procedure is validated by using manufacturers’ data for six commercially crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules. Comparing the computed and measured current–voltage characteristics the determination coefficient is in the range 0.976–0.998. Thus, the proposed procedure represents a feasible tool for solving the five-parameter model applied to crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules. The procedure is described in detail, to guide potential users to derive similar models for other types of photovoltaic modules.

Survival rates and bone loss after immediate loading of implants in fresh extraction sockets (single gaps). A clinical prospective study with 4 year follow-up

Science.gov (United States)

Wojtovicz, Eduardo; España-Lopez, Antonio; Jimenez-Guerra, Alvaro; Monsalve-Guil, Loreto; Ortiz-Garcia, Ivan; Serrera-Figallo, Maria-Angeles

2018-01-01

Background The aim of this prospective study was to report the outcome of treatment with implants inserted after tooth extraction and immediately loaded. Material and Methods Fifty-six patients with single tooth loss were treated with 116 IPX Galimplant® implants with internal connections and a sandblasted, acid-etched surface. All implants were placed after tooth extraction using a flapless approach without bone regeneration, and they were then immediately loaded with cemented acrylic prostheses. After a period of three months, definitive cemented ceramic prostheses were placed. Patients were examined throughout a total of 4 years of follow-up. Marginal bone loss and survival rates were evaluated using digital periapical radiographs, taking into account clinical variables such as age, gender, smoking, history of periodontitis, etiology of extraction, placement site, diameter, and implant length. The Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric tests were used to compare differences between subgroups created based on the different clinical variables identified. Results Clinical results indicate an implant survival and success rate of 97.4%. Three implants were lost. Of the 116 immediate acrylic single crowns initially placed, 113 were replaced with definitive ceramic crowns after 3 months. A total of 77.8% of implants were inserted in the maxilla, while 22.2% were inserted in the mandible. No further complications were reported after the follow-up period (4 years). The mean marginal bone loss was 0.67 mm ± 0.40 mm. No differences were found among the subgroups of study patients. Conclusions This study indicates that dental implants that are inserted after tooth extraction and immediately loaded may constitute a successful and predictable alternative implant treatment. Key words:Dental implants, post-extraction implants, fresh sockets, immediate loading, immediate prostheses, implant dentistry. PMID:29476669

Enhanced Named Entity Extraction via Error-Driven Aggregation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Lemmond, T D; Perry, N C; Guensche, J W; Nitao, J J; Glaser, R E; Kidwell, P; Hanley, W G

2010-02-22

Despite recent advances in named entity extraction technologies, state-of-the-art extraction tools achieve insufficient accuracy rates for practical use in many operational settings. However, they are not generally prone to the same types of error, suggesting that substantial improvements may be achieved via appropriate combinations of existing tools, provided their behavior can be accurately characterized and quantified. In this paper, we present an inference methodology for the aggregation of named entity extraction technologies that is founded upon a black-box analysis of their respective error processes. This method has been shown to produce statistically significant improvements in extraction relative to standard performance metrics and to mitigate the weak performance of entity extractors operating under suboptimal conditions. Moreover, this approach provides a framework for quantifying uncertainty and has demonstrated the ability to reconstruct the truth when majority voting fails.

Comparative clinical evaluation of Boerhavia diffusa root extract with standard Enalapril treatment in Canine chronic renal failure

Science.gov (United States)

Oburai, Nethaji Lokeswar; Rao, V. Vaikunta; Bonath, Ram Babu Naik

2015-01-01

Background: Complementing herbal drugs with conservative modern treatment could improve renal condition in canine chronic renal failure (CRF). Objective: In this study, clinical evaluation of Boerhavia diffusa root extract was carried out in CRF in dogs in comparison with standard enalapril. Materials and Methods: A total of 20 dogs of mixed breeds suffering from CRF from 1 to 2 months were divided into two groups (n = 10) and treated as follows: Group I - Enalapril at 0.5 mg/kg p.o. once daily for 90 days + amoxicillin and cloxacillin at 25 mg/kg i.m. once daily for 1-week; Group II - B. diffusa root extract at 500 mg p.o per dog daily for 90 days. Both groups were maintained on a supportive fluid therapy. The data were analyzed using paired t-test and one-way ANOVA followed by Dunnett's post-hoc test. Results: CRF caused a significant (P renal architecture, hyper-echoic cortex, medulla, and sunken kidneys. Both the treatments significantly (P < 0.05) reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure by day 30. Serum Creatinine, urea nitrogen, phosphorus, urinary protein, ALP, and GGT showed significant (P < 0.05) reduction by day 60 in both the treatments. However, potassium levels were normalized only by B. diffusa root extract treatment by day 30. Both the treatments failed to show a significant improvement in nephrosonographic picture even after 90 days posttreatment. Conclusion: In conclusion, the efficacy of B. diffusa root extract was comparable to standard enalapril treatment of CRF in dogs. PMID:26604549

Simultaneous extraction and determination of monoamine neurotransmitters in human urine for clinical routine testing based on a dual functional solid phase extraction assisted by phenylboronic acid coupled with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Xiaoguang Sunny; Li, Shu; Kellermann, Gottfried

2017-04-01

The major monoamine neurotransmitters, serotonin (5-HT) and catecholamines (i.e., norepinephrine (NE), epinephrine (E), and dopamine (DA)), are critical to the nervous system function, and imbalances of the neurotransmitters have been connected to a variety of diseases, making their measurement useful in a clinical setting. A simple, rapid, robust, sensitive, and specific LC-MS/MS method has been developed and validated for the simultaneous quantitation of urinary serotonin and catecholamines with low cost, which is ideal for routine clinical applications. A simple extraction from complex urine was accomplished using tailored solid phase extraction incorporating phenylboronic acid complexation on a 96-well HLB microplate for the sample extraction and resulted in significantly improved throughput, selectivity, and extraction recovery. Compared to 1-10 mL of urine typically used, this method required only 10 μL. A rapid chromatographic elution with a total cycle time of 6 min per sample compared to reported run times of 19-75 min was achieved on a PFP column. The sensitivity of l and 2 ng mL -1 for the detection of low abundant E and NE combined with the high coverage of 1024 ng mL -1 for DA enabled the multi-analyte detection of these biogenic amines in a single run. Good linearity (2.0-512, 1.0-512, 4.0-1024, and 4.0-1024 ng mL -1 for NE, E, DA, and 5-HT, respectively), accuracy (87.6-104.0%), precision (≤8.0%), extraction recovery (69.6-103.7%), and matrix effect (87.1-113.1% for catecholamines and 63.6-71.4% for 5-HT) were obtained. No autosampler carryover was observed. The analytes were stable for 5 days at 20 °C, 14 days at 4 °C, and 30 days at -20 °C and five freeze-thaw cycles. The easy sample preparation, rapid LC, and multi-analyte MS detection allow two 96-well plates of samples to be extracted within 2 h and analyzed on an LC-MS/MS system within 24 h. The applicability and reliability of the assay were demonstrated by assessment

Extraction and separation studies of uranium(VI) with tris-(2-ethyl hexyl) phosphate

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sundaramurthi, N.M.; Desai, G.S.; Shinde, V.M.

1990-01-01

A solvent extraction method is proposed for the extraction and separation of uranium from salicylate media using tris-(2-ethyl hexyl) phosphate dissolved in xylene as an extractant. The optimum conditions were evaluated from a critical study of pH, salicylate concentration, extractant concentration, period of equilibration and diluent. The method permits the separation of uranium from thorium, cerium, titanium, zirconium, hafnium, copper, vanadium and chromium from binary mixtures and is applicable to the analysis of uranium in synthetic samples. The method is precise, accurate, fast and selective. (author) 5 refs.; 2 tabs

Assessment of clinical effects and safety of an oral supplement based on marine protein, vitamin C, grape seed extract, zinc, and tomato extract in the improvement of visible signs of skin aging in men

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Costa A

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Adilson Costa,1,2 Elisangela Samartin Pegas Pereira,1 Elvira Cancio Assumpção,1 Felipe Borba Calixto dos Santos,1 Fernanda Sayuri Ota,1 Margareth de Oliveira Pereira,1 Maria Carolina Fidelis,1 Raquel Fávaro,1 Stephanie Selma Barros Langen,1 Lúcia Helena Favaro de Arruda,1 Eva Nydal Abildgaard3 1Department of Dermatology, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil; 2KOLderma Clinical Trials Institute, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil; 3Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, Nutritional Sciences, Copenhagen, Denmark Background: Skin aging is a natural process that may be aggravated by environmental factors. Topical products are the conventional means to combat aging; however, the use of oral supplements is on the rise to assist in the management of aged skin.Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the effects and safety of an oral supplement containing (per tablet marine protein (105 mg, vitamin C (27 mg, grape seed extract (13.75 mg, zinc (2 mg, and tomato extract (14.38 mg in the improvement of skin aging in men.Methods: This single-center, open-label, quasi-experimental clinical study enrolled 47 male subjects, aged 30–45 years, with phototypes I–IV on the Fitzpatrick scale. Subjects received two tablets of the oral supplement for 180 consecutive days. Each subject served as their own control. Clinical assessments were made by medical personnel and by the subjects, respectively. Objective assessments were carried out through pH measurements, sebumetry, corneometry, ultrasound scanning, skin biopsies, and photographic images.Results: Forty-one subjects (87% completed the study. Clinical improvements on both investigator- and subject-rated outcomes were found for the following parameters: erythema, hydration, radiance, and overall appearance (P<0.05. The objective measurements in the facial skin showed significant improvements from baseline in skin hydration (P<0.05, dermal ultrasound density (P<0.001, and

Efficacy and safety of Ginkgo biloba standardized extract in the treatment of vascular cognitive impairment: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Demarin V

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Vida Demarin,1,2 Vanja Bašić Kes,1 Zlatko Trkanjec,1 Mislav Budišić,1 Marija Bošnjak Pašić,3,4 Petra Črnac,5 Hrvoje Budinčević4,5 1Department of Neurology, University Hospital Center “Sestre Milosrdnice”, 2International Institute for Brain Health, 3Department of Neurology, University Hospital Center Zagreb, Zagreb, 4Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University Josip Juraj Strossmayer, Osijek, 5Department of Neurology, Stroke and Intensive Care Unit, University Hospital “Sveti Duh”, Zagreb, Croatia Objectives: The aim of this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was to determine the efficacy and safety of Ginkgo biloba extract in patients diagnosed with vascular cognitive impairment (VCI. Methods: A total of 90 patients (aged 67.1±8.0 years; 59 women were randomly allocated (1:1:1 to receive G. biloba 120 mg, G. biloba 60 mg, or placebo during a 6-month period. Assessment was made for efficacy indicators, including neuropsychological tests scores (Sandoz Clinical Assessment Geriatric Scale, Folstein Mini-Mental State Examination, Mattis Dementia Rating Scale, and Clinical Global Impression and transcranial Doppler ultrasound findings. Safety indicators included laboratory findings, reported adverse reactions, and clinical examination. Results: At the end of 6-month study period, G. biloba 120 and 60 mg showed a statistically significant positive effect in comparison with placebo only on the Clinical Global Impression score (2.6±0.8 vs 3.1±0.7 vs 2.8±0.7, respectively; P=0.038. The Clinical Global Impression score showed a significant deterioration from the baseline values in the placebo group (-0.3±0.5; P=0.021 as opposed to G. biloba groups. No significant differences were found in the transcranial Doppler ultrasound findings. Adverse reactions were significantly more common and serious in the placebo group (16 subjects than in either of the two G. biloba extract groups (eight and nine subjects

Hemodynamic changes following injection of local anesthetics with different concentrations of epinephrine during simple tooth extraction: A prospective randomized clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Abu-Mostafa, Nedal; Al-Showaikhat, Fatimah; Al-Shubbar, Fatimah; Al-Zawad, Kawther; Al-Zawad, Fatimah

2015-10-01

Presence of epinephrine in local anesthetic cartridge increases the duration of local anesthesia (LA), decreases the risk of toxicity, and provides hemostasis. However, the unfavorable effects are increasing heart rate (HR) and raising blood pressure (BP). The aim was to evaluate hemodynamic changes in the BP, HR, and oxygen saturation (SpO2) of normal patients undergoing tooth extraction using LA with various epinephrine concentrations. A prospective randomized clinical trial was conducted on 120 patients who were divided randomly into 3 parallel groups according to the LA received. Group 1: lidocaine 2% with epinephrine 1:80,000 (L80). Group 2: articaine 4% with epinephrine 1:100,000 (A100). Group 3: articaine 4% with epinephrine 1:200,000 (A200). normal patients whose BP extraction. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) significantly increased after injection of L80 and continued after extraction to be significant than pre-injection. SBP significantly increased after injection of A100 then decreased after extraction. In the group of A200, SBP insignificantly decreased after injection then increased after extraction. The increasing of SBP between time point 1and 2 was significantly higher in G1 than G3 (p=0.014). Diastolic blood pressure decreased after LA in the 3 groups; however it was significant only with L80, then increased after extraction for all. The changings of DBP, HR and SpO2 after anesthesia and extraction showed no significant difference among the three groups. However, A200 had significant lesser effect on SBP than L80 and the least effect on other parameters. Therefore, A200 is considered safer than L80 and A100 and is recommended for LA before teeth extraction in normal patient. Local anesthesia, lidocaine, epinephrine 1:80,000, articaine, epinephrine 1:100,000, epinephrine 1:200,000, tooth extraction.

Development of transfer standard devices for ensuring the accurate calibration of ultrasonic physical therapy machines in clinical use

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hekkenberg, R T; Richards, A; Beissner, K; Zeqiri, B; Prout, G; Cantrall, Ch; Bezemer, R A; Koch, Ch; Hodnett, M

2004-01-01

Physical therapy ultrasound is widely applied to patients. However, many devices do not comply with the relevant standard stating that the actual power output shall be within ±20% of the device indication. Extreme cases have been reported: from delivering effectively no ultrasound or operating at maximum power at all powers indicated. This can potentially lead to patient injury as well as mistreatment. The present European (EC) project is an ongoing attempt to improve the quality of the treatment of patients being treated with ultrasonic physical-therapy. A Portable ultrasound Power Standard (PPS) is being developed and accurately calibrated. The PPS includes: Ultrasound transducers (including one exhibiting an unusual output) and a driver for the ultrasound transducers that has calibration and proficiency test functions. Also included with the PPS is a Cavitation Detector to determine the onset of cavitation occurring within the propagation medium. The PPS will be suitable for conducting in-the-field accreditation (proficiency testing and calibration). In order to be accredited it will be important to be able to show traceability of the calibration, the calibration process and qualification of testing staff. The clinical user will benefit from traceability because treatments will be performed more reliably

Fine-grained information extraction from German transthoracic echocardiography reports.

Science.gov (United States)

Toepfer, Martin; Corovic, Hamo; Fette, Georg; Klügl, Peter; Störk, Stefan; Puppe, Frank

2015-11-12

Information extraction techniques that get structured representations out of unstructured data make a large amount of clinically relevant information about patients accessible for semantic applications. These methods typically rely on standardized terminologies that guide this process. Many languages and clinical domains, however, lack appropriate resources and tools, as well as evaluations of their applications, especially if detailed conceptualizations of the domain are required. For instance, German transthoracic echocardiography reports have not been targeted sufficiently before, despite of their importance for clinical trials. This work therefore aimed at development and evaluation of an information extraction component with a fine-grained terminology that enables to recognize almost all relevant information stated in German transthoracic echocardiography reports at the University Hospital of Würzburg. A domain expert validated and iteratively refined an automatically inferred base terminology. The terminology was used by an ontology-driven information extraction system that outputs attribute value pairs. The final component has been mapped to the central elements of a standardized terminology, and it has been evaluated according to documents with different layouts. The final system achieved state-of-the-art precision (micro average.996) and recall (micro average.961) on 100 test documents that represent more than 90 % of all reports. In particular, principal aspects as defined in a standardized external terminology were recognized with f 1=.989 (micro average) and f 1=.963 (macro average). As a result of keyword matching and restraint concept extraction, the system obtained high precision also on unstructured or exceptionally short documents, and documents with uncommon layout. The developed terminology and the proposed information extraction system allow to extract fine-grained information from German semi-structured transthoracic echocardiography reports

Evaluation of urinary excretion of cortisol by radioimmunoassay through two methods (extracted and non-extracted)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fonte Kohek, M.B. da.

1992-01-01

The radioimmunoassay of urinary cortisol extracted by organic solvent (free cortisol) has been used for along time in the hypercortisolism diagnosis. With the development of more specific antisera it became possible to measure urinary cortisol without extracting it. The objective of this paper is to compare the feasibility, sensitivity and specificity of both methods (extracted versus non-extracted) in the hypercortisolism diagnosis. It was used Gamma Coat 125 I - cortisol kit provided by Clinical Assay, Incstar, US, for both methods extracting it with methylene chloride in order to measure the extracted cortisol. The sensitivity of the methods were similar (100% and 98,1%, for non-extracted and extracted methods, respectively). A positive correlation between the two methods was noticed in all groups studied (p < 0.05). It was concluded that both methods are efficient for the investigation of hypercortisolism. However, it's suggested that non-extracted urinary cortisol measurement should be the method of choice since it's an easy-to-perform and affordable method to diagnose Cushing's syndrome. (author)

Automatical and accurate segmentation of cerebral tissues in fMRI dataset with combination of image processing and deep learning

Science.gov (United States)

Kong, Zhenglun; Luo, Junyi; Xu, Shengpu; Li, Ting

2018-02-01

Image segmentation plays an important role in medical science. One application is multimodality imaging, especially the fusion of structural imaging with functional imaging, which includes CT, MRI and new types of imaging technology such as optical imaging to obtain functional images. The fusion process require precisely extracted structural information, in order to register the image to it. Here we used image enhancement, morphometry methods to extract the accurate contours of different tissues such as skull, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) on 5 fMRI head image datasets. Then we utilized convolutional neural network to realize automatic segmentation of images in deep learning way. Such approach greatly reduced the processing time compared to manual and semi-automatic segmentation and is of great importance in improving speed and accuracy as more and more samples being learned. The contours of the borders of different tissues on all images were accurately extracted and 3D visualized. This can be used in low-level light therapy and optical simulation software such as MCVM. We obtained a precise three-dimensional distribution of brain, which offered doctors and researchers quantitative volume data and detailed morphological characterization for personal precise medicine of Cerebral atrophy/expansion. We hope this technique can bring convenience to visualization medical and personalized medicine.

Accurate coding in sepsis: clinical significance and financial implications.

Science.gov (United States)

Chin, Y T; Scattergood, N; Thornber, M; Thomas, S

2016-09-01

Sepsis is a major healthcare problem and leading cause of death worldwide. UK hospital mortality statistics and payments for patient episodes of care are calculated on clinical coding data. The accuracy of these data depends on the quality of coding. This study aimed to investigate whether patients with significant bacteraemia are coded for sepsis and to estimate the financial costs of miscoding. Of 54 patients over a one-month period with a significant bacteraemia, only 19% had been coded for sepsis. This is likely to lead to falsely high calculated hospital mortality. Furthermore, this resulted in an underpayment of £21,000 for one month alone. Copyright © 2016 The Healthcare Infection Society. All rights reserved.

Ethics and epistemology of accurate prediction in clinical research.

Science.gov (United States)

Hey, Spencer Phillips

2015-07-01

All major research ethics policies assert that the ethical review of clinical trial protocols should include a systematic assessment of risks and benefits. But despite this policy, protocols do not typically contain explicit probability statements about the likely risks or benefits involved in the proposed research. In this essay, I articulate a range of ethical and epistemic advantages that explicit forecasting would offer to the health research enterprise. I then consider how some particular confidence levels may come into conflict with the principles of ethical research. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.

A literature search tool for intelligent extraction of disease-associated genes.

Science.gov (United States)

Jung, Jae-Yoon; DeLuca, Todd F; Nelson, Tristan H; Wall, Dennis P

2014-01-01

To extract disorder-associated genes from the scientific literature in PubMed with greater sensitivity for literature-based support than existing methods. We developed a PubMed query to retrieve disorder-related, original research articles. Then we applied a rule-based text-mining algorithm with keyword matching to extract target disorders, genes with significant results, and the type of study described by the article. We compared our resulting candidate disorder genes and supporting references with existing databases. We demonstrated that our candidate gene set covers nearly all genes in manually curated databases, and that the references supporting the disorder-gene link are more extensive and accurate than other general purpose gene-to-disorder association databases. We implemented a novel publication search tool to find target articles, specifically focused on links between disorders and genotypes. Through comparison against gold-standard manually updated gene-disorder databases and comparison with automated databases of similar functionality we show that our tool can search through the entirety of PubMed to extract the main gene findings for human diseases rapidly and accurately.

High-Q Bandpass Comb Filter for Mains Interference Extraction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Neycheva T.

2009-12-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a simple digital high-Q bandpass comb filter for power-line (PL or other periodical interference extraction. The filter concept relies on a correlated signal average resulting in alternating constructive and destructive spectrum interference i.e. the so-called comb frequency response. The presented filter is evaluated by Matlab simulations with real ECG signal contaminated with low amplitude PL interference. The made simulations show that this filter accurately extract the PL interference. It has high-Q notches only at PL odd harmonics and is appropriate for extraction of any kind of odd harmonic interference including rectangular shape. The filter is suitable for real-time operation with popular low-cost microcontrollers.

Automated DNA extraction from genetically modified maize using aminosilane-modified bacterial magnetic particles.

Science.gov (United States)

Ota, Hiroyuki; Lim, Tae-Kyu; Tanaka, Tsuyoshi; Yoshino, Tomoko; Harada, Manabu; Matsunaga, Tadashi

2006-09-18

A novel, automated system, PNE-1080, equipped with eight automated pestle units and a spectrophotometer was developed for genomic DNA extraction from maize using aminosilane-modified bacterial magnetic particles (BMPs). The use of aminosilane-modified BMPs allowed highly accurate DNA recovery. The (A(260)-A(320)):(A(280)-A(320)) ratio of the extracted DNA was 1.9+/-0.1. The DNA quality was sufficiently pure for PCR analysis. The PNE-1080 offered rapid assay completion (30 min) with high accuracy. Furthermore, the results of real-time PCR confirmed that our proposed method permitted the accurate determination of genetically modified DNA composition and correlated well with results obtained by conventional cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB)-based methods.

Parameter Extraction Method for the Electrical Model of a Silicon Photomultiplier

Science.gov (United States)

Licciulli, Francesco; Marzocca, Cristoforo

2016-10-01

The availability of an effective electrical model, able to accurately reproduce the signals generated by a Silicon Photo-Multiplier coupled to the front-end electronics, is mandatory when the performance of a detection system based on this kind of detector has to be evaluated by means of reliable simulations. We propose a complete extraction procedure able to provide the whole set of the parameters involved in a well-known model of the detector, which includes the substrate ohmic resistance. The technique allows achieving very good quality of the fit between simulation results provided by the model and experimental data, thanks to accurate discrimination between the quenching and substrate resistances, which results in a realistic set of extracted parameters. The extraction procedure has been applied to a commercial device considering a wide range of different conditions in terms of input resistance of the front-end electronics and interconnection parasitics. In all the considered situations, very good correspondence has been found between simulations and measurements, especially for what concerns the leading edge of the current pulses generated by the detector, which strongly affects the timing performance of the detection system, thus confirming the effectiveness of the model and the associated parameter extraction technique.

Analysis of Intracellular Metabolites from Microorganisms: Quenching and Extraction Protocols.

Science.gov (United States)

Pinu, Farhana R; Villas-Boas, Silas G; Aggio, Raphael

2017-10-23

Sample preparation is one of the most important steps in metabolome analysis. The challenges of determining microbial metabolome have been well discussed within the research community and many improvements have already been achieved in last decade. The analysis of intracellular metabolites is particularly challenging. Environmental perturbations may considerably affect microbial metabolism, which results in intracellular metabolites being rapidly degraded or metabolized by enzymatic reactions. Therefore, quenching or the complete stop of cell metabolism is a pre-requisite for accurate intracellular metabolite analysis. After quenching, metabolites need to be extracted from the intracellular compartment. The choice of the most suitable metabolite extraction method/s is another crucial step. The literature indicates that specific classes of metabolites are better extracted by different extraction protocols. In this review, we discuss the technical aspects and advancements of quenching and extraction of intracellular metabolite analysis from microbial cells.

A NEW MULTI-SPECTRAL THRESHOLD NORMALIZED DIFFERENCE WATER INDEX (MST-NDWI WATER EXTRACTION METHOD – A CASE STUDY IN YANHE WATERSHED

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Y. Zhou

2018-05-01

Full Text Available Accurate remote sensing water extraction is one of the primary tasks of watershed ecological environment study. Since the Yanhe water system has typical characteristics of a small water volume and narrow river channel, which leads to the difficulty for conventional water extraction methods such as Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI. A new Multi-Spectral Threshold segmentation of the NDWI (MST-NDWI water extraction method is proposed to achieve the accurate water extraction in Yanhe watershed. In the MST-NDWI method, the spectral characteristics of water bodies and typical backgrounds on the Landsat/TM images have been evaluated in Yanhe watershed. The multi-spectral thresholds (TM1, TM4, TM5 based on maximum-likelihood have been utilized before NDWI water extraction to realize segmentation for a division of built-up lands and small linear rivers. With the proposed method, a water map is extracted from the Landsat/TM images in 2010 in China. An accuracy assessment is conducted to compare the proposed method with the conventional water indexes such as NDWI, Modified NDWI (MNDWI, Enhanced Water Index (EWI, and Automated Water Extraction Index (AWEI. The result shows that the MST-NDWI method generates better water extraction accuracy in Yanhe watershed and can effectively diminish the confusing background objects compared to the conventional water indexes. The MST-NDWI method integrates NDWI and Multi-Spectral Threshold segmentation algorithms, with richer valuable information and remarkable results in accurate water extraction in Yanhe watershed.

Chlorophyll Extraction from Microalgae: A Review on the Process Engineering Aspects

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Aris Hosikian

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Chlorophyll is an essential compound in many everyday products. It is used not only as an additive in pharmaceutical and cosmetic products but also as a natural food colouring agent. Additionally, it has antioxidant and antimutagenic properties. This review discusses the process engineering of chlorophyll extraction from microalgae. Different chlorophyll extraction methods and chlorophyll purification techniques are evaluated. Our preliminary analysis suggests supercritical fluid extraction to be superior to organic solvent extraction. When compared to spectroscopic technique, high performance liquid chromatography was shown to be more accurate and sensitive for chlorophyll analysis. Finally, through CO2 capture and wastewater treatment, microalgae cultivation process was shown to have strong potential for mitigation of environmental impacts.

Pre-clinical evaluation of extracts and essential oils from betel-like ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The extracts and oils were preclinically studied based on cyto - and genotoxicity using microculture tetrazolium (MTT) and comet assays. Results: The crude extracts showed an IC50 in leukocytes and HeLa cells of 58.59 -97.31 mg/ml and 34.91-101.79 mg/ml, the LD50 is higher than 5000 mg/kg. With lower values than the ...

An Improved Cambridge Filter Pad Extraction Methodology to Obtain More Accurate Water and “Tar” Values: In Situ Cambridge Filter Pad Extraction Methodology

OpenAIRE

Ghosh David; Jeannet Cyril

2014-01-01

Previous investigations by others and internal investigations at Philip Morris International (PMI) have shown that the standard trapping and extraction procedure used for conventional cigarettes, defined in the International Standard ISO 4387 (Cigarettes -- Determination of total and nicotine-free dry particulate matter using a routine analytical smoking machine), is not suitable for high-water content aerosols. Errors occur because of water losses during the opening of the Cambridge filter p...

Is bioelectrical impedance accurate for use in large epidemiological studies?

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Merchant Anwar T

2008-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Percentage of body fat is strongly associated with the risk of several chronic diseases but its accurate measurement is difficult. Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA is a relatively simple, quick and non-invasive technique, to measure body composition. It measures body fat accurately in controlled clinical conditions but its performance in the field is inconsistent. In large epidemiologic studies simpler surrogate techniques such as body mass index (BMI, waist circumference, and waist-hip ratio are frequently used instead of BIA to measure body fatness. We reviewed the rationale, theory, and technique of recently developed systems such as foot (or hand-to-foot BIA measurement, and the elements that could influence its results in large epidemiologic studies. BIA results are influenced by factors such as the environment, ethnicity, phase of menstrual cycle, and underlying medical conditions. We concluded that BIA measurements validated for specific ethnic groups, populations and conditions can accurately measure body fat in those populations, but not others and suggest that for large epdiemiological studies with diverse populations BIA may not be the appropriate choice for body composition measurement unless specific calibration equations are developed for different groups participating in the study.

A method to accurately estimate the muscular torques of human wearing exoskeletons by torque sensors.

Science.gov (United States)

Hwang, Beomsoo; Jeon, Doyoung

2015-04-09

In exoskeletal robots, the quantification of the user's muscular effort is important to recognize the user's motion intentions and evaluate motor abilities. In this paper, we attempt to estimate users' muscular efforts accurately using joint torque sensor which contains the measurements of dynamic effect of human body such as the inertial, Coriolis, and gravitational torques as well as torque by active muscular effort. It is important to extract the dynamic effects of the user's limb accurately from the measured torque. The user's limb dynamics are formulated and a convenient method of identifying user-specific parameters is suggested for estimating the user's muscular torque in robotic exoskeletons. Experiments were carried out on a wheelchair-integrated lower limb exoskeleton, EXOwheel, which was equipped with torque sensors in the hip and knee joints. The proposed methods were evaluated by 10 healthy participants during body weight-supported gait training. The experimental results show that the torque sensors are to estimate the muscular torque accurately in cases of relaxed and activated muscle conditions.

A Method to Accurately Estimate the Muscular Torques of Human Wearing Exoskeletons by Torque Sensors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Beomsoo Hwang

2015-04-01

Full Text Available In exoskeletal robots, the quantification of the user’s muscular effort is important to recognize the user’s motion intentions and evaluate motor abilities. In this paper, we attempt to estimate users’ muscular efforts accurately using joint torque sensor which contains the measurements of dynamic effect of human body such as the inertial, Coriolis, and gravitational torques as well as torque by active muscular effort. It is important to extract the dynamic effects of the user’s limb accurately from the measured torque. The user’s limb dynamics are formulated and a convenient method of identifying user-specific parameters is suggested for estimating the user’s muscular torque in robotic exoskeletons. Experiments were carried out on a wheelchair-integrated lower limb exoskeleton, EXOwheel, which was equipped with torque sensors in the hip and knee joints. The proposed methods were evaluated by 10 healthy participants during body weight-supported gait training. The experimental results show that the torque sensors are to estimate the muscular torque accurately in cases of relaxed and activated muscle conditions.

Application of extraction replicas and analytical electron microscopy to precipitate phase studies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kenik, E.A.; Maziasz, P.J.

1984-01-01

Extraction replicas provide a powerful extension of AEM techniques for analysis of fine precipitates. In many cases, replicas allow more accurate analyses to be performed and, in some cases, allow unique analyses which cannot be performed in-foil. However, there are limitations to the use of extraction replicas in AEM, of which the analyst must be aware. Many can be eliminated by careful preparation. Often, combined AEM studies of precipitates in-foil and on extraction replicas provide complementary and corroborative information for the fullest analysis of precipitate phases

Evaluation of urinary cortisol excretion by radioimmunoassay through two methods (extracted and non-extracted)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fonte Kohek, M.B. da; Mendonca, B.B. de; Nicolau, W.

1993-01-01

The objective of this paper is to compare the feasibility, sensitivity and specificity of both methods (extracted versus non-extracted) in the hypercortisolism diagnosis. It used Gamma Coat 125 cortisol Kit provided by Clinical Assays, Incstar, USA, for both methods extracting it with methylene chloride in order to measure the extracted cortisol. It was performed 32 assays from which it was obtained from 0.1 to 0.47 u g/d l of sensitivity. The intra-run precision was varied from 8.29 +- 3.38% and 8.19 +-4.72% for high and low levels, respectively for non-extracted cortisol, and 9.72 +- 1.94% and 9.54 +- 44% for high and low levels, respectively, for extracted cortisol. The inter-run precision was 15.98% and 16.15% for high level of non-extracted cortisol, respectively. For the low level it obtained 17.25% and 18.59% for non-extracted and extracted cortisol respectively. It was evaluated 24-hour urine basal samples from 43 normal subjects, and 53 obese (body mass index > 30) and 53 Cushing's syndrome patients. The sensitivity of the methods were similar (100% and 98.1% for non-extracted and extracted methods, respectively) and the specificity was the same for both methods (100%). It was noticed a positive correlation between the two methods in all the groups studied (p s syndrome. (author)

Documentation of pain care processes does not accurately reflect pain management delivered in primary care.

Science.gov (United States)

Krebs, Erin E; Bair, Matthew J; Carey, Timothy S; Weinberger, Morris

2010-03-01

Researchers and quality improvement advocates sometimes use review of chart-documented pain care processes to assess the quality of pain management. Studies have found that primary care providers frequently fail to document pain assessment and management. To assess documentation of pain care processes in an academic primary care clinic and evaluate the validity of this documentation as a measure of pain care delivered. Prospective observational study. 237 adult patients at a university-affiliated internal medicine clinic who reported any pain in the last week. Immediately after a visit, we asked patients to report the pain treatment they received. Patients completed the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI) to assess pain severity at baseline and 1 month later. We extracted documentation of pain care processes from the medical record and used kappa statistics to assess agreement between documentation and patient report of pain treatment. Using multivariable linear regression, we modeled whether documented or patient-reported pain care predicted change in pain at 1 month. Participants' mean age was 53.7 years, 66% were female, and 74% had chronic pain. Physicians documented pain assessment for 83% of visits. Patients reported receiving pain treatment more often (67%) than was documented by physicians (54%). Agreement between documentation and patient report was moderate for receiving a new pain medication (k = 0.50) and slight for receiving pain management advice (k = 0.13). In multivariable models, documentation of new pain treatment was not associated with change in pain (p = 0.134). In contrast, patient-reported receipt of new pain treatment predicted pain improvement (p = 0.005). Chart documentation underestimated pain care delivered, compared with patient report. Documented pain care processes had no relationship with pain outcomes at 1 month, but patient report of receiving care predicted clinically significant improvement. Chart review measures may not accurately

Analysis of Coastline Extraction from Landsat-8 OLI Imagery

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Yaolin Liu

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Coastline extraction is a fundamental work for coastal resource management, coastal environmental protection and coastal sustainable development. Due to the free access and long-term record, Landsat series images have the potential to be used for coastline extraction. However, dynamic features of different types of coastlines (e.g., rocky, sandy, artificial, caused by sea level fluctuation from tidal, storm and reclamation, make it difficult to be accurately extracted with coarse spatial resolution, e.g., 30 m, of Landsat images. To access this problem, we analyze the performance of coastline extraction by integrating downscaling, pansharpening and water index approaches in increasing the accuracy of coastline extraction from the latest Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI imagery. In order to prove the availability of the proposed method, we designed three strategies: (1 Strategy 1 uses the traditional water index method to extract coastline directly from original 30 m Landsat-8 OLI multispectral (MS image; (2 Strategy 2 extracts coastlines from 15 m fused MS images generated by integrating 15 m panchromatic (PAN band and 30 m MS image with ten pansharpening algorithms; (3 Strategy 3 first downscales the PAN band to a finer spatial resolution (e.g., 7.5 m band, and then extracts coastlines from pansharpened MS images generated by integrating downscaled spatial resolution PAN band and 30 m MS image with ten pansharpening algorithms. Using the coastline extracted from ZiYuan-3 (ZY-3 5.8 m MS image as reference, accuracies of coastlines extracted from MS images in three strategies were validated visually and quantitatively. The results show that, compared with coastline extracted directly from 30 m Landsat-8 MS image (strategy 1, strategy 3 achieves the best accuracies with optimal mean net shoreline movement (MNSM of −2.54 m and optimal mean absolute difference (MAD of 11.26 m, followed by coastlines extracted in strategy 2 with optimal MNSM

Transvaginal organ extraction: potential for broad clinical application.

Science.gov (United States)

Jacobsen, Garth R; Barajas-Gamboa, Juan S; Coker, Alisa M; Cheverie, Joslin; Macias, C Aitor; Sandler, Bryan J; Talamini, Mark A; Horgan, Santiago

2014-02-01

Natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery procedures have evolved over the past few years. A transvaginal approach is a promising alternative for intraperitoneal procedures. Our objective was to evaluate the safety and feasibility of transvaginal organ extraction. This institutional review board-approved protocol involved retrospective review of an ongoing prospective study. Female subjects who presented to our hospital for elective cholecystectomy, appendectomy, or sleeve gastrectomy were offered participation in the study. Eligible patients met the following criteria: age between 18 and 75, diagnosis of gallbladder disease, acute appendicitis, or morbid obesity who desired surgical treatment. A hybrid transvaginal natural orifice approach was used in this series. Thirty-four women underwent transvaginal organ extraction between September 2007 and January 2012. The mean age was 40 ± 12.1 years (range 23-63 years). The mean body mass index was 27 ± 6.4 kg/m(2) (range 16-43 kg/m(2)). All patients had an American Society of Anesthesiologists classification of two or below. The mean operative time for cholecystectomy, appendectomy, and sleeve gastrectomy was 90, 71, and 135 min, respectively. There were no conversions to open operation and no intraoperative complications. The mean hospital stay was 2 days for all cases. Patients were followed for a mean of 24 months (range 1-61 months). There were two pregnancies and two successful vaginal deliveries. Six patients (18 %) had minor complaints of spotting or heavy menses in the immediate postoperative period that resolved with conservative measures. There were no abdominal wall complications. There were no long-term complications and no mortalities. This initial experience suggests that this surgical approach is safe, does not increase length of stay, and has no long-term vaginal complications. Given this attractive profile, a transvaginal approach may prove to be a superior mode of organ extraction

Extractive Summarisation of Medical Documents

OpenAIRE

Abeed Sarker; Diego Molla; Cecile Paris

2012-01-01

Background Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) practice requires practitioners to extract evidence from published medical research when answering clinical queries. Due to the time-consuming nature of this practice, there is a strong motivation for systems that can automatically summarise medical documents and help practitioners find relevant information. Aim The aim of this work is to propose an automatic query-focused, extractive summarisation approach that selects informative sentences from medic...

The Effectiveness of a New Hemostatic Agent (Ankaferd Blood Stopper for the Control of Bleeding following Tooth Extraction in Hemophilia: A Controlled Clinical Trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hakkı Oğuz Kazancıoğlu

2013-03-01

Full Text Available Objective: To assess the hemostatic efficacy of a new local hemostatic agent, Ankaferd Blood Stopper (ABS, for the control of bleeding following tooth extraction in hemophiliacs. Materials and Methods: Simple tooth extractions were performed in 27 hemophilia A patients. In the treatment group (n=17 local hemostasis was achieved via application of ABS to the extraction sockets, whereas in the control group (n=10 local hemostasis was achieved via direct packing with gauze. Results: In all, 57 (21 primary and 36 permanent teeth extractions were performed in 27 hemophilia A patients. There were no significant differences in age or factor VIII level distribution between the 2 groups (p>0.05. The most significant clinical difference between the groups was associated with the use of ABS; those in the treatment group had significantly shorter duration of bleeding (p=0.002. Conclusion: This is the first study to evaluate the efficacy of ABS for the control of bleeding following tooth extraction in hemophiliacs. ABS can be considered an alternative local hemostatic agent for reducing clotting factor concentrates in hemophilia patients.

An Interpretable Machine Learning Model for Accurate Prediction of Sepsis in the ICU.

Science.gov (United States)

Nemati, Shamim; Holder, Andre; Razmi, Fereshteh; Stanley, Matthew D; Clifford, Gari D; Buchman, Timothy G

2018-04-01

Sepsis is among the leading causes of morbidity, mortality, and cost overruns in critically ill patients. Early intervention with antibiotics improves survival in septic patients. However, no clinically validated system exists for real-time prediction of sepsis onset. We aimed to develop and validate an Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert algorithm for early prediction of sepsis. Observational cohort study. Academic medical center from January 2013 to December 2015. Over 31,000 admissions to the ICUs at two Emory University hospitals (development cohort), in addition to over 52,000 ICU patients from the publicly available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III ICU database (validation cohort). Patients who met the Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis (Sepsis-3) prior to or within 4 hours of their ICU admission were excluded, resulting in roughly 27,000 and 42,000 patients within our development and validation cohorts, respectively. None. High-resolution vital signs time series and electronic medical record data were extracted. A set of 65 features (variables) were calculated on hourly basis and passed to the Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert algorithm to predict onset of sepsis in the proceeding T hours (where T = 12, 8, 6, or 4). Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert was used to predict onset of sepsis in the proceeding T hours and to produce a list of the most significant contributing factors. For the 12-, 8-, 6-, and 4-hour ahead prediction of sepsis, Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic in the range of 0.83-0.85. Performance of the Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert on the development and validation cohorts was indistinguishable. Using data available in the ICU in real-time, Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert can accurately predict the onset of sepsis in an ICU patient 4-12 hours prior to clinical recognition. A prospective study is necessary to determine the

Analysis of Intracellular Metabolites from Microorganisms: Quenching and Extraction Protocols

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Farhana R. Pinu

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Sample preparation is one of the most important steps in metabolome analysis. The challenges of determining microbial metabolome have been well discussed within the research community and many improvements have already been achieved in last decade. The analysis of intracellular metabolites is particularly challenging. Environmental perturbations may considerably affect microbial metabolism, which results in intracellular metabolites being rapidly degraded or metabolized by enzymatic reactions. Therefore, quenching or the complete stop of cell metabolism is a pre-requisite for accurate intracellular metabolite analysis. After quenching, metabolites need to be extracted from the intracellular compartment. The choice of the most suitable metabolite extraction method/s is another crucial step. The literature indicates that specific classes of metabolites are better extracted by different extraction protocols. In this review, we discuss the technical aspects and advancements of quenching and extraction of intracellular metabolite analysis from microbial cells.

Automatic Road Centerline Extraction from Imagery Using Road GPS Data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chuqing Cao

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Road centerline extraction from imagery constitutes a key element in numerous geospatial applications, which has been addressed through a variety of approaches. However, most of the existing methods are not capable of dealing with challenges such as different road shapes, complex scenes, and variable resolutions. This paper presents a novel method for road centerline extraction from imagery in a fully automatic approach that addresses the aforementioned challenges by exploiting road GPS data. The proposed method combines road color feature with road GPS data to detect road centerline seed points. After global alignment of road GPS data, a novel road centerline extraction algorithm is developed to extract each individual road centerline in local regions. Through road connection, road centerline network is generated as the final output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can rapidly and accurately extract road centerline from remotely sensed imagery.

Active learning reduces annotation time for clinical concept extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Kholghi, Mahnoosh; Sitbon, Laurianne; Zuccon, Guido; Nguyen, Anthony

2017-10-01

To investigate: (1) the annotation time savings by various active learning query strategies compared to supervised learning and a random sampling baseline, and (2) the benefits of active learning-assisted pre-annotations in accelerating the manual annotation process compared to de novo annotation. There are 73 and 120 discharge summary reports provided by Beth Israel institute in the train and test sets of the concept extraction task in the i2b2/VA 2010 challenge, respectively. The 73 reports were used in user study experiments for manual annotation. First, all sequences within the 73 reports were manually annotated from scratch. Next, active learning models were built to generate pre-annotations for the sequences selected by a query strategy. The annotation/reviewing time per sequence was recorded. The 120 test reports were used to measure the effectiveness of the active learning models. When annotating from scratch, active learning reduced the annotation time up to 35% and 28% compared to a fully supervised approach and a random sampling baseline, respectively. Reviewing active learning-assisted pre-annotations resulted in 20% further reduction of the annotation time when compared to de novo annotation. The number of concepts that require manual annotation is a good indicator of the annotation time for various active learning approaches as demonstrated by high correlation between time rate and concept annotation rate. Active learning has a key role in reducing the time required to manually annotate domain concepts from clinical free text, either when annotating from scratch or reviewing active learning-assisted pre-annotations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Vitex agnus-castus extracts for female reproductive disorders: a systematic review of clinical trials.

Science.gov (United States)

van Die, M Diana; Burger, Henry G; Teede, Helena J; Bone, Kerry M

2013-05-01

Vitex agnus-castus L. (chaste tree; chasteberry) is a popular herbal treatment, predominantly used for a range of female reproductive conditions in Anglo-American and European practice. The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate the evidence for the efficacy and safety of Vitex extracts from randomised, controlled trials investigating women's health.Eight databases were searched using Latin and common names for Vitex and phytotherapeutic preparations of the herb as a sole agent, together with filters for randomised, controlled trials or clinical trials. Methodological quality was assessed according to the Cochrane risk of bias and Jadad scales, as well as the proposed elaboration of CONSORT for reporting trials on herbal interventions.Thirteen randomised, controlled trials were identified and twelve are included in this review, of which eight investigated premenstrual syndrome, two premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and two latent hyperprolactinaemia. For premenstrual syndrome, seven of eight trials found Vitex extracts to be superior to placebo (5 of 6 studies), pyridoxine (1), and magnesium oxide (1). In premenstrual dysphoric disorder, one study reported Vitex to be equivalent to fluoxetine, while in the other, fluoxetine outperformed Vitex. In latent hyperprolactinaemia, one trial reported it to be superior to placebo for reducing TRH-stimulated prolactin secretion, normalising a shortened luteal phase, increasing mid-luteal progesterone and 17β-oestradiol levels, while the other found Vitex comparable to bromocriptine for reducing serum prolactin levels and ameliorating cyclic mastalgia. Adverse events with Vitex were mild and generally infrequent. The methodological quality of the included studies varied, but was generally moderate-to-high. Limitations include small sample sizes in some studies, heterogeneity of conditions being treated, and a range of reference treatments.Despite some methodological limitations, the results from randomised

Accurate and robust brain image alignment using boundary-based registration.

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Greve, Douglas N; Fischl, Bruce

2009-10-15

The fine spatial scales of the structures in the human brain represent an enormous challenge to the successful integration of information from different images for both within- and between-subject analysis. While many algorithms to register image pairs from the same subject exist, visual inspection shows that their accuracy and robustness to be suspect, particularly when there are strong intensity gradients and/or only part of the brain is imaged. This paper introduces a new algorithm called Boundary-Based Registration, or BBR. The novelty of BBR is that it treats the two images very differently. The reference image must be of sufficient resolution and quality to extract surfaces that separate tissue types. The input image is then aligned to the reference by maximizing the intensity gradient across tissue boundaries. Several lower quality images can be aligned through their alignment with the reference. Visual inspection and fMRI results show that BBR is more accurate than correlation ratio or normalized mutual information and is considerably more robust to even strong intensity inhomogeneities. BBR also excels at aligning partial-brain images to whole-brain images, a domain in which existing registration algorithms frequently fail. Even in the limit of registering a single slice, we show the BBR results to be robust and accurate.

Automatic generation of accurate subject-specific bone finite element models to be used in clinical studies.

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Viceconti, Marco; Davinelli, Mario; Taddei, Fulvia; Cappello, Angelo

2004-10-01

Most of the finite element models of bones used in orthopaedic biomechanics research are based on generic anatomies. However, in many cases it would be useful to generate from CT data a separate finite element model for each subject of a study group. In a recent study a hexahedral mesh generator based on a grid projection algorithm was found very effective in terms of accuracy and automation. However, so far the use of this method has been documented only on data collected in vitro and only for long bones. The present study was aimed at verifying if this method represents a procedure for the generation of finite element models of human bones from data collected in vivo, robust, accurate, automatic and general enough to be used in clinical studies. Robustness, automation and numerical accuracy of the proposed method were assessed on five femoral CT data sets of patients affected by various pathologies. The generality of the method was verified by processing a femur, an ileum, a phalanx, a proximal femur reconstruction, and the micro-CT of a small sample of spongy bone. The method was found robust enough to cope with the variability of the five femurs, producing meshes with a numerical accuracy and a computational weight comparable to those found in vitro. Even when the method was used to process the other bones the levels of mesh conditioning remained within acceptable limits. Thus, it may be concluded that the method presents a generality sufficient to cope with almost any orthopaedic application.

Fourier transform profilometry (FTP) using an innovative band-pass filter for accurate 3-D surface reconstruction

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Liang-Chia; Ho, Hsuan-Wei; Nguyen, Xuan-Loc

2010-02-01

This article presents a novel band-pass filter for Fourier transform profilometry (FTP) for accurate 3-D surface reconstruction. FTP can be employed to obtain 3-D surface profiles by one-shot images to achieve high-speed measurement. However, its measurement accuracy has been significantly influenced by the spectrum filtering process required to extract the phase information representing various surface heights. Using the commonly applied 2-D Hanning filter, the measurement errors could be up to 5-10% of the overall measuring height and it is unacceptable to various industrial application. To resolve this issue, the article proposes an elliptical band-pass filter for extracting the spectral region possessing essential phase information for reconstructing accurate 3-D surface profiles. The elliptical band-pass filter was developed and optimized to reconstruct 3-D surface models with improved measurement accuracy. Some experimental results verify that the accuracy can be effectively enhanced by using the elliptical filter. The accuracy improvement of 44.1% and 30.4% can be achieved in 3-D and sphericity measurement, respectively, when the elliptical filter replaces the traditional filter as the band-pass filtering method. Employing the developed method, the maximum measured error can be kept within 3.3% of the overall measuring range.

Clinically-inspired automatic classification of ovarian carcinoma subtypes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aicha BenTaieb

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Context: It has been shown that ovarian carcinoma subtypes are distinct pathologic entities with differing prognostic and therapeutic implications. Histotyping by pathologists has good reproducibility, but occasional cases are challenging and require immunohistochemistry and subspecialty consultation. Motivated by the need for more accurate and reproducible diagnoses and to facilitate pathologists′ workflow, we propose an automatic framework for ovarian carcinoma classification. Materials and Methods: Our method is inspired by pathologists′ workflow. We analyse imaged tissues at two magnification levels and extract clinically-inspired color, texture, and segmentation-based shape descriptors using image-processing methods. We propose a carefully designed machine learning technique composed of four modules: A dissimilarity matrix, dimensionality reduction, feature selection and a support vector machine classifier to separate the five ovarian carcinoma subtypes using the extracted features. Results: This paper presents the details of our implementation and its validation on a clinically derived dataset of eighty high-resolution histopathology images. The proposed system achieved a multiclass classification accuracy of 95.0% when classifying unseen tissues. Assessment of the classifier′s confusion (confusion matrix between the five different ovarian carcinoma subtypes agrees with clinician′s confusion and reflects the difficulty in diagnosing endometrioid and serous carcinomas. Conclusions: Our results from this first study highlight the difficulty of ovarian carcinoma diagnosis which originate from the intrinsic class-imbalance observed among subtypes and suggest that the automatic analysis of ovarian carcinoma subtypes could be valuable to clinician′s diagnostic procedure by providing a second opinion.

Predicting the disease of Alzheimer with SNP biomarkers and clinical data using data mining classification approach: decision tree.

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Erdoğan, Onur; Aydin Son, Yeşim

2014-01-01

Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are the most common genomic variations where only a single nucleotide differs between individuals. Individual SNPs and SNP profiles associated with diseases can be utilized as biological markers. But there is a need to determine the SNP subsets and patients' clinical data which is informative for the diagnosis. Data mining approaches have the highest potential for extracting the knowledge from genomic datasets and selecting the representative SNPs as well as most effective and informative clinical features for the clinical diagnosis of the diseases. In this study, we have applied one of the widely used data mining classification methodology: "decision tree" for associating the SNP biomarkers and significant clinical data with the Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is the most common form of "dementia". Different tree construction parameters have been compared for the optimization, and the most accurate tree for predicting the AD is presented.

A Swarm Optimization approach for clinical knowledge mining.

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Christopher, J Jabez; Nehemiah, H Khanna; Kannan, A

2015-10-01

Rule-based classification is a typical data mining task that is being used in several medical diagnosis and decision support systems. The rules stored in the rule base have an impact on classification efficiency. Rule sets that are extracted with data mining tools and techniques are optimized using heuristic or meta-heuristic approaches in order to improve the quality of the rule base. In this work, a meta-heuristic approach called Wind-driven Swarm Optimization (WSO) is used. The uniqueness of this work lies in the biological inspiration that underlies the algorithm. WSO uses Jval, a new metric, to evaluate the efficiency of a rule-based classifier. Rules are extracted from decision trees. WSO is used to obtain different permutations and combinations of rules whereby the optimal ruleset that satisfies the requirement of the developer is used for predicting the test data. The performance of various extensions of decision trees, namely, RIPPER, PART, FURIA and Decision Tables are analyzed. The efficiency of WSO is also compared with the traditional Particle Swarm Optimization. Experiments were carried out with six benchmark medical datasets. The traditional C4.5 algorithm yields 62.89% accuracy with 43 rules for liver disorders dataset where as WSO yields 64.60% with 19 rules. For Heart disease dataset, C4.5 is 68.64% accurate with 98 rules where as WSO is 77.8% accurate with 34 rules. The normalized standard deviation for accuracy of PSO and WSO are 0.5921 and 0.5846 respectively. WSO provides accurate and concise rulesets. PSO yields results similar to that of WSO but the novelty of WSO lies in its biological motivation and it is customization for rule base optimization. The trade-off between the prediction accuracy and the size of the rule base is optimized during the design and development of rule-based clinical decision support system. The efficiency of a decision support system relies on the content of the rule base and classification accuracy. Copyright �

Research on Crowdsourcing Emergency Information Extraction of Based on Events' Frame

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Yang, Bo; Wang, Jizhou; Ma, Weijun; Mao, Xi

2018-01-01

At present, the common information extraction method cannot extract the structured emergency event information accurately; the general information retrieval tool cannot completely identify the emergency geographic information; these ways also do not have an accurate assessment of these results of distilling. So, this paper proposes an emergency information collection technology based on event framework. This technique is to solve the problem of emergency information picking. It mainly includes emergency information extraction model (EIEM), complete address recognition method (CARM) and the accuracy evaluation model of emergency information (AEMEI). EIEM can be structured to extract emergency information and complements the lack of network data acquisition in emergency mapping. CARM uses a hierarchical model and the shortest path algorithm and allows the toponomy pieces to be joined as a full address. AEMEI analyzes the results of the emergency event and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the event framework. Experiments show that event frame technology can solve the problem of emergency information drawing and provides reference cases for other applications. When the emergency disaster is about to occur, the relevant departments query emergency's data that has occurred in the past. They can make arrangements ahead of schedule which defense and reducing disaster. The technology decreases the number of casualties and property damage in the country and world. This is of great significance to the state and society.

Extracting BI-RADS Features from Portuguese Clinical Texts.

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Nassif, Houssam; Cunha, Filipe; Moreira, Inês C; Cruz-Correia, Ricardo; Sousa, Eliana; Page, David; Burnside, Elizabeth; Dutra, Inês

2012-01-01

In this work we build the first BI-RADS parser for Portuguese free texts, modeled after existing approaches to extract BI-RADS features from English medical records. Our concept finder uses a semantic grammar based on the BIRADS lexicon and on iterative transferred expert knowledge. We compare the performance of our algorithm to manual annotation by a specialist in mammography. Our results show that our parser's performance is comparable to the manual method.

Highly accurate thickness measurement of multi-layered automotive paints using terahertz technology

Science.gov (United States)

Krimi, Soufiene; Klier, Jens; Jonuscheit, Joachim; von Freymann, Georg; Urbansky, Ralph; Beigang, René

2016-07-01

In this contribution, we present a highly accurate approach for thickness measurements of multi-layered automotive paints using terahertz time domain spectroscopy in reflection geometry. The proposed method combines the benefits of a model-based material parameters extraction method to calibrate the paint coatings, a generalized Rouard's method to simulate the terahertz radiation behavior within arbitrary thin films, and the robustness of a powerful evolutionary optimization algorithm to increase the sensitivity of the minimum thickness measurement limit. Within the framework of this work, a self-calibration model is introduced, which takes into consideration the real industrial challenges such as the effect of wet-on-wet spray in the painting process.

[Extraction and content determination of polysaccharides in Viscum coloratum].

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Jun; Zhu, Yi-fan

2007-11-01

To establish a method for extraction and content determination of polysaccharide in Viscum coloratum. Polysaccharide was extracted by hot water, separated by ultrafiltration and ion-exchange chromatography. The content determination was performed at wavelength 490 nm with phenol-sulfuric acid as a chtomo-genic agent. The content of polyaccharide in V. coloratum, CVPS-III, and CVPS-III-C were respectively 4.93% (RSD 1.04%, n = 3), 43.28% (RSD 1.39%, n =3), 69.55% (RSD 1.62%, n = 3), and the average recovery was 96.07% (RSD 2.54%, n = 5). The method was simple, rapid, and accurate.

Accurate Sample Time Reconstruction of Inertial FIFO Data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sebastian Stieber

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In the context of modern cyber-physical systems, the accuracy of underlying sensor data plays an increasingly important role in sensor data fusion and feature extraction. The raw events of multiple sensors have to be aligned in time to enable high quality sensor fusion results. However, the growing number of simultaneously connected sensor devices make the energy saving data acquisition and processing more and more difficult. Hence, most of the modern sensors offer a first-in-first-out (FIFO interface to store multiple data samples and to relax timing constraints, when handling multiple sensor devices. However, using the FIFO interface increases the negative influence of individual clock drifts—introduced by fabrication inaccuracies, temperature changes and wear-out effects—onto the sampling data reconstruction. Furthermore, additional timing offset errors due to communication and software latencies increases with a growing number of sensor devices. In this article, we present an approach for an accurate sample time reconstruction independent of the actual clock drift with the help of an internal sensor timer. Such timers are already available in modern sensors, manufactured in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS technology. The presented approach focuses on calculating accurate time stamps using the sensor FIFO interface in a forward-only processing manner as a robust and energy saving solution. The proposed algorithm is able to lower the overall standard deviation of reconstructed sampling periods below 40 μ s, while run-time savings of up to 42% are achieved, compared to single sample acquisition.

Clinical observation of small-incision extracapsular cataract extraction with intraocular lens implantation for the treatment of cataract in the sight restoration project

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiao-Jian Cheng

2014-04-01

Full Text Available AIM: To analyze the clinical effects of small-incision extracapsular cataract extraction with intraocular lens implantation for the treatment of cataract.METHODS:Totally 642 cases 676 eyes of cataract were treated by small-incision extracapsular cataract extraction with intraocular lens implantation. Complication during and after operations and postoperative visual acuity was observed.RESULTS:Visual acuity of 670 eyes was ≥0.05 and off-blindness rate was 99.11%, and there was 627 eyes ≥0.3 and the off-disability rate was 92.75% after 1mo. Rupture of posterior capsule during surgery occurred in 24 eyes. Fifty-four eyes were corneal edema, and anterior chamber exudation were 26 eyes, and 23 eyes were hypertension after operation. CONCLUSION: There are a little complications during and after operation for cataract treated by small-incision extracapsular cataract extraction with intraocular lens implantation. Patients have good recovery after operation. This operation does not need high-standard equipments and is suitable in the sight restoration project.

Fusion of phase congruency and harris algorithm for extraction of iris corner points

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Mabuza-Hocquet, G

2015-12-01

Full Text Available iris identification systems. Low cost devices used under uncontrolled environments acquire poor iris images with inconsistent illumination and specular reflections. These factors inflict challenges towards the accurate identification and extraction...

Building extraction for 3D city modelling using airborne laser ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology has become a standard tool for three-dimensional mapping because it offers fast rate of data acquisition with unprecedented level of accuracy. This study presents an approach to accurately extract and model building in three-dimensional space from airborne laser scanning ...

Topical Benefits of Two Fucoidan-Rich Extracts from Marine Macroalgae

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J. Helen Fitton

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Two concentrated and well-characterized fucoidan-rich extracts were investigated to determine their benefits in topical applications. An Undaria pinnatifida extract, containing 85% fucoidan, and a Fucus vesiculosus co-extract, containing 60% fucoidan and 30% polyphenol, were assessed in a number of in vitro assays to measure the effect of the extracts on enzyme inhibition, glycation, antioxidant activity and Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1 protein expression. Double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical studies were also conducted to measure soothing, protection, wrinkle depth, brightness and skin spot intensity. Both extracts demonstrated marked inhibitory effects on processes linked to skin aging, including the increased expression of SIRT1 in vitro. Clinical testing established the efficacy of the extracts in a range of the tested applications, relative to placebo. The Fucus vesiculosus extract with high polyphenol content demonstrated additional in vitro antioxidant activity, as well as improved efficacy in skin brightening applications, relative to placebo. The major effects of the Undaria pinnatifida extract aided skin immunity, soothing and protection, while the Fucus vesiculosus extract most significantly affected age spot reduction and increased brightness, soothing and protection.

Study on effective MOSFET channel length extracted from gate capacitance

Science.gov (United States)

Tsuji, Katsuhiro; Terada, Kazuo; Fujisaka, Hisato

2018-01-01

The effective channel length (L GCM) of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) is extracted from the gate capacitances of actual-size MOSFETs, which are measured by charge-injection-induced-error-free charge-based capacitance measurement (CIEF CBCM). To accurately evaluate the capacitances between the gate and the channel of test MOSFETs, the parasitic capacitances are removed by using test MOSFETs having various channel sizes and a source/drain reference device. A strong linear relationship between the gate-channel capacitance and the design channel length is obtained, from which L GCM is extracted. It is found that L GCM is slightly less than the effective channel length (L CRM) extracted from the measured MOSFET drain current. The reason for this is discussed, and it is found that the capacitance between the gate electrode and the source and drain regions affects this extraction.

Pomegranate extract exhibits in vitro activity against Clostridium difficile.

Science.gov (United States)

Finegold, Sydney M; Summanen, Paula H; Corbett, Karen; Downes, Julia; Henning, Susanne M; Li, Zhaoping

2014-10-01

To determine the possible utility of pomegranate extract in the management or prevention of Clostridium difficile infections or colonization. The activity of pomegranate was tested against 29 clinical C. difficile isolates using the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute-approved agar dilution technique. Total phenolics content of the pomegranate extract was determined by Folin-Ciocalteau colorimetric method and final concentrations of 6.25 to 400 μg/mL gallic acid equivalent were achieved in the agar. All strains had MICs at 12.5 to 25 mg/mL gallic acid equivalent range. Our results suggest antimicrobial in vitro activity for pomegranate extract against toxigenic C. difficile. Pomegranate extract may be a useful contributor to the management and prevention of C. difficile disease or colonization. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Learning-based meta-algorithm for MRI brain extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Feng; Wang, Li; Gilmore, John H; Lin, Weili; Shen, Dinggang

2011-01-01

Multiple-segmentation-and-fusion method has been widely used for brain extraction, tissue segmentation, and region of interest (ROI) localization. However, such studies are hindered in practice by their computational complexity, mainly coming from the steps of template selection and template-to-subject nonlinear registration. In this study, we address these two issues and propose a novel learning-based meta-algorithm for MRI brain extraction. Specifically, we first use exemplars to represent the entire template library, and assign the most similar exemplar to the test subject. Second, a meta-algorithm combining two existing brain extraction algorithms (BET and BSE) is proposed to conduct multiple extractions directly on test subject. Effective parameter settings for the meta-algorithm are learned from the training data and propagated to subject through exemplars. We further develop a level-set based fusion method to combine multiple candidate extractions together with a closed smooth surface, for obtaining the final result. Experimental results show that, with only a small portion of subjects for training, the proposed method is able to produce more accurate and robust brain extraction results, at Jaccard Index of 0.956 +/- 0.010 on total 340 subjects under 6-fold cross validation, compared to those by the BET and BSE even using their best parameter combinations.

The extraction of low-concentrations of gold(I) with 198Au as a radiotracer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jianzhun Jiang; Chunli Liu; Weijin Zhou; Hongcheng Gao

2002-01-01

The solvent extraction of gold from alkaline cyanide solution was studied by using 198 Au as a radiotracer. The influence of several variables on the gold extraction, including the concentration of gold, the molar ratio of extractants to gold(I), the volume percentage of cosolvent and the pH value of the aqueous phase, was investigated. The results indicated that the radioactive tracer technique is a quick, accurate, and convenient tool to investigate the extraction behavior of an element existing in low concentrations. The experimental results indicated that the studied amines, tetradecyldimethylbenzylammonium chloride, N1923 and tri-n-octylamine, could be used as extractants for the recovery of gold from aqueous alkaline cyanide solutions. (author)

Layout-aware text extraction from full-text PDF of scientific articles.

Science.gov (United States)

Ramakrishnan, Cartic; Patnia, Abhishek; Hovy, Eduard; Burns, Gully Apc

2012-05-28

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the most commonly used file format for online scientific publications. The absence of effective means to extract text from these PDF files in a layout-aware manner presents a significant challenge for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use published literature as an information source. In this paper we introduce the 'Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction' (LA-PDFText) system to facilitate accurate extraction of text from PDF files of research articles for use in text mining applications. Our paper describes the construction and performance of an open source system that extracts text blocks from PDF-formatted full-text research articles and classifies them into logical units based on rules that characterize specific sections. The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1) Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2) Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3) Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks. We show that our system can identify text blocks and classify them into rhetorical categories with Precision1 = 0.96% Recall = 0.89% and F1 = 0.91%. We also present an evaluation of the accuracy of the block detection algorithm used in step 2. Additionally, we have compared the accuracy of the text extracted by LA-PDFText to the text from the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. We then compared this accuracy with that of the text extracted by the PDF2Text system, 2commonly used to extract text from PDF. Finally, we discuss preliminary error analysis for

Deep-depletion physics-based analytical model for scanning capacitance microscopy carrier profile extraction

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wong, K. M.; Chim, W. K.

2007-01-01

An approach for fast and accurate carrier profiling using deep-depletion analytical modeling of scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM) measurements is shown for an ultrashallow p-n junction with a junction depth of less than 30 nm and a profile steepness of about 3 nm per decade change in carrier concentration. In addition, the analytical model is also used to extract the SCM dopant profiles of three other p-n junction samples with different junction depths and profile steepnesses. The deep-depletion effect arises from rapid changes in the bias applied between the sample and probe tip during SCM measurements. The extracted carrier profile from the model agrees reasonably well with the more accurate carrier profile from inverse modeling and the dopant profile from secondary ion mass spectroscopy measurements

Enhancement of Twins Fetal ECG Signal Extraction Based on Hybrid Blind Extraction Techniques

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmed Kareem Abdullah

2017-07-01

Full Text Available ECG machines are noninvasive system used to measure the heartbeat signal. It’s very important to monitor the fetus ECG signals during pregnancy to check the heat activity and to detect any problem early before born, therefore the monitoring of ECG signals have clinical significance and importance. For multi-fetal pregnancy case the classical filtering algorithms are not sufficient to separate the ECG signals between mother and fetal. In this paper the mixture consists of mixing from three ECG signals, the first signal is the mother ECG (M-ECG signal, second signal the Fetal-1 ECG (F1-ECG, and third signal is the Fetal-2 ECG (F2-ECG, these signals are extracted based on modified blind source extraction (BSE techniques. The proposed work based on hybridization between two BSE techniques to ensure that the extracted signals separated well. The results demonstrate that the proposed work very efficiently to extract the useful ECG signals

Stable and accurate methods for identification of water bodies from Landsat series imagery using meta-heuristic algorithms

Science.gov (United States)

Gamshadzaei, Mohammad Hossein; Rahimzadegan, Majid

2017-10-01

Identification of water extents in Landsat images is challenging due to surfaces with similar reflectance to water extents. The objective of this study is to provide stable and accurate methods for identifying water extents in Landsat images based on meta-heuristic algorithms. Then, seven Landsat images were selected from various environmental regions in Iran. Training of the algorithms was performed using 40 water pixels and 40 nonwater pixels in operational land imager images of Chitgar Lake (one of the study regions). Moreover, high-resolution images from Google Earth were digitized to evaluate the results. Two approaches were considered: index-based and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. In the first approach, nine common water spectral indices were investigated. AI algorithms were utilized to acquire coefficients of optimal band combinations to extract water extents. Among the AI algorithms, the artificial neural network algorithm and also the ant colony optimization, genetic algorithm, and particle swarm optimization (PSO) meta-heuristic algorithms were implemented. Index-based methods represented different performances in various regions. Among AI methods, PSO had the best performance with average overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of 93% and 98%, respectively. The results indicated the applicability of acquired band combinations to extract accurately and stably water extents in Landsat imagery.

An X-band waveguide measurement technique for the accurate characterization of materials with low dielectric loss permittivity

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Allen, Kenneth W., E-mail: kenneth.allen@gtri.gatech.edu; Scott, Mark M.; Reid, David R.; Bean, Jeffrey A.; Ellis, Jeremy D.; Morris, Andrew P.; Marsh, Jeramy M. [Advanced Concepts Laboratory, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta, Georgia 30318 (United States)

2016-05-15

In this work, we present a new X-band waveguide (WR90) measurement method that permits the broadband characterization of the complex permittivity for low dielectric loss tangent material specimens with improved accuracy. An electrically long polypropylene specimen that partially fills the cross-section is inserted into the waveguide and the transmitted scattering parameter (S{sub 21}) is measured. The extraction method relies on computational electromagnetic simulations, coupled with a genetic algorithm, to match the experimental S{sub 21} measurement. The sensitivity of the technique to sample length was explored by simulating specimen lengths from 2.54 to 15.24 cm, in 2.54 cm increments. Analysis of our simulated data predicts the technique will have the sensitivity to measure loss tangent values on the order of 10{sup −3} for materials such as polymers with relatively low real permittivity values. The ability to accurately characterize low-loss dielectric material specimens of polypropylene is demonstrated experimentally. The method was validated by excellent agreement with a free-space focused-beam system measurement of a polypropylene sheet. This technique provides the material measurement community with the ability to accurately extract material properties of low-loss material specimen over the entire X-band range. This technique could easily be extended to other frequency bands.

Extracting quantitative measures from EAP: a small clinical study using BFOR.

Science.gov (United States)

Hosseinbor, A Pasha; Chung, Moo K; Wu, Yu-Chien; Fleming, John O; Field, Aaron S; Alexander, Andrew L

2012-01-01

The ensemble average propagator (EAP) describes the 3D average diffusion process of water molecules, capturing both its radial and angular contents, and hence providing rich information about complex tissue microstructure properties. Bessel Fourier orientation reconstruction (BFOR) is one of several analytical, non-Cartesian EAP reconstruction schemes employing multiple shell acquisitions that have recently been proposed. Such modeling bases have not yet been fully exploited in the extraction of rotationally invariant q-space indices that describe the degree of diffusion anisotropy/restrictivity. Such quantitative measures include the zero-displacement probability (P(o)), mean squared displacement (MSD), q-space inverse variance (QIV), and generalized fractional anisotropy (GFA), and all are simply scalar features of the EAP. In this study, a general relationship between MSD and q-space diffusion signal is derived and an EAP-based definition of GFA is introduced. A significant part of the paper is dedicated to utilizing BFOR in a clinical dataset, comprised of 5 multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and 4 healthy controls, to estimate P(o), MSD, QIV, and GFA of corpus callosum, and specifically, to see if such indices can detect changes between normal appearing white matter (NAWM) and healthy white matter (WM). Although the sample size is small, this study is a proof of concept that can be extended to larger sample sizes in the future.

A distributed clinical decision support system architecture

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shaker H. El-Sappagh

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This paper proposes an open and distributed clinical decision support system architecture. This technical architecture takes advantage of Electronic Health Record (EHR, data mining techniques, clinical databases, domain expert knowledge bases, available technologies and standards to provide decision-making support for healthcare professionals. The architecture will work extremely well in distributed EHR environments in which each hospital has its own local EHR, and it satisfies the compatibility, interoperability and scalability objectives of an EHR. The system will also have a set of distributed knowledge bases. Each knowledge base will be specialized in a specific domain (i.e., heart disease, and the model achieves cooperation, integration and interoperability between these knowledge bases. Moreover, the model ensures that all knowledge bases are up-to-date by connecting data mining engines to each local knowledge base. These data mining engines continuously mine EHR databases to extract the most recent knowledge, to standardize it and to add it to the knowledge bases. This framework is expected to improve the quality of healthcare, reducing medical errors and guaranteeing the safety of patients by helping clinicians to make correct, accurate, knowledgeable and timely decisions.

Clinical data miner: an electronic case report form system with integrated data preprocessing and machine-learning libraries supporting clinical diagnostic model research.

Science.gov (United States)

Installé, Arnaud Jf; Van den Bosch, Thierry; De Moor, Bart; Timmerman, Dirk

2014-10-20

Using machine-learning techniques, clinical diagnostic model research extracts diagnostic models from patient data. Traditionally, patient data are often collected using electronic Case Report Form (eCRF) systems, while mathematical software is used for analyzing these data using machine-learning techniques. Due to the lack of integration between eCRF systems and mathematical software, extracting diagnostic models is a complex, error-prone process. Moreover, due to the complexity of this process, it is usually only performed once, after a predetermined number of data points have been collected, without insight into the predictive performance of the resulting models. The objective of the study of Clinical Data Miner (CDM) software framework is to offer an eCRF system with integrated data preprocessing and machine-learning libraries, improving efficiency of the clinical diagnostic model research workflow, and to enable optimization of patient inclusion numbers through study performance monitoring. The CDM software framework was developed using a test-driven development (TDD) approach, to ensure high software quality. Architecturally, CDM's design is split over a number of modules, to ensure future extendability. The TDD approach has enabled us to deliver high software quality. CDM's eCRF Web interface is in active use by the studies of the International Endometrial Tumor Analysis consortium, with over 4000 enrolled patients, and more studies planned. Additionally, a derived user interface has been used in six separate interrater agreement studies. CDM's integrated data preprocessing and machine-learning libraries simplify some otherwise manual and error-prone steps in the clinical diagnostic model research workflow. Furthermore, CDM's libraries provide study coordinators with a method to monitor a study's predictive performance as patient inclusions increase. To our knowledge, CDM is the only eCRF system integrating data preprocessing and machine-learning libraries

Semantic Information Extraction of Lanes Based on Onboard Camera Videos

Science.gov (United States)

Tang, L.; Deng, T.; Ren, C.

2018-04-01

In the field of autonomous driving, semantic information of lanes is very important. This paper proposes a method of automatic detection of lanes and extraction of semantic information from onboard camera videos. The proposed method firstly detects the edges of lanes by the grayscale gradient direction, and improves the Probabilistic Hough transform to fit them; then, it uses the vanishing point principle to calculate the lane geometrical position, and uses lane characteristics to extract lane semantic information by the classification of decision trees. In the experiment, 216 road video images captured by a camera mounted onboard a moving vehicle were used to detect lanes and extract lane semantic information. The results show that the proposed method can accurately identify lane semantics from video images.

Computerized tomography magnified bone windows are superior to standard soft tissue windows for accurate measurement of stone size: an in vitro and clinical study.

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Eisner, Brian H; Kambadakone, Avinash; Monga, Manoj; Anderson, James K; Thoreson, Andrew A; Lee, Hang; Dretler, Stephen P; Sahani, Dushyant V

2009-04-01

We determined the most accurate method of measuring urinary stones on computerized tomography. For the in vitro portion of the study 24 calculi, including 12 calcium oxalate monohydrate and 12 uric acid stones, that had been previously collected at our clinic were measured manually with hand calipers as the gold standard measurement. The calculi were then embedded into human kidney-sized potatoes and scanned using 64-slice multidetector computerized tomography. Computerized tomography measurements were performed at 4 window settings, including standard soft tissue windows (window width-320 and window length-50), standard bone windows (window width-1120 and window length-300), 5.13x magnified soft tissue windows and 5.13x magnified bone windows. Maximum stone dimensions were recorded. For the in vivo portion of the study 41 patients with distal ureteral stones who underwent noncontrast computerized tomography and subsequently spontaneously passed the stones were analyzed. All analyzed stones were 100% calcium oxalate monohydrate or mixed, calcium based stones. Stones were prospectively collected at the clinic and the largest diameter was measured with digital calipers as the gold standard. This was compared to computerized tomography measurements using 4.0x magnified soft tissue windows and 4.0x magnified bone windows. Statistical comparisons were performed using Pearson's correlation and paired t test. In the in vitro portion of the study the most accurate measurements were obtained using 5.13x magnified bone windows with a mean 0.13 mm difference from caliper measurement (p = 0.6). Measurements performed in the soft tissue window with and without magnification, and in the bone window without magnification were significantly different from hand caliper measurements (mean difference 1.2, 1.9 and 1.4 mm, p = 0.003, window settings with magnification. For uric acid calculi the measurement error was observed only in standard soft tissue window settings. In vivo 4.0x

Preventive Effect of Glycyrrhiza Glabra Extract on Oral Mucositis in Patients under Head and Neck Radiotherapy: A Randomized Clinical Trial

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Shamsolmolok Najafi

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Objectives: About two-thirds of cancer patients undergo radiotherapy. Oral mucositis represents a major complication of radiotherapy, causing morbidity and mortality and decreasing the quality of life of patients. This study aimed to assess the preventive effect of Glycyrrhiza aqueous extract on oral mucositis in cancer patients under head and neck radiotherapy.Materials and Methods: In this double-blind clinical trial, 37 head and neck cancer patients were divided into intervention (n=19 group receiving Glycyrrhiza aqueous extract and control (n=18 group receiving placebo. Patients in the test group used Glycyrrhiza aqueous extract topically twice a day from the first day of starting radiotherapy until the end of the second week. Patients were examined in the first day of radiotherapy for any type of wound before treatment and those with oral ulcers before radiotherapy were excluded from the study. The grade of mucositis was determined using the classification by the World Health Organization. ANCOVA was performed to assess any difference between the two groups with regard to oral mucosal irritation and wound size after the intervention while controlling for the covariates such as sex and age.Results: Significant differences were found in the maximum grade of mucositis and oral mucosal irritation between the intervention and control groups (P<0.001.Conclusions: This study showed that aqueous extract of Glycyrrhiza can be effective for decreasing the severity of oral mucositis in head and neck cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy.

studies on solvent extraction of free hydrogen cyanide from river water

African Journals Online (AJOL)

A method for free and strongly complexed cyanide measurement in river water was developed. Recovery tests from solution with and without river water, using various solvent combinations and background control were investigated to obtain an accurate and precise extraction method for the measurement of hydrogen ...

Feature extraction for face recognition via Active Shape Model (ASM) and Active Appearance Model (AAM)

Science.gov (United States)

Iqtait, M.; Mohamad, F. S.; Mamat, M.

2018-03-01

Biometric is a pattern recognition system which is used for automatic recognition of persons based on characteristics and features of an individual. Face recognition with high recognition rate is still a challenging task and usually accomplished in three phases consisting of face detection, feature extraction, and expression classification. Precise and strong location of trait point is a complicated and difficult issue in face recognition. Cootes proposed a Multi Resolution Active Shape Models (ASM) algorithm, which could extract specified shape accurately and efficiently. Furthermore, as the improvement of ASM, Active Appearance Models algorithm (AAM) is proposed to extracts both shape and texture of specified object simultaneously. In this paper we give more details about the two algorithms and give the results of experiments, testing their performance on one dataset of faces. We found that the ASM is faster and gains more accurate trait point location than the AAM, but the AAM gains a better match to the texture.

Laser-assisted lead extraction: the European experience.

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Kennergren, C; Bucknall, C A; Butter, C; Charles, R; Fuhrer, J; Grosfeld, M; Tavernier, R; Morgado, T B; Mortensen, P; Paul, V; Richter, P; Schwartz, T; Wellens, F

2007-08-01

The aim of this study is to investigate the safety and effectiveness of Excimer laser-assisted lead extraction in Europe. The final European multi-centre study experience is presented. The Excimer is a cool cutting laser (50 degrees C) with a wavelength of 308 nm. The energy is emitted from the tip of a flexible sheath and is absorbed by proteins and lipids, 64% of the energy is absorbed at a tissue depth of 0.06 mm. The sheath is positioned over the lead, and the fibrosis surrounding the lead is vaporized while advancing the sheath without damaging other leads. From August 1996 to March 2001, 383 leads (170 atrial, 213 ventricular) in 292 patients (mean age 61.6 years, range 13-96) were extracted at 14 European centres. Mean implantation time was 74 months (3-358). Most frequent indications were pocket infection (26%), non-functional leads (21%), patient morbidity (21%), septicaemia or endocarditis (14%), erosion (5%), and lead interference (8%). Median extraction time was 15 min (1-300). Complete extraction was achieved in 90.9% of the leads and partial extraction in 3.4%. Extraction failed in 5.7% of the leads. Major complications = perforations caused 10/22 (3.4/5.7%) of the failures. Most partially extracted patients were considered clinically successful, as only minor lead parts without clinical significance were left. Femoral non-laser technique was used to remove 8/12 of the non-complication failures. The total complication rate, including five minor complications (1.7%), was 5.1%. No in-hospital mortality occurred. Pacing and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator leads can safely, effectively, and predictably be extracted. Open-heart extractions can be limited to special cases. The results indicate that the traditional policy of abandoning redundant leads, instead of removing them, may be obsolete in many patients.

Using an electronic prescribing system to ensure accurate medication lists in a large multidisciplinary medical group.

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Stock, Ron; Scott, Jim; Gurtel, Sharon

2009-05-01

Although medication safety has largely focused on reducing medication errors in hospitals, the scope of adverse drug events in the outpatient setting is immense. A fundamental problem occurs when a clinician lacks immediate access to an accurate list of the medications that a patient is taking. Since 2001, PeaceHealth Medical Group (PHMG), a multispecialty physician group, has been using an electronic prescribing system that includes medication-interaction warnings and allergy checks. Yet, most practitioners recognized the remaining potential for error, especially because there was no assurance regarding the accuracy of information on the electronic medical record (EMR)-generated medication list. PeaceHealth developed and implemented a standardized approach to (1) review and reconcile the medication list for every patient at each office visit and (2) report on the results obtained within the PHMG clinics. In 2005, PeaceHealth established the ambulatory medication reconciliation project to develop a reliable, efficient process for maintaining accurate patient medication lists. Each of PeaceHealth's five regions created a medication reconciliation task force to redesign its clinical practice, incorporating the systemwide aims and agreed-on key process components for every ambulatory visit. Implementation of the medication reconciliation process at the PHMG clinics resulted in a substantial increase in the number of accurate medication lists, with fewer discrepancies between what the patient is actually taking and what is recorded in the EMR. The PeaceHealth focus on patient safety, and particularly the reduction of medication errors, has involved a standardized approach for reviewing and reconciling medication lists for every patient visiting a physician office. The standardized processes can be replicated at other ambulatory clinics-whether or not electronic tools are available.

DNA extraction techniques compared for accurate detection of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in maize food and feed products.

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Turkec, Aydin; Kazan, Hande; Karacanli, Burçin; Lucas, Stuart J

2015-08-01

In this paper, DNA extraction methods have been evaluated to detect the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in maize food and feed products commercialised in Turkey. All the extraction methods tested performed well for the majority of maize foods and feed products analysed. However, the highest DNA content was achieved by the Wizard, Genespin or the CTAB method, all of which produced optimal DNA yield and purity for different maize food and feed products. The samples were then screened for the presence of GM elements, along with certified reference materials. Of the food and feed samples, 8 % tested positive for the presence of one GM element (NOS terminator), of which half (4 % of the total) also contained a second element (the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus 35S promoter). The results obtained herein clearly demonstrate the presence of GM maize in the Turkish market, and that the Foodproof GMO Screening Kit provides reliable screening of maize food and feed products.

Antimicrobial Activities of Methanol, Ethanol and Supercritical CO2 Extracts of Philippine Piper betle L. on Clinical Isolates of Gram Positive and Gram Negative Bacteria with Transferable Multiple Drug Resistance.

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Demetrio L Valle

Full Text Available Piper betle L. has traditionally been used in alternative medicine in different countries for various therapeutic purposes, including as an anti-infective agent. However, studies reported in the literature are mainly on its activities on drug susceptible bacterial strains. This study determined the antimicrobial activities of its ethanol, methanol, and supercritical CO2 extracts on clinical isolates of multiple drug resistant bacteria which have been identified by the Infectious Disease Society of America as among the currently more challenging strains in clinical management. Assay methods included the standard disc diffusion method and the broth microdilution method for the determination of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC and the minimum bactericidal concentrations (MBC of the extracts for the test microorganisms. This study revealed the bactericidal activities of all the P. betle leaf crude extracts on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE, extended spectrum β-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, and metallo-β-lactamase-producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii, with minimum bactericidal concentrations that ranged from 19μg/ml to 1250 μg/ml. The extracts proved to be more potent against the Gram positive MRSA and VRE than for the Gram negative test bacteria. VRE isolates were more susceptible to all the extracts than the MRSA isolates. Generally, the ethanol extracts proved to be more potent than the methanol extracts and supercritical CO2 extracts as shown by their lower MICs for both the Gram positive and Gram negative MDRs. MTT cytotoxicity assay showed that the highest concentration (100 μg/ml of P. betle ethanol extract tested was not toxic to normal human dermal fibroblasts (HDFn. Data from the study firmly established P. betle as an alternative source of anti-infectives against multiple drug resistant

Antimicrobial Activities of Methanol, Ethanol and Supercritical CO2 Extracts of Philippine Piper betle L. on Clinical Isolates of Gram Positive and Gram Negative Bacteria with Transferable Multiple Drug Resistance.

Science.gov (United States)

Valle, Demetrio L; Cabrera, Esperanza C; Puzon, Juliana Janet M; Rivera, Windell L

2016-01-01

Piper betle L. has traditionally been used in alternative medicine in different countries for various therapeutic purposes, including as an anti-infective agent. However, studies reported in the literature are mainly on its activities on drug susceptible bacterial strains. This study determined the antimicrobial activities of its ethanol, methanol, and supercritical CO2 extracts on clinical isolates of multiple drug resistant bacteria which have been identified by the Infectious Disease Society of America as among the currently more challenging strains in clinical management. Assay methods included the standard disc diffusion method and the broth microdilution method for the determination of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and the minimum bactericidal concentrations (MBC) of the extracts for the test microorganisms. This study revealed the bactericidal activities of all the P. betle leaf crude extracts on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), extended spectrum β-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, and metallo-β-lactamase-producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii, with minimum bactericidal concentrations that ranged from 19μg/ml to 1250 μg/ml. The extracts proved to be more potent against the Gram positive MRSA and VRE than for the Gram negative test bacteria. VRE isolates were more susceptible to all the extracts than the MRSA isolates. Generally, the ethanol extracts proved to be more potent than the methanol extracts and supercritical CO2 extracts as shown by their lower MICs for both the Gram positive and Gram negative MDRs. MTT cytotoxicity assay showed that the highest concentration (100 μg/ml) of P. betle ethanol extract tested was not toxic to normal human dermal fibroblasts (HDFn). Data from the study firmly established P. betle as an alternative source of anti-infectives against multiple drug resistant bacteria.

A simple and accurate onset detection method for a measured bell-shaped speed profile

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Lior Botzer

2009-06-01

Full Text Available Motor control neuroscientists measure limb trajectories and extract the onset of the movement for a variety of purposes. Such trajectories are often aligned relative to the onset of individual movement before the features of that movement are extracted and their properties are inspected. Onset detection is performed either manually or automatically, typically by selecting a velocity threshold. Here, we present a simple onset detection algorithm that is more accurate than the conventional velocity threshold technique. The proposed method is based on a simple regression and follows the minimum acceleration with constraints model, in which the initial phase of the bell-shaped movement is modeled by a cubic power of the time. We demonstrate the performance of the suggested method and compare it to the velocity threshold technique and to manual onset detection by a group of motor control experts. The database for this comparison consists of simulated minimum jerk trajectories and recorded reaching movements.

Effects of standardized methanol extract of Andrographis paniculata ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Extracts of Andrographis paniculata Nees is used in traditional medicine for the treatment several diseases including inflammation, asthma and common cold. The aim of this study was to investigate the possible effects of a clinical dose of the methanol extract of A. paniculata (AP) on tracheal cyclooxygenase and ...

Advanced field-solver techniques for RC extraction of integrated circuits

CERN Document Server

Yu, Wenjian

2014-01-01

Resistance and capacitance (RC) extraction is an essential step in modeling the interconnection wires and substrate coupling effect in nanometer-technology integrated circuits (IC). The field-solver techniques for RC extraction guarantee the accuracy of modeling, and are becoming increasingly important in meeting the demand for accurate modeling and simulation of VLSI designs. Advanced Field-Solver Techniques for RC Extraction of Integrated Circuits presents a systematic introduction to, and treatment of, the key field-solver methods for RC extraction of VLSI interconnects and substrate coupling in mixed-signal ICs. Various field-solver techniques are explained in detail, with real-world examples to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm. This book will benefit graduate students and researchers in the field of electrical and computer engineering, as well as engineers working in the IC design and design automation industries. Dr. Wenjian Yu is an Associate Professor at the Department of ...

Immediate Implant Placement into Extraction Sockets with Labial Plate Dehiscence Defects: A Clinical Case Series.

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Sarnachiaro, Guido O; Chu, Stephen J; Sarnachiaro, Evangelina; Gotta, Sergio Luis; Tarnow, Dennis P

2016-08-01

To measure the buccal plate reconstruction of extraction sockets with labial plate dehiscence defects using a bone allograft in combination with an absorbable collagen membrane and a custom-healing abutment at the time of tooth removal. Ten patients underwent immediate implant placement and reconstruction of the buccal plate. Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) was performed preextraction, immediately after bone grafting and implant placement (day 0), and between 6 and 9 months following implant surgery. Measurements were taken at three levels: coronal (L1), middle (L2), and apical (L3) level. Implants placed into sockets with labial plate dehiscence defects demonstrated radiographic reformation of the labial plate dehiscence defect at 6 to 9 months posttreatment. The net gain in labial plate on cone beam computerized tomography (CBCT) in L1 and L2 was 3.0 mm, where 0 mm existed at pretreatment. The minimum amount of labial plate thickness of 2.0 mm was achieved in all treated sites, evaluated radiographically at 6 to 9 months postoperatively, in a single procedure, without flap elevation and maintaining the gingival architecture and satisfactory esthetics. Placing an absorbable membrane, bone graft, and custom-healing abutment at the time of flapless anterior tooth extraction and immediate implant placement into a socket with a labial osseous dehiscence is a viable clinical technique to reconstitute the absence of the labial bone plate. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Immediate implant placement and provisional crown fabrication after a minimally invasive extraction of a peg-shaped maxillary lateral incisor: a clinical report.

Science.gov (United States)

Turkyilmaz, Ilser; Suarez, Jose Carlos; Company, Andrea M

2009-09-01

The aim of this case report is to describe the replacement of a maxillary peg-shaped lateral incisor with the placement of an immediate implant and a provisional restoration following a minimally invasive extraction to preserve anterior esthetics. Extraction sites in the anterior maxilla can present restorative challenges with regard to esthetics. Resistance to wearing a temporary removable partial denture during healing makes immediate implant therapy an appealing alternative to patients. Implant placement into fresh extraction sockets using no flap elevation has recently become more popular due to some advantages including less bleeding, swelling, and the preservation of existing soft tissue contours. A 20-year-old woman with a peg-shaped maxillary left lateral incisor was treated using an implant placed into the fresh extraction socket using a flapless approach and immediate provisional crown fabrication. Flapless implant placement helps to preserve site morphology by protecting and supporting existing hard and soft tissues while minimizing surgical trauma to the adjacent tissues. Using a previously fabricated acrylic index, a provisional acrylic crown was fabricated on the adjusted temporary abutment and delivered to the patient the same day during the extraction visit. This report describes the diagnosis and treatment of an over-prepared peg-shaped maxillary left lateral incisor associated with multiple crown decementations. The tooth was extracted without flap elevation and an implant was inserted immediately using flapless surgery and placement of an immediate provisional single crown. Flapless implant insertion into fresh extraction sockets and placement of immediate provisional crowns in cases involving the maxillary anterior region represent a viable treatment option in appropriate clinical situations where esthetics are a high priority. The strategy preserves optimum gingival contours and papillary height may be a viable option compared to fixed partial

Is the extraction by Whatman FTA filter matrix technology and sequencing of large ribosomal subunit D1-D2 region sufficient for identification of clinical fungi?

Science.gov (United States)

Kiraz, Nuri; Oz, Yasemin; Aslan, Huseyin; Erturan, Zayre; Ener, Beyza; Akdagli, Sevtap Arikan; Muslumanoglu, Hamza; Cetinkaya, Zafer

2015-10-01

Although conventional identification of pathogenic fungi is based on the combination of tests evaluating their morphological and biochemical characteristics, they can fail to identify the less common species or the differentiation of closely related species. In addition these tests are time consuming, labour-intensive and require experienced personnel. We evaluated the feasibility and sufficiency of DNA extraction by Whatman FTA filter matrix technology and DNA sequencing of D1-D2 region of the large ribosomal subunit gene for identification of clinical isolates of 21 yeast and 160 moulds in our clinical mycology laboratory. While the yeast isolates were identified at species level with 100% homology, 102 (63.75%) clinically important mould isolates were identified at species level, 56 (35%) isolates at genus level against fungal sequences existing in DNA databases and two (1.25%) isolates could not be identified. Consequently, Whatman FTA filter matrix technology was a useful method for extraction of fungal DNA; extremely rapid, practical and successful. Sequence analysis strategy of D1-D2 region of the large ribosomal subunit gene was found considerably sufficient in identification to genus level for the most clinical fungi. However, the identification to species level and especially discrimination of closely related species may require additional analysis. © 2015 Blackwell Verlag GmbH.

Ultrasound-assisted extraction of Ca, K and Mg from in vitro citrus culture

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Arruda Sandra C. C.

2003-01-01

Full Text Available An ultrasound extraction procedure for Ca, K and Mg from in vitro plant cultures is proposed, comparing cultures of different embryogenic levels of Citrus sinensis and Citrus limonia, employing ultrasound energy. Parameters related to metals extraction, such as plant material sampling, acid concentration and sonication time were investigated. For accuracy check, the proposed ultrasound extraction procedure was compared with a microwave-assisted digestion procedure and no differences in the results were verified at 95% of the confidence level. With this simple and accurate extraction procedure, it was possible to determine differences in Ca, K and Mg concentrations during Citrus embryo formation/development and between cultures (embryogenic and non-embryogenic. Finally, the ultrasound extraction method demonstrated to be an excellent alternative for handless sampling and operational costs.

Highly accurate thickness measurement of multi-layered automotive paints using terahertz technology

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Krimi, Soufiene; Beigang, René; Klier, Jens; Jonuscheit, Joachim; Freymann, Georg von; Urbansky, Ralph

2016-01-01

In this contribution, we present a highly accurate approach for thickness measurements of multi-layered automotive paints using terahertz time domain spectroscopy in reflection geometry. The proposed method combines the benefits of a model-based material parameters extraction method to calibrate the paint coatings, a generalized Rouard's method to simulate the terahertz radiation behavior within arbitrary thin films, and the robustness of a powerful evolutionary optimization algorithm to increase the sensitivity of the minimum thickness measurement limit. Within the framework of this work, a self-calibration model is introduced, which takes into consideration the real industrial challenges such as the effect of wet-on-wet spray in the painting process.

Solid-phase extraction of carotenoids.

Science.gov (United States)

Shen, Yao; Hu, Yumin; Huang, Ke; Yin, Shi'an; Chen, Bo; Yao, Shouzhuo

2009-07-24

In this work, solid-phase extraction (SPE) trapping performance of lutein and beta-carotene, which were used as the model molecules of carotenoids, was investigated. The absorption, elution, and enrichment of carotenoids on SPE cartridges with four different sorbents, i.e. C(30), C(18), diol, and silica, were compared respectively with the help of frontal analysis technique. The high retentions of both lutein and beta-carotene were achieved on the C(18) and C(30) cartridges. The diol and silica cartridges only had good retention for lutein. The optimized SPE method for sample pretreatment for the carotenoids analysis was obtained after the investigation of trapping performance. The method was applied successfully to the analysis of biological sample, i.e. serum and human breast milk. The recovery, accuracy, and precision of SPE method comparing with those of traditional liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) method for the sample pretreatment for the analysis of carotenoids owned a number of advantages such as rapid, no chloroform used, and accurate versus LLE.

Layout-aware text extraction from full-text PDF of scientific articles

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ramakrishnan Cartic

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The Portable Document Format (PDF is the most commonly used file format for online scientific publications. The absence of effective means to extract text from these PDF files in a layout-aware manner presents a significant challenge for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use published literature as an information source. In this paper we introduce the ‘Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction’ (LA-PDFText system to facilitate accurate extraction of text from PDF files of research articles for use in text mining applications. Results Our paper describes the construction and performance of an open source system that extracts text blocks from PDF-formatted full-text research articles and classifies them into logical units based on rules that characterize specific sections. The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1 Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2 Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3 Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks. We show that our system can identify text blocks and classify them into rhetorical categories with Precision1 = 0.96% Recall = 0.89% and F1 = 0.91%. We also present an evaluation of the accuracy of the block detection algorithm used in step 2. Additionally, we have compared the accuracy of the text extracted by LA-PDFText to the text from the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. We then compared this accuracy with that of the text extracted by the PDF2Text system, 2commonly used to extract text from PDF

Toward accurate and fast iris segmentation for iris biometrics.

Science.gov (United States)

He, Zhaofeng; Tan, Tieniu; Sun, Zhenan; Qiu, Xianchao

2009-09-01

Iris segmentation is an essential module in iris recognition because it defines the effective image region used for subsequent processing such as feature extraction. Traditional iris segmentation methods often involve an exhaustive search of a large parameter space, which is time consuming and sensitive to noise. To address these problems, this paper presents a novel algorithm for accurate and fast iris segmentation. After efficient reflection removal, an Adaboost-cascade iris detector is first built to extract a rough position of the iris center. Edge points of iris boundaries are then detected, and an elastic model named pulling and pushing is established. Under this model, the center and radius of the circular iris boundaries are iteratively refined in a way driven by the restoring forces of Hooke's law. Furthermore, a smoothing spline-based edge fitting scheme is presented to deal with noncircular iris boundaries. After that, eyelids are localized via edge detection followed by curve fitting. The novelty here is the adoption of a rank filter for noise elimination and a histogram filter for tackling the shape irregularity of eyelids. Finally, eyelashes and shadows are detected via a learned prediction model. This model provides an adaptive threshold for eyelash and shadow detection by analyzing the intensity distributions of different iris regions. Experimental results on three challenging iris image databases demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed.

The Effect of Hydroalcoholic Extracts of Capsella Bursa-Pastoris on Heavy Menstrual Bleeding: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

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Naafe, Mahdis; Kariman, Nourossadat; Keshavarz, Zohreh; Khademi, Nasim; Mojab, Faraz; Mohammadbeigi, Abolfazl

2018-03-20

Heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) is one of the leading causes of low quality of life and iron deficiency anemia in women. This study aimed to determine the effect of hydroalcoholic extracts of Capsella bursa-pastoris on HMB. This study is a triple-blinded, randomized clinical trial. The study was conducted in gynecology clinics affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. Our patients affected to a complaint of HMB. After obtaining a complete medical history of the women and filling out the demographic forms, the participants were assigned randomly into the experimental (n = 42) and control groups (n = 42). The eligible participants were given a pictorial blood loss assessment chart (PBLAC) to confirm HMB during the menstrual cycle. The experimental group received two capsules of mefenamic acid (500 mg) every 8 h and two Capsella bursa-pastoris capsules every 12 h. The intervention started from the first day of menstruation to the end of this period up to 7 days for two consecutive cycles. In the control group, the patients received mefenamic acid and placebo instead of Capsella bursa-pastoris capsules. The PBLAC score and number of bleeding days, incidence of any possible problems, as well as participant satisfaction were measured. The data were analyzed using t-test, Chi-square, repeated-measures ANOVA, and ANCOVA tests in PASW Statistics ver. 18. After the intervention, there was observed significant decrease in the amount of menstrual bleeding in both groups. However, the mean decrease in the amount of bleeding was significantly more in the Capsella bursa-pastoris group (p < 0/001). Compared with control group, hydroalcoholic extracts of Capsella bursa-pastoris capsule appeared to be effective in reducing menstrual bleeding in this study. Further research regarding the efficacy and safety of Capsella bursa-pastoris is required.

Clinical Efficacy Associated with Enhanced Antioxidant Enzyme Activities of Silver Nanoparticles Biosynthesized Using Moringa oleifera Leaf Extract, Against Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in a Murine Model of Leishmania major.

Science.gov (United States)

El-Khadragy, Manal; Alolayan, Ebtesam M; Metwally, Dina M; El-Din, Mohamed F Serag; Alobud, Sara S; Alsultan, Nour I; Alsaif, Sarah S; Awad, Manal A; Abdel Moneim, Ahmed E

2018-05-22

Leishmaniasis is one of the most significant vector-borne syndromes of individuals. This parasitic infection can be affected by many species of Leishmania, most of which are zoonotic. Natural products have made and are continuing to make important contributions to the search for new antileishmanial agents. The use of plants in the production assembly of silver nanoparticles has drawn attention because of its rapid, eco-friendly, non-pathogenic, economical protocol and provides a single step technique for the biosynthetic process. Hence, we aimed to biosynthesize silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) using Moringa oleifera leaf extract and investigated the antileishmanial activity of these nanoparticles in a murine model of Leishmania major infection. A total of 50 mice were used and divided into five groups-healthy control, infected, infected mice treated with pentostam, infected mice treated with Ag-NPs and infected mice pretreated with Ag-NPs. In the present study, the leaf extract of the plant species Moringa oleifera was found to be a good source for the synthesis of silver nanoparticles, their formation being confirmed by color change and stability in solution. In the present murine model of Leishmania major infection, we found that oral treatment with silver nanoparticles biosynthesized using Moringa oleifera extract resulted in a significant reduction in the average size of leishmaniasis cutaneous lesions compared with untreated mice. Furthermore, the clinical efficacy of Moringa oleifera extract was associated with enhanced antioxidant enzyme activities. In conclusion, treatment with silver nanoparticles biosynthesized using Moringa oleifera extract has higher and faster clinical efficacy than standard pentavalent antimonial treatment, probably by boosting the endogenous antioxidant activity.

[Analysis of triterpenoids in Ganoderma lucidum by microwave-assisted continuous extraction].

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Yan-fang; An, Jing; Jiang, Ye

2015-04-01

For further improving the extraction efficiency of microwave extraction, a microwave-assisted contijuous extraction (MACE) device has been designed and utilized. By contrasting with the traditional methods, the characteristics and extraction efficiency of MACE has also been studied. The method was validated by the analysis of the triterpenoids in Ganoderma lucidum. The extraction conditions of MACE were: using 95% ethanol as solvent, microwave power 200 W and radiation time 14.5 min (5 cycles). The extraction results were subsequently compared with traditional heat reflux extraction ( HRE) , soxhlet extraction (SE), ultrasonic extraction ( UE) as well as the conventional microwave extraction (ME). For triterpenoids, the two methods based on the microwaves (ME and MACE) were in general capable of finishing the extraction in 10, 14.5 min, respectively, while other methods should consume 60 min and even more than 100 min. Additionally, ME can produce comparable extraction results as the classical HRE and higher extraction yield than both SE and UE, however, notably lower extraction yield than MASE. More importantly, the purity of the crud extract by MACE is far better than the other methods. MACE can effectively combine the advantages of microwave extraction and soxhlet extraction, thus enabling a more complete extraction of the analytes of TCMs in comparison with ME. And therefore makes the analytic result more accurate. It provides a novel, high efficient, rapid and reliable pretreatment technique for the analysis of TCMs, and it could potentially be extended to ingredient preparation or extracting techniques of TCMs.

Comparison of water extraction methods in Tibet based on GF-1 data

Science.gov (United States)

Jia, Lingjun; Shang, Kun; Liu, Jing; Sun, Zhongqing

2018-03-01

In this study, we compared four different water extraction methods with GF-1 data according to different water types in Tibet, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Decision Tree Classifier based on False Normalized Difference Water Index (FNDWI-DTC), and PCA-SVM. The results show that all of the four methods can extract large area water body, but only SVM and PCA-SVM can obtain satisfying extraction results for small size water body. The methods were evaluated by both overall accuracy (OAA) and Kappa coefficient (KC). The OAA of PCA-SVM, SVM, FNDWI-DTC, PCA are 96.68%, 94.23%, 93.99%, 93.01%, and the KCs are 0.9308, 0.8995, 0.8962, 0.8842, respectively, in consistent with visual inspection. In summary, SVM is better for narrow rivers extraction and PCA-SVM is suitable for water extraction of various types. As for dark blue lakes, the methods using PCA can extract more quickly and accurately.

Accurate diagnosis of CHD by Paediatricians with Expertise in Cardiology.

Science.gov (United States)

Jacob, Hannah C; Massey, Hannah; Yates, Robert W M; Kelsall, A Wilfred

2017-08-01

Introduction Paediatricians with Expertise in Cardiology assess children with a full history, examination, and often perform an echocardiogram. A minority are then referred to an outreach clinic run jointly with a visiting paediatric cardiologist. The accuracy of the echocardiography diagnosis made by the Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology is unknown. Materials and methods We conducted a retrospective review of clinic letters for children seen in the outreach clinic for the first time between March, 2004 and March, 2011. Children with CHD diagnosed antenatally or elsewhere were excluded. We recorded the echocardiography diagnosis made by the paediatric cardiologist and previously by the Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology. The Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology referred 317/3145 (10%) children seen in the local cardiac clinics to the outreach clinic over this period, and among them 296 were eligible for inclusion. Their median age was 1.5 years (range 1 month-15.1 years). For 244 (82%) children, there was complete diagnostic agreement between the Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology and the paediatric cardiologist. For 29 (10%) children, the main diagnosis was identical with additional findings made by the paediatric cardiologist. The abnormality had resolved in 17 (6%) cases by the time of clinic attendance. In six (2%) patients, the paediatric cardiologist made a different diagnosis. In total, 138 (47%) patients underwent a surgical or catheter intervention. Discussion Paediatricians with Expertise in Cardiology can make accurate diagnoses of CHD in children referred to their clinics. This can allow effective triage of children attending the outreach clinic, making best use of limited specialist resources.

Development of a modified cortisol extraction procedure for intermediately sized fish not amenable to whole-body or plasma extraction methods.

Science.gov (United States)

Guest, Taylor W; Blaylock, Reginald B; Evans, Andrew N

2016-02-01

The corticosteroid hormone cortisol is the central mediator of the teleost stress response. Therefore, the accurate quantification of cortisol in teleost fishes is a vital tool for addressing fundamental questions about an animal's physiological response to environmental stressors. Conventional steroid extraction methods using plasma or whole-body homogenates, however, are inefficient within an intermediate size range of fish that are too small for phlebotomy and too large for whole-body steroid extractions. To assess the potential effects of hatchery-induced stress on survival of fingerling hatchery-reared Spotted Seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus), we developed a novel extraction procedure for measuring cortisol in intermediately sized fish (50-100 mm in length) that are not amenable to standard cortisol extraction methods. By excising a standardized portion of the caudal peduncle, this tissue extraction procedure allows for a small portion of a larger fish to be sampled for cortisol, while minimizing the potential interference from lipids that may be extracted using whole-body homogenization procedures. Assay precision was comparable to published plasma and whole-body extraction procedures, and cortisol quantification over a wide range of sample dilutions displayed parallelism versus assay standards. Intra-assay %CV was 8.54%, and average recovery of spiked samples was 102%. Also, tissue cortisol levels quantified using this method increase 30 min after handling stress and are significantly correlated with blood values. We conclude that this modified cortisol extraction procedure provides an excellent alternative to plasma and whole-body extraction procedures for intermediately sized fish, and will facilitate the efficient assessment of cortisol in a variety of situations ranging from basic laboratory research to industrial and field-based environmental health applications.

TLS-Based Feature Extraction and 3D Modeling for Arch Structures

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiangyang Xu

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS technology is one of the most efficient and accurate tools for 3D measurement which can reveal surface-based characteristics of objects with the aid of computer vision and programming. Thus, it plays an increasingly important role in deformation monitoring and analysis. Automatic data extraction and high efficiency and accuracy modeling from scattered point clouds are challenging issues during the TLS data processing. This paper presents a data extraction method considering the partial and statistical distribution of the point clouds scanned, called the window-neighborhood method. Based on the point clouds extracted, 3D modeling of the boundary of an arched structure was carried out. The ideal modeling strategy should be fast, accurate, and less complex regarding its application to large amounts of data. The paper discusses the accuracy of fittings in four cases between whole curve, segmentation, polynomial, and B-spline. A similar number of parameters was set for polynomial and B-spline because the number of unknown parameters is essential for the accuracy of the fittings. The uncertainties of the scanned raw point clouds and the modeling are discussed. This process is considered a prerequisite step for 3D deformation analysis with TLS.

Overestimation of organic phosphorus in wetland soils by alkaline extraction and molybdate colorimetry.

Science.gov (United States)

Turner, Benjamin L; Newman, Susan; Reddy, K Ramesh

2006-05-15

Accurate information on the chemical nature of soil phosphorus is essential for understanding its bioavailability and fate in wetland ecosystems. Solution phosphorus-31 nuclear magnetic resonance (31P NMR) spectroscopy was used to assess the conventional colorimetric procedure for phosphorus speciation in alkaline extracts of organic soils from the Florida Everglades. Molybdate colorimetry markedly overestimated organic phosphorus by between 30 and 54% compared to NMR spectroscopy. This was due in large part to the association of inorganic phosphate with organic matter, although the error was exacerbated in some samples by the presence of pyrophosphate, an inorganic polyphosphate that is not detected by colorimetry. The results have important implications for our understanding of phosphorus biogeochemistry in wetlands and suggest that alkaline extraction and solution 31p NMR spectroscopy is the only accurate method for quantifying organic phosphorus in wetland soils.

Assessment of antibacterial activity of crude leaf and root extracts of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

... whether crude leaf and root extracts of Cassia alata (Caesalpiniaceae) have antimicrobial activity against clinically resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria. To determine and compare the MICs of their ether and methanol extracts. Materials and methods: Ether and methanol extracts were prepared from the plant parts.

Technical Note: Using experimentally determined proton spot scanning timing parameters to accurately model beam delivery time.

Science.gov (United States)

Shen, Jiajian; Tryggestad, Erik; Younkin, James E; Keole, Sameer R; Furutani, Keith M; Kang, Yixiu; Herman, Michael G; Bues, Martin

2017-10-01

To accurately model the beam delivery time (BDT) for a synchrotron-based proton spot scanning system using experimentally determined beam parameters. A model to simulate the proton spot delivery sequences was constructed, and BDT was calculated by summing times for layer switch, spot switch, and spot delivery. Test plans were designed to isolate and quantify the relevant beam parameters in the operation cycle of the proton beam therapy delivery system. These parameters included the layer switch time, magnet preparation and verification time, average beam scanning speeds in x- and y-directions, proton spill rate, and maximum charge and maximum extraction time for each spill. The experimentally determined parameters, as well as the nominal values initially provided by the vendor, served as inputs to the model to predict BDTs for 602 clinical proton beam deliveries. The calculated BDTs (T BDT ) were compared with the BDTs recorded in the treatment delivery log files (T Log ): ∆t = T Log -T BDT . The experimentally determined average layer switch time for all 97 energies was 1.91 s (ranging from 1.9 to 2.0 s for beam energies from 71.3 to 228.8 MeV), average magnet preparation and verification time was 1.93 ms, the average scanning speeds were 5.9 m/s in x-direction and 19.3 m/s in y-direction, the proton spill rate was 8.7 MU/s, and the maximum proton charge available for one acceleration is 2.0 ± 0.4 nC. Some of the measured parameters differed from the nominal values provided by the vendor. The calculated BDTs using experimentally determined parameters matched the recorded BDTs of 602 beam deliveries (∆t = -0.49 ± 1.44 s), which were significantly more accurate than BDTs calculated using nominal timing parameters (∆t = -7.48 ± 6.97 s). An accurate model for BDT prediction was achieved by using the experimentally determined proton beam therapy delivery parameters, which may be useful in modeling the interplay effect and patient throughput. The model may

Towards accurate emergency response behavior

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sargent, T.O.

1981-01-01

Nuclear reactor operator emergency response behavior has persisted as a training problem through lack of information. The industry needs an accurate definition of operator behavior in adverse stress conditions, and training methods which will produce the desired behavior. Newly assembled information from fifty years of research into human behavior in both high and low stress provides a more accurate definition of appropriate operator response, and supports training methods which will produce the needed control room behavior. The research indicates that operator response in emergencies is divided into two modes, conditioned behavior and knowledge based behavior. Methods which assure accurate conditioned behavior, and provide for the recovery of knowledge based behavior, are described in detail

Extraction of gravitational waves in numerical relativity.

Science.gov (United States)

Bishop, Nigel T; Rezzolla, Luciano

2016-01-01

A numerical-relativity calculation yields in general a solution of the Einstein equations including also a radiative part, which is in practice computed in a region of finite extent. Since gravitational radiation is properly defined only at null infinity and in an appropriate coordinate system, the accurate estimation of the emitted gravitational waves represents an old and non-trivial problem in numerical relativity. A number of methods have been developed over the years to "extract" the radiative part of the solution from a numerical simulation and these include: quadrupole formulas, gauge-invariant metric perturbations, Weyl scalars, and characteristic extraction. We review and discuss each method, in terms of both its theoretical background as well as its implementation. Finally, we provide a brief comparison of the various methods in terms of their inherent advantages and disadvantages.

Automatic Extraction of Urban Built-Up Area Based on Object-Oriented Method and Remote Sensing Data

Science.gov (United States)

Li, L.; Zhou, H.; Wen, Q.; Chen, T.; Guan, F.; Ren, B.; Yu, H.; Wang, Z.

2018-04-01

Built-up area marks the use of city construction land in the different periods of the development, the accurate extraction is the key to the studies of the changes of urban expansion. This paper studies the technology of automatic extraction of urban built-up area based on object-oriented method and remote sensing data, and realizes the automatic extraction of the main built-up area of the city, which saves the manpower cost greatly. First, the extraction of construction land based on object-oriented method, the main technical steps include: (1) Multi-resolution segmentation; (2) Feature Construction and Selection; (3) Information Extraction of Construction Land Based on Rule Set, The characteristic parameters used in the rule set mainly include the mean of the red band (Mean R), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Ratio of residential index (RRI), Blue band mean (Mean B), Through the combination of the above characteristic parameters, the construction site information can be extracted. Based on the degree of adaptability, distance and area of the object domain, the urban built-up area can be quickly and accurately defined from the construction land information without depending on other data and expert knowledge to achieve the automatic extraction of the urban built-up area. In this paper, Beijing city as an experimental area for the technical methods of the experiment, the results show that: the city built-up area to achieve automatic extraction, boundary accuracy of 2359.65 m to meet the requirements. The automatic extraction of urban built-up area has strong practicality and can be applied to the monitoring of the change of the main built-up area of city.

Fractal Complexity-Based Feature Extraction Algorithm of Communication Signals

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Hui; Li, Jingchao; Guo, Lili; Dou, Zheng; Lin, Yun; Zhou, Ruolin

How to analyze and identify the characteristics of radiation sources and estimate the threat level by means of detecting, intercepting and locating has been the central issue of electronic support in the electronic warfare, and communication signal recognition is one of the key points to solve this issue. Aiming at accurately extracting the individual characteristics of the radiation source for the increasingly complex communication electromagnetic environment, a novel feature extraction algorithm for individual characteristics of the communication radiation source based on the fractal complexity of the signal is proposed. According to the complexity of the received signal and the situation of environmental noise, use the fractal dimension characteristics of different complexity to depict the subtle characteristics of the signal to establish the characteristic database, and then identify different broadcasting station by gray relation theory system. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm can achieve recognition rate of 94% even in the environment with SNR of -10dB, and this provides an important theoretical basis for the accurate identification of the subtle features of the signal at low SNR in the field of information confrontation.

Accurate and noninvasive embryos screening during in vitro fertilization (IVF) assisted by Raman analysis of embryos culture medium Accurate and noninvasive embryos screening during IVF

Science.gov (United States)

Shen, A. G.; Peng, J.; Zhao, Q. H.; Su, L.; Wang, X. H.; Hu, J. M.; Yang, J.

2012-04-01

In combination with morphological evaluation tests, we employ Raman spectroscopy to select higher potential reproductive embryos during in vitro fertilization (IVF) based on chemical composition of embryos culture medium. In this study, 57 Raman spectra are acquired from both higher and lower quality embryos culture medium (ECM) from 10 patients which have been preliminarily confirmed by clinical assay. Data are fit by using a linear combination model of least squares method in which 12 basis spectra represent the chemical features of ECM. The final fitting coefficients provide insight into the chemical compositions of culture medium samples and are subsequently used as criterion to evaluate the quality of embryos. The relative fitting coefficients ratios of sodium pyruvate/albumin and phenylalanine/albumin seem act as key roles in the embryo screening, attaining 85.7% accuracy in comparison with clinical pregnancy. The good results demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy therefore is an important candidate for an accurate and noninvasive screening of higher quality embryos, which potentially decrease the time-consuming clinical trials during IVF.

The preliminary exploration of 64-slice volume computed tomography in the accurate measurement of pleural effusion.

Science.gov (United States)

Guo, Zhi-Jun; Lin, Qiang; Liu, Hai-Tao; Lu, Jun-Ying; Zeng, Yan-Hong; Meng, Fan-Jie; Cao, Bin; Zi, Xue-Rong; Han, Shu-Ming; Zhang, Yu-Huan

2013-09-01

Using computed tomography (CT) to rapidly and accurately quantify pleural effusion volume benefits medical and scientific research. However, the precise volume of pleural effusions still involves many challenges and currently does not have a recognized accurate measuring. To explore the feasibility of using 64-slice CT volume-rendering technology to accurately measure pleural fluid volume and to then analyze the correlation between the volume of the free pleural effusion and the different diameters of the pleural effusion. The 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique was used to measure and analyze three parts. First, the fluid volume of a self-made thoracic model was measured and compared with the actual injected volume. Second, the pleural effusion volume was measured before and after pleural fluid drainage in 25 patients, and the volume reduction was compared with the actual volume of the liquid extract. Finally, the free pleural effusion volume was measured in 26 patients to analyze the correlation between it and the diameter of the effusion, which was then used to calculate the regression equation. After using the 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique to measure the fluid volume of the self-made thoracic model, the results were compared with the actual injection volume. No significant differences were found, P = 0.836. For the 25 patients with drained pleural effusions, the comparison of the reduction volume with the actual volume of the liquid extract revealed no significant differences, P = 0.989. The following linear regression equation was used to compare the pleural effusion volume (V) (measured by the CT volume-rendering technique) with the pleural effusion greatest depth (d): V = 158.16 × d - 116.01 (r = 0.91, P = 0.000). The following linear regression was used to compare the volume with the product of the pleural effusion diameters (l × h × d): V = 0.56 × (l × h × d) + 39.44 (r = 0.92, P = 0.000). The 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique can

The preliminary exploration of 64-slice volume computed tomography in the accurate measurement of pleural effusion

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Guo, Zhi-Jun; Lin, Qiang; Liu, Hai-Tao

2013-01-01

Background: Using computed tomography (CT) to rapidly and accurately quantify pleural effusion volume benefits medical and scientific research. However, the precise volume of pleural effusions still involves many challenges and currently does not have a recognized accurate measuring. Purpose: To explore the feasibility of using 64-slice CT volume-rendering technology to accurately measure pleural fluid volume and to then analyze the correlation between the volume of the free pleural effusion and the different diameters of the pleural effusion. Material and Methods: The 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique was used to measure and analyze three parts. First, the fluid volume of a self-made thoracic model was measured and compared with the actual injected volume. Second, the pleural effusion volume was measured before and after pleural fluid drainage in 25 patients, and the volume reduction was compared with the actual volume of the liquid extract. Finally, the free pleural effusion volume was measured in 26 patients to analyze the correlation between it and the diameter of the effusion, which was then used to calculate the regression equation. Results: After using the 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique to measure the fluid volume of the self-made thoracic model, the results were compared with the actual injection volume. No significant differences were found, P = 0.836. For the 25 patients with drained pleural effusions, the comparison of the reduction volume with the actual volume of the liquid extract revealed no significant differences, P = 0.989. The following linear regression equation was used to compare the pleural effusion volume (V) (measured by the CT volume-rendering technique) with the pleural effusion greatest depth (d): V = 158.16 X d - 116.01 (r = 0.91, P = 0.000). The following linear regression was used to compare the volume with the product of the pleural effusion diameters (l X h X d): V = 0.56 X (l X h X d) + 39.44 (r = 0.92, P = 0

The preliminary exploration of 64-slice volume computed tomography in the accurate measurement of pleural effusion

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Guo, Zhi-Jun [Dept. of Radiology, North China Petroleum Bureau General Hospital, Renqiu, Hebei (China)], e-mail: Gzj3@163.com; Lin, Qiang [Dept. of Oncology, North China Petroleum Bureau General Hospital, Renqiu, Hebei (China); Liu, Hai-Tao [Dept. of General Surgery, North China Petroleum Bureau General Hospital, Renqiu, Hebei (China)] [and others])

2013-09-15

Background: Using computed tomography (CT) to rapidly and accurately quantify pleural effusion volume benefits medical and scientific research. However, the precise volume of pleural effusions still involves many challenges and currently does not have a recognized accurate measuring. Purpose: To explore the feasibility of using 64-slice CT volume-rendering technology to accurately measure pleural fluid volume and to then analyze the correlation between the volume of the free pleural effusion and the different diameters of the pleural effusion. Material and Methods: The 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique was used to measure and analyze three parts. First, the fluid volume of a self-made thoracic model was measured and compared with the actual injected volume. Second, the pleural effusion volume was measured before and after pleural fluid drainage in 25 patients, and the volume reduction was compared with the actual volume of the liquid extract. Finally, the free pleural effusion volume was measured in 26 patients to analyze the correlation between it and the diameter of the effusion, which was then used to calculate the regression equation. Results: After using the 64-slice CT volume-rendering technique to measure the fluid volume of the self-made thoracic model, the results were compared with the actual injection volume. No significant differences were found, P = 0.836. For the 25 patients with drained pleural effusions, the comparison of the reduction volume with the actual volume of the liquid extract revealed no significant differences, P = 0.989. The following linear regression equation was used to compare the pleural effusion volume (V) (measured by the CT volume-rendering technique) with the pleural effusion greatest depth (d): V = 158.16 X d - 116.01 (r = 0.91, P = 0.000). The following linear regression was used to compare the volume with the product of the pleural effusion diameters (l X h X d): V = 0.56 X (l X h X d) + 39.44 (r = 0.92, P = 0

Multicenter Evaluation of the Bruker MALDI Biotyper CA System for the Identification of Clinical Aerobic Gram-Negative Bacterial Isolates.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Matthew L Faron

Full Text Available The prompt and accurate identification of bacterial pathogens is fundamental to patient health and outcome. Recent advances in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS have revolutionized bacterial identification in the clinical laboratory, but uniform incorporation of this technology in the U.S. market has been delayed by a lack of FDA-cleared systems. In this study, we conducted a multicenter evaluation of the MALDI Biotyper CA (MBT-CA System (Bruker Daltonics Inc, Billerica, MA for the identification of aerobic gram-negative bacteria as part of a 510(k submission to the FDA. A total of 2,263 aerobic gram negative bacterial isolates were tested representing 23 genera and 61 species. Isolates were collected from various clinical sources and results obtained from the MBT-CA System were compared to DNA sequencing and/or biochemical testing. Isolates that failed to report as a "high confidence species ID" [log(score ≥2.00] were re-tested using an extraction method. The MBT-CA System identified 96.8% and 3.1% of isolates with either a "high confidence" or a "low confidence" [log(score value between 1.70 and <2.00] species ID, respectively. Two isolates did not produce acceptable confidence scores after extraction. The MBT-CA System correctly identified 99.8% (2,258/2,263 to genus and 98.2% (2,222/2,263 to species level. These data demonstrate that the MBT-CA System provides accurate results for the identification of aerobic gram-negative bacteria.

Multicenter Evaluation of the Bruker MALDI Biotyper CA System for the Identification of Clinical Aerobic Gram-Negative Bacterial Isolates.

Science.gov (United States)

Faron, Matthew L; Buchan, Blake W; Hyke, Josh; Madisen, Neil; Lillie, Jennifer L; Granato, Paul A; Wilson, Deborah A; Procop, Gary W; Novak-Weekley, Susan; Marlowe, Elizabeth; Cumpio, Joven; Griego-Fullbright, Christen; Kindig, Sandra; Timm, Karen; Young, Stephen; Ledeboer, Nathan A

2015-01-01

The prompt and accurate identification of bacterial pathogens is fundamental to patient health and outcome. Recent advances in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) have revolutionized bacterial identification in the clinical laboratory, but uniform incorporation of this technology in the U.S. market has been delayed by a lack of FDA-cleared systems. In this study, we conducted a multicenter evaluation of the MALDI Biotyper CA (MBT-CA) System (Bruker Daltonics Inc, Billerica, MA) for the identification of aerobic gram-negative bacteria as part of a 510(k) submission to the FDA. A total of 2,263 aerobic gram negative bacterial isolates were tested representing 23 genera and 61 species. Isolates were collected from various clinical sources and results obtained from the MBT-CA System were compared to DNA sequencing and/or biochemical testing. Isolates that failed to report as a "high confidence species ID" [log(score) ≥2.00] were re-tested using an extraction method. The MBT-CA System identified 96.8% and 3.1% of isolates with either a "high confidence" or a "low confidence" [log(score) value between 1.70 and <2.00] species ID, respectively. Two isolates did not produce acceptable confidence scores after extraction. The MBT-CA System correctly identified 99.8% (2,258/2,263) to genus and 98.2% (2,222/2,263) to species level. These data demonstrate that the MBT-CA System provides accurate results for the identification of aerobic gram-negative bacteria.

Biological activities of Allium sativum and Zingiber officinale extracts on clinically important bacterial pathogens, their phytochemical and FT-IR spectroscopic analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Awan, Uzma Azeem; Ali, Shaukat; Shahnawaz, Amna Mir; Shafique, Irsa; Zafar, Atiya; Khan, Muhammad Abdul Rauf; Ghous, Tahseen; Saleem, Azhar; Andleeb, Saiqa

2017-05-01

The spread of bacterial infectious diseases is a major public threat. Herbs and spices have offered an excellent, important and useful source of antimicrobial agents against many pathological infections. In the current study, the antimicrobial potency of fresh, naturally and commercial dried Allium sativum and Zingiber officinale extracts had been investigated against seven local clinical bacterial isolates such as Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumonia, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Serratia marcesnces by the agar disc diffusion method. All tested pathogens except P. aeruginosa and E. coli were most susceptible to ethanolic and methanolic extracts of A. sativum. Similarly, chloroform and diethyl ether extracts of Z. officinale showed a greater zone of inhibition of tested pathogens except for P. aeruginosa and E. coli. We found that all extracts of A. sativum and Z. officinale have a strong antibacterial effect compared to recommended standard antibiotics through activity index. All results were evaluated statistically and a significant difference was recorded at Psativum and Z. officinale proposed the presence of various phytochemicals such as tannins, phenols, alkaloids, steroids and saponins. Retention factor of diverse phytochemicals provides a valuable clue regarding their polarity and the selection of solvents for separation of phytochemicals. Significant inhibition of S. aureus was also observed through TLC-Bioautography. FT-IR Spectrometry was also performed to characterize both natural and commercial extracts of A. sativum and Z. officinale to evaluate bioactive compounds. These findings provide new insights to use A. sativum and Z. officinale as potential plant sources for controlling pathogenic bacteria and potentially considered as cost-effective in the management of diseases and to the threat of drug resistance phenomenon.

Antitrypanosomal Potentials of Ethanolic Leaf Extracts of Punica ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Three doses (20mg/kg, 40mg/kg,80mg/kg) of ethanolic extracts of the leaves of Punica granatum were screened for trypanocidal activity against Trypanosoma brucei bruce in Balb Strain Albino mice. Parasitaemia and disappearance of clinical signs were used as parameters to monitor the efficacy of the extracts using the ...

High-resolution dynamic imaging and quantitative analysis of lung cancer xenografts in nude mice using clinical PET/CT.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Ying Yi; Wang, Kai; Xu, Zuo Yu; Song, Yan; Wang, Chu Nan; Zhang, Chong Qing; Sun, Xi Lin; Shen, Bao Zhong

2017-08-08

Considering the general application of dedicated small-animal positron emission tomography/computed tomography is limited, an acceptable alternative in many situations might be clinical PET/CT. To estimate the feasibility of using clinical PET/CT with [F-18]-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose for high-resolution dynamic imaging and quantitative analysis of cancer xenografts in nude mice. Dynamic clinical PET/CT scans were performed on xenografts for 60 min after injection with [F-18]-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose. Scans were reconstructed with or without SharpIR method in two phases. And mice were sacrificed to extracting major organs and tumors, using ex vivo γ-counting as a reference. Strikingly, we observed that the image quality and the correlation between the all quantitive data from clinical PET/CT and the ex vivo counting was better with the SharpIR reconstructions than without. Our data demonstrate that clinical PET/CT scanner with SharpIR reconstruction is a valuable tool for imaging small animals in preclinical cancer research, offering dynamic imaging parameters, good image quality and accurate data quatification.

Localized thin-section CT with radiomics feature extraction and machine learning to classify early-detected pulmonary nodules from lung cancer screening

Science.gov (United States)

Tu, Shu-Ju; Wang, Chih-Wei; Pan, Kuang-Tse; Wu, Yi-Cheng; Wu, Chen-Te

2018-03-01

Lung cancer screening aims to detect small pulmonary nodules and decrease the mortality rate of those affected. However, studies from large-scale clinical trials of lung cancer screening have shown that the false-positive rate is high and positive predictive value is low. To address these problems, a technical approach is greatly needed for accurate malignancy differentiation among these early-detected nodules. We studied the clinical feasibility of an additional protocol of localized thin-section CT for further assessment on recalled patients from lung cancer screening tests. Our approach of localized thin-section CT was integrated with radiomics features extraction and machine learning classification which was supervised by pathological diagnosis. Localized thin-section CT images of 122 nodules were retrospectively reviewed and 374 radiomics features were extracted. In this study, 48 nodules were benign and 74 malignant. There were nine patients with multiple nodules and four with synchronous multiple malignant nodules. Different machine learning classifiers with a stratified ten-fold cross-validation were used and repeated 100 times to evaluate classification accuracy. Of the image features extracted from the thin-section CT images, 238 (64%) were useful in differentiating between benign and malignant nodules. These useful features include CT density (p  =  0.002 518), sigma (p  =  0.002 781), uniformity (p  =  0.032 41), and entropy (p  =  0.006 685). The highest classification accuracy was 79% by the logistic classifier. The performance metrics of this logistic classification model was 0.80 for the positive predictive value, 0.36 for the false-positive rate, and 0.80 for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Our approach of direct risk classification supervised by the pathological diagnosis with localized thin-section CT and radiomics feature extraction may support clinical physicians in determining

Computer-designed surgical guide template compared with free-hand operation for mesiodens extraction in premaxilla using “trapdoor” method

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, Ying Kai; Xie, Qian Yang; Yang, Chi; Xu, Guang Zhou

2017-01-01

Abstract The aim of this study was to introduce a novel method of mesiodens extraction using a vascularized pedicled bone flap by piezosurgery and to compare the differences between a computer-aided design surgical guide template and free-hand operation. A total of 8 patients with mesiodens, 4 with a surgical guide (group I), and 4 without it (group II) were included in the study. The surgical design was to construct a trapdoor pedicle on the superior mucoperiosteal attachment with application of piezosurgery. The bone lid was repositioned after mesiodens extraction. Group I patients underwent surgeries based on the preoperative planning with surgical guide templates, while group II patients underwent free-hand operation. The outcome variables were success rate, intraoperative time, anterior nasal spine (ANS) position, changes of nasolabial angle (NLA), and major complications. Data from the 2 groups were compared by SPSS 17.0, using Wilcoxon test. The operative time was significantly shorter in group I patients. All the mesiodentes were extracted successfully and no obvious differences of preoperative and postoperative ANS position and NLA value were found in both groups. The patients were all recovered uneventfully. Surgical guide templates can enhance clinical accuracy and reduce operative time by facilitating accurate osteotomies. PMID:28658139

Spectrally accurate contour dynamics

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Van Buskirk, R.D.; Marcus, P.S.

1994-01-01

We present an exponentially accurate boundary integral method for calculation the equilibria and dynamics of piece-wise constant distributions of potential vorticity. The method represents contours of potential vorticity as a spectral sum and solves the Biot-Savart equation for the velocity by spectrally evaluating a desingularized contour integral. We use the technique in both an initial-value code and a newton continuation method. Our methods are tested by comparing the numerical solutions with known analytic results, and it is shown that for the same amount of computational work our spectral methods are more accurate than other contour dynamics methods currently in use

Automated road network extraction from high spatial resolution multi-spectral imagery

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Qiaoping

For the last three decades, the Geomatics Engineering and Computer Science communities have considered automated road network extraction from remotely-sensed imagery to be a challenging and important research topic. The main objective of this research is to investigate the theory and methodology of automated feature extraction for image-based road database creation, refinement or updating, and to develop a series of algorithms for road network extraction from high resolution multi-spectral imagery. The proposed framework for road network extraction from multi-spectral imagery begins with an image segmentation using the k-means algorithm. This step mainly concerns the exploitation of the spectral information for feature extraction. The road cluster is automatically identified using a fuzzy classifier based on a set of predefined road surface membership functions. These membership functions are established based on the general spectral signature of road pavement materials and the corresponding normalized digital numbers on each multi-spectral band. Shape descriptors of the Angular Texture Signature are defined and used to reduce the misclassifications between roads and other spectrally similar objects (e.g., crop fields, parking lots, and buildings). An iterative and localized Radon transform is developed for the extraction of road centerlines from the classified images. The purpose of the transform is to accurately and completely detect the road centerlines. It is able to find short, long, and even curvilinear lines. The input image is partitioned into a set of subset images called road component images. An iterative Radon transform is locally applied to each road component image. At each iteration, road centerline segments are detected based on an accurate estimation of the line parameters and line widths. Three localization approaches are implemented and compared using qualitative and quantitative methods. Finally, the road centerline segments are grouped into a

Aggregator: a machine learning approach to identifying MEDLINE articles that derive from the same underlying clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Shao, Weixiang; Adams, Clive E; Cohen, Aaron M; Davis, John M; McDonagh, Marian S; Thakurta, Sujata; Yu, Philip S; Smalheiser, Neil R

2015-03-01

It is important to identify separate publications that report outcomes from the same underlying clinical trial, in order to avoid over-counting these as independent pieces of evidence. We created positive and negative training sets (comprised of pairs of articles reporting on the same condition and intervention) that were, or were not, linked to the same clinicaltrials.gov trial registry number. Features were extracted from MEDLINE and PubMed metadata; pairwise similarity scores were modeled using logistic regression. Article pairs from the same trial were identified with high accuracy (F1 score=0.843). We also created a clustering tool, Aggregator, that takes as input a PubMed user query for RCTs on a given topic, and returns article clusters predicted to arise from the same clinical trial. Although painstaking examination of full-text may be needed to be conclusive, metadata are surprisingly accurate in predicting when two articles derive from the same underlying clinical trial. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Antimicrobial activity of extracts from in vivo and in vitro propagated ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The antimicrobial activity of 18 different extracts from in vivo and in vitro grown L. album L. plants was evaluated against clinical bacteria and yeasts using the well diffusion method. All the used extracts demonstrated antibacterial activity, whereas only the water extracts from leaves (in vivo) possessed antifungal activity ...

A computer-aided system for automatic extraction of femur neck trabecular bone architecture using isotropic volume construction from clinical hip computed tomography images.

Science.gov (United States)

Vivekanandhan, Sapthagirivasan; Subramaniam, Janarthanam; Mariamichael, Anburajan

2016-10-01

Hip fractures due to osteoporosis are increasing progressively across the globe. It is also difficult for those fractured patients to undergo dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scans due to its complicated protocol and its associated cost. The utilisation of computed tomography for the fracture treatment has become common in the clinical practice. It would be helpful for orthopaedic clinicians, if they could get some additional information related to bone strength for better treatment planning. The aim of our study was to develop an automated system to segment the femoral neck region, extract the cortical and trabecular bone parameters, and assess the bone strength using an isotropic volume construction from clinical computed tomography images. The right hip computed tomography and right femur dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry measurements were taken from 50 south-Indian females aged 30-80 years. Each computed tomography image volume was re-constructed to form isotropic volumes. An automated system by incorporating active contour models was used to segment the neck region. A minimum distance boundary method was applied to isolate the cortical and trabecular bone components. The trabecular bone was enhanced and segmented using trabecular enrichment approach. The cortical and trabecular bone features were extracted and statistically compared with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry measured femur neck bone mineral density. The extracted bone measures demonstrated a significant correlation with neck bone mineral density (r > 0.7, p computed tomography images scanned with low dose could eventually be helpful in osteoporosis diagnosis and its treatment planning. © IMechE 2016.

Acute and Subacute Toxicity Evaluation of Corn Silk Extract.

Science.gov (United States)

Ha, Ae Wha; Kang, Hyeon Jung; Kim, Sun Lim; Kim, Myung Hwan; Kim, Woo Kyoung

2018-03-01

Many studies have reported therapeutic efficacy of corn silk extract. However, research on its toxicity and safe dose range is limited. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine the acute and subacute toxicity of corn silk extract in ICR mice. To determine acute toxicity, corn silk extract containing high levels of maysin was orally administered to mice at a dose of 0 or 2,000 mg/kg. Clinical symptoms, mortality, and body weight changes were recorded for 14 days. To determine subacute toxicity, corn silk extract was orally administered to mice over a 4-week period, and then body weight, water and food consumption, and organ weight were determined. In addition, urine and serum analyses were performed. In the acute toxicity study, no death or abnormal symptoms was observed in all treatment groups during the study period. Body weights did not show any significant change compared to those of the control group. Lethal dose of corn silk extract was estimated to be more than 2,000 mg/kg. In the 4-week subacute toxicity study, there was no corn silk extract related toxic effect on body weight, water intake, food consumption, urine parameters, clinical chemistry, or organ weight. Histopathological examination showed no abnormality related to the administration of corn silk extract at 500 mg/kg. The maximum non-toxic dose of corn silk extract containing high levels of maysin was found to be more than 500 mg/kg.

Accurate cut-offs for predicting endoscopic activity and mucosal healing in Crohn's disease with fecal calprotectin

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Juan María Vázquez-Morón

Full Text Available Background: Fecal biomarkers, especially fecal calprotectin, are useful for predicting endoscopic activity in Crohn's disease; however, the cut-off point remains unclear. The aim of this paper was to analyze whether faecal calprotectin and M2 pyruvate kinase are good tools for generating highly accurate scores for the prediction of the state of endoscopic activity and mucosal healing. Methods: The simple endoscopic score for Crohn's disease and the Crohn's disease activity index was calculated for 71 patients diagnosed with Crohn's. Fecal calprotectin and M2-PK were measured by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test. Results: A fecal calprotectin cut-off concentration of ≥ 170 µg/g (sensitivity 77.6%, specificity 95.5% and likelihood ratio +17.06 predicts a high probability of endoscopic activity, and a fecal calprotectin cut-off of ≤ 71 µg/g (sensitivity 95.9%, specificity 52.3% and likelihood ratio -0.08 predicts a high probability of mucosal healing. Three clinical groups were identified according to the data obtained: endoscopic activity (calprotectin ≥ 170, mucosal healing (calprotectin ≤ 71 and uncertainty (71 > calprotectin < 170, with significant differences in endoscopic values (F = 26.407, p < 0.01. Clinical activity or remission modified the probabilities of presenting endoscopic activity (100% vs 89% or mucosal healing (75% vs 87% in the diagnostic scores generated. M2-PK was insufficiently accurate to determine scores. Conclusions: The highly accurate scores for fecal calprotectin provide a useful tool for interpreting the probabilities of presenting endoscopic activity or mucosal healing, and are valuable in the specific clinical context.

In vitro evaluation of the interaction between methanol extract of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Antimicrobial interaction studies between methanol extract of lichen (Ramalina farinacea (I) ach. (Fam: Ramalinacea) and tetracycline, against clinical isolates of Staphylococcus aureus was evaluated. Preliminary antimicrobial properties of the extract were evaluated. Antimicrobial interaction studies between the methanol ...

Resist Parameter Extraction from Line-and-Space Patterns of Chemically Amplified Resist for Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography

Science.gov (United States)

Kozawa, Takahiro; Oizumi, Hiroaki; Itani, Toshiro; Tagawa, Seiichi

2010-11-01

The development of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has progressed owing to worldwide effort. As the development status of EUV lithography approaches the requirements for the high-volume production of semiconductor devices with a minimum line width of 22 nm, the extraction of resist parameters becomes increasingly important from the viewpoints of the accurate evaluation of resist materials for resist screening and the accurate process simulation for process and mask designs. In this study, we demonstrated that resist parameters (namely, quencher concentration, acid diffusion constant, proportionality constant of line edge roughness, and dissolution point) can be extracted from the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of patterned resists without the knowledge on the details of resist contents using two types of latest EUV resist.

ContextD: an algorithm to identify contextual properties of medical terms in a Dutch clinical corpus.

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Afzal, Zubair; Pons, Ewoud; Kang, Ning; Sturkenboom, Miriam C J M; Schuemie, Martijn J; Kors, Jan A

2014-11-29

In order to extract meaningful information from electronic medical records, such as signs and symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, it is important to take into account the contextual properties of the identified information: negation, temporality, and experiencer. Most work on automatic identification of these contextual properties has been done on English clinical text. This study presents ContextD, an adaptation of the English ConText algorithm to the Dutch language, and a Dutch clinical corpus. We created a Dutch clinical corpus containing four types of anonymized clinical documents: entries from general practitioners, specialists' letters, radiology reports, and discharge letters. Using a Dutch list of medical terms extracted from the Unified Medical Language System, we identified medical terms in the corpus with exact matching. The identified terms were annotated for negation, temporality, and experiencer properties. To adapt the ConText algorithm, we translated English trigger terms to Dutch and added several general and document specific enhancements, such as negation rules for general practitioners' entries and a regular expression based temporality module. The ContextD algorithm utilized 41 unique triggers to identify the contextual properties in the clinical corpus. For the negation property, the algorithm obtained an F-score from 87% to 93% for the different document types. For the experiencer property, the F-score was 99% to 100%. For the historical and hypothetical values of the temporality property, F-scores ranged from 26% to 54% and from 13% to 44%, respectively. The ContextD showed good performance in identifying negation and experiencer property values across all Dutch clinical document types. Accurate identification of the temporality property proved to be difficult and requires further work. The anonymized and annotated Dutch clinical corpus can serve as a useful resource for further algorithm development.

Biomechanical considerations in mandibular incisor extraction cases.

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Rachala, Madhukar Reddy; Aileni, Kaladhar Reddy; Dasari, Arun Kumar; Sinojiya, Jay

2015-01-01

Mandibular incisor extraction can be regarded as a valuable treatment option in certain malocclusions to obtain excellence in orthodontic results in terms of function, aesthetics and stability. This treatment alternative is indicated in clinical situations like mild to moderate class III malocclusion, mild anterior mandibular tooth size excess, periodontally compromised teeth, ectopic eruption of mandibular incisor and minimal openbite tendencies. Unlike in premolar extraction cases, space closure in mandibular incisor extraction cases is unique in which the extraction space will be in the middle of the arch. The end result of space closure in these cases should be well aligned, upright, anterior teeth with parallel roots and the goal can be achieved with the bodily tooth movement through proper application of biomechanics. The purpose of this article is to explain the biomechanics of space closure in mandibular incisor extraction cases.

A thresholding based technique to extract retinal blood vessels from fundus images

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jyotiprava Dash

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Retinal imaging has become the significant tool among all the medical imaging technology, due to its capability to extract many data which is linked to various eye diseases. So, the accurate extraction of blood vessel is necessary that helps the eye care specialists and ophthalmologist to identify the diseases at the early stages. In this paper, we have proposed a computerized technique for extraction of blood vessels from fundus images. The process is conducted in three phases: (i pre-processing where the image is enhanced using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization and median filter, (ii segmentation using mean-C thresholding to extract retinal blood vessels, (iii post-processing where morphological cleaning operation is used to remove isolated pixels. The performance of the proposed method is tested on and experimental results show that our method achieve an accuracies of 0.955 and 0.954 on Digital retinal images for vessel extraction (DRIVE and Child heart and health study in England (CHASE_DB1 databases respectively.

A Prospective, Descriptive Study to Assess the Clinical Benefits of Using Calendula officinalis Hydroglycolic Extract for the Topical Treatment of Diabetic Foot Ulcers.

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Buzzi, Marcelo; de Freitas, Franciele; Winter, Marcos

2016-03-01

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) have a significant impact on patient quality of life. A prospective, descriptive pilot study was conducted between May 2012 and December 2013 through the dermatology outpatient unit in a Brazilian hospital to evaluate the clinical benefits of using Calendula officinalis hydroglycolic extract in the treatment of DFUs. Patients diagnosed with a stable neuropathic ulcer of >3 months' duration; ranging in size from 0.5-40 cm(2); without osteomyelitis, gangrene, bone exposure, cancer, or deep tissue infection; ages 18-90 years; with adequate glycemic control and no history of an allergy to C. officinalis were enrolled. Patients provided demographic and diabetes-related information and were evaluated biweekly for 30 weeks or until healing (ie, full epithelialization with no wound drainage). DFUs were measured and clinically examined for microbiological flora and presence of odor, tissue type (eg, granulation, fibrin sloth, necrosis), exudate, and retraction rate using planimetry images. Patients' blood tests and neuropathic pain assessment (the latter by clinician-directed questionnaire) were performed at baseline and the end of treatment; pain also was assessed during dressing changes using a 10-point rating scale. Patients' ulcers were treated twice daily with C. officinalis hydroglycolic extract spray solution and covered with saline-moistened, sterile, nonadherent gauze and bandages followed by foot offloading with adequate protective footwear. Patients received their first treatment in the clinic then performed care at home. From a potential population of 109 patients, 25 did not meet the inclusion criteria. Of the remaining 84 participants enrolled, 43 withdrew before study completion; cited reasons included lost to follow-up (16), medical judgment (2), failure to attend >3 scheduled visits (17), protocol violation (5), and death (3). Forty-one (41) - 17 women, average age 62 years (range 44-82 years), average glycemic level 153 mg

[Evaluation of the total biological activity and allergenic composition of allergenic extracts].

Science.gov (United States)

Lombardero, M; González, R; Duffort, O; Juan, F; Ayuso, R; Ventas, P; Cortés, C; Carreira, J

1986-01-01

In the present study, a complete procedure is presented in order to standardize allergenic extracts, the meaning of which is the measurement of the total allergenic activity and the determination of the allergenic composition. The measurement of the biological activity comprises 2 steps: Preparation of Reference Extracts and determination of their "in vivo" activity. Evaluation of the total allergenic activity of extracts for clinical use. Reference extracts were prepared from the main allergens and their "in vivo" biological activity was determined by a quantitative skin prick test in a sample of at least 30 allergic patients. By definition, the protein concentration of Reference Extract that produces, in the allergic population, a geometric mean wheal of 75 mm.2 has an activity of 100 biological units (BUs). The determination of the biological activity of a problem extract is made by RAST inhibition. The sample is compared with the corresponding Reference Extract by this technique and, from this comparison, it is possible to quantify the activity of the problem extract in biologic units (BUs) with clinical significance. Likewise, different techniques have been used to determine the allergenic composition of extracts. These techniques comprise 2 steps: Separation of the components of the extract. Identification of the components that bind specific human IgE. The separation of the components of the extract has been carried out by isoelectric focusing (IEF) and electrophoresis in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS-PAGE). In order to identify the allergenic components, an immunoblotting technique has been employed. The separated components in the IEF gel or SDS-PAGE gel are transferred to a nitrocellulose sheet and later on, this membrane is overlaid with a serum pool from allergic patients and a mouse monoclonal anti-human IgE, labelled with 125I. Finally, the autoradiography of the nitrocellulose membrane is obtained. In this way it is possible to compare

A simple method for normalization of DNA extraction to improve the quantitative detection of soil-borne plant pathogenic oomycetes by real-time PCR.

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Li, M; Ishiguro, Y; Kageyama, K; Zhu, Z

2015-08-01

Most of the current research into the quantification of soil-borne pathogenic oomycetes lacks determination of DNA extraction efficiency, probably leading to an incorrect estimation of DNA quantity. In this study, we developed a convenient method by using a 100 bp artificially synthesized DNA sequence derived from the mitochondrion NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 gene of Thunnus thynnus as a control to determine the DNA extraction efficiency. The control DNA was added to soils and then co-extracted along with soil genomic DNA. DNA extraction efficiency was determined by the control DNA. Two different DNA extraction methods were compared and evaluated using different types of soils, and the commercial kit was proved to give more consistent results. We used the control DNA combined with real-time PCR to quantify the oomycete DNAs from 12 naturally infested soils. Detectable target DNA concentrations were three to five times higher after normalization. Our tests also showed that the extraction efficiencies varied on a sample-to-sample basis and were simple and useful for the accurate quantification of soil-borne pathogenic oomycetes. Oomycetes include many important plant pathogens. Accurate quantification of these pathogens is essential in the management of diseases. This study reports an easy method utilizing an external DNA control for the normalization of DNA extraction by real-time PCR. By combining two different efficient soil DNA extraction methods, the developed quantification method dramatically improved the results. This study also proves that the developed normalization method is necessary and useful for the accurate quantification of soil-borne plant pathogenic oomycetes. © 2015 The Society for Applied Microbiology.

A simple and efficient total genomic DNA extraction method for individual zooplankton.

Science.gov (United States)

Fazhan, Hanafiah; Waiho, Khor; Shahreza, Md Sheriff

2016-01-01

Molecular approaches are widely applied in species identification and taxonomic studies of minute zooplankton. One of the most focused zooplankton nowadays is from Subclass Copepoda. Accurate species identification of all life stages of the generally small sized copepods through molecular analysis is important, especially in taxonomic and systematic assessment of harpacticoid copepod populations and to understand their dynamics within the marine community. However, total genomic DNA (TGDNA) extraction from individual harpacticoid copepods can be problematic due to their small size and epibenthic behavior. In this research, six TGDNA extraction methods done on individual harpacticoid copepods were compared. The first new simple, feasible, efficient and consistent TGDNA extraction method was designed and compared with the commercial kit and modified available TGDNA extraction methods. The newly described TGDNA extraction method, "Incubation in PCR buffer" method, yielded good and consistent results based on the high success rate of PCR amplification (82%) compared to other methods. Coupled with its relatively consistent and economical method the "Incubation in PCR buffer" method is highly recommended in the TGDNA extraction of other minute zooplankton species.

Clinical Effects of Formulated Food of Peucedanum japonicum Extract and Saw Palmetto Extract in Male Patients with Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms.

Science.gov (United States)

Kageyama, Shinji; Beppu, Masanori; Ohnogi, Hiromu; Miyazaki, Sayaka; Haruno, Akihiro; Ito, Yoshihiko; Yamada, Shizuo

2018-05-01

To evaluate changes over time in subjective symptom scores and urination parameters before and after oral administration of formulated food containing a combination of Peucedanum japonicum (P. japonicum) extract and saw palmetto extract (SPE) in male patients with lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). This study was conducted in an open label manner on male patients with untreated LUTS. The urination state of patients was evaluated before and after administration of food formulated with P. japonicum extract and SPE for 4 weeks, based on urodynamic parameters and subjective symptom scores (International Prostate Symptom Score [IPSS and IPSS-QOL], Overactive Bladder Symptom Score [OABSS], Overactive Bladder Questionnaire [OAB-q], and International Index of Erectile Function [IIEF]). After the administration of food formulated with these extracts, the following results were obtained: (i) Subjective findings: The IPSS-QOL score improved significantly; both parameters related to nocturia, i.e., frequency of nighttime urination and OABSS-2, improved significantly; other ratings for subjective symptoms slightly improved. (ii) Objective findings: Residual urine volume decreased significantly, and blood prostate specific antigen (PSA) and urinary 8-OHdG levels decreased slightly after the treatment. (iii) Other findings: Blood pressure decreased slightly. No adverse drug reactions were reported. (iv) Patient impressions: 75% of patients gave a rating of "Good" or higher, with 15 out of 20 patients wanting to continue treatment after the end of 4-week administration period. Food formulated with P. japonicum extract and SPE may be useful to decrease frequency of nighttime urination and residual urine volume in male patients with LUTS. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.

Accurate cloud-based smart IMT measurement, its validation and stroke risk stratification in carotid ultrasound: A web-based point-of-care tool for multicenter clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Saba, Luca; Banchhor, Sumit K; Suri, Harman S; Londhe, Narendra D; Araki, Tadashi; Ikeda, Nobutaka; Viskovic, Klaudija; Shafique, Shoaib; Laird, John R; Gupta, Ajay; Nicolaides, Andrew; Suri, Jasjit S

2016-08-01

This study presents AtheroCloud™ - a novel cloud-based smart carotid intima-media thickness (cIMT) measurement tool using B-mode ultrasound for stroke/cardiovascular risk assessment and its stratification. This is an anytime-anywhere clinical tool for routine screening and multi-center clinical trials. In this pilot study, the physician can upload ultrasound scans in one of the following formats (DICOM, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF or TIFF) directly into the proprietary cloud of AtheroPoint from the local server of the physician's office. They can then run the intelligent and automated AtheroCloud™ cIMT measurements in point-of-care settings in less than five seconds per image, while saving the vascular reports in the cloud. We statistically benchmark AtheroCloud™ cIMT readings against sonographer (a registered vascular technologist) readings and manual measurements derived from the tracings of the radiologist. One hundred patients (75 M/25 F, mean age: 68±11 years), IRB approved, Toho University, Japan, consisted of Left/Right common carotid artery (CCA) artery (200 ultrasound scans), (Toshiba, Tokyo, Japan) were collected using a 7.5MHz transducer. The measured cIMTs for L/R carotid were as follows (in mm): (i) AtheroCloud™ (0.87±0.20, 0.77±0.20); (ii) sonographer (0.97±0.26, 0.89±0.29) and (iii) manual (0.90±0.20, 0.79±0.20), respectively. The coefficient of correlation (CC) between sonographer and manual for L/R cIMT was 0.74 (Preliability and accuracy of the results. The proposed AtheroCloud™ system is completely reliable, automated, fast (3-5 seconds depending upon the image size having an internet speed of 180Mbps), accurate, and an intelligent, web-based clinical tool for multi-center clinical trials and routine telemedicine clinical care. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Improved Cole parameter extraction based on the least absolute deviation method

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yang, Yuxiang; Ni, Wenwen; Sun, Qiang; Wen, He; Teng, Zhaosheng

2013-01-01

The Cole function is widely used in bioimpedance spectroscopy (BIS) applications. Fitting the measured BIS data onto the model and then extracting the Cole parameters (R 0 , R ∞ , α and τ) is a common practice. Accurate extraction of the Cole parameters from the measured BIS data has great significance for evaluating the physiological or pathological status of biological tissue. The traditional least-squares (LS)-based curve fitting method for Cole parameter extraction is often sensitive to noise or outliers and becomes non-robust. This paper proposes an improved Cole parameter extraction based on the least absolute deviation (LAD) method. Comprehensive simulation experiments are carried out and the performances of the LAD method are compared with those of the LS method under the conditions of outliers, random noises and both disturbances. The proposed LAD method exhibits much better robustness under all circumstances, which demonstrates that the LAD method is deserving as an improved alternative to the LS method for Cole parameter extraction for its robustness to outliers and noises. (paper)

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry: protocol standardization and database expansion for rapid identification of clinically important molds.

Science.gov (United States)

Paul, Saikat; Singh, Pankaj; Rudramurthy, Shivaprakash M; Chakrabarti, Arunaloke; Ghosh, Anup K

2017-12-01

To standardize the matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry protocols and expansion of existing Bruker Biotyper database for mold identification. Four different sample preparation methods (protocol A, B, C and D) were evaluated. On analyzing each protein extraction method, reliable identification and best log scores were achieved through protocol D. The same protocol was used to identify 153 clinical isolates. Of these 153, 123 (80.3%) were accurately identified by using existing database and remaining 30 (19.7%) were not identified due to unavailability in database. On inclusion of missing main spectrum profile in existing database, all 153 isolates were identified. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry can be used for routine identification of clinically important molds.

Massive parallel 3D PIC simulation of negative ion extraction

Science.gov (United States)

Revel, Adrien; Mochalskyy, Serhiy; Montellano, Ivar Mauricio; Wünderlich, Dirk; Fantz, Ursel; Minea, Tiberiu

2017-09-01

The 3D PIC-MCC code ONIX is dedicated to modeling Negative hydrogen/deuterium Ion (NI) extraction and co-extraction of electrons from radio-frequency driven, low pressure plasma sources. It provides valuable insight on the complex phenomena involved in the extraction process. In previous calculations, a mesh size larger than the Debye length was used, implying numerical electron heating. Important steps have been achieved in terms of computation performance and parallelization efficiency allowing successful massive parallel calculations (4096 cores), imperative to resolve the Debye length. In addition, the numerical algorithms have been improved in terms of grid treatment, i.e., the electric field near the complex geometry boundaries (plasma grid) is calculated more accurately. The revised model preserves the full 3D treatment, but can take advantage of a highly refined mesh. ONIX was used to investigate the role of the mesh size, the re-injection scheme for lost particles (extracted or wall absorbed), and the electron thermalization process on the calculated extracted current and plasma characteristics. It is demonstrated that all numerical schemes give the same NI current distribution for extracted ions. Concerning the electrons, the pair-injection technique is found well-adapted to simulate the sheath in front of the plasma grid.

In vitro time kill assessment of crude methanol extract of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The in vitro antibacterial activities and time kill regimes of crude methanol extract of Helichrysum pedunculatum was assessed using standard microbiological procedures. The experiment was conducted against a panel of bacterial species made up of clinical, environmental and reference strains. The extract was active ...

Driver drowsiness classification using fuzzy wavelet-packet-based feature-extraction algorithm.

Science.gov (United States)

Khushaba, Rami N; Kodagoda, Sarath; Lal, Sara; Dissanayake, Gamini

2011-01-01

Driver drowsiness and loss of vigilance are a major cause of road accidents. Monitoring physiological signals while driving provides the possibility of detecting and warning of drowsiness and fatigue. The aim of this paper is to maximize the amount of drowsiness-related information extracted from a set of electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram (EOG), and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals during a simulation driving test. Specifically, we develop an efficient fuzzy mutual-information (MI)- based wavelet packet transform (FMIWPT) feature-extraction method for classifying the driver drowsiness state into one of predefined drowsiness levels. The proposed method estimates the required MI using a novel approach based on fuzzy memberships providing an accurate-information content-estimation measure. The quality of the extracted features was assessed on datasets collected from 31 drivers on a simulation test. The experimental results proved the significance of FMIWPT in extracting features that highly correlate with the different drowsiness levels achieving a classification accuracy of 95%-- 97% on an average across all subjects.

The determination of organochlorine pesticides based on dynamic microwave-assisted extraction coupled with on-line solid-phase extraction of high-performance liquid chromatography

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chen Ligang; Ding Lan; Jin Haiyan; Song Daqian; Zhang Huarong; Li Jiantao; Zhang Kun; Wang Yutang; Zhang Hanqi

2007-01-01

A rapid technique based on dynamic microwave-assisted extraction coupled with on-line solid-phase extraction of high-performance liquid chromatography (DMAE-SPE-HPLC) has been developed. A TM 010 microwave resonance cavity built in the laboratory was applied to concentrate the microwave energy. The sample placed in the zone of microwave irradiation was extracted with 95% acetonitrile (ACN) aqueous solution which was driven by a peristaltic pump at a flow rate of 1.0 mL min -1 . The extraction can be completed in a recirculating system in 10 min. When a number of extraction cycles were completed, the extract (1 mL) was diluted on-line with water. Then the extract was loaded into an SPE column where the analytes were retained while the unretained matrix components were washed away. Subsequently, the analytes were automatically transferred from the SPE column to the analytical column and determined by UV detector at 238 nm. The technique was used for determination of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in grains, including wheat, rice, corn and bean. The limits of detection of OCPs are in the range of 19-37 ng g -1 . The recoveries obtained by analyzing the four spiked grain samples are in the range of 86-105%, whereas the relative standard deviation (R.S.D.) values are <8.7% ranging from 1.2 to 8.7%. Our method was demonstrated to be fast, accurate, and precise. In addition, only small quantities of solvent and sample were required

The Extraction of Road Boundary from Crowdsourcing Trajectory Using Constrained Delaunay Triangulation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

YANG Wei

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Extraction of road boundary accurately from crowdsourcing trajectory lines is still a hard work.Therefore,this study presented a new approach to use vehicle trajectory lines to extract road boundary.Firstly, constructing constrained Delaunay triangulation within interpolated track lines to calculate road boundary descriptors using triangle edge length and Voronoi cell.Road boundary recognition model was established by integrating the two boundary descriptors.Then,based on seed polygons,a regional growing method was proposed to extract road boundary. Finally, taxi GPS traces in Beijing were used to verify the validity of the novel method, and the results also showed that our method was suitable for GPS traces with disparity density,complex road structure and different time interval.

Use of ethyl lactate to extract bioactive compounds from Cytisus scoparius: Comparison of pressurized liquid extraction and medium scale ambient temperature systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Lores, Marta; Pájaro, Marta; Álvarez-Casas, Marta; Domínguez, Jorge; García-Jares, Carmen

2015-08-01

An important trend in the extraction of chemical compounds is the application of new environmentally friendly, food grade solvents. Ethyl lactate (ethyl 2-hydroxypropanoate), produced by fermentation of carbohydrates, is miscible with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds being a potentially good solvent for bioactive compounds. Despite its relatively wide use as a general solvent, the utilization of ethyl lactate as an extraction solvent has only recently been considered. Here, we evaluate the possible use of ethyl lactate to extract phenolic compounds from wild plants belonging to Cytisus scoparius, and we compare the characteristics of the extracts obtained by Pressurized Solvent Extraction (the total phenolics content, the antioxidant activity and the concentration of the major polyphenols) with those of other extracts obtained with methanol. In order to explore the industrial production of the ethyl lactate Cytisus extract, we also evaluate medium scale ambient temperature setups. The whole plant and the different parts (flowers, branches, and seed pods) were evaluated separately as potential sources of polyphenols. All extracts were analyzed by LC-MS/MS for accurate identification of the major polyphenols. Similar phenolic profiles were obtained when using ethyl lactate or methanol. The main bioactives found in the Cytisus extract were the non-flavonoid phenolic compounds caffeic and protocatechuic acids and 3,4-dihydroxybenzaldehyde; the flavonoids rutin, kaempferol and quercetin; the flavones chrysin, orientin and apigenin; and the alkaloid lupanine. Regarding the comparison of the extraction systems, although the performance of the PLE was much better than that of the ambient-temperature columns, the energy consumption was also much higher. Ethyl lactate has resulted an efficient extraction solvent for polyphenols from C. scoparius, yielding extracts with high levels of plant phenolics and antioxidant activity. The antimicrobial activity of these

SU-F-BRF-09: A Non-Rigid Point Matching Method for Accurate Bladder Dose Summation in Cervical Cancer HDR Brachytherapy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chen, H; Zhen, X; Zhou, L; Zhong, Z; Pompos, A; Yan, H; Jiang, S; Gu, X

2014-01-01

Purpose: To propose and validate a deformable point matching scheme for surface deformation to facilitate accurate bladder dose summation for fractionated HDR cervical cancer treatment. Method: A deformable point matching scheme based on the thin plate spline robust point matching (TPSRPM) algorithm is proposed for bladder surface registration. The surface of bladders segmented from fractional CT images is extracted and discretized with triangular surface mesh. Deformation between the two bladder surfaces are obtained by matching the two meshes' vertices via the TPS-RPM algorithm, and the deformation vector fields (DVFs) characteristic of this deformation is estimated by B-spline approximation. Numerically, the algorithm is quantitatively compared with the Demons algorithm using five clinical cervical cancer cases by several metrics: vertex-to-vertex distance (VVD), Hausdorff distance (HD), percent error (PE), and conformity index (CI). Experimentally, the algorithm is validated on a balloon phantom with 12 surface fiducial markers. The balloon is inflated with different amount of water, and the displacement of fiducial markers is benchmarked as ground truth to study TPS-RPM calculated DVFs' accuracy. Results: In numerical evaluation, the mean VVD is 3.7(±2.0) mm after Demons, and 1.3(±0.9) mm after TPS-RPM. The mean HD is 14.4 mm after Demons, and 5.3mm after TPS-RPM. The mean PE is 101.7% after Demons and decreases to 18.7% after TPS-RPM. The mean CI is 0.63 after Demons, and increases to 0.90 after TPS-RPM. In the phantom study, the mean Euclidean distance of the fiducials is 7.4±3.0mm and 4.2±1.8mm after Demons and TPS-RPM, respectively. Conclusions: The bladder wall deformation is more accurate using the feature-based TPS-RPM algorithm than the intensity-based Demons algorithm, indicating that TPS-RPM has the potential for accurate bladder dose deformation and dose summation for multi-fractional cervical HDR brachytherapy. This work is supported

Post-processing of Deep Web Information Extraction Based on Domain Ontology

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PENG, T.

2013-11-01

Full Text Available Many methods are utilized to extract and process query results in deep Web, which rely on the different structures of Web pages and various designing modes of databases. However, some semantic meanings and relations are ignored. So, in this paper, we present an approach for post-processing deep Web query results based on domain ontology which can utilize the semantic meanings and relations. A block identification model (BIM based on node similarity is defined to extract data blocks that are relevant to specific domain after reducing noisy nodes. Feature vector of domain books is obtained by result set extraction model (RSEM based on vector space model (VSM. RSEM, in combination with BIM, builds the domain ontology on books which can not only remove the limit of Web page structures when extracting data information, but also make use of semantic meanings of domain ontology. After extracting basic information of Web pages, a ranking algorithm is adopted to offer an ordered list of data records to users. Experimental results show that BIM and RSEM extract data blocks and build domain ontology accurately. In addition, relevant data records and basic information are extracted and ranked. The performances precision and recall show that our proposed method is feasible and efficient.

Accurate Evaluation of Quantum Integrals

Science.gov (United States)

Galant, D. C.; Goorvitch, D.; Witteborn, Fred C. (Technical Monitor)

1995-01-01

Combining an appropriate finite difference method with Richardson's extrapolation results in a simple, highly accurate numerical method for solving a Schrodinger's equation. Important results are that error estimates are provided, and that one can extrapolate expectation values rather than the wavefunctions to obtain highly accurate expectation values. We discuss the eigenvalues, the error growth in repeated Richardson's extrapolation, and show that the expectation values calculated on a crude mesh can be extrapolated to obtain expectation values of high accuracy.

Accurate 3-D Profile Extraction of Skull Bone Using an Ultrasound Matrix Array.

Science.gov (United States)

Hajian, Mehdi; Gaspar, Robert; Maev, Roman Gr

2017-12-01

The present study investigates the feasibility, accuracy, and precision of 3-D profile extraction of the human skull bone using a custom-designed ultrasound matrix transducer in Pulse-Echo. Due to the attenuative scattering properties of the skull, the backscattered echoes from the inner surface of the skull are severely degraded, attenuated, and at some points overlapped. Furthermore, the speed of sound (SOS) in the skull varies significantly in different zones and also from case to case; if considered constant, it introduces significant error to the profile measurement. A new method for simultaneous estimation of the skull profiles and the sound speed value is presented. The proposed method is a two-folded procedure: first, the arrival times of the backscattered echoes from the skull bone are estimated using multi-lag phase delay (MLPD) and modified space alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) algorithms. Next, these arrival times are fed into an adaptive sound speed estimation algorithm to compute the optimal SOS value and subsequently, the skull bone thickness. For quantitative evaluation, the estimated bone phantom thicknesses were compared with the mechanical measurements. The accuracies of the bone thickness measurements using MLPD and modified SAGE algorithms combined with the adaptive SOS estimation were 7.93% and 4.21%, respectively. These values were 14.44% and 10.75% for the autocorrelation and cross-correlation methods. Additionally, the Bland-Altman plots showed the modified SAGE outperformed the other methods with -0.35 and 0.44 mm limits of agreement. No systematic error that could be related to the skull bone thickness was observed for this method.

Improvement of skin condition in striae distensae: development, characterization and clinical efficacy of a cosmetic product containing Punica granatum seed oil and Croton lechleri resin extract.

Science.gov (United States)

Bogdan, Cătălina; Iurian, Sonia; Tomuta, Ioan; Moldovan, Mirela

2017-01-01

Striae distensae are a frequent skin condition associated with pregnancy, weight change or lack of skin elasticity. The aim of this research was to obtain a topical product containing herbal active ingredients with documented antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity ( Punica granatum seed oil and Croton lechleri resin extract) and demonstrate its positive effect on prevention and treatment of striae distensae. First, the cream base formulation was optimized through experimental design. Secondly, the cream containing the two active ingredients was investigated in an interventional nonrandomized clinical trial. The clinical outcome was assessed through biophysical parameters and ultrasonographic evaluation. The state of the skin was evaluated by biophysical measurements and ultrasonography at the beginning of the study and after 3 and 6 weeks. The experimental design was successfully used to set the best ranges for the technological and formulation factors to obtain a cosmetic formulation with optimal characteristics. The study of clinical efficacy on the optimal formulation revealed an increase in the dermis thickness, hydration and elasticity values in both groups after 6 weeks of cream application. The new oil-in-water cream containing P. granatum seed oil and C. lechleri resin extract can be helpful in the prevention or improving of skin changes associated with striae.

Using machine learning and surface reconstruction to accurately differentiate different trajectories of mood and energy dysregulation in youth.

Science.gov (United States)

Versace, Amelia; Sharma, Vinod; Bertocci, Michele A; Bebko, Genna; Iyengar, Satish; Dwojak, Amanda; Bonar, Lisa; Perlman, Susan B; Schirda, Claudiu; Travis, Michael; Gill, Mary Kay; Diwadkar, Vaibhav A; Sunshine, Jeffrey L; Holland, Scott K; Kowatch, Robert A; Birmaher, Boris; Axelson, David; Frazier, Thomas W; Arnold, L Eugene; Fristad, Mary A; Youngstrom, Eric A; Horwitz, Sarah M; Findling, Robert L; Phillips, Mary L

2017-01-01

Difficulty regulating positive mood and energy is a feature that cuts across different pediatric psychiatric disorders. Yet, little is known regarding the neural mechanisms underlying different developmental trajectories of positive mood and energy regulation in youth. Recent studies indicate that machine learning techniques can help elucidate the role of neuroimaging measures in classifying individual subjects by specific symptom trajectory. Cortical thickness measures were extracted in sixty-eight anatomical regions covering the entire brain in 115 participants from the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS) study and 31 healthy comparison youth (12.5 y/o;-Male/Female = 15/16;-IQ = 104;-Right/Left handedness = 24/5). Using a combination of trajectories analyses, surface reconstruction, and machine learning techniques, the present study aims to identify the extent to which measures of cortical thickness can accurately distinguish youth with higher (n = 18) from those with lower (n = 34) trajectories of manic-like behaviors in a large sample of LAMS youth (n = 115; 13.6 y/o; M/F = 68/47, IQ = 100.1, R/L = 108/7). Machine learning analyses revealed that widespread cortical thickening in portions of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right inferior and middle temporal gyrus, bilateral precuneus, and bilateral paracentral gyri and cortical thinning in portions of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and right parahippocampal gyrus accurately differentiate (Area Under Curve = 0.89;p = 0.03) youth with different (higher vs lower) trajectories of positive mood and energy dysregulation over a period up to 5years, as measured by the Parent General Behavior Inventory-10 Item Mania Scale. Our findings suggest that specific patterns of cortical thickness may reflect transdiagnostic neural mechanisms associated with different temporal trajectories of positive mood and energy dysregulation in youth. This approach has

Using machine learning and surface reconstruction to accurately differentiate different trajectories of mood and energy dysregulation in youth.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amelia Versace

Full Text Available Difficulty regulating positive mood and energy is a feature that cuts across different pediatric psychiatric disorders. Yet, little is known regarding the neural mechanisms underlying different developmental trajectories of positive mood and energy regulation in youth. Recent studies indicate that machine learning techniques can help elucidate the role of neuroimaging measures in classifying individual subjects by specific symptom trajectory. Cortical thickness measures were extracted in sixty-eight anatomical regions covering the entire brain in 115 participants from the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS study and 31 healthy comparison youth (12.5 y/o;-Male/Female = 15/16;-IQ = 104;-Right/Left handedness = 24/5. Using a combination of trajectories analyses, surface reconstruction, and machine learning techniques, the present study aims to identify the extent to which measures of cortical thickness can accurately distinguish youth with higher (n = 18 from those with lower (n = 34 trajectories of manic-like behaviors in a large sample of LAMS youth (n = 115; 13.6 y/o; M/F = 68/47, IQ = 100.1, R/L = 108/7. Machine learning analyses revealed that widespread cortical thickening in portions of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right inferior and middle temporal gyrus, bilateral precuneus, and bilateral paracentral gyri and cortical thinning in portions of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and right parahippocampal gyrus accurately differentiate (Area Under Curve = 0.89;p = 0.03 youth with different (higher vs lower trajectories of positive mood and energy dysregulation over a period up to 5years, as measured by the Parent General Behavior Inventory-10 Item Mania Scale. Our findings suggest that specific patterns of cortical thickness may reflect transdiagnostic neural mechanisms associated with different temporal trajectories of positive mood and energy dysregulation in youth. This

Template based rodent brain extraction and atlas mapping.

Science.gov (United States)

Weimin Huang; Jiaqi Zhang; Zhiping Lin; Su Huang; Yuping Duan; Zhongkang Lu

2016-08-01

Accurate rodent brain extraction is the basic step for many translational studies using MR imaging. This paper presents a template based approach with multi-expert refinement to automatic rodent brain extraction. We first build the brain appearance model based on the learning exemplars. Together with the template matching, we encode the rodent brain position into the search space to reliably locate the rodent brain and estimate the rough segmentation. With the initial mask, a level-set segmentation and a mask-based template learning are implemented further to the brain region. The multi-expert fusion is used to generate a new mask. We finally combine the region growing based on the histogram distribution learning to delineate the final brain mask. A high-resolution rodent atlas is used to illustrate that the segmented low resolution anatomic image can be well mapped to the atlas. Tested on a public data set, all brains are located reliably and we achieve the mean Jaccard similarity score at 94.99% for brain segmentation, which is a statistically significant improvement compared to two other rodent brain extraction methods.

Approaching system equilibrium with accurate or not accurate feedback information in a two-route system

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Xiao-mei; Xie, Dong-fan; Li, Qi

2015-02-01

With the development of intelligent transport system, advanced information feedback strategies have been developed to reduce traffic congestion and enhance the capacity. However, previous strategies provide accurate information to travelers and our simulation results show that accurate information brings negative effects, especially in delay case. Because travelers prefer to the best condition route with accurate information, and delayed information cannot reflect current traffic condition but past. Then travelers make wrong routing decisions, causing the decrease of the capacity and the increase of oscillations and the system deviating from the equilibrium. To avoid the negative effect, bounded rationality is taken into account by introducing a boundedly rational threshold BR. When difference between two routes is less than the BR, routes have equal probability to be chosen. The bounded rationality is helpful to improve the efficiency in terms of capacity, oscillation and the gap deviating from the system equilibrium.

In vivo anti-plasmodial activities and toxic impacts of lime extract of a ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

specified accurate dosage and clear knowledge of the toxic impacts of their constituent compounds on body organs may be an impediment to the usage of the plants despite the acclaimed efficacy. Ethanolic extracts of. Clerodendrum violaceum leaves considerably reversed the alterations caused by malaria infection in liver ...

Cerebral fat embolism: Use of MR spectroscopy for accurate diagnosis

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Laxmi Kokatnur

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Cerebral fat embolism (CFE is an uncommon but serious complication following orthopedic procedures. It usually presents with altered mental status, and can be a part of fat embolism syndrome (FES if associated with cutaneous and respiratory manifestations. Because of the presence of other common factors affecting the mental status, particularly in the postoperative period, the diagnosis of CFE can be challenging. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI of brain typically shows multiple lesions distributed predominantly in the subcortical region, which appear as hyperintense lesions on T2 and diffusion weighted images. Although the location offers a clue, the MRI findings are not specific for CFE. Watershed infarcts, hypoxic encephalopathy, disseminated infections, demyelinating disorders, diffuse axonal injury can also show similar changes on MRI of brain. The presence of fat in these hyperintense lesions, identified by MR spectroscopy as raised lipid peaks will help in accurate diagnosis of CFE. Normal brain tissue or conditions producing similar MRI changes will not show any lipid peak on MR spectroscopy. We present a case of CFE initially misdiagnosed as brain stem stroke based on clinical presentation and cranial computed tomography (CT scan, and later, MR spectroscopy elucidated the accurate diagnosis.

Alexnet Feature Extraction and Multi-Kernel Learning for Objectoriented Classification

Science.gov (United States)

Ding, L.; Li, H.; Hu, C.; Zhang, W.; Wang, S.

2018-04-01

In view of the fact that the deep convolutional neural network has stronger ability of feature learning and feature expression, an exploratory research is done on feature extraction and classification for high resolution remote sensing images. Taking the Google image with 0.3 meter spatial resolution in Ludian area of Yunnan Province as an example, the image segmentation object was taken as the basic unit, and the pre-trained AlexNet deep convolution neural network model was used for feature extraction. And the spectral features, AlexNet features and GLCM texture features are combined with multi-kernel learning and SVM classifier, finally the classification results were compared and analyzed. The results show that the deep convolution neural network can extract more accurate remote sensing image features, and significantly improve the overall accuracy of classification, and provide a reference value for earthquake disaster investigation and remote sensing disaster evaluation.

ALEXNET FEATURE EXTRACTION AND MULTI-KERNEL LEARNING FOR OBJECTORIENTED CLASSIFICATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

L. Ding

2018-04-01

Full Text Available In view of the fact that the deep convolutional neural network has stronger ability of feature learning and feature expression, an exploratory research is done on feature extraction and classification for high resolution remote sensing images. Taking the Google image with 0.3 meter spatial resolution in Ludian area of Yunnan Province as an example, the image segmentation object was taken as the basic unit, and the pre-trained AlexNet deep convolution neural network model was used for feature extraction. And the spectral features, AlexNet features and GLCM texture features are combined with multi-kernel learning and SVM classifier, finally the classification results were compared and analyzed. The results show that the deep convolution neural network can extract more accurate remote sensing image features, and significantly improve the overall accuracy of classification, and provide a reference value for earthquake disaster investigation and remote sensing disaster evaluation.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging: An accurate diagnostic tool in the precise localization of penile fracture

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mujeeb M Rahiman

2013-01-01

Full Text Available An 18-year-old male presented with history and clinical findings suggestive of penile fracture. An MRI demonstrated disruption of the tunica albuginea and corpora cavernosa on the left dorso-lateral aspect, mid-shaft of penis with adjacent hematoma, and subcutaneous edema. At surgery, imaging findings were found to be accurate, and the penis was successfully repaired with minimal postoperative morbidity.

Lambert W-function based exact representation for double diode model of solar cells: Comparison on fitness and parameter extraction

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gao, Xiankun; Cui, Yan; Hu, Jianjun; Xu, Guangyin; Yu, Yongchang

2016-01-01

Highlights: • Lambert W-function based exact representation (LBER) is presented for double diode model (DDM). • Fitness difference between LBER and DDM is verified by reported parameter values. • The proposed LBER can better represent the I–V and P–V characteristics of solar cells. • Parameter extraction difference between LBER and DDM is validated by two algorithms. • The parameter values extracted from LBER are more accurate than those from DDM. - Abstract: Accurate modeling and parameter extraction of solar cells play an important role in the simulation and optimization of PV systems. This paper presents a Lambert W-function based exact representation (LBER) for traditional double diode model (DDM) of solar cells, and then compares their fitness and parameter extraction performance. Unlike existing works, the proposed LBER is rigorously derived from DDM, and in LBER the coefficients of Lambert W-function are not extra parameters to be extracted or arbitrary scalars but the vectors of terminal voltage and current of solar cells. The fitness difference between LBER and DDM is objectively validated by the reported parameter values and experimental I–V data of a solar cell and four solar modules from different technologies. The comparison results indicate that under the same parameter values, the proposed LBER can better represent the I–V and P–V characteristics of solar cells and provide a closer representation to actual maximum power points of all module types. Two different algorithms are used to compare the parameter extraction performance of LBER and DDM. One is our restart-based bound constrained Nelder-Mead (rbcNM) algorithm implemented in Matlab, and the other is the reported R_c_r-IJADE algorithm executed in Visual Studio. The comparison results reveal that, the parameter values extracted from LBER using two algorithms are always more accurate and robust than those from DDM despite more time consuming. As an improved version of DDM, the

GPU implementation of discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm for endmember extraction from hyperspectral image

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Chaoyin; Yuan, Zhengwu; Wu, Yuanfeng

2017-10-01

Hyperspectral image unmixing is an important part of hyperspectral data analysis. The mixed pixel decomposition consists of two steps, endmember (the unique signatures of pure ground components) extraction and abundance (the proportion of each endmember in each pixel) estimation. Recently, a Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (DPSO) was proposed for accurately extract endmembers with high optimal performance. However, the DPSO algorithm shows very high computational complexity, which makes the endmember extraction procedure very time consuming for hyperspectral image unmixing. Thus, in this paper, the DPSO endmember extraction algorithm was parallelized, implemented on the CUDA (GPU K20) platform, and evaluated by real hyperspectral remote sensing data. The experimental results show that with increasing the number of particles the parallelized version obtained much higher computing efficiency while maintain the same endmember exaction accuracy.

Acute Kidney Injury: Definition, Pathophysiology and Clinical Phenotypes.

Science.gov (United States)

Makris, Konstantinos; Spanou, Loukia

2016-05-01

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a clinical syndrome that complicates the course and worsens the outcome in a significant number of hospitalised patients. Recent advances in clinical and basic research will help with a more accurate definition of this syndrome and in the elucidation of its pathogenesis. With this knowledge we will be able to conduct more accurate epidemiologic studies in an effort to gain a better understanding of the impact of this syndrome. AKI is a syndrome that rarely has a sole and distinct pathophysiology. Recent evidence, in both basic science and clinical research, is beginning to change our view for AKI from a single organ failure syndrome to a syndrome where the kidney plays an active role in the progress of multi-organ dysfunction. Accurate and prompt recognition of AKI and better understanding of the pathophysiologic mechanisms underlying the various clinical phenotypes are of great importance to research for effective therapeutic interventions. In this review we provide the most recent updates in the definition, epidemiology and pathophysiology of AKI.

Text Character Extraction Implementation from Captured Handwritten Image to Text Conversionusing Template Matching Technique

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Barate Seema

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Images contain various types of useful information that should be extracted whenever required. A various algorithms and methods are proposed to extract text from the given image, and by using that user will be able to access the text from any image. Variations in text may occur because of differences in size, style,orientation, alignment of text, and low image contrast, composite backgrounds make the problem during extraction of text. If we develop an application that extracts and recognizes those texts accurately in real time, then it can be applied to many important applications like document analysis, vehicle license plate extraction, text- based image indexing, etc and many applications have become realities in recent years. To overcome the above problems we develop such application that will convert the image into text by using algorithms, such as bounding box, HSV model, blob analysis,template matching, template generation.

Comparison of mobility extraction methods based on field-effect measurements for graphene

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Hua Zhong

2015-05-01

Full Text Available Carrier mobility extraction methods for graphene based on field-effect measurements are explored and compared according to theoretical analysis and experimental results. A group of graphene devices with different channel lengths were fabricated and measured, and carrier mobility is extracted from those electrical transfer curves using three different methods. Accuracy and applicability of those methods were compared. Transfer length method (TLM can obtain accurate density dependent mobility and contact resistance at relative high carrier density based on data from a group of devices, and then can act as a standard method to verify other methods. As two of the most popular methods, direct transconductance method (DTM and fitting method (FTM can extract mobility easily based on transfer curve of a sole graphene device. DTM offers an underestimated mobility at any carrier density owing to the neglect of contact resistances, and the accuracy can be improved through fabricating field-effect transistors with long channel and good contacts. FTM assumes a constant mobility independent on carrier density, and then can obtain mobility, contact resistance and residual density stimulations through fitting a transfer curve. However, FTM tends to obtain a mobility value near Dirac point and then overestimates carrier mobility of graphene. Comparing with the DTM and FTM, TLM could offer a much more accurate and carrier density dependent mobility, that reflects the complete properties of graphene carrier mobility.

Survival of Implants in Immediate Extraction Sockets of Anterior Teeth: Early Clinical Results.

Science.gov (United States)

Sabir, Mohammad; Alam, Mohammad Nazish

2015-06-01

The aims and objectives of this study were placement of implants in freshly extracted sockets of anterior teeth and to evaluate the implant stability, peri-implant radiolucency and gingival inflammation around implant over a short period of 30 months. A total of 12 patients (8 male and 4 female), ranging in the age from 20 to 50 years, from March 2007 to June 2007, were evaluated for immediate implant placement into 22 fresh extraction sockets. Only maxillary and mandibular anterior teeth/roots (central incisors, lateral incisors and canines) were considered for replacement with implants. One piece implant with integrated abutment and integrated surface, non-submerged, threaded and tapered at apical 5 mm, sand-blasted and acid etched surfaced implants (HI-TEC TRX-OP Implants of Life Care Company) were used. The mobility was not present in any of the implants at all the follow up visits. There were 2 implants at 6 month, 1 implant at 12 month, 1 implant at 18 month visits, showing peri-implant radiolucency at some sites at bone to implant contact site. Severe gingival inflammation was not observed in any of the implant site. At every follow-up visit, every implant met the criteria of success and none was found to be failed over a 30 months duration i.e. 100% success rate was achieved by implants in immediate extraction socket. The success rate of implant survival in this study was found 100%. These implants have fulfilled all the criteria of implant success and based on the defined criteria, the success rate of implants placed in immediate extraction sockets of anterior teeth compared favorably with the conventional implants. The early results of the present study showed that high survival rates with the implants in immediate extraction sockets can be achieved.

How far away is far enough for extracting numerical waveforms, and how much do they depend on the extraction method?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pazos, Enrique; Dorband, Ernst Nils; Nagar, Alessandro; Palenzuela, Carlos; Schnetter, Erik; Tiglio, Manuel

2007-01-01

We present a method for extracting gravitational waves from numerical spacetimes which generalizes and refines one of the standard methods based on the Regge-Wheeler-Zerilli perturbation formalism. At the analytical level, this generalization allows a much more general class of slicing conditions for the background geometry, and is thus not restricted to Schwarzschild-like coordinates. At the numerical level, our approach uses high-order multi-block methods, which improve both the accuracy of our simulations and of our extraction procedure. In particular, the latter is simplified since there is no need for interpolation, and we can afford to extract accurate waves at large radii with only little additional computational effort. We then present fully nonlinear three-dimensional numerical evolutions of a distorted Schwarzschild black hole in Kerr-Schild coordinates with an odd parity perturbation and analyse the improvement that we gain from our generalized wave extraction, comparing our new method to the standard one. In particular, we analyse in detail the quasinormal frequencies of the extracted waves, using both methods. We do so by comparing the extracted waves with one-dimensional high resolution solutions of the corresponding generalized Regge-Wheeler equation. We explicitly see that the errors in the waveforms extracted with the standard method at fixed, finite extraction radii do not converge to zero with increasing resolution. We find that even with observers as far out as R = 80M-which is larger than what is commonly used in state-of-the-art simulations-the assumption in the standard method that the background is close to having Schwarzschild-like coordinates increases the error in the extracted waves considerably. Furthermore, those errors are dominated by the extraction method itself and not by the accuracy of our simulations. For extraction radii between 20M and 80M and for the resolutions that we use in this paper, our new method decreases the errors

How far away is far enough for extracting numerical waveforms, and how much do they depend on the extraction method?

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Pazos, Enrique [Department of Physics and Astronomy, 202 Nicholson Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (United States); Dorband, Ernst Nils [Department of Physics and Astronomy, 202 Nicholson Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (United States); Nagar, Alessandro [Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca Degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino (Italy); Palenzuela, Carlos [Department of Physics and Astronomy, 202 Nicholson Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (United States); Schnetter, Erik [Center for Computation and Technology, 216 Johnston Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (United States); Tiglio, Manuel [Department of Physics and Astronomy, 202 Nicholson Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (United States)

2007-06-21

We present a method for extracting gravitational waves from numerical spacetimes which generalizes and refines one of the standard methods based on the Regge-Wheeler-Zerilli perturbation formalism. At the analytical level, this generalization allows a much more general class of slicing conditions for the background geometry, and is thus not restricted to Schwarzschild-like coordinates. At the numerical level, our approach uses high-order multi-block methods, which improve both the accuracy of our simulations and of our extraction procedure. In particular, the latter is simplified since there is no need for interpolation, and we can afford to extract accurate waves at large radii with only little additional computational effort. We then present fully nonlinear three-dimensional numerical evolutions of a distorted Schwarzschild black hole in Kerr-Schild coordinates with an odd parity perturbation and analyse the improvement that we gain from our generalized wave extraction, comparing our new method to the standard one. In particular, we analyse in detail the quasinormal frequencies of the extracted waves, using both methods. We do so by comparing the extracted waves with one-dimensional high resolution solutions of the corresponding generalized Regge-Wheeler equation. We explicitly see that the errors in the waveforms extracted with the standard method at fixed, finite extraction radii do not converge to zero with increasing resolution. We find that even with observers as far out as R = 80M-which is larger than what is commonly used in state-of-the-art simulations-the assumption in the standard method that the background is close to having Schwarzschild-like coordinates increases the error in the extracted waves considerably. Furthermore, those errors are dominated by the extraction method itself and not by the accuracy of our simulations. For extraction radii between 20M and 80M and for the resolutions that we use in this paper, our new method decreases the errors

SpotCaliper: fast wavelet-based spot detection with accurate size estimation.

Science.gov (United States)

Püspöki, Zsuzsanna; Sage, Daniel; Ward, John Paul; Unser, Michael

2016-04-15

SpotCaliper is a novel wavelet-based image-analysis software providing a fast automatic detection scheme for circular patterns (spots), combined with the precise estimation of their size. It is implemented as an ImageJ plugin with a friendly user interface. The user is allowed to edit the results by modifying the measurements (in a semi-automated way), extract data for further analysis. The fine tuning of the detections includes the possibility of adjusting or removing the original detections, as well as adding further spots. The main advantage of the software is its ability to capture the size of spots in a fast and accurate way. http://bigwww.epfl.ch/algorithms/spotcaliper/ zsuzsanna.puspoki@epfl.ch Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Optimization of extraction of linarin from Flos chrysanthemi indici by response surface methodology and artificial neural network.

Science.gov (United States)

Pan, Hongye; Zhang, Qing; Cui, Keke; Chen, Guoquan; Liu, Xuesong; Wang, Longhu

2017-05-01

The extraction of linarin from Flos chrysanthemi indici by ethanol was investigated. Two modeling techniques, response surface methodology and artificial neural network, were adopted to optimize the process parameters, such as, ethanol concentration, extraction period, extraction frequency, and solvent to material ratio. We showed that both methods provided good predictions, but artificial neural network provided a better and more accurate result. The optimum process parameters include, ethanol concentration of 74%, extraction period of 2 h, extraction three times, solvent to material ratio of 12 mL/g. The experiment yield of linarin was 90.5% that deviated less than 1.6% from that obtained by predicted result. © 2017 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Robust real-time extraction of respiratory signals from PET list-mode data.

Science.gov (United States)

Salomon, Andre; Zhang, Bin; Olivier, Patrick; Goedicke, Andreas

2018-05-01

Respiratory motion, which typically cannot simply be suspended during PET image acquisition, affects lesions' detection and quantitative accuracy inside or in close vicinity to the lungs. Some motion compensation techniques address this issue via pre-sorting ("binning") of the acquired PET data into a set of temporal gates, where each gate is assumed to be minimally affected by respiratory motion. Tracking respiratory motion is typically realized using dedicated hardware (e.g. using respiratory belts and digital cameras). Extracting respiratory signalsdirectly from the acquired PET data simplifies the clinical workflow as it avoids to handle additional signal measurement equipment. We introduce a new data-driven method "Combined Local Motion Detection" (CLMD). It uses the Time-of-Flight (TOF) information provided by state-of-the-art PET scanners in order to enable real-time respiratory signal extraction without additional hardware resources. CLMD applies center-of-mass detection in overlapping regions based on simple back-positioned TOF event sets acquired in short time frames. Following a signal filtering and quality-based pre-selection step, the remaining extracted individual position information over time is then combined to generate a global respiratory signal. The method is evaluated using 7 measured FDG studies from single and multiple scan positions of the thorax region, and it is compared to other software-based methods regarding quantitative accuracy and statistical noise stability. Correlation coefficients around 90% between the reference and the extracted signal have been found for those PET scans where motion affected features such as tumors or hot regions were present in the PET field-of-view. For PET scans with a quarter of typically applied radiotracer doses, the CLMD method still provides similar high correlation coefficients which indicates its robustness to noise. Each CLMD processing needed less than 0.4s in total on a standard multi-core CPU

Robust real-time extraction of respiratory signals from PET list-mode data

Science.gov (United States)

Salomon, André; Zhang, Bin; Olivier, Patrick; Goedicke, Andreas

2018-06-01

Respiratory motion, which typically cannot simply be suspended during PET image acquisition, affects lesions’ detection and quantitative accuracy inside or in close vicinity to the lungs. Some motion compensation techniques address this issue via pre-sorting (‘binning’) of the acquired PET data into a set of temporal gates, where each gate is assumed to be minimally affected by respiratory motion. Tracking respiratory motion is typically realized using dedicated hardware (e.g. using respiratory belts and digital cameras). Extracting respiratory signals directly from the acquired PET data simplifies the clinical workflow as it avoids handling additional signal measurement equipment. We introduce a new data-driven method ‘combined local motion detection’ (CLMD). It uses the time-of-flight (TOF) information provided by state-of-the-art PET scanners in order to enable real-time respiratory signal extraction without additional hardware resources. CLMD applies center-of-mass detection in overlapping regions based on simple back-positioned TOF event sets acquired in short time frames. Following a signal filtering and quality-based pre-selection step, the remaining extracted individual position information over time is then combined to generate a global respiratory signal. The method is evaluated using seven measured FDG studies from single and multiple scan positions of the thorax region, and it is compared to other software-based methods regarding quantitative accuracy and statistical noise stability. Correlation coefficients around 90% between the reference and the extracted signal have been found for those PET scans where motion affected features such as tumors or hot regions were present in the PET field-of-view. For PET scans with a quarter of typically applied radiotracer doses, the CLMD method still provides similar high correlation coefficients which indicates its robustness to noise. Each CLMD processing needed less than 0.4 s in total on a standard

A comparison of quantitative methods for clinical imaging with hyperpolarized (13)C-pyruvate.

Science.gov (United States)

Daniels, Charlie J; McLean, Mary A; Schulte, Rolf F; Robb, Fraser J; Gill, Andrew B; McGlashan, Nicholas; Graves, Martin J; Schwaiger, Markus; Lomas, David J; Brindle, Kevin M; Gallagher, Ferdia A

2016-04-01

Dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) enables the metabolism of hyperpolarized (13)C-labelled molecules, such as the conversion of [1-(13)C]pyruvate to [1-(13)C]lactate, to be dynamically and non-invasively imaged in tissue. Imaging of this exchange reaction in animal models has been shown to detect early treatment response and correlate with tumour grade. The first human DNP study has recently been completed, and, for widespread clinical translation, simple and reliable methods are necessary to accurately probe the reaction in patients. However, there is currently no consensus on the most appropriate method to quantify this exchange reaction. In this study, an in vitro system was used to compare several kinetic models, as well as simple model-free methods. Experiments were performed using a clinical hyperpolarizer, a human 3 T MR system, and spectroscopic imaging sequences. The quantitative methods were compared in vivo by using subcutaneous breast tumours in rats to examine the effect of pyruvate inflow. The two-way kinetic model was the most accurate method for characterizing the exchange reaction in vitro, and the incorporation of a Heaviside step inflow profile was best able to describe the in vivo data. The lactate time-to-peak and the lactate-to-pyruvate area under the curve ratio were simple model-free approaches that accurately represented the full reaction, with the time-to-peak method performing indistinguishably from the best kinetic model. Finally, extracting data from a single pixel was a robust and reliable surrogate of the whole region of interest. This work has identified appropriate quantitative methods for future work in the analysis of human hyperpolarized (13)C data. © 2016 The Authors. NMR in Biomedicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

a Statistical Texture Feature for Building Collapse Information Extraction of SAR Image

Science.gov (United States)

Li, L.; Yang, H.; Chen, Q.; Liu, X.

2018-04-01

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has become one of the most important ways to extract post-disaster collapsed building information, due to its extreme versatility and almost all-weather, day-and-night working capability, etc. In view of the fact that the inherent statistical distribution of speckle in SAR images is not used to extract collapsed building information, this paper proposed a novel texture feature of statistical models of SAR images to extract the collapsed buildings. In the proposed feature, the texture parameter of G0 distribution from SAR images is used to reflect the uniformity of the target to extract the collapsed building. This feature not only considers the statistical distribution of SAR images, providing more accurate description of the object texture, but also is applied to extract collapsed building information of single-, dual- or full-polarization SAR data. The RADARSAT-2 data of Yushu earthquake which acquired on April 21, 2010 is used to present and analyze the performance of the proposed method. In addition, the applicability of this feature to SAR data with different polarizations is also analysed, which provides decision support for the data selection of collapsed building information extraction.

Fucose-containing sulfated polysaccharides from brown seaweed: Extraction technolgy and bioactivity assessment

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ale, Marcel Tutor

will generate new valuable products that may help lessen coastal pollution by seaweeds and create new seaweed-based resources. Thus, utilization of these natural resources is of great importance. The objectives of this PhD study were to develop a technology to extract bioactive compounds from nuisance brown...... seaweeds, and investigate their bioactivity. To this effect, designed optimized extraction of fucose-containing sulfated polysaccharides (FCSPs) and/or crude fucoidan from brown seaweed were performed, and the bioactivity of the isolated FCSPs was investigated. Moreover, to assess the potential of seaweed...... to assimilate nitrogen-based nutrients, a technology for accurate monitoring of differential seaweed growth responses to nutrient assimilation was also developed. Fucoidan is a term used to describe a class of sulfated polysaccharides extracted from brown seaweed, which contains substantial amounts of fucose...

A Novel Approach to Extract Water Body from ASAR Dual-Polarized Data

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ma, Jianwei; Song, Xiaoning; Leng, Pei; Zhou, Fangcheng; Li, Shuang; Li, Xiaotao

2014-01-01

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) has become a useful and efficient method for monitoring flood extent due to its capability of 24-hour and all weather observation. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to extract water bodies from ASAR dual-polarized images. Firstly, a new SAR image was created from ASAR Dual-Polarized data using a discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) fusion method. Then, a modified Otsu threshold method was used to extract water bodies of Poyang Lake with the new fused image. Next, this image was compared with the one extracted from ETM+ data. The result showed that the fused image was feasible and more accurate. Besides, it could reduce the influences of shadow and noise. Moreover, the approach could be conducted automatically, which is very important under urgent condition for flood monitoring

Comparative study of modern extraction techniques for the determination of environmental samples (M14)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gfrerer, M.; Lankmayr, E.

2002-01-01

Full text: The aim of any extraction method in analytical chemistry is, to effectively separate the analytes from the matrix. The whole step should be fast and quantitative with minimal solvent and time required. The classical Soxhlet extraction usually requires large volumes (up to 200 ml) of solvent to be refluxed through the solid samples for several hours. Therefore, in the last decades, alternatives for this extraction method have been presented and investigated such as ultrasonic extraction (UE), supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), accelerated solvent extraction (ASE), microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) and fluidized-bed extraction (FBE). The actual choice for analytical application is frequently the initial capital cost, operating costs, simplicity of operation, amount of organic solvent required and sample throughput. Since sample preparation is a critical step in the analytical cycle, special care has to be taken for an accurate choice and optimization of extraction techniques and clean-up procedures. Therefore, MAE and FBE were investigated for their influential extraction parameters and these parameters were optimized for the extraction of organochlorine biocides, polychlorinated biphenyls and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from environmental matrices like soil, sediment and sewage sludge. The extraction yields were compared with those obtained by Soxhlet extraction performed following DIN-methods. Finally, the optimized modern methods were validated by systematic experiments with certified reference materials. Refs. 3 (author)

Defining the clinical course of multiple sclerosis

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lublin, Fred D; Reingold, Stephen C; Cohen, Jeffrey A

2014-01-01

Accurate clinical course descriptions (phenotypes) of multiple sclerosis (MS) are important for communication, prognostication, design and recruitment of clinical trials, and treatment decision-making. Standardized descriptions published in 1996 based on a survey of international MS experts...

Autonomous celestial navigation based on Earth ultraviolet radiance and fast gradient statistic feature extraction

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Shan; Zhang, Hanmo

2016-01-01

To meet the requirement of autonomous orbit determination, this paper proposes a fast curve fitting method based on earth ultraviolet features to obtain accurate earth vector direction, in order to achieve the high precision autonomous navigation. Firstly, combining the stable characters of earth ultraviolet radiance and the use of transmission model software of atmospheric radiation, the paper simulates earth ultraviolet radiation model on different time and chooses the proper observation band. Then the fast improved edge extracting method combined Sobel operator and local binary pattern (LBP) is utilized, which can both eliminate noises efficiently and extract earth ultraviolet limb features accurately. And earth's centroid locations on simulated images are estimated via the least square fitting method using part of the limb edges. Taken advantage of the estimated earth vector direction and earth distance, Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is applied to realize the autonomous navigation finally. Experiment results indicate the proposed method can achieve a sub-pixel earth centroid location estimation and extremely enhance autonomous celestial navigation precision.

Ultra-performance liquid chromatography MS/MS method for the determination of parabens in compost from sewage sludge: comparison of the efficiency of two extraction techniques.

Science.gov (United States)

Benítez-Villalba, Julio César; Zafra-Gómez, Alberto; Dorival-García, Noemí; Camino-Sánchez, Francisco Javier; Cantarero, Samuel; Vílchez, José Luis

2013-08-01

The efficiency of two extraction techniques--ultrasound-assisted extraction and pressurized liquid extraction--are compared and evaluated in the determination of parabens in compost samples. The extraction parameters for each technique were accurately optimized. The selected compounds were detected and quantified using ultra-performance LC MS/MS, operating in negative ESI and in SRM mode. The analytes were separated in less than 5 min. Ethylparaben (ring-(13)C6 labeled) was used as an internal standard. Two selective, sensitive, and accurate analytical methods were developed and validated. The LODs of the methods ranged from 3 to 7 ng/g and the LOQs from 10 to 23 ng/g, while inter- and intraday variability was under 6% in all cases. The methods were validated separately by using matrix-matched calibration and recovery assays with spiked samples. Recovery rates ranged from 94.0 to 105.0%. Compost samples were taken from different composting plants. Although the statistical comparison demonstrated no statistically significant differences between the two extraction techniques, the method based on pressurized liquid extraction was more sensitive than the ultrasound extraction based method. © 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Sliding Window-Based Region of Interest Extraction for Finger Vein Images

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Lu; Yang, Gongping; Yin, Yilong; Xiao, Rongyang

2013-01-01

Region of Interest (ROI) extraction is a crucial step in an automatic finger vein recognition system. The aim of ROI extraction is to decide which part of the image is suitable for finger vein feature extraction. This paper proposes a finger vein ROI extraction method which is robust to finger displacement and rotation. First, we determine the middle line of the finger, which will be used to correct the image skew. Then, a sliding window is used to detect the phalangeal joints and further to ascertain the height of ROI. Last, for the corrective image with certain height, we will obtain the ROI by using the internal tangents of finger edges as the left and right boundary. The experimental results show that the proposed method can extract ROI more accurately and effectively compared with other methods, and thus improve the performance of finger vein identification system. Besides, to acquire the high quality finger vein image during the capture process, we propose eight criteria for finger vein capture from different aspects and these criteria should be helpful to some extent for finger vein capture. PMID:23507824

Effectivity of Betel Leaf (Piper betle L. Gel Extract in Shortening Bleeding Time After Deciduous Tooth Extraction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Regina Tedjasulaksana

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Background: As an Indonesian traditional medicine, betel leafis often used to stop nosebleed. Effective substances in betel leaves which serves to stop the bleeding is tannin. Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the betel leaf ethanol extract gel shortened bleeding time after the revocation of deciduous teeth. Method: This research was conducted at the Department of Dental Nursing Clinic, Health Polytechnic Denpasar.This study is pure experimental research design with Completely Randomized Post Test Only Control Group Design. The total sample of 27 respondents were divided into a treatment group and two control groups. Anterior deciduous teeth on the physiological loose grade 3 or 4 is extracted, then the tooth socket is put pure gel for group 1 to group 2, epinephrine gel and gel ethanol extract of betel leaf for group 3. The bleeding time is calculated from the first moment the blood out until there is blood on filter paper that is placed on the tooth socket. Data were statistically analyzed with descriptive test and comparability test with One Way Anova. Result: The results showed bleeding time pure gel groups differ significantly with epinephrine group and the group of ethanol extract of betel leaf gel (p< 0.05. Bleeding time of epinephrine group did not differ significantly with betel leaf ethanol extract group (p>0.05. Conclusion: This means ethanol gel betel leaf extract can shorten bleeding after deciduous tooth extraction and it is suggested that the use of gel ethanol extract of betel leaves to cope with bleeding after tooth extraction.

Filter Membrane Effects on Water-Extractable Phosphorus Concentrations from Soil.

Science.gov (United States)

Norby, Jessica; Strawn, Daniel; Brooks, Erin

2018-03-01

To accurately assess P concentrations in soil extracts, standard laboratory practices for monitoring P concentrations are needed. Water-extractable P is a common analytical test to determine P availability for leaching from soils, and it is used to determine best management practices. Most P analytical tests require filtration through a filter membrane with 0.45-μm pore size to distinguish between particulate and dissolved P species. However, filter membrane type is rarely specified in method protocols, and many different types of membranes are available. In this study, three common filter membrane materials (polyether sulfone, nylon, and nitrocellulose), all with 0.45-μm pore sizes, were tested for analytical differences in total P concentrations and dissolved reactive P (DRP) concentrations in water extracts from six soils sampled from two regions. Three of the extracts from the six soil samples had different total P concentrations for all three membrane types. The other three soil extracts had significantly different total P results from at least one filter membrane type. Total P concentration differences were as great as 35%. The DRP concentrations in the extracts were dependent on filter type in five of the six soil types. Results from this research show that filter membrane type is an important parameter that affects concentrations of total P and DRP from soil extracts. Thus, membrane type should be specified in soil extraction protocols. Copyright © by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, Inc.

Accurate registration of peri-implant soft tissues to create an optimal emergence profile

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ibraheem Fahad Alshiddi

2015-01-01

Full Text Available One of the challenges in restoring anterior space with implant restoration is maintaining the natural looking of peri-implant area. This case report presents a clinical procedure to create the soft tissue emergence profile for anterior maxillary teeth. A 49-year-old male presented with missing right maxillary lateral incisor. A provisional restoration was inserted 1 week after implant placement. Area of the provisional restoration related to the gingival tissue (transmucosal area was adjusted to create an optimum emergence profile. Two months later, an indirect method was used to accurately transfer the soft peri-implant tissues to the master cast. This clinical technique minimizes surgical procedure and avoids the possibility of soft tissue collapsing that may occur during the impression procedure.

How Severely Is DNA Quantification Hampered by RNA Co-extraction?

Science.gov (United States)

Sanchez, Ignacio; Remm, Matthieu; Frasquilho, Sonia; Betsou, Fay; Mathieson, William

2015-10-01

The optional RNase digest that is part of many DNA extraction protocols is often omitted, either because RNase is not provided in the kit or because users do not want to risk contaminating their laboratory. Consequently, co-eluting RNA can become a "contaminant" of unknown magnitude in a DNA extraction. We extracted DNA from liver, lung, kidney, and heart tissues and established that 28-52% of the "DNA" as assessed by spectrophotometry is actually RNA (depending on tissue type). Including an RNase digest in the extraction protocol reduced 260:280 purity ratios. Co-eluting RNA drives an overestimation of DNA yield when quantification is carried out using OD 260 nm spectrophotometry, or becomes an unquantified contaminant when spectrofluorometry is used for DNA quantification. This situation is potentially incompatible with the best practice guidelines for biobanks issued by organizations such as the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, which state that biospecimens should be accurately characterized in terms of their identity, purity, concentration, and integrity. Consequently, we conclude that an RNase digest must be included in DNA extractions if pure DNA is required. We also discuss the implications of unquantified RNA contamination in DNA samples in the context of laboratory accreditation schemes.

Depth-time interpolation of feature trends extracted from mobile microelectrode data with kernel functions.

Science.gov (United States)

Wong, Stephen; Hargreaves, Eric L; Baltuch, Gordon H; Jaggi, Jurg L; Danish, Shabbar F

2012-01-01

Microelectrode recording (MER) is necessary for precision localization of target structures such as the subthalamic nucleus during deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery. Attempts to automate this process have produced quantitative temporal trends (feature activity vs. time) extracted from mobile MER data. Our goal was to evaluate computational methods of generating spatial profiles (feature activity vs. depth) from temporal trends that would decouple automated MER localization from the clinical procedure and enhance functional localization in DBS surgery. We evaluated two methods of interpolation (standard vs. kernel) that generated spatial profiles from temporal trends. We compared interpolated spatial profiles to true spatial profiles that were calculated with depth windows, using correlation coefficient analysis. Excellent approximation of true spatial profiles is achieved by interpolation. Kernel-interpolated spatial profiles produced superior correlation coefficient values at optimal kernel widths (r = 0.932-0.940) compared to standard interpolation (r = 0.891). The choice of kernel function and kernel width resulted in trade-offs in smoothing and resolution. Interpolation of feature activity to create spatial profiles from temporal trends is accurate and can standardize and facilitate MER functional localization of subcortical structures. The methods are computationally efficient, enhancing localization without imposing additional constraints on the MER clinical procedure during DBS surgery. Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Evaluation of Saponin Extract from Vitex doniana and Pentaclethra macrophylla for Antibacterial Activity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nneoma E. Akaniro-Ejim

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Saponins are pharmacologically active compounds that have been shown to ameliorate abnormal physiological processes and be aptly applied in folklore for the treatment of maladies occasioned by infectious agents. Consequently, saponins from Vitex doniana and Pentaclethra macrophylla were evaluated for antibacterial properties, as these herbs are used in folk medicine. Dried pulverized plant materials were defatted, and solvents with varying polarity were applied at varying ratios for the extraction of saponins. Phyto-chemistry was in accordance with standard methods, while an antibacterial assay was made through the agar well diffusion and micro broth dilution techniques. Phytochemical quantitation showed high concentrations of tannins, 231 ± 0.6 CE/g, and saponins, 58% from V. doniana. Similarly, P. macrophylla stem bark extract also showed high concentrations of tannins, 309 ± 2.42 CE/g, alkaloids, 71% ± 0.5%, and saponins, 87% ± 3.4%. The ethanol extracts of V. doniana inhibited the growth of Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC 11775 and a clinical strain with inhibition zone ranges of 15.5 ± 2.12 to 7.0 ± 0.0 (mm against leaf extracts and 20.0 ± 1.41 to 7.0 ± 0.0 (mm against stem bark extracts. Conversely, saponin extract from V. doniana showed a broad spectrum of activity, as it inhibited both Gram-negative and -positive test strains, E. coli clinical strain (20.0 ± 1.41 mm, P. aeruginosa clinical strain (18.5 ± 0.71 mm, E. coli ATCC 11775 (17.0 ± 0 mm, and S. aureus clinical strain (13.0 ± 1.41 mm. However, a broad spectrum was similarly achieved with P. macrophylla extracts, as all test bacteria genus was susceptible. Saponin fractions showed a high potency and broad spectrum antibacterial activity and thus a validation of the folklore applications and the potential for use as a drug or drug scaffold.

Healing of ungrafted and grafted extraction sockets after 12 weeks: a prospective clinical study.

Science.gov (United States)

Heberer, Susanne; Al-Chawaf, Bassem; Jablonski, Carlo; Nelson, John J; Lage, Hermann; Nelson, Katje

2011-01-01

In this prospective study, bone formation in human extraction sockets augmented with Bio-Oss Collagen after a 12-week healing period was quantified and compared to bone formation in unaugmented extraction sockets. Selected patients with four-walled extraction sockets were included in this prospective study. After extraction, the sockets were randomly augmented using Bio-Oss Collagen or left to heal unfilled without raising a mucoperiosteal flap. At the time of implant placement, histologic specimens were obtained from the socket and analyzed. Statistical analysis was performed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Twenty-five patients with a total of 39 sockets (20 augmented, 19 unaugmented) were included in the study and the histologic specimens analyzed. All specimens were free of inflammatory cells. The mean overall new bone formation in the augmented sites was 25% (range, 8%-41%) and in the unaugmented sockets it was 44% (range, 3%-79%). There was a significant difference in the rate of new bone formation between the grafted and ungrafted sockets and a significant difference in the bone formation rate in the apical compared to the coronal regions of all sockets, independent of the healing mode. This descriptive study demonstrated that bone formation in Bio-Oss Collagen-grafted human extraction sockets was lower than bone formation in ungrafted sockets. Bone formation occurred in all specimens with varying degrees of maturation independent of the grafting material and was initiated from the apical region.

Extracts from Hericium erinaceus relieve inflammatory bowel disease by regulating immunity and gut microbiota.

Science.gov (United States)

Diling, Chen; Xin, Yang; Chaoqun, Zheng; Jian, Yang; Xiaocui, Tang; Jun, Chen; Ou, Shuai; Yizhen, Xie

2017-10-17

Hericium erinaceus (HE), a traditional edible mushroom, is known as a medicine food homology to ameliorate gastrointestinal diseases. To investigate whether HE is clinically effective in alleviating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), HE extracts (polysaccharide, alcoholic extracts and whole extracts were prepared using solvent extraction methods) were administrated for 2 weeks in rats with IBD induced by trinitro-benzene-sulfonic acid (TNBS) enema (150 mg/kg). Significant clinical and histological changes in IBD rats were identified, including damage activity, common morphous and tissue damage index scores in colonic mucosa and myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity. The damage activity, common morphous and tissue damage index scores in colonic mucosa ( P <0.05) were improved, MPO activities were decreased. Inflammatory factors were also differentially expressed in colonic mucosa in IBD rats, including serum cytokines, Foxp3 and interleukin (IL)-10 were increased while NF-κB p65 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α were decreased ( P <0.05), and T cells were activated ( P <0.05), especially in the alcohol extracts-treated group. We also found that the structure of gut microbiota of the H. erinaceus extracts-treated groups changed significantly by compared with the model group. Further studies revealed that the polysaccharides in HE extracts may play a prebiotic role, whereas the alcoholic extracts show bactericidin-like and immunomodulatory effects. Taken together, we demonstrated that H. erinaceus extracts could promote the growth of beneficial gut bacteria and improve the host immunity in vivo IBD model, which shows clinical potential in relieving IBD by regulating gut microbiota and immune system.

Antibacterial, antibiofilm and antitumor activities of grape and mulberry leaves ethanolic extracts towards bacterial clinical strains

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Elshahat M. Ramadan

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC were measured at concentrations of 0.01–2.56 mg/mL of grape and mulberry leaves ethanolic extracts. The MIC values were ranged from 0.08 to 0.16 mg/mL against Ps. aeruginosa Ps9, and 0.32 mg/mL against each of S. aureus St3, E. coli Ec3, and S. typhi Sa1. Whereas, the MBC values were ranged from 0.32 to 1.28 mg/mL of the tested extracts. The effects of the tested extracts were also studied representing the bactericidal effect of the grape extract with a ratio of 2 against all investigated isolates, except S. typhi Sa1. Whereas, the mulberry extract had a bactericidal effect towards S. aureus St3 and E. coli Ec3 with ratio of 2, and a bacteriostatic effect against Ps. aeruginosa Ps9 and S. typhi Sa1 with a ratio ≥4. The investigated bacteria found to have a strong ability to form biofilms with densities ranged from 0.67 to 0.80. Both tested extracts inhibited these biofilms with percentages ranged from 48 to 66% at sub-inhibitory concentrations (SICs ranged from 0.04 to 0.16 mg/mL. In addition, the tested extracts have an excellent cytotoxic activity towards colon cancer cell lines (HCT-16. Five phenolic compounds detected in the tested extracts of grape and mulberry using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC after 9.53 min of the retention time. The phenolic compounds of both tested extracts were gallic, coumaric, ferulic, chlorogenic and caffeic with concentrations ranged from 1.28 to 6.56 µg/mL.

Accurate estimation of motion blur parameters in noisy remote sensing image

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Xueyan; Wang, Lin; Shao, Xiaopeng; Wang, Huilin; Tao, Zhong

2015-05-01

The relative motion between remote sensing satellite sensor and objects is one of the most common reasons for remote sensing image degradation. It seriously weakens image data interpretation and information extraction. In practice, point spread function (PSF) should be estimated firstly for image restoration. Identifying motion blur direction and length accurately is very crucial for PSF and restoring image with precision. In general, the regular light-and-dark stripes in the spectrum can be employed to obtain the parameters by using Radon transform. However, serious noise existing in actual remote sensing images often causes the stripes unobvious. The parameters would be difficult to calculate and the error of the result relatively big. In this paper, an improved motion blur parameter identification method to noisy remote sensing image is proposed to solve this problem. The spectrum characteristic of noisy remote sensing image is analyzed firstly. An interactive image segmentation method based on graph theory called GrabCut is adopted to effectively extract the edge of the light center in the spectrum. Motion blur direction is estimated by applying Radon transform on the segmentation result. In order to reduce random error, a method based on whole column statistics is used during calculating blur length. Finally, Lucy-Richardson algorithm is applied to restore the remote sensing images of the moon after estimating blur parameters. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and robustness of our algorithm.

Antibacterial activity of the fruit extract of Physalis angulata and its ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The inhibitory activity of zinc oxide-ointment formulation as well as the unformulated crude extract of fruits of Physalis angulata was investigated against clinical wound isolates of Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The zinc oxide-ointment formulation and the unformulated P. angulata crude extract were ...

Extraction Method for Earthquake-Collapsed Building Information Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chen, Peng; Wu, Jian; Liu, Yaolin; Wang, Jing

2014-01-01

At present, the extraction of earthquake disaster information from remote sensing data relies on visual interpretation. However, this technique cannot effectively and quickly obtain precise and efficient information for earthquake relief and emergency management. Collapsed buildings in the town of Zipingpu after the Wenchuan earthquake were used as a case study to validate two kinds of rapid extraction methods for earthquake-collapsed building information based on pixel-oriented and object-oriented theories. The pixel-oriented method is based on multi-layer regional segments that embody the core layers and segments of the object-oriented method. The key idea is to mask layer by layer all image information, including that on the collapsed buildings. Compared with traditional techniques, the pixel-oriented method is innovative because it allows considerably rapid computer processing. As for the object-oriented method, a multi-scale segment algorithm was applied to build a three-layer hierarchy. By analyzing the spectrum, texture, shape, location, and context of individual object classes in different layers, the fuzzy determined rule system was established for the extraction of earthquake-collapsed building information. We compared the two sets of results using three variables: precision assessment, visual effect, and principle. Both methods can extract earthquake-collapsed building information quickly and accurately. The object-oriented method successfully overcomes the pepper salt noise caused by the spectral diversity of high-resolution remote sensing data and solves the problem of same object, different spectrums and that of same spectrum, different objects. With an overall accuracy of 90.38%, the method achieves more scientific and accurate results compared with the pixel-oriented method (76.84%). The object-oriented image analysis method can be extensively applied in the extraction of earthquake disaster information based on high-resolution remote sensing

Determination of major elements in annual tree rings by acid extraction

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Belacy, N.; Abou EL-Nour, F.; Simpson, H.J.

1991-01-01

A method utilizing acid extraction of Na, K, Ca and Mg from the wood of annual growth rings of egyptian trees was executed. The method was applied on a Morus Alba tree located at Nile delta, northern of egypt. The acid extraction method includes the use of dilute nitric acid to extract the elements of the wood. The wood was soaked for one hour with continuous stirring at room temperature. Element contents of both leachant and ash of the extracted wood dissolved in 2N HNO 3 , were then estimated using an atomic absorption spectrophotometer. The method was optimized and led to an accurate determination of the elements in the wood of the examined tree rings. The results showed a difference in the level of these elements along the annual rings of the examined tree. The data obtained in this work can help in understanding the correlation between the concentration of these elements in the annual growth rings of the egyptian trees and the expected changes in the salinity of water of irrigation before and after the high dam project

Maximized Inter-Class Weighted Mean for Fast and Accurate Mitosis Cells Detection in Breast Cancer Histopathology Images.

Science.gov (United States)

Nateghi, Ramin; Danyali, Habibollah; Helfroush, Mohammad Sadegh

2017-08-14

Based on the Nottingham criteria, the number of mitosis cells in histopathological slides is an important factor in diagnosis and grading of breast cancer. For manual grading of mitosis cells, histopathology slides of the tissue are examined by pathologists at 40× magnification for each patient. This task is very difficult and time-consuming even for experts. In this paper, a fully automated method is presented for accurate detection of mitosis cells in histopathology slide images. First a method based on maximum-likelihood is employed for segmentation and extraction of mitosis cell. Then a novel Maximized Inter-class Weighted Mean (MIWM) method is proposed that aims at reducing the number of extracted non-mitosis candidates that results in reducing the false positive mitosis detection rate. Finally, segmented candidates are classified into mitosis and non-mitosis classes by using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in accuracy of mitosis cells detection in different grades of breast cancer histopathological images.

Mouse single oral dose toxicity test of bupleuri radix aqueous extracts.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Kyung-Hu; Gam, Cheol-Ou; Choi, Seong-Hun; Ku, Sae-Kwang

2012-03-01

The aim of this study was to evaluate the single oral dose toxicity of Bupleuri Radix (BR) aqueous extracts, it has been traditionally used as anti-inflammatory agent, in male and female mice. BR extracts (yield = 16.52%) was administered to female and male ICR mice as an oral dose of 2,000, 1,000 and 500 mg/kg (body weight) according to the recommendation of Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) Guidelines. Animals were monitored for the mortality and changes in body weight, clinical signs and gross observation during 14 days after dosing, upon necropsy; organ weight and histopathology of 14 principal organs were examined. As the results, no BR extracts treatment related mortalities, clinical signs, changes on the body and organ weights, gross and histopathological observations against 14 principal organs were detected up to 2,000 mg/kg in both female and male mice, except for soft feces and related body weight decrease detected in male mice treated with 2,000 mg/kg. Therefore, LD50 (50% lethal dose) and approximate LD of BR aqueous extracts after single oral treatment in female and male mice were considered over 2000 mg/kg, respectively. Although it was also observed that the possibilities of digestive disorders, like soft feces when administered over 2,000 mg/kg of BR extracts in the present study, these possibilities of digestive disorders can be disregard in clinical use because they are transient in the highest dosages male only.

Renal contrast-enhanced MR angiography: timing errors and accurate depiction of renal artery origins.

Science.gov (United States)

Schmidt, Maria A; Morgan, Robert

2008-10-01

To investigate bolus timing artifacts that impair depiction of renal arteries at contrast material-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) angiography and to determine the effect of contrast agent infusion rates on artifact generation. Renal contrast-enhanced MR angiography was simulated for a variety of infusion schemes, assuming both correct and incorrect timing between data acquisition and contrast agent injection. In addition, the ethics committee approved the retrospective evaluation of clinical breath-hold renal contrast-enhanced MR angiographic studies obtained with automated detection of contrast agent arrival. Twenty-two studies were evaluated for their ability to depict the origin of renal arteries in patent vessels and for any signs of timing errors. Simulations showed that a completely artifactual stenosis or an artifactual overestimation of an existing stenosis at the renal artery origin can be caused by timing errors of the order of 5 seconds in examinations performed with contrast agent infusion rates compatible with or higher than those of hand injections. Lower infusion rates make the studies more likely to accurately depict the origin of the renal arteries. In approximately one-third of all clinical examinations, different contrast agent uptake rates were detected on the left and right sides of the body, and thus allowed us to confirm that it is often impossible to optimize depiction of both renal arteries. In three renal arteries, a signal void was found at the origin in a patent vessel, and delayed contrast agent arrival was confirmed. Computer simulations and clinical examinations showed that timing errors impair the accurate depiction of renal artery origins. (c) RSNA, 2008.

Extraction and LC determination of lysine clonixinate salt in water/oil microemulsions.

Science.gov (United States)

Pineros, I; Ballesteros, P; Lastres, J L

2002-02-01

A new reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography method has been developed and validated for the quantitative determination of lysine clonixinate salt in water/oil microemulsions. The mobile phase was acetonitrile-buffer phosphate pH 3.3. Detection was UV absorbance at 252 nm. The precision and accurately of the method were excellent. The established linearity range was 5-60 microg ml(-1) (r(2)=0.999). Microemulsions samples were dispersed with chloroform and extracted lysine clonixinate salt with water. This easy method employing chloroformic extraction has been done three times. The recovery of lysine clonixinate salt from spiked placebo and microemulsion were >90% over the linear range.

Advanced RF-KO slow-extraction method for the reduction of spill ripple

CERN Document Server

Noda, K; Shibuya, S; Uesugi, T; Muramatsu, M; Kanazawa, M; Takada, E; Yamada, S

2002-01-01

Two advanced RF-knockout (RF-KO) slow-extraction methods have been developed at HIMAC in order to reduce the spill ripple for accurate heavy-ion cancer therapy: the dual frequency modulation (FM) method and the separated function method. As a result of simulations and experiments, it was verified that the spill ripple could be considerably reduced using these advanced methods, compared with the ordinary RF-KO method. The dual FM method and the separated function method bring about a low spill ripple within standard deviations of around 25% and of 15% during beam extraction within around 2 s, respectively, which are in good agreement with the simulation results.

Fusion of Pixel-based and Object-based Features for Road Centerline Extraction from High-resolution Satellite Imagery

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

CAO Yungang

2016-10-01

Full Text Available A novel approach for road centerline extraction from high spatial resolution satellite imagery is proposed by fusing both pixel-based and object-based features. Firstly, texture and shape features are extracted at the pixel level, and spectral features are extracted at the object level based on multi-scale image segmentation maps. Then, extracted multiple features are utilized in the fusion framework of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory to roughly identify the road network regions. Finally, an automatic noise removing algorithm combined with the tensor voting strategy is presented to accurately extract the road centerline. Experimental results using high-resolution satellite imageries with different scenes and spatial resolutions showed that the proposed approach compared favorably with the traditional methods, particularly in the aspect of eliminating the salt noise and conglutination phenomenon.

Ginger extracts influence the expression of IL-27 and IL-33 in the central nervous system in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis and ameliorates the clinical symptoms of disease.

Science.gov (United States)

Jafarzadeh, A; Mohammadi-Kordkhayli, M; Ahangar-Parvin, R; Azizi, V; Khoramdel-Azad, H; Shamsizadeh, A; Ayoobi, A; Nemati, M; Hassan, Z M; Moazeni, S M; Khaksari, M

2014-11-15

The immunomodulatory effects of the IL-27 and IL-33 and the anti-inflammatory effects of ginger have been reported in some studies. The aim was to evaluate the effects of the ginger extract on the expression of IL-27 and IL-33 in a model of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE). In PBS-treated EAE mice the expression of IL-27 P28 was significantly lower whereas the expression of IL-33 was significantly higher than unimmunized control mice. In 200 and 300 mg/kg ginger-treated EAE groups the expression of IL-27 P28 and IL-27 EBI3 was significantly higher whereas the expression of IL-33 was significantly lower than PBS-treated EAE mice. The EAE clinical symptoms and the pathological scores were significantly lower in ginger-treated EAE groups. These results showed that the ginger extract modulates the expression of the IL-27 and IL-33 in the spinal cord of EAE mice and ameliorates the clinical symptoms of disease. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Respiratory rate extraction from pulse oximeter and electrocardiographic recordings

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lee, Jinseok; Chon, Ki H; Florian, John P

2011-01-01

We present an algorithm of respiratory rate extraction using particle filter (PF), which is applicable to both photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. For the respiratory rate estimation, 1 min data are analyzed with combination of a PF method and an autoregressive model where among the resultant coefficients, the corresponding pole angle with the highest magnitude is searched since this reflects the closest approximation of the true breathing rate. The PPG data were collected from 15 subjects with the metronome breathing rate ranging from 24 to 36 breaths per minute in the supine and upright positions. The ECG data were collected from 11 subjects with spontaneous breathing ranging from 36 to 60 breaths per minute during treadmill exercises. Our method was able to accurately extract respiratory rates for both metronome and spontaneous breathing even during strenuous exercises. More importantly, despite slow increases in breathing rates concomitant with greater exercise vigor with time, our method was able to accurately track these progressive increases in respiratory rates. We quantified the accuracy of our method by using the mean, standard deviation and interquartile range of the error rates which all reflected high accuracy in estimating the true breathing rates. We are not aware of any other algorithms that are able to provide accurate respiratory rates directly from either ECG signals or PPG signals with spontaneous breathing during strenuous exercises. Our method is near real-time realizable because the computational time on 1 min data segment takes only 10 ms on a 2.66 GHz Intel Core2 microprocessor; the data are subsequently shifted every 10 s to obtain near-continuous breathing rates. This is an attractive feature since most other techniques require offline data analyses to estimate breathing rates

Respiratory rate extraction from pulse oximeter and electrocardiographic recordings.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Jinseok; Florian, John P; Chon, Ki H

2011-11-01

We present an algorithm of respiratory rate extraction using particle filter (PF), which is applicable to both photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. For the respiratory rate estimation, 1 min data are analyzed with combination of a PF method and an autoregressive model where among the resultant coefficients, the corresponding pole angle with the highest magnitude is searched since this reflects the closest approximation of the true breathing rate. The PPG data were collected from 15 subjects with the metronome breathing rate ranging from 24 to 36 breaths per minute in the supine and upright positions. The ECG data were collected from 11 subjects with spontaneous breathing ranging from 36 to 60 breaths per minute during treadmill exercises. Our method was able to accurately extract respiratory rates for both metronome and spontaneous breathing even during strenuous exercises. More importantly, despite slow increases in breathing rates concomitant with greater exercise vigor with time, our method was able to accurately track these progressive increases in respiratory rates. We quantified the accuracy of our method by using the mean, standard deviation and interquartile range of the error rates which all reflected high accuracy in estimating the true breathing rates. We are not aware of any other algorithms that are able to provide accurate respiratory rates directly from either ECG signals or PPG signals with spontaneous breathing during strenuous exercises. Our method is near real-time realizable because the computational time on 1 min data segment takes only 10 ms on a 2.66 GHz Intel Core2 microprocessor; the data are subsequently shifted every 10 s to obtain near-continuous breathing rates. This is an attractive feature since most other techniques require offline data analyses to estimate breathing rates.

Viscum album L. extracts in breast and gynaecological cancers: a systematic review of clinical and preclinical research

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kienle Gunver S

2009-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Viscum album L. extracts (VAE, European mistletoe are a widely used medicinal plant extract in gynaecological and breast-cancer treatment. Methods Systematic review to evaluate clinical studies and preclinical research on the therapeutic effectiveness and biological effects of VAE on gynaecological and breast cancer. Search of databases, reference lists and expert consultations. Criteria-based assessment of methodological study quality. Results 19 randomized (RCT, 16 non-randomized (non-RCT controlled studies, and 11 single-arm cohort studies were identified that investigated VAE treatment of breast or gynaecological cancer. They included 2420, 6399 and 1130 patients respectively. 8 RCTs and 8 non-RCTs were embedded in the same large epidemiological cohort study. 9 RCTs and 13 non-RCTs assessed survival; 12 reported a statistically significant benefit, the others either a trend or no difference. 3 RCTs and 6 non-RCTs assessed tumour behaviour (remission or time to relapse; 3 reported statistically significant benefit, the others either a trend, no difference or mixed results. Quality of life (QoL and tolerability of chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery was assessed in 15 RCTs and 9 non-RCTs. 21 reported a statistically significant positive result, the others either a trend, no difference, or mixed results. Methodological quality of the studies differed substantially; some had major limitations, especially RCTs on survival and tumour behaviour had very small sample sizes. Some recent studies, however, especially on QoL were reasonably well conducted. Single-arm cohort studies investigated tumour behaviour, QoL, pharmacokinetics and safety of VAE. Tumour remission was observed after high dosage and local application. VAE application was well tolerated. 34 animal experiments investigated VAE and isolated or recombinant compounds in various breast and gynaecological cancer models in mice and rats. VAE showed increase of survival

What is a Dune: Developing AN Automated Approach to Extracting Dunes from Digital Elevation Models

Science.gov (United States)

Taylor, H.; DeCuir, C.; Wernette, P. A.; Taube, C.; Eyler, R.; Thopson, S.

2016-12-01

Coastal dunes can absorb storm surge and mitigate inland erosion caused by elevated water levels during a storm. In order to understand how a dune responds to and recovers from a storm, it is important that we can first identify and differentiate the beach and dune from the rest of the landscape. Current literature does not provide a consistent definition of what the dune features (e.g. dune toe, dune crest) are or how they can be extracted. The purpose of this research is to develop enhanced approaches to extracting dunes from a digital elevation model (DEM). Manual delineation, convergence index, least-cost path, relative relief, and vegetation abundance were compared and contrasted on a small area of Padre Island National Seashore (PAIS), Preliminary results indicate that the method used to extract the dune greatly affects our interpretation of how the dune changes. The manual delineation method was time intensive and subjective, while the convergence index approach was useful to easily identify the dune crest through maximum and minimum values. The least-cost path method proved to be time intensive due to data clipping; however, this approach resulted in continuous geomorphic landscape features (e.g. dune toe, dune crest). While the relative relief approach shows the most features in multi resolution, it is difficult to assess the accuracy of the extracted features because extracted features appear as points that can vary widely in their location from one meter to the next. The vegetation approach was greatly impacted by the seasonal and annual fluctuations of growth but is advantageous in historical change studies because it can be used to extract consistent dune formation from historical aerial imagery. Improving our ability to more accurately assess dune response and recovery to a storm will enable coastal managers to more accurately predict how dunes may respond to future climate change scenarios.

Bioaccessibility tests accurately estimate bioavailability of lead to quail

Science.gov (United States)

Beyer, W. Nelson; Basta, Nicholas T; Chaney, Rufus L.; Henry, Paula F.; Mosby, David; Rattner, Barnett A.; Scheckel, Kirk G.; Sprague, Dan; Weber, John

2016-01-01

Hazards of soil-borne Pb to wild birds may be more accurately quantified if the bioavailability of that Pb is known. To better understand the bioavailability of Pb to birds, we measured blood Pb concentrations in Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) fed diets containing Pb-contaminated soils. Relative bioavailabilities were expressed by comparison with blood Pb concentrations in quail fed a Pb acetate reference diet. Diets containing soil from five Pb-contaminated Superfund sites had relative bioavailabilities from 33%-63%, with a mean of about 50%. Treatment of two of the soils with phosphorus significantly reduced the bioavailability of Pb. Bioaccessibility of Pb in the test soils was then measured in six in vitro tests and regressed on bioavailability. They were: the “Relative Bioavailability Leaching Procedure” (RBALP) at pH 1.5, the same test conducted at pH 2.5, the “Ohio State University In vitro Gastrointestinal” method (OSU IVG), the “Urban Soil Bioaccessible Lead Test”, the modified “Physiologically Based Extraction Test” and the “Waterfowl Physiologically Based Extraction Test.” All regressions had positive slopes. Based on criteria of slope and coefficient of determination, the RBALP pH 2.5 and OSU IVG tests performed very well. Speciation by X-ray absorption spectroscopy demonstrated that, on average, most of the Pb in the sampled soils was sorbed to minerals (30%), bound to organic matter (24%), or present as Pb sulfate (18%). Additional Pb was associated with P (chloropyromorphite, hydroxypyromorphite and tertiary Pb phosphate), and with Pb carbonates, leadhillite (a lead sulfate carbonate hydroxide), and Pb sulfide. The formation of chloropyromorphite reduced the bioavailability of Pb and the amendment of Pb-contaminated soils with P may be a thermodynamically favored means to sequester Pb.

Prognostic breast cancer signature identified from 3D culture model accurately predicts clinical outcome across independent datasets

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Martin, Katherine J.; Patrick, Denis R.; Bissell, Mina J.; Fournier, Marcia V.

2008-10-20

One of the major tenets in breast cancer research is that early detection is vital for patient survival by increasing treatment options. To that end, we have previously used a novel unsupervised approach to identify a set of genes whose expression predicts prognosis of breast cancer patients. The predictive genes were selected in a well-defined three dimensional (3D) cell culture model of non-malignant human mammary epithelial cell morphogenesis as down-regulated during breast epithelial cell acinar formation and cell cycle arrest. Here we examine the ability of this gene signature (3D-signature) to predict prognosis in three independent breast cancer microarray datasets having 295, 286, and 118 samples, respectively. Our results show that the 3D-signature accurately predicts prognosis in three unrelated patient datasets. At 10 years, the probability of positive outcome was 52, 51, and 47 percent in the group with a poor-prognosis signature and 91, 75, and 71 percent in the group with a good-prognosis signature for the three datasets, respectively (Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, p<0.05). Hazard ratios for poor outcome were 5.5 (95% CI 3.0 to 12.2, p<0.0001), 2.4 (95% CI 1.6 to 3.6, p<0.0001) and 1.9 (95% CI 1.1 to 3.2, p = 0.016) and remained significant for the two larger datasets when corrected for estrogen receptor (ER) status. Hence the 3D-signature accurately predicts breast cancer outcome in both ER-positive and ER-negative tumors, though individual genes differed in their prognostic ability in the two subtypes. Genes that were prognostic in ER+ patients are AURKA, CEP55, RRM2, EPHA2, FGFBP1, and VRK1, while genes prognostic in ER patients include ACTB, FOXM1 and SERPINE2 (Kaplan-Meier p<0.05). Multivariable Cox regression analysis in the largest dataset showed that the 3D-signature was a strong independent factor in predicting breast cancer outcome. The 3D-signature accurately predicts breast cancer outcome across multiple datasets and holds prognostic

Can the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinic Outcome Reporting System (SART CORS) be used to accurately report clinic total reproductive potential (TRP)?

Science.gov (United States)

Stern, Judy E; Hickman, Timothy N; Kinzer, Donna; Penzias, Alan S; Ball, G David; Gibbons, William E

2012-04-01

To assess whether total reproductive potential (TRP), the chance of a live birth from each fresh cycle (fresh cycle plus frozen transfers), could be calculated from the national Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinic Outcome Reporting System (SART CORS) database and whether information not available in SART CORS resulted in significant changes to the TRP calculation. Retrospective study using SART CORS and clinic data. Three assisted reproductive technology clinics. Women undergoing ART. None. Two- and three-year TRPs for 2005 and 2006 were calculated according to patient age at cycle start by linking fresh to frozen cycles up to first live birth. Clinic records were used to adjust for (remove) frozen cycles that used more than one fresh cycle as a source of embryos and for any embryos donated to other patients or research or shipped to another facility before a live birth. TRP was higher than fresh per-cycle rates for most ages at all clinics, although accuracy was compromised when there were fewer than 20 cycles per category. Two- and 3-year TRPs differed in only 2 of 24 calculations. Adjusted TRPs differed less than three percentage points from unadjusted TRPs when volume was sufficient. Clinic TRP can be calculated from SART CORS. Data suggest that calculations of clinic TRP from the national dataset would be meaningful. Copyright © 2012 American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Accurate SERS detection of malachite green in aquatic products on basis of graphene wrapped flexible sensor.

Science.gov (United States)

Ouyang, Lei; Yao, Ling; Zhou, Taohong; Zhu, Lihua

2018-10-16

Malachite Green (MG) is a banned pesticide for aquaculture products. As a required inspection item, its fast and accurate determination before the products' accessing market is very important. Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a promising tool for MG sensing, but it requires the overcoming of several problems such as fairly poor sensitivity and reproducibility, especially laser induced chemical conversion and photo-bleaching during SERS observation. By using a graphene wrapped Ag array based flexible membrane sensor, a modified SERS strategy was proposed for the sensitive and accurate detection of MG. The graphene layer functioned as an inert protector for impeding chemical transferring of the bioproduct Leucomalachite Green (LMG) to MG during the SERS detection, and as a heat transmitter for preventing laser induced photo-bleaching, which enables the separate detection of MG and LMG in fish extracts. The combination of the Ag array and the graphene cover also produced plentiful densely and uniformly distributed hot spots, leading to analytical enhancement factor up to 3.9 × 10 8 and excellent reproducibility (relative standard deviation low to 5.8% for 70 runs). The proposed method was easily used for MG detection with limit of detection (LOD) as low as 2.7 × 10 -11  mol L -1 . The flexibility of the sensor enable it have a merit for in-field fast detection of MG residues on the scale of a living fish through a surface extraction and paste transferring manner. The developed strategy was successfully applied in the analysis of real samples, showing good prospects for both the fast inspection and quantitative detection of MG. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cordyceps cicadae extracts ameliorate renal malfunction in a remnant kidney model*

OpenAIRE

Zhu, Rong; Chen, Yi-ping; Deng, Yue-yi; Zheng, Rong; Zhong, Yi-fei; Wang, Lin; Du, Lan-ping

2011-01-01

Background and Objectives: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a growing public health problem with an urgent need for new pharmacological agents. Cordyceps cicadae is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and has potential renoprotective benefits. The current study aimed to determine any scientific evidence to support its clinical use. Methods: We analyzed the potential of two kinds of C. cicadae extract, total extract (TE) and acetic ether extract (AE), in treating kidney disease si...

The decision to extract: Part 1--Interclinician agreement.

Science.gov (United States)

Baumrind, S; Korn, E L; Boyd, R L; Maxwell, R

1996-03-01

As part of an ongoing prospective clinical trial of conventional orthodontic treatment, the decision making patterns of a representative group of orthodontic clinicians were examined. Data were available for 148 subjects (100 adolescents and 48 adults) who had presented at the University of California San Francisco Graduate Orthodontic Clinic requesting treatment for correction of a Class I or Class II malocclusion. The records for each subject were evaluated independently by each of five members of the clinical faculty, making available a total of 740 independent patient evaluations. With regard to the primary decision as to whether extraction or nonextraction treatment was to be preferred, agreement among clinicians was higher than had been anticipated. In almost two thirds of the cases, the decisions of all five clinicians were in agreement as to whether extraction or nonextraction was the preferred treatment modality. (This figure included 59 cases of complete agreement for extraction therapy (40%) and 38 cases of complete agreement for nonextraction therapy (26%)). In only 51 cases (34%), did the reviewing clinicians disagree as to whether extraction or nonextraction was the preferred modality of treatment. The clinicians were also asked to indicate their opinions as to whether orthognathic surgery was likely to be a part of the ultimate treatment course for each individual subject. Nine percent of the 740 patient evaluations contained a clinician judgement that surgery would be a probable or definite component of the orthodontic treatment plan. For 29% of the adult subjects (14 cases) and 23% of the adolescent subjects (23 cases), one or more of the five examining clinicians believed that adjunctive surgical intervention would probably or definitely be appropriate. These high values were unexpected, particularly because the sample had been prescreened by a single clinician to exclude subjects who might require orthognathic surgery. Clinician agreement of

LIMS and Clinical Data Management.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Yalan; Lin, Yuxin; Yuan, Xuye; Shen, Bairong

2016-01-01

In order to achieve more accurate disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, clinical and genetic data need extensive and systematically associated study. As one way to achieve precision medicine, a laboratory information management system (LIMS) can effectively associate clinical data in a macrocosmic aspect and genomic data in a microcosmic aspect. This chapter summarizes the application of the LIMS in a clinical data management and implementation mode. It also discusses the principles of a LIMS in clinical data management, as well as the opportunities and challenges in the context of medical informatics.

Accurate clinical genetic testing for autoinflammatory diseases using the next-generation sequencing platform MiSeq.

Science.gov (United States)

Nakayama, Manabu; Oda, Hirotsugu; Nakagawa, Kenji; Yasumi, Takahiro; Kawai, Tomoki; Izawa, Kazushi; Nishikomori, Ryuta; Heike, Toshio; Ohara, Osamu

2017-03-01

Autoinflammatory diseases occupy one of a group of primary immunodeficiency diseases that are generally thought to be caused by mutation of genes responsible for innate immunity, rather than by acquired immunity. Mutations related to autoinflammatory diseases occur in 12 genes. For example, low-level somatic mosaic NLRP3 mutations underlie chronic infantile neurologic, cutaneous, articular syndrome (CINCA), also known as neonatal-onset multisystem inflammatory disease (NOMID). In current clinical practice, clinical genetic testing plays an important role in providing patients with quick, definite diagnoses. To increase the availability of such testing, low-cost high-throughput gene-analysis systems are required, ones that not only have the sensitivity to detect even low-level somatic mosaic mutations, but also can operate simply in a clinical setting. To this end, we developed a simple method that employs two-step tailed PCR and an NGS system, MiSeq platform, to detect mutations in all coding exons of the 12 genes responsible for autoinflammatory diseases. Using this amplicon sequencing system, we amplified a total of 234 amplicons derived from the 12 genes with multiplex PCR. This was done simultaneously and in one test tube. Each sample was distinguished by an index sequence of second PCR primers following PCR amplification. With our procedure and tips for reducing PCR amplification bias, we were able to analyze 12 genes from 25 clinical samples in one MiSeq run. Moreover, with the certified primers designed by our short program-which detects and avoids common SNPs in gene-specific PCR primers-we used this system for routine genetic testing. Our optimized procedure uses a simple protocol, which can easily be followed by virtually any office medical staff. Because of the small PCR amplification bias, we can analyze simultaneously several clinical DNA samples with low cost and can obtain sufficient read numbers to detect a low level of somatic mosaic mutations.

Clinical Assessment of Tribulus terrestris Extract in the Treatment of Female Sexual Dysfunction

Science.gov (United States)

Gama, Carlos RB; Lasmar, Ricardo; Gama, Gustavo F; Abreu, Camila S; Nunes, Carlos P; Geller, Mauro; Oliveira, Lisa; Santos, Alessandra

2014-01-01

This is a qualitative–quantitative study based on hospital records of female patients of reproductive age, presenting sexual dysfunction, and treated with 250 mg Tribulus terrestris extract (1 tablet thrice daily for 90 days). Safety monitoring included vital signs, physical examination, laboratory tests, and occurrence of adverse events. Efficacy analysis included results of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) levels together with total and free testosterone, and the patient and physician assessments. There was a statistically significant improvement in total FSFI scores (P terrestris extract is safe and effective in the treatment of female sexual dysfunction. PMID:25574150

Clinical Assessment of Tribulus terrestris Extract in the Treatment of Female Sexual Dysfunction.

Science.gov (United States)

Gama, Carlos Rb; Lasmar, Ricardo; Gama, Gustavo F; Abreu, Camila S; Nunes, Carlos P; Geller, Mauro; Oliveira, Lisa; Santos, Alessandra

2014-01-01

This is a qualitative-quantitative study based on hospital records of female patients of reproductive age, presenting sexual dysfunction, and treated with 250 mg Tribulus terrestris extract (1 tablet thrice daily for 90 days). Safety monitoring included vital signs, physical examination, laboratory tests, and occurrence of adverse events. Efficacy analysis included results of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) levels together with total and free testosterone, and the patient and physician assessments. There was a statistically significant improvement in total FSFI scores (P terrestris extract is safe and effective in the treatment of female sexual dysfunction.

Open critical area model and extraction algorithm based on the net flow-axis

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wang Le; Wang Jun-Ping; Gao Yan-Hong; Xu Dan; Li Bo-Bo; Liu Shi-Gang

2013-01-01

In the integrated circuit manufacturing process, the critical area extraction is a bottleneck to the layout optimization and the integrated circuit yield estimation. In this paper, we study the problem that the missing material defects may result in the open circuit fault. Combining the mathematical morphology theory, we present a new computation model and a novel extraction algorithm for the open critical area based on the net flow-axis. Firstly, we find the net flow-axis for different nets. Then, the net flow-edges based on the net flow-axis are obtained. Finally, we can extract the open critical area by the mathematical morphology. Compared with the existing methods, the nets need not to divide into the horizontal nets and the vertical nets, and the experimental results show that our model and algorithm can accurately extract the size of the open critical area and obtain the location information of the open circuit critical area. (interdisciplinary physics and related areas of science and technology)

Genetic validation and spectroscopic detailing of DHN-melanin extracted from an environmental fungus

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nitya Meenakshi Raman

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Accurate characterization of melanin using analytical methodologies has proved to be difficult due to its heterogeneity, insolubility in wide pH and broad range of solvents. The present study was undertaken to characterize melanin extracted from an environmental Aspergillus fumigatus AFGRD105 by studying its genes, chemical properties and spectral data. A gene based approach to confirm the type of melanin carried out indicated the extracted melanin to be of the dihydroxynaphthalene type. On comparison with synthetic melanin, UV–Vis and IR spectra of the extracted melanin revealed characteristic peaks that can be further used for confirmation of DHN-melanin extracted from any source. Solid state 13C NMR spectroscopy established the presence of the hydroxyl-naphthalene moiety and validated the results obtained by genetic analysis. The correct assignment of the observed spectral frequency characteristic of functional groups can be further adapted in future works that deal with binding capacities and biomolecule systems involving melanin.

Archived neonatal dried blood spot samples can be used for accurate whole genome and exome-targeted next-generation sequencing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hollegaard, Mads Vilhelm; Grauholm, Jonas; Nielsen, Ronni

2013-01-01

Dried blood spot samples (DBSS) have been collected and stored for decades as part of newborn screening programmes worldwide. Representing almost an entire population under a certain age and collected with virtually no bias, the Newborn Screening Biobanks are of immense value in medical studies......, for example, to examine the genetics of various disorders. We have previously demonstrated that DNA extracted from a fraction (2×3.2mm discs) of an archived DBSS can be whole genome amplified (wgaDNA) and used for accurate array genotyping. However, until now, it has been uncertain whether wgaDNA from DBSS...... can be used for accurate whole genome sequencing (WGS) and exome sequencing (WES). This study examined two individuals represented by three different types of samples each: whole-blood (reference samples), 3-year-old DBSS spotted with reference material (refDBSS), and 27- to 29-year-old archived...

Auto-Context Convolutional Neural Network (Auto-Net) for Brain Extraction in Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Science.gov (United States)

Mohseni Salehi, Seyed Sadegh; Erdogmus, Deniz; Gholipour, Ali

2017-11-01

Brain extraction or whole brain segmentation is an important first step in many of the neuroimage analysis pipelines. The accuracy and the robustness of brain extraction, therefore, are crucial for the accuracy of the entire brain analysis process. The state-of-the-art brain extraction techniques rely heavily on the accuracy of alignment or registration between brain atlases and query brain anatomy, and/or make assumptions about the image geometry, and therefore have limited success when these assumptions do not hold or image registration fails. With the aim of designing an accurate, learning-based, geometry-independent, and registration-free brain extraction tool, in this paper, we present a technique based on an auto-context convolutional neural network (CNN), in which intrinsic local and global image features are learned through 2-D patches of different window sizes. We consider two different architectures: 1) a voxelwise approach based on three parallel 2-D convolutional pathways for three different directions (axial, coronal, and sagittal) that implicitly learn 3-D image information without the need for computationally expensive 3-D convolutions and 2) a fully convolutional network based on the U-net architecture. Posterior probability maps generated by the networks are used iteratively as context information along with the original image patches to learn the local shape and connectedness of the brain to extract it from non-brain tissue. The brain extraction results we have obtained from our CNNs are superior to the recently reported results in the literature on two publicly available benchmark data sets, namely, LPBA40 and OASIS, in which we obtained the Dice overlap coefficients of 97.73% and 97.62%, respectively. Significant improvement was achieved via our auto-context algorithm. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of our algorithm in the challenging problem of extracting arbitrarily oriented fetal brains in reconstructed fetal brain magnetic

Andrographis paniculata extract (HMPL-004) for active ulcerative colitis.

Science.gov (United States)

Sandborn, William J; Targan, Stephan R; Byers, Vera S; Rutty, Dean A; Mu, Hua; Zhang, Xun; Tang, Tom

2013-01-01

Andrographis paniculata has in vitro inhibitory activity against TNF-α, IL-1β and NF-κB. A pilot study of A. paniculata extract (HMPL-004) suggested similar efficacy to mesalamine for ulcerative colitis. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluated the efficacy of A. paniculata extract (HMPL-004) in 224 adults with mild-to-moderate ulcerative colitis. Patients were randomized to A. paniculata extract (HMPL-004) 1,200 mg or 1,800 mg daily or placebo for 8 weeks. In total, 45 and 60% of patients receiving A. paniculata 1,200 mg and 1,800 mg daily, respectively, were in clinical response at week 8, compared with 40% of those who received placebo (P=0.5924 for 1,200 mg vs. placebo and P=0.0183 for 1,800 mg vs. placebo). In all, 34 and 38% of patients receiving A. paniculata 1,200 mg and 1,800 mg daily, respectively, were in clinical remission at week 8, compared with 25% of those who received placebo (P=0.2582 for 1,200 mg vs. placebo and P=0.1011 for 1,800 mg vs. placebo). Adverse events developed in 60 and 53% of patients in the A. paniculata 1,200 mg and 1,800 mg daily groups, respectively, and 60% in the placebo group. Patients with mildly to moderately active ulcerative colitis treated with A. paniculata extract (HMPL-004) at a dose of 1,800 mg daily were more likely to achieve clinical response than those receiving placebo.

Clinical Assessment of Extract in the Treatment of Female Sexual Dysfunction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carlos R.B. Gama

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This is a qualitative—quantitative study based on hospital records of female patients of reproductive age, presenting sexual dysfunction, and treated with 250 mg Tribulus terrestris extract (1 tablet thrice daily for 90 days. Safety monitoring included vital signs, physical examination, laboratory tests, and occurrence of adverse events. Efficacy analysis included results of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA levels together with total and free testosterone, and the patient and physician assessments. There was a statistically significant improvement in total FSFI scores ( P < 0.0001 post-treatment, with improvement among 106 (88.33% subjects. There was a statistically significant ( P < 0.0001 increase in the level of DHEA, while the levels of both serum testosterone ( P = 0.284 and free testosterone decreased ( P < 0.0001. Most adverse events recorded were related to the gastrointestinal tract. Physical examination showed no significant changes post-treatment. Based on the results, it is concluded that the T. terrestris extract is safe and effective in the treatment of female sexual dysfunction.

Fuel reprocessing of the fast molten salt reactor: actinides et lanthanides extraction

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jaskierowicz, S.

2012-01-01

The fuel reprocessing of the molten salt reactor (Gen IV concept) is a multi-steps process in which actinides and lanthanides extraction is performed by a reductive extraction technique. The development of an analytic model has showed that the contact between the liquid fuel LiF-ThF 4 and a metallic phase constituted of Bi-Li provide firstly a selective and quantitative extraction of actinides and secondly a quantitative extraction of lanthanides. The control of this process implies the knowledge of saline phase properties. Studies of the physico-chemical properties of fluoride salts lead to develop a technique based on potentiometric measurements to evaluate the fluoro-acidity of the salts. An acidity scale was established in order to classify the different fluoride salts considered. Another electrochemical method was also developed in order to determine the solvation properties of solutes in fluoride F- environment (and particularly ThF 4 by F-) in reductive extraction technique, a metallic phase is also involved. A method to prepare this phase was developed by electro-reduction of lithium on a bismuth liquid cathode in LiCl-LiF melt. This technique allows to accurately control the molar fraction of lithium introduced into the liquid bismuth, which is a main parameter to obtain an efficient extraction. (author)

Hyperspectral image analysis for rapid and accurate discrimination of bacterial infections: A benchmark study.

Science.gov (United States)

Arrigoni, Simone; Turra, Giovanni; Signoroni, Alberto

2017-09-01

With the rapid diffusion of Full Laboratory Automation systems, Clinical Microbiology is currently experiencing a new digital revolution. The ability to capture and process large amounts of visual data from microbiological specimen processing enables the definition of completely new objectives. These include the direct identification of pathogens growing on culturing plates, with expected improvements in rapid definition of the right treatment for patients affected by bacterial infections. In this framework, the synergies between light spectroscopy and image analysis, offered by hyperspectral imaging, are of prominent interest. This leads us to assess the feasibility of a reliable and rapid discrimination of pathogens through the classification of their spectral signatures extracted from hyperspectral image acquisitions of bacteria colonies growing on blood agar plates. We designed and implemented the whole data acquisition and processing pipeline and performed a comprehensive comparison among 40 combinations of different data preprocessing and classification techniques. High discrimination performance has been achieved also thanks to improved colony segmentation and spectral signature extraction. Experimental results reveal the high accuracy and suitability of the proposed approach, driving the selection of most suitable and scalable classification pipelines and stimulating clinical validations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Extraction techniques for arsenic species in rice flour and their speciation by HPLC-ICP-MS.

Science.gov (United States)

Narukawa, Tomohiro; Suzuki, Toshihiro; Inagaki, Kazumi; Hioki, Akiharu

2014-12-01

The extraction of arsenic (As) species present in rice flour samples was investigated using different extracting solvents, and the concentration of each species was determined by HPLC-ICP-MS after heat-assisted extraction. The extraction efficiencies for total arsenic species and especially for arsenite [As(III)] and arsenate [As(V)] were investigated. As(III), As(V) and dimethylarsinic acid (DMAA) were found in the samples, and the concentration of DMAA did not vary with treatment conditions. However, the concentrations of extracted total arsenic and those of As(III) and As(V) depended on the extracting solvents. When an extracting solvent was highly acidic, the concentrations of extracted total arsenic were in good agreement with the total arsenic concentration determined by ICP-MS after microwave-assisted digestion, though a part of the As(V) was reduced to As(III) during the highly acidic extraction process. Extraction under neutral conditions increased the extracted As(V), but extracted total arsenic was decreased because a part of the As(III) could not be extracted. Optimum conditions for the extraction of As(III) and As(V) from rice flour samples are discussed to allow the accurate determinations of As(III), As(V) and DMAA in the rice flour samples. Heat block extraction techniques using 0.05 mol L(-1) HClO4 and silver-containing 0.15 mol L(-1) HNO3 were also developed. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

AUTOMATIC SHAPE-BASED TARGET EXTRACTION FOR CLOSE-RANGE PHOTOGRAMMETRY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

X. Guo

2016-06-01

Full Text Available In order to perform precise identification and location of artificial coded targets in natural scenes, a novel design of circle-based coded target and the corresponding coarse-fine extraction algorithm are presented. The designed target separates the target box and coding box totally and owns an advantage of rotation invariance. Based on the original target, templates are prepared by three geometric transformations and are used as the input of shape-based template matching. Finally, region growing and parity check methods are used to extract the coded targets as final results. No human involvement is required except for the preparation of templates and adjustment of thresholds in the beginning, which is conducive to the automation of close-range photogrammetry. The experimental results show that the proposed recognition method for the designed coded target is robust and accurate.

Latest Developments on Obtaining Accurate Measurements with Pitot Tubes in ZPG Turbulent Boundary Layers

Science.gov (United States)

Nagib, Hassan; Vinuesa, Ricardo

2013-11-01

Ability of available Pitot tube corrections to provide accurate mean velocity profiles in ZPG boundary layers is re-examined following the recent work by Bailey et al. Measurements by Bailey et al., carried out with probes of diameters ranging from 0.2 to 1.89 mm, together with new data taken with larger diameters up to 12.82 mm, show deviations with respect to available high-quality datasets and hot-wire measurements in the same Reynolds number range. These deviations are significant in the buffer region around y+ = 30 - 40 , and lead to disagreement in the von Kármán coefficient κ extracted from profiles. New forms for shear, near-wall and turbulence corrections are proposed, highlighting the importance of the latest one. Improved agreement in mean velocity profiles is obtained with new forms, where shear and near-wall corrections contribute with around 85%, and remaining 15% of the total correction comes from turbulence correction. Finally, available algorithms to correct wall position in profile measurements of wall-bounded flows are tested, using as benchmark the corrected Pitot measurements with artificially simulated probe shifts and blockage effects. We develop a new scheme, κB - Musker, which is able to accurately locate wall position.

Accurate palm vein recognition based on wavelet scattering and spectral regression kernel discriminant analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Elnasir, Selma; Shamsuddin, Siti Mariyam; Farokhi, Sajad

2015-01-01

Palm vein recognition (PVR) is a promising new biometric that has been applied successfully as a method of access control by many organizations, which has even further potential in the field of forensics. The palm vein pattern has highly discriminative features that are difficult to forge because of its subcutaneous position in the palm. Despite considerable progress and a few practical issues, providing accurate palm vein readings has remained an unsolved issue in biometrics. We propose a robust and more accurate PVR method based on the combination of wavelet scattering (WS) with spectral regression kernel discriminant analysis (SRKDA). As the dimension of WS generated features is quite large, SRKDA is required to reduce the extracted features to enhance the discrimination. The results based on two public databases-PolyU Hyper Spectral Palmprint public database and PolyU Multi Spectral Palmprint-show the high performance of the proposed scheme in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. The proposed approach scored a 99.44% identification rate and a 99.90% verification rate [equal error rate (EER)=0.1%] for the hyperspectral database and a 99.97% identification rate and a 99.98% verification rate (EER=0.019%) for the multispectral database.

Sophia: A Expedient UMLS Concept Extraction Annotator.

Science.gov (United States)

Divita, Guy; Zeng, Qing T; Gundlapalli, Adi V; Duvall, Scott; Nebeker, Jonathan; Samore, Matthew H

2014-01-01

An opportunity exists for meaningful concept extraction and indexing from large corpora of clinical notes in the Veterans Affairs (VA) electronic medical record. Currently available tools such as MetaMap, cTAKES and HITex do not scale up to address this big data need. Sophia, a rapid UMLS concept extraction annotator was developed to fulfill a mandate and address extraction where high throughput is needed while preserving performance. We report on the development, testing and benchmarking of Sophia against MetaMap and cTAKEs. Sophia demonstrated improved performance on recall as compared to cTAKES and MetaMap (0.71 vs 0.66 and 0.38). The overall f-score was similar to cTAKES and an improvement over MetaMap (0.53 vs 0.57 and 0.43). With regard to speed of processing records, we noted Sophia to be several fold faster than cTAKES and the scaled-out MetaMap service. Sophia offers a viable alternative for high-throughput information extraction tasks.

Morgellons disease: Analysis of a population with clinically confirmed microscopic subcutaneous fibers of unknown etiology.

Science.gov (United States)

Savely, Virginia R; Stricker, Raphael B

2010-05-13

Morgellons disease is a controversial illness in which patients complain of stinging, burning, and biting sensations under the skin. Unusual subcutaneous fibers are the unique objective finding. The etiology of Morgellons disease is unknown, and diagnostic criteria have yet to be established. Our goal was to identify prevalent symptoms in patients with clinically confirmed subcutaneous fibers in order to develop a case definition for Morgellons disease. Patients with subcutaneous fibers observed on physical examination (designated as the fiber group) were evaluated using a data extraction tool that measured clinical and demographic characteristics. The prevalence of symptoms common to the fiber group was then compared with the prevalence of these symptoms in patients with Lyme disease and no complaints of skin fibers. The fiber group consisted of 122 patients. Significant findings in this group were an association with tick-borne diseases and hypothyroidism, high numbers from two states (Texas and California), high prevalence in middle-aged Caucasian women, and an increased prevalence of smoking and substance abuse. Although depression was noted in 29% of the fiber patients, pre-existing delusional disease was not reported. After adjusting for nonspecific symptoms, the most common symptoms reported in the fiber group were: crawling sensations under the skin; spontaneously appearing, slow-healing lesions; hyperpigmented scars when lesions heal; intense pruritus; seed-like objects, black specks, or "fuzz balls" in lesions or on intact skin; fine, thread-like fibers of varying colors in lesions and intact skin; lesions containing thick, tough, translucent fibers that are highly resistant to extraction; and a sensation of something trying to penetrate the skin from the inside out. This study of the largest clinical cohort reported to date provides the basis for an accurate and clinically useful case definition for Morgellons disease.

Extractive text summarization system to aid data extraction from full text in systematic review development.

Science.gov (United States)

Bui, Duy Duc An; Del Fiol, Guilherme; Hurdle, John F; Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha

2016-12-01

Extracting data from publication reports is a standard process in systematic review (SR) development. However, the data extraction process still relies too much on manual effort which is slow, costly, and subject to human error. In this study, we developed a text summarization system aimed at enhancing productivity and reducing errors in the traditional data extraction process. We developed a computer system that used machine learning and natural language processing approaches to automatically generate summaries of full-text scientific publications. The summaries at the sentence and fragment levels were evaluated in finding common clinical SR data elements such as sample size, group size, and PICO values. We compared the computer-generated summaries with human written summaries (title and abstract) in terms of the presence of necessary information for the data extraction as presented in the Cochrane review's study characteristics tables. At the sentence level, the computer-generated summaries covered more information than humans do for systematic reviews (recall 91.2% vs. 83.8%, p<0.001). They also had a better density of relevant sentences (precision 59% vs. 39%, p<0.001). At the fragment level, the ensemble approach combining rule-based, concept mapping, and dictionary-based methods performed better than individual methods alone, achieving an 84.7% F-measure. Computer-generated summaries are potential alternative information sources for data extraction in systematic review development. Machine learning and natural language processing are promising approaches to the development of such an extractive summarization system. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The antibacterial effect of sage extract (Salvia officinalis) mouthwash against Streptococcus mutans in dental plaque: a randomized clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Beheshti-Rouy, Maryam; Azarsina, Mohadese; Rezaie-Soufi, Loghman; Alikhani, Mohammad Yousef; Roshanaie, Ghodratollah; Komaki, Samira

2015-06-01

The aim of the study was to evaluate the clinical effects of a mouthwash containing Sage (Salvia officinalis) extracts on Streptococcus mutans (SM) causing dental plaque in school-aged children. A double blind clinical trial study was conducted in a dormitory on 70 girls aged 11-14 years having the same socioeconomic and oral hygiene conditions. These students were randomly divided into 2 groups; the first group (N=35) using Sage mouthwash, and the second group (N=35) using placebo mouthwash without active any ingredients. At the baseline, plaque samples obtained from the buccal surfaces of teeth were sent to laboratory to achieve SM colony count. These tests were reevaluated after 21 days of using the mouthwashes. Statistical data analysis was performed using t-student tests with pSage mouthwash significantly reduced the colony count (P=0.001). Average number of colonies in test group was 3900 per plaque sample at the baseline, and 300 after mouthwash application. In the control group, pre-test colony count was 4400 that was reduced to 4000; although this reduction wasn't significant. The Sage mouthwash effectively reduced the number of Streptococcus mutans in dental plaque.

Fuzzy logic-based approach to detecting a passive RFID tag in an outpatient clinic.

Science.gov (United States)

Min, Daiki; Yih, Yuehwern

2011-06-01

This study is motivated by the observations on the data collected by radio frequency identification (RFID) readers in a pilot study, which was used to investigate the feasibility of implementing an RFID-based monitoring system in an outpatient eye clinic. The raw RFID data collected from RFID readers contain noise and missing reads, which prevent us from determining the tag location. In this paper, fuzzy logic-based algorithms are proposed to interpret the raw RFID data to extract accurate information. The proposed algorithms determine the location of an RFID tag by evaluating its possibility of presence and absence. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, numerical experiments are conducted using the data observed in the outpatient eye clinic. Experiments results showed that the proposed algorithms outperform existing static smoothing method in terms of minimizing both false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms are applied to a set of simulated data to show the robustness of the proposed algorithms at various levels of RFID reader reliability.

[Extraction of buildings three-dimensional information from high-resolution satellite imagery based on Barista software].

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Pei-feng; Hu, Yuan-man; He, Hong-shi

2010-05-01

The demand for accurate and up-to-date spatial information of urban buildings is becoming more and more important for urban planning, environmental protection, and other vocations. Today's commercial high-resolution satellite imagery offers the potential to extract the three-dimensional information of urban buildings. This paper extracted the three-dimensional information of urban buildings from QuickBird imagery, and validated the precision of the extraction based on Barista software. It was shown that the extraction of three-dimensional information of the buildings from high-resolution satellite imagery based on Barista software had the advantages of low professional level demand, powerful universality, simple operation, and high precision. One pixel level of point positioning and height determination accuracy could be achieved if the digital elevation model (DEM) and sensor orientation model had higher precision and the off-Nadir View Angle was relatively perfect.

Clinical validation of the Tempus xO assay

Science.gov (United States)

Beaubier, Nike; Tell, Robert; Huether, Robert; Bontrager, Martin; Bush, Stephen; Parsons, Jerod; Shah, Kaanan; Baker, Tim; Selkov, Gene; Taxter, Tim; Thomas, Amber; Bettis, Sam; Khan, Aly; Lau, Denise; Lee, Christina; Barber, Matthew; Cieslik, Marcin; Frankenberger, Casey; Franzen, Amy; Weiner, Ali; Palmer, Gary; Lonigro, Robert; Robinson, Dan; Wu, Yi-Mi; Cao, Xuhong; Lefkofsky, Eric; Chinnaiyan, Arul; White, Kevin P.

2018-01-01

We have developed a clinically validated NGS assay that includes tumor, germline and RNA sequencing. We apply this assay to clinical specimens and cell lines, and we demonstrate a clinical sensitivity of 98.4% and positive predictive value of 100% for the clinically actionable variants measured by the assay. We also demonstrate highly accurate copy number measurements and gene rearrangement identification. PMID:29899824

ANTIFUNGAL ACTIVITY OF ETHANOLIC LEAF EXTRACT OF ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Ethanolic leaf extract of Eucalyptus camaldulensis, dispersed in a concentrated sugar solution had marked fungicidal effect against clinical dermatophytic fungal isolates; Microsporium gypseum and Trichophyton mentagrophytes. Microsporium gypseum at an inoculum level of 4.8 x 103 cfu/ml and T. mentagrophytes at ...

Time-frequency energy density precipitation method for time-of-flight extraction of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Zhang, Y., E-mail: thuzhangyu@foxmail.com; Huang, S. L., E-mail: huangsling@tsinghua.edu.cn; Wang, S.; Zhao, W. [State Key Laboratory of Power Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084 (China)

2016-05-15

The time-of-flight of the Lamb wave provides an important basis for defect evaluation in metal plates and is the input signal for Lamb wave tomographic imaging. However, the time-of-flight can be difficult to acquire because of the Lamb wave dispersion characteristics. This work proposes a time-frequency energy density precipitation method to accurately extract the time-of-flight of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals in metal plates. In the proposed method, a discrete short-time Fourier transform is performed on the narrowband Lamb wave detection signals to obtain the corresponding discrete time-frequency energy density distribution. The energy density values at the center frequency for all discrete time points are then calculated by linear interpolation. Next, the time-domain energy density curve focused on that center frequency is precipitated by least squares fitting of the calculated energy density values. Finally, the peak times of the energy density curve obtained relative to the initial pulse signal are extracted as the time-of-flight for the narrowband Lamb wave detection signals. An experimental platform is established for time-of-flight extraction of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals, and sensitivity analysis of the proposed time-frequency energy density precipitation method is performed in terms of propagation distance, dispersion characteristics, center frequency, and plate thickness. For comparison, the widely used Hilbert–Huang transform method is also implemented for time-of-flight extraction. The results show that the time-frequency energy density precipitation method can accurately extract the time-of-flight with relative error of <1% and thus can act as a universal time-of-flight extraction method for narrowband Lamb wave detection signals.

Time-frequency energy density precipitation method for time-of-flight extraction of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhang, Y.; Huang, S. L.; Wang, S.; Zhao, W.

2016-01-01

The time-of-flight of the Lamb wave provides an important basis for defect evaluation in metal plates and is the input signal for Lamb wave tomographic imaging. However, the time-of-flight can be difficult to acquire because of the Lamb wave dispersion characteristics. This work proposes a time-frequency energy density precipitation method to accurately extract the time-of-flight of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals in metal plates. In the proposed method, a discrete short-time Fourier transform is performed on the narrowband Lamb wave detection signals to obtain the corresponding discrete time-frequency energy density distribution. The energy density values at the center frequency for all discrete time points are then calculated by linear interpolation. Next, the time-domain energy density curve focused on that center frequency is precipitated by least squares fitting of the calculated energy density values. Finally, the peak times of the energy density curve obtained relative to the initial pulse signal are extracted as the time-of-flight for the narrowband Lamb wave detection signals. An experimental platform is established for time-of-flight extraction of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals, and sensitivity analysis of the proposed time-frequency energy density precipitation method is performed in terms of propagation distance, dispersion characteristics, center frequency, and plate thickness. For comparison, the widely used Hilbert–Huang transform method is also implemented for time-of-flight extraction. The results show that the time-frequency energy density precipitation method can accurately extract the time-of-flight with relative error of <1% and thus can act as a universal time-of-flight extraction method for narrowband Lamb wave detection signals.

Early Loading of Fluoridated Implants Placed in Fresh Extraction Sockets and Healed Bone: A 3- to 5-Year Clinical and Radiographic Follow-Up Study of 39 Consecutive Patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Oxby, Gert; Oxby, Fredrik; Oxby, Johan; Saltvik, Tomas; Nilsson, Peter

2015-10-01

Immediate placement of implants in extraction sockets for early loading is an attractive treatment modality due to reduced treatment time. However, the outcome of fluoridated implants in this situation with regard to bone levels and health of soft tissues is not well documented. To evaluate the outcome of early loading of OsseoSpeed(™) dental implants placed into fresh extraction sockets and healed bone in consecutive patients treated in a private clinic. A total of 182 OsseoSpeed(™) implants (Astra Tech Implant System, DENTSPLY Implants, Mölndal, Sweden), 72 in immediate extraction sockets and 110 in healed sites, were placed in 39 consecutive patients. The implants were loaded with permanent restorations within 60 days (average 31 days). Clinical and radiographic follow-up examinations were performed annually for at least 3 years (mean 55 months). An aesthetic index was used to evaluate the soft tissues adjacent to the prosthetic restorations. No implant was lost during the observation period, giving a survival rate of 100%. Bone level changes during the observation period were minimal, with a mean marginal bone loss of 0.3 ± 0.9 mm around the delayed implants and a mean marginal bone gain of 0.3 ± 1.4 mm around the immediate implants (p = .0036). The frequency distribution of bone level revealed that 85% of implants placed in fresh extraction sockets and 84% of implants in healed bone did not show any loss of bone level during follow-up (p = NS). Soft tissue complications were observed at two immediate implant sites in one patient. The remaining 180 implants received the highest aesthetic score. Moreover, no signs of peri-implant purulent infection or aggressive bone loss were found during the follow-up period. Early loading of fluoridated implants with permanent constructions appears to be a viable therapy for implants placed immediately in extraction sites and in healed bone. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Big Data Mining and Adverse Event Pattern Analysis in Clinical Drug Trials.

Science.gov (United States)

Federer, Callie; Yoo, Minjae; Tan, Aik Choon

2016-12-01

Drug adverse events (AEs) are a major health threat to patients seeking medical treatment and a significant barrier in drug discovery and development. AEs are now required to be submitted during clinical trials and can be extracted from ClinicalTrials.gov ( https://clinicaltrials.gov/ ), a database of clinical studies around the world. By extracting drug and AE information from ClinicalTrials.gov and structuring it into a database, drug-AEs could be established for future drug development and repositioning. To our knowledge, current AE databases contain mainly U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs. However, our database contains both FDA-approved and experimental compounds extracted from ClinicalTrials.gov . Our database contains 8,161 clinical trials of 3,102,675 patients and 713,103 reported AEs. We extracted the information from ClinicalTrials.gov using a set of python scripts, and then used regular expressions and a drug dictionary to process and structure relevant information into a relational database. We performed data mining and pattern analysis of drug-AEs in our database. Our database can serve as a tool to assist researchers to discover drug-AE relationships for developing, repositioning, and repurposing drugs.

Spectral Cauchy Characteristic Extraction: Gravitational Waves and Gauge Free News

Science.gov (United States)

Handmer, Casey; Szilagyi, Bela; Winicour, Jeff

2015-04-01

We present a fast, accurate spectral algorithm for the characteristic evolution of the full non-linear vacuum Einstein field equations in the Bondi framework. Developed within the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC), we demonstrate how spectral Cauchy characteristic extraction produces gravitational News without confounding gauge effects. We explain several numerical innovations and demonstrate speed, stability, accuracy, exponential convergence, and consistency with existing methods. We highlight its capability to deliver physical insights in the study of black hole binaries.

Use of elevator instruments when luxating and extracting teeth in dentistry: clinical techniques.

Science.gov (United States)

Mamoun, John

2017-06-01

In dentistry, elevator instruments are used to luxate teeth, and this technique imparts forces to tooth particles that sever the periodontal ligament around tooth roots inside the socket and expand alveolar bone around tooth particles. These effects can result in extraction of the tooth particles or facilitate systematic forceps extraction of the tooth particles. This article presents basic oral surgery techniques for applying elevators to luxate teeth. Determination of the optimal luxation technique requires understanding of the functions of the straight elevator and the Cryer elevator, the concept of purchase points, how the design elements of elevator working ends and tips influence the functionality of an elevator, application of forces to tooth particles, sectioning teeth at furcations, and bone removal to facilitate luxation. The effectiveness of tooth particle luxation is influenced by elevator tip shape and size, the magnitude and the vectors of forces applied to the tooth particle by the tip, and sectioning and bone removal within the operating field. Controlled extraction procedures are facilitated by a dental operating microscope or the magnification of binocular surgical loupes telescopes, combined with co-axial illumination.

The in vitro antimicrobial activity of fruit and leaf crude extracts of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Objective: To evaluate the antimicrobial activity of Momordica charantia extracts on reference strains and microorganisms isolated from clinical specimens. Method: Petroleum ether and methanolic crude extracts of fruits and leaves of the plant were evaluated for antimicrobial activity using the disk diffusion method on four ...

Extraction of DNA from plant and fungus tissues in situ

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abu Almakarem Amal S

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background When samples are collected in the field and transported to the lab, degradation of the nucleic acids contained in the samples is frequently observed. Immediate extraction and precipitation of the nucleic acids reduces degradation to a minimum, thus preserving accurate sequence information. An extraction method to obtain high quality DNA in field studies is described. Findings DNA extracted immediately after sampling was compared to DNA extracted after allowing the sampled tissues to air dry at 21°C for 48 or 72 hours. While DNA extracted from fresh tissues exhibited little degradation, DNA extracted from all tissues exposed to 21°C air for 48 or 72 hours exhibited varying degrees of degradation. Yield was higher for extractions from fresh tissues in most cases. Four microcentrifuges were compared for DNA yield: one standard electric laboratory microcentrifuge (max rcf = 16,000×g, two battery-operated microcentrifuges (max rcf = 5,000 and 3,000 ×g, and one manually-operated microcentrifuge (max rcf = 120×g. Yields for all centrifuges were similar. DNA extracted under simulated field conditions was similar in yield and quality to DNA extracted in the laboratory using the same equipment. Conclusions This CTAB (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide DNA extraction method employs battery-operated and manually-operated equipment to isolate high quality DNA in the field. The method was tested on plant and fungus tissues, and may be adapted for other types of organisms. The method produced high quality DNA in laboratory tests and under simulated field conditions. The field extraction method should prove useful for working in remote sites, where ice, dry ice, and liquid nitrogen are unavailable; where degradation is likely to occur due to the long distances between the sample site and the laboratory; and in instances where other DNA preservation and transportation methods have been unsuccessful. It may be possible to adapt

Accurate clinical genetic testing for autoinflammatory diseases using the next-generation sequencing platform MiSeq

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Manabu Nakayama

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Autoinflammatory diseases occupy one of a group of primary immunodeficiency diseases that are generally thought to be caused by mutation of genes responsible for innate immunity, rather than by acquired immunity. Mutations related to autoinflammatory diseases occur in 12 genes. For example, low-level somatic mosaic NLRP3 mutations underlie chronic infantile neurologic, cutaneous, articular syndrome (CINCA, also known as neonatal-onset multisystem inflammatory disease (NOMID. In current clinical practice, clinical genetic testing plays an important role in providing patients with quick, definite diagnoses. To increase the availability of such testing, low-cost high-throughput gene-analysis systems are required, ones that not only have the sensitivity to detect even low-level somatic mosaic mutations, but also can operate simply in a clinical setting. To this end, we developed a simple method that employs two-step tailed PCR and an NGS system, MiSeq platform, to detect mutations in all coding exons of the 12 genes responsible for autoinflammatory diseases. Using this amplicon sequencing system, we amplified a total of 234 amplicons derived from the 12 genes with multiplex PCR. This was done simultaneously and in one test tube. Each sample was distinguished by an index sequence of second PCR primers following PCR amplification. With our procedure and tips for reducing PCR amplification bias, we were able to analyze 12 genes from 25 clinical samples in one MiSeq run. Moreover, with the certified primers designed by our short program—which detects and avoids common SNPs in gene-specific PCR primers—we used this system for routine genetic testing. Our optimized procedure uses a simple protocol, which can easily be followed by virtually any office medical staff. Because of the small PCR amplification bias, we can analyze simultaneously several clinical DNA samples with low cost and can obtain sufficient read numbers to detect a low level of

Robust rooftop extraction from visible band images using higher order CRF

KAUST Repository

Li, Er

2015-08-01

In this paper, we propose a robust framework for building extraction in visible band images. We first get an initial classification of the pixels based on an unsupervised presegmentation. Then, we develop a novel conditional random field (CRF) formulation to achieve accurate rooftops extraction, which incorporates pixel-level information and segment-level information for the identification of rooftops. Comparing with the commonly used CRF model, a higher order potential defined on segment is added in our model, by exploiting region consistency and shape feature at segment level. Our experiments show that the proposed higher order CRF model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both at pixel and object levels on rooftops with complex structures and sizes in challenging environments. © 1980-2012 IEEE.

Finding the Cause: Verbal Framing Helps Children Extract Causal Evidence Embedded in a Complex Scene

Science.gov (United States)

Butler, Lucas P.; Markman, Ellen M.

2012-01-01

In making causal inferences, children must both identify a causal problem and selectively attend to meaningful evidence. Four experiments demonstrate that verbally framing an event ("Which animals make Lion laugh?") helps 4-year-olds extract evidence from a complex scene to make accurate causal inferences. Whereas framing was unnecessary when…

Study on Angelica and its different extracts by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and two-dimensional correlation IR spectroscopy

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Hong-xia; Sun, Su-qin; Lv, Guang-hua; Chan, Kelvin K. C.

2006-05-01

In order to develop a rapid and effective analysis method for studying integrally the main constituents in the medicinal materials and their extracts, discriminating the extracts from different extraction process, comparing the categories of chemical constituents in the different extracts and monitoring the qualities of medicinal materials, we applied Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) associated with second derivative infrared spectroscopy and two-dimensional correlation infrared spectroscopy (2D-IR) to study the main constituents in traditional Chinese medicine Angelica and its different extracts (extracted by petroleum ether, ethanol and water in turn). The findings indicated that FT-IR spectrum can provide many holistic variation rules of chemical constituents. Use of the macroscopical fingerprint characters of FT-IR and 2D-IR spectrum can not only identify the main chemical constituents in medicinal materials and their different extracts, but also compare the components differences among the similar samples. This analytical method is highly rapid, effective, visual and accurate for pharmaceutical research.

Accurate corresponding point search using sphere-attribute-image for statistical bone model generation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Saito, Toki; Nakajima, Yoshikazu; Sugita, Naohiko; Mitsuishi, Mamoru; Hashizume, Hiroyuki; Kuramoto, Kouichi; Nakashima, Yosio

2011-01-01

Statistical deformable model based two-dimensional/three-dimensional (2-D/3-D) registration is a promising method for estimating the position and shape of patient bone in the surgical space. Since its accuracy depends on the statistical model capacity, we propose a method for accurately generating a statistical bone model from a CT volume. Our method employs the Sphere-Attribute-Image (SAI) and has improved the accuracy of corresponding point search in statistical model generation. At first, target bone surfaces are extracted as SAIs from the CT volume. Then the textures of SAIs are classified to some regions using Maximally-stable-extremal-regions methods. Next, corresponding regions are determined using Normalized cross-correlation (NCC). Finally, corresponding points in each corresponding region are determined using NCC. The application of our method to femur bone models was performed, and worked well in the experiments. (author)

AND Citrus senensis PEEL EXTRACTS ON Aeromonas hydrophila ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

DR. AMINU

the two plant extracts against some clinical isolates: six Salmonella paratyphi B, one S. typhi and three A. ... century make the medicines and drugs of vegetables origin lost their ... in preventing heart disease. ... is a remedy for edema.

A new model with an anatomically accurate human renal collecting system for training in fluoroscopy-guided percutaneous nephrolithotomy access.

Science.gov (United States)

Turney, Benjamin W

2014-03-01

Obtaining renal access is one of the most important and complex steps in learning percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL). Ideally, this skill should be practiced outside the operating room. There is a need for anatomically accurate and cheap models for simulated training. The objective was to develop a cost-effective, anatomically accurate, nonbiologic training model for simulated PCNL access under fluoroscopic guidance. Collecting systems from routine computed tomography urograms were extracted and reformatted using specialized software. These images were printed in a water-soluble plastic on a three-dimensional (3D) printer to create biomodels. These models were embedded in silicone and then the models were dissolved in water to leave a hollow collecting system within a silicone model. These PCNL models were filled with contrast medium and sealed. A layer of dense foam acted as a spacer to replicate the tissues between skin and kidney. 3D printed models of human collecting systems are a useful adjunct in planning PCNL access. The PCNL access training model is relatively low cost and reproduces the anatomy of the renal collecting system faithfully. A range of models reflecting the variety and complexity of human collecting systems can be reproduced. The fluoroscopic triangulation process needed to target the calix of choice can be practiced successfully in this model. This silicone PCNL training model accurately replicates the anatomic architecture and orientation of the human renal collecting system. It provides a safe, clean, and effective model for training in accurate fluoroscopy-guided PCNL access.

Direct toxic effects of aqueous extract of cigarette smoke on cardiac myocytes at clinically relevant concentrations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yamada, Shigeyuki; Zhang Xiuquan; Kadono, Toshie; Matsuoka, Nobuhiro; Rollins, Douglas; Badger, Troy; Rodesch, Christopher K.; Barry, William H.

2009-01-01

Aims: Our goal was to determine if clinically relevant concentrations of aqueous extract of cigarette smoke (CSE) have direct deleterious effects on ventricular myocytes during simulated ischemia, and to investigate the mechanisms involved. Methods: CSE was prepared with a smoking chamber. Ischemia was simulated by metabolic inhibition (MI) with cyanide (CN) and 0 glucose. Adult rabbit and mouse ventricular myocyte [Ca 2+ ] i was measured by flow cytometry using fluo-3. Mitochondrial [Ca 2+ ] was measured with confocal microscopy, and Rhod-2 fluorescence. The mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT) was detected by TMRM fluorescence and myocyte contracture. Myocyte oxidative stress was quantified by dichlorofluorescein (DCF) fluorescence with confocal microscopy. Results: CSE 0.1% increased myocyte contracture caused by MI. The nicotine concentration (HPLC) in 0.1% CSE was 15 ng/ml, similar to that in humans after smoking cigarettes. CSE 0.1% increased mitochondrial Ca 2+ uptake, and increased the susceptibility of mitochondria to the MPT. CSE 0.1% increased DCF fluorescence in isolated myocytes, and increased [Ca 2+ ] i in paced myocytes exposed to 2.0 mM CN, 0 glucose (P-MI). These effects were inhibited by the superoxide scavenger Tiron. The effect of CSE on [Ca 2+ ] i during P-MI was also prevented by ranolazine. Conclusions: CSE in clinically relevant concentrations increases myocyte [Ca 2+ ] i during simulated ischemia, and increases myocyte susceptibility to the MPT. These effects appear to be mediated at least in part by oxidative radicals in CSE, and likely contribute to the effects of cigarette smoke to increase myocardial infarct size, and to decrease angina threshold

Parameter extraction using global particle swarm optimization approach and the influence of polymer processing temperature on the solar cell parameters

Science.gov (United States)

Kumar, S.; Singh, A.; Dhar, A.

2017-08-01

The accurate estimation of the photovoltaic parameters is fundamental to gain an insight of the physical processes occurring inside a photovoltaic device and thereby to optimize its design, fabrication processes, and quality. A simulative approach of accurately determining the device parameters is crucial for cell array and module simulation when applied in practical on-field applications. In this work, we have developed a global particle swarm optimization (GPSO) approach to estimate the different solar cell parameters viz., ideality factor (η), short circuit current (Isc), open circuit voltage (Voc), shunt resistant (Rsh), and series resistance (Rs) with wide a search range of over ±100 % for each model parameter. After validating the accurateness and global search power of the proposed approach with synthetic and noisy data, we applied the technique to the extract the PV parameters of ZnO/PCDTBT based hybrid solar cells (HSCs) prepared under different annealing conditions. Further, we examine the variation of extracted model parameters to unveil the physical processes occurring when different annealing temperatures are employed during the device fabrication and establish the role of improved charge transport in polymer films from independent FET measurements. The evolution of surface morphology, optical absorption, and chemical compositional behaviour of PCDTBT co-polymer films as a function of processing temperature has also been captured in the study and correlated with the findings from the PV parameters extracted using GPSO approach.

An accurate on-site calibration system for electronic voltage transformers using a standard capacitor

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, Chen; Chen, Mian-zhou; Li, Hong-bin; Zhang, Zhu; Jiao, Yang; Shao, Haiming

2018-05-01

Ordinarily electronic voltage transformers (EVTs) are calibrated off-line and the calibration procedure requires complex switching operations, which will influence the reliability of the power grid and induce large economic losses. To overcome this problem, this paper investigates a 110 kV on-site calibration system for EVTs, including a standard channel, a calibrated channel and a PC equipped with the LabView environment. The standard channel employs a standard capacitor and an analogue integrating circuit to reconstruct the primary voltage signal. Moreover, an adaptive full-phase discrete Fourier transform (DFT) algorithm is proposed to extract electrical parameters. The algorithm involves the process of extracting the frequency of the grid, adjusting the operation points, and calculating the results using DFT. In addition, an insulated automatic lifting device is designed to realize the live connection of the standard capacitor, which is driven by a wireless remote controller. A performance test of the capacitor verifies the accurateness of the standard capacitor. A system calibration test shows that the system ratio error is less than 0.04% and the phase error is below 2‧, which meets the requirement of the 0.2 accuracy class. Finally, the developed calibration system was used in a substation, and the field test data validates the availability of the system.

Radioimmunological detection of vasopressin in urine extracts

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Buengner, R.

1983-01-01

After initial measures had been taken to ensure that ion exchange chromatography would yield a sufficiently high recovery of labelled and non-labelled hormone as well as to eliminate all intervening factors it was possible to use the described extraction procedure in connection with the RIA introduced by Freisenhausen et al. At the clinical level, the technique was employed to assess the post-operative release of AVP (argenine vasopressin) in 24-hour urine samples obtained from patients subjected to hypophysectomy. In a total of 10 patients, where hypophysectomy had been performed for different clinical reasons, the AVP values were seen to be significantly decreased for the first three hours after surgical intervention. They recovered slightly during the following three hours to remain at an average level of 2 pg / 400 μl urine. The extraction procedure described can be used to determine levels of AVP approaching the limit of detection - either due to large volumes of urine or very low concentrations of AVP. (orig./MG) [de

Extraction of Urban Water Bodies from High-Resolution Remote-Sensing Imagery Using Deep Learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yang Chen

2018-05-01

Full Text Available Accurate information on urban surface water is important for assessing the role it plays in urban ecosystem services in the context of human survival and climate change. The precise extraction of urban water bodies from images is of great significance for urban planning and socioeconomic development. In this paper, a novel deep-learning architecture is proposed for the extraction of urban water bodies from high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS imagery. First, an adaptive simple linear iterative clustering algorithm is applied for segmentation of the remote-sensing image into high-quality superpixels. Then, a new convolutional neural network (CNN architecture is designed that can extract useful high-level features of water bodies from input data in a complex urban background and mark the superpixel as one of two classes: an including water or no-water pixel. Finally, a high-resolution image of water-extracted superpixels is generated. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved higher accuracy for water extraction from the high-resolution remote-sensing images than traditional approaches, and the average overall accuracy is 99.14%.

Time-frequency energy density precipitation method for time-of-flight extraction of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Y; Huang, S L; Wang, S; Zhao, W

2016-05-01

The time-of-flight of the Lamb wave provides an important basis for defect evaluation in metal plates and is the input signal for Lamb wave tomographic imaging. However, the time-of-flight can be difficult to acquire because of the Lamb wave dispersion characteristics. This work proposes a time-frequency energy density precipitation method to accurately extract the time-of-flight of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals in metal plates. In the proposed method, a discrete short-time Fourier transform is performed on the narrowband Lamb wave detection signals to obtain the corresponding discrete time-frequency energy density distribution. The energy density values at the center frequency for all discrete time points are then calculated by linear interpolation. Next, the time-domain energy density curve focused on that center frequency is precipitated by least squares fitting of the calculated energy density values. Finally, the peak times of the energy density curve obtained relative to the initial pulse signal are extracted as the time-of-flight for the narrowband Lamb wave detection signals. An experimental platform is established for time-of-flight extraction of narrowband Lamb wave detection signals, and sensitivity analysis of the proposed time-frequency energy density precipitation method is performed in terms of propagation distance, dispersion characteristics, center frequency, and plate thickness. For comparison, the widely used Hilbert-Huang transform method is also implemented for time-of-flight extraction. The results show that the time-frequency energy density precipitation method can accurately extract the time-of-flight with relative error of wave detection signals.

Tooth extraction education at dental schools across Europe

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Brand, H.S.; van der Cammen, C.C.J.; Roorda, S.M.E.; Baart, J.A.

2015-01-01

Objectives/Aims: To explore students’ opinion about theoretical and clinical training in tooth extraction at different European dental schools. Materials and Methods: An online questionnaire, containing 36 dichotomous, multiple choice and Likert scale rating questions, was distributed among students

Extracting breathing rate information from a wearable reflectance pulse oximeter sensor.

Science.gov (United States)

Johnston, W S; Mendelson, Y

2004-01-01

The integration of multiple vital physiological measurements could help combat medics and field commanders to better predict a soldier's health condition and enhance their ability to perform remote triage procedures. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of extracting accurate breathing rate information from a photoplethysmographic signal that was recorded by a reflectance pulse oximeter sensor mounted on the forehead and subsequently processed by a simple time domain filtering and frequency domain Fourier analysis.

Towards complete and accurate reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy: The STARD initiative

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bossuyt, P.M.; Reitsma, J.B.; Bruns, D.E.; Gatsonis, C.A.; Glasziou, P.P.; Irwig, L.M.; Lijmer, J.G.; Moher, D.; Rennie, D.; Vet, H.C.W. de

2003-01-01

AIM: To improve the accuracy and completeness of reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy in order to allow readers to assess the potential for bias in a study and to evaluate the general isability of its results. METHODS: The standards for reporting of diagnostic accuracy (STARD) steering committee searched the literature to identify publications on the appropriate conduct and reporting of diagnostic studies and extracted potential items into an extensive list. Researchers, editors, and members of professional organisations shortened this list during a 2 day consensus meeting with the goal of developing a checklist and a generic flow diagram for studies of diagnostic accuracy. RESULTS: The search for published guidelines about diagnostic research yielded 33 previously published checklists, from which we extracted a list of 75 potential items. At the consensus meeting, participants shortened the list to a 25-item checklist, by using evidence whenever available. A prototype of a flow diagram provides information about the method of recruitment of patients, the order of test execution and the numbers of patients undergoing the test under evaluation, the reference standard, or both. CONCLUSIONS: Evaluation of research depends on complete and accurate reporting. If medical journals adopt the checklist and the flow diagram, the quality of reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy should improve to the advantage of clinicians, researchers, reviewers, journals, and the public

Chemical-induced disease relation extraction with various linguistic features.

Science.gov (United States)

Gu, Jinghang; Qian, Longhua; Zhou, Guodong

2016-01-01

Understanding the relations between chemicals and diseases is crucial in various biomedical tasks such as new drug discoveries and new therapy developments. While manually mining these relations from the biomedical literature is costly and time-consuming, such a procedure is often difficult to keep up-to-date. To address these issues, the BioCreative-V community proposed a challenging task of automatic extraction of chemical-induced disease (CID) relations in order to benefit biocuration. This article describes our work on the CID relation extraction task on the BioCreative-V tasks. We built a machine learning based system that utilized simple yet effective linguistic features to extract relations with maximum entropy models. In addition to leveraging various features, the hypernym relations between entity concepts derived from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)-controlled vocabulary were also employed during both training and testing stages to obtain more accurate classification models and better extraction performance, respectively. We demoted relation extraction between entities in documents to relation extraction between entity mentions. In our system, pairs of chemical and disease mentions at both intra- and inter-sentence levels were first constructed as relation instances for training and testing, then two classification models at both levels were trained from the training examples and applied to the testing examples. Finally, we merged the classification results from mention level to document level to acquire final relations between chemicals and diseases. Our system achieved promisingF-scores of 60.4% on the development dataset and 58.3% on the test dataset using gold-standard entity annotations, respectively. Database URL:https://github.com/JHnlp/BC5CIDTask. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

The status of and future research into Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: the need of accurate diagnosis, objective assessment, and acknowledging biological and clinical subgroups

Science.gov (United States)

Twisk, Frank N. M.

2014-01-01

Although Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) are used interchangeably, the diagnostic criteria define two distinct clinical entities. Cognitive impairment, (muscle) weakness, circulatory disturbances, marked variability of symptoms, and, above all, post-exertional malaise: a long-lasting increase of symptoms after a minor exertion, are distinctive symptoms of ME. This latter phenomenon separates ME, a neuro-immune illness, from chronic fatigue (syndrome), other disorders and deconditioning. The introduction of the label, but more importantly the diagnostic criteria for CFS have generated much confusion, mostly because chronic fatigue is a subjective and ambiguous notion. CFS was redefined in 1994 into unexplained (persistent or relapsing) chronic fatigue, accompanied by at least four out of eight symptoms, e.g., headaches and unrefreshing sleep. Most of the research into ME and/or CFS in the last decades was based upon the multivalent CFS criteria, which define a heterogeneous patient group. Due to the fact that fatigue and other symptoms are non-discriminative, subjective experiences, research has been hampered. Various authors have questioned the physiological nature of the symptoms and qualified ME/CFS as somatization. However, various typical symptoms can be assessed objectively using standardized methods. Despite subjective and unclear criteria and measures, research has observed specific abnormalities in ME/CFS repetitively, e.g., immunological abnormalities, oxidative and nitrosative stress, neurological anomalies, circulatory deficits and mitochondrial dysfunction. However, to improve future research standards and patient care, it is crucial that patients with post-exertional malaise (ME) and patients without this odd phenomenon are acknowledged as separate clinical entities that the diagnosis of ME and CFS in research and clinical practice is based upon accurate criteria and an objective assessment of characteristic symptoms

Development of a simple extraction procedure for chlorpyrifos determination in food samples by immunoassay.

Science.gov (United States)

Gabaldón, J A; Maquieira, A; Puchades, R

2007-02-28

The suitability of immunoassay methodology for rapid and accurate determination of chlorpyrifos in vegetables was tested. The optimised ELISA detection limit was 0.32ng/ml, with a working range from 0.69 to 6.21ng/ml and an immunoassay test-mid point (IC(50)) of 2.08ng/ml. A rapid sample preparation procedure considering different parameters such as the amount of sample, volume of extractant, extraction time and dilution factor was optimised. The developed direct extraction (DE) and multiresidue (ME) standard procedures were performed in different fortified fresh and processed vegetable samples (tomato, bonnet pepper, bean, pea, asparagus, broccoli, watermelon, melon, lettuce, cucumber, celery and red pepper). Recoveries were in all cases in the whole range 85.2-108.9% for both DE and ME extracts. Also, the comparison of the results obtained by both immunochemical and chromatographic methods for spiked fruits and vegetables were good with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.97.

Shape adaptive, robust iris feature extraction from noisy iris images.

Science.gov (United States)

Ghodrati, Hamed; Dehghani, Mohammad Javad; Danyali, Habibolah

2013-10-01

In the current iris recognition systems, noise removing step is only used to detect noisy parts of the iris region and features extracted from there will be excluded in matching step. Whereas depending on the filter structure used in feature extraction, the noisy parts may influence relevant features. To the best of our knowledge, the effect of noise factors on feature extraction has not been considered in the previous works. This paper investigates the effect of shape adaptive wavelet transform and shape adaptive Gabor-wavelet for feature extraction on the iris recognition performance. In addition, an effective noise-removing approach is proposed in this paper. The contribution is to detect eyelashes and reflections by calculating appropriate thresholds by a procedure called statistical decision making. The eyelids are segmented by parabolic Hough transform in normalized iris image to decrease computational burden through omitting rotation term. The iris is localized by an accurate and fast algorithm based on coarse-to-fine strategy. The principle of mask code generation is to assign the noisy bits in an iris code in order to exclude them in matching step is presented in details. An experimental result shows that by using the shape adaptive Gabor-wavelet technique there is an improvement on the accuracy of recognition rate.

Extraction of electrical characteristics from pixels of multifrequency electrical impedance tomographs

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fitzgerald, A.J.; Thomas, B.J.; Cornish, B.H.; Michael, G.J.

1996-01-01

Full text: Multi-frequency electrical impedance tomography (MFEIT) is a modality that provides images of the change in the electrical response of tissue at a number of discrete frequencies relative to the response at a selected reference frequency (H Griffiths and A Ahmed, Clin. Phys. Physiol. Meas. 8A:103-107, 1987). This method overcomes the need, when forming in vivo static images, to measure or calculate the voltage profiles of a resistive, homogeneous reference medium and therefore avoids the errors introduced due to boundary shape and electrode location inaccuracies. Information on the spectral response of the tissue is contained within the pixel values, hence characteristics of the tissues and the state of health can be obtained by extracting this information from in vivo MFEIT images. Griffith and Jossinet (Physiol Meas. 15A: 59-63, 1994) used computer modelling to demonstrate that the Cole-Cole plot (variations of resistance and reactance with frequency) can be extracted from pixel values of MFEIT images provided the reference set was obtained from a purely resistive and homogeneous medium. To date it has not been possible to extract true Cole-Cole plots from in vivo MFEIT images because tissue contains a reactive component of impedance which introduces an unknown phase angle into the reference data set. Instead, an impedance spectrum, equivalent to a Cole-Cole plot rotated about the origin by the unknown phase angle, may be extracted. A correction for this rotation of the Cole-Cole plot is necessary since parameters derived from the impedance spectrum do not accurately reflect the electrical response of the imaged tissue. We have developed two distinct methods to determine this unknown phase angle and hence enable the extraction of parameters that more accurately reflect the true electrical response of tissue from in vivo MFEIT images. The first method is an empirical method based on observation of the distribution of frequency data around the Cole

Antimicrobial effect of proteflazid extract on microflora of peri-implant areas in infectious and inflammatory complications after dental implantation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. M. Ananieva

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to investigate the proteflazid extraction antimicrobial action onto causative agents of infectious and inflammatory diseases occurring during dental implant placement. Materials and Methods. We studied clinical strains of Streptococcus sanguinis, Staphylococcus warneri and Kocuria kristinae, isolated from oral mucosa of patients who were diagnosed with peri-implant mucositis and peri-implantitis. The cultivation of strains was carried out by standard method. Final identification was carried out with an automatic bacteriological analyzer Viteck 2 compact bioMérieux (France according to manufacturer's instructions. The sensitivity of derived strains to proteflazid and to 96 % ethyl alcohol assessment was done by double serial dilutions according to the standard procedure. Results. The clinical strains of Streptococcus sanguinis, Staphylococcus warneri and Kocuria kristinae were found to be sensitive to effects of proteflazid extract. K. kristinae was proven to be the least susceptible strain. But the clinical strain of Streptococcus sanguinis was found to be the most sensitive to proteflazid extract. 96 % ethyl alcohol, which is a component of the extract, showed a bactericidal effect on the clinical strains in the study, but its minimal bactericidal concentration was significantly lower than minimal bactericidal concentration of the proteflazid extract. Conclusions. The proteflazid extract can produce antimicrobial effect on the clinical strains of Streptococcus sanguinis, Staphylococcus warneri and Kocuria kristinae, which colonize the oral mucosa of patients with infectious and inflammatory complications following dental implant placement. Antimicrobial action of the proteflazid extract is much higher than action of 96% ethyl alcohol that confirms the direct antimicrobial action of flavonoids, which are components of the studied extract.

A wavelet ridge extraction method employing a novel cost function in two-dimensional wavelet transform profilometry

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Jianhua; Yang, Yanxi

2018-05-01

We present a new wavelet ridge extraction method employing a novel cost function in two-dimensional wavelet transform profilometry (2-D WTP). First of all, the maximum value point is extracted from two-dimensional wavelet transform coefficient modulus, and the local extreme value points over 90% of maximum value are also obtained, they both constitute wavelet ridge candidates. Then, the gradient of rotate factor is introduced into the Abid's cost function, and the logarithmic Logistic model is used to adjust and improve the cost function weights so as to obtain more reasonable value estimation. At last, the dynamic programming method is used to accurately find the optimal wavelet ridge, and the wrapped phase can be obtained by extracting the phase at the ridge. Its advantage is that, the fringe pattern with low signal-to-noise ratio can be demodulated accurately, and its noise immunity will be better. Meanwhile, only one fringe pattern is needed to projected to measured object, so dynamic three-dimensional (3-D) measurement in harsh environment can be realized. Computer simulation and experimental results show that, for the fringe pattern with noise pollution, the 3-D surface recovery accuracy by the proposed algorithm is increased. In addition, the demodulation phase accuracy of Morlet, Fan and Cauchy mother wavelets are compared.

Comparative substoichiometric extraction of cadmium with potassium salts of ethyl, propyl, butyl, pentyl and benzyl xanthates

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chandrasekhar Reddy, P.; Rangamannar, B.

1995-01-01

A comparative study of the extractability of cadmium with potassium salts of ethyl, propyl, butyl, pentyl and benzyl xanthates into chloroform and a mixture of 1:4 pyridine and ethyl acetate from pH 1-7 buffers and sodium formate media, respectively, has been carried out employing an accurate and highly sensitive substoichiometric radiochemical method. The effect of foreign ions on the extractability was studied. The method developed was utilized for the determination of cadmium content in standard as well as in geological water samples. (author) 4 refs.; 5 figs.; 3 tabs

Double spike isotope dilution GC-ICP-MS for evaluation of mercury species transformation in real fish samples using ultrasound-assisted extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Esteban-Fernández, Diego; Mirat, Manuela; de la Hinojosa, M Ignacia Martín; Alonso, J Ignacio García

2012-08-29

Sample preparation continues being a key factor to obtain fast and reliable quantification of Hg species. Assisted procedures enhance the efficiency and reduce the extraction time; however, collateral species transformations have been observed. Moreover, differential interconversions have been observed even between similar matrixes, which introduce an important uncertainty for real sample analysis. Trying to minimize Hg species transformations, we have tested a soft ultrasound-assisted extraction procedure. Species quantification and transformations have been evaluated using double spike isotope dilution analysis (IDA) together with gas chromatography inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (GC-ICP-MS) for a CRM material (Tort-2) and shark and swordfish muscle samples. Optimum extraction solution and sonication time led to quantitative extraction and accurate determination of MeHg and IHg in a short time, although different behaviors regarding species preservation were observed depending on the sample. Negligible species transformations were observed in the analysis of the CRM, while a small but significant demethylation factor was observed in the case of real samples. In comparison with other extraction procedures, species transformations became smaller, and fewer differences between fish species were found. Similar results were obtained for fresh and lyophilized samples of both fish samples, which permit one to analyze the fresh sample directly and save time in the sample preparation step. The high grade of species preservation and the affordability of the extraction procedure allow one to obtain accurate determinations even for routine laboratories using quantification techniques, which do not estimate species transformations.

Hierarchical graph-based segmentation for extracting road networks from high-resolution satellite images

Science.gov (United States)

Alshehhi, Rasha; Marpu, Prashanth Reddy

2017-04-01

Extraction of road networks in urban areas from remotely sensed imagery plays an important role in many urban applications (e.g. road navigation, geometric correction of urban remote sensing images, updating geographic information systems, etc.). It is normally difficult to accurately differentiate road from its background due to the complex geometry of the buildings and the acquisition geometry of the sensor. In this paper, we present a new method for extracting roads from high-resolution imagery based on hierarchical graph-based image segmentation. The proposed method consists of: 1. Extracting features (e.g., using Gabor and morphological filtering) to enhance the contrast between road and non-road pixels, 2. Graph-based segmentation consisting of (i) Constructing a graph representation of the image based on initial segmentation and (ii) Hierarchical merging and splitting of image segments based on color and shape features, and 3. Post-processing to remove irregularities in the extracted road segments. Experiments are conducted on three challenging datasets of high-resolution images to demonstrate the proposed method and compare with other similar approaches. The results demonstrate the validity and superior performance of the proposed method for road extraction in urban areas.

Comparison of RNA extraction methods from biofilm samples of Staphylococcus epidermidis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

França Angela

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Microbial biofilms are communities of bacteria adhered to a surface and surrounded by an extracellular polymeric matrix. Biofilms have been associated with increased antibiotic resistance and tolerance to the immune system. Staphylococcus epidermidis is the major bacterial species found in biofilm-related infections on indwelling medical devices. Obtaining high quality mRNA from biofilms is crucial to validate the transcriptional measurements associated with the switching to the biofilm mode of growth. Therefore, we selected three commercially available RNA extraction kits with distinct characteristics, including those using silica membrane or organic extraction methods, and enzymatic or mechanical cell lysis, and evaluated the RNA quality obtained from two distinct S. epidermidis bacterial biofilms. Results RNA extracted using the different kits was evaluated for quantity, purity, integrity, and functionally. All kits were able to extract intact and functional total RNA from the biofilms generated from each S. epidermidis strain. The results demonstrated that the kit based on mechanical lysis and organic extraction (FastRNA® Pro Blue was the only one that was able to isolate pure and large quantities of RNA. Normalized expression of the icaA virulence gene showed that RNA extracted with PureLink™ had a significant lower concentration of icaA mRNA transcripts than the other kits tested. Conclusions When working with complex samples, such as biofilms, that contain a high content extracellular polysaccharide and proteins, special care should be taken when selecting the appropriate RNA extraction system, in order to obtain accurate, reproducible, and biologically significant results. Among the RNA extraction kits tested, FastRNA® Pro Blue was the best option for both S. epidermidis biofilms used.

[Accurate 3D free-form registration between fan-beam CT and cone-beam CT].

Science.gov (United States)

Liang, Yueqiang; Xu, Hongbing; Li, Baosheng; Li, Hongsheng; Yang, Fujun

2012-06-01

Because the X-ray scatters, the CT numbers in cone-beam CT cannot exactly correspond to the electron densities. This, therefore, results in registration error when the intensity-based registration algorithm is used to register planning fan-beam CT and cone-beam CT. In order to reduce the registration error, we have developed an accurate gradient-based registration algorithm. The gradient-based deformable registration problem is described as a minimization of energy functional. Through the calculus of variations and Gauss-Seidel finite difference method, we derived the iterative formula of the deformable registration. The algorithm was implemented by GPU through OpenCL framework, with which the registration time was greatly reduced. Our experimental results showed that the proposed gradient-based registration algorithm could register more accurately the clinical cone-beam CT and fan-beam CT images compared with the intensity-based algorithm. The GPU-accelerated algorithm meets the real-time requirement in the online adaptive radiotherapy.