Mammographic interpretation training: how useful is handheld technology?

In the UK a national self-assessment scheme (PERFORMS) for mammographers is undertaken as part of the National Health Search Breast Screening Programme. Where appropriate, further training is suggested to improve performance. Ideally, such training would be on-demand; that is whenever and wherever an individual decides to undertake it. To use a portable device for such a purpose would be attractive on many levels. However, it is not known whether handheld technology can be used effectively for viewing mammographic images. Previous studies indicate the potential for viewing medical images with fairly low spatial resolution (e.g. CT, MRI) on PDAs. In this study, we set out to investigate factors that might affect the feasibility of using PDAs as a training technology for examining large, high resolution mammographic images. Two studies are reported: 20 mammographers examined a series of mammograms presented on a PDA, specifying the location of any abnormality. Secondly, a group of technologists examined a series of mammograms presented at different sizes and resolutions to mimic presentation on a PDA and their eye movements were recorded. The results indicate the potential for using PDAs to show such large, high resolution images if suitable Human-computer Interaction (HCI) techniques are employed

A novel robust reversible watermarking scheme for protecting authenticity and integrity of medical images

It is of great importance in telemedicine to protect authenticity and integrity of medical images. They are mainly addressed by two technologies, which are region of interest (ROI) lossless watermarking and reversible watermarking. However, the former causes biases on diagnosis by distorting region of none interest (RONI) and introduces security risks by segmenting image spatially for watermark embedding. The latter fails to provide reliable recovery function for the tampered areas when protecting image integrity. To address these issues, a novel robust reversible watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. In our scheme, a reversible watermarking method is designed based on recursive dither modulation (RDM) to avoid biases on diagnosis. In addition, RDM is combined with Slantlet transform and singular value decomposition to provide a reliable solution for protecting image authenticity. Moreover, ROI and RONI are divided for watermark generation to design an effective recovery function under limited embedding capacity. Finally, watermarks are embedded into whole medical images to avoid the risks caused by segmenting image spatially. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed lossless scheme not only has remarkable imperceptibility and sufficient robustness, but also provides reliable authentication, tamper detection, localization and recovery functions, which outperforms existing schemes for protecting medical image

Design and management of lighting in modern workplace

Change is omnipresent in the modern workplace. Property and infrastructure inherited from the past is therefore increasingly constraint businesses and building users, and requires the provision of higher flexible arrangement to alleviate the impact of change on the workplace. Flexible measures for property and infrastructure usually requires a vast amount of capital investments. And greater emphasis is placed on the capital cost rather than operating cost. Consequently, innovative solutions for improving the degree of flexibility in the workplace and their long-term benefits to organisations and their employees are always overlooked. Space planning and management is a core competence of facility managers. The concept of flexibility has been widened in this respect in order to achieve an effective space utilisation. Reconciling with the changing space arrangement, flexible building services designs are also essential in the workplace. Although there are a number of flexible building services designs that have been extensively adopted in the modern workplace, the utilisation of flexible lighting system is standstill. Exceptionally high capital cost is the main reason that building owners and investors evade to innovate their obsolete lighting system. For many years, building owners and investors placed too much emphasis on the energy issue of the lighting system. As facility management is a profession that brings together a wide range of property- and user-related functions, facility managers should provide a strategic lighting system which can improve individual well-being and economic interest. Flexibility and manageability are also important issues on designing a strategic lighting system. Three lighting systems models are compared based upon a commercial building in terms of their physical, functional and financial performances. The two innovative lighting systems, C-Bus and Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI) lighting management systems, are conspicuously superior to the conventional lighting system. With the use of these two innovative systems, both manageability and flexibility are significantly improved with desirable payback period. Furthermore, DALI system is the best choice that can maximally satisfy building owners, investors and building occupants. Facility managers, who have a sound management experience and knowledge, should participate in the briefing and design stages so as to establish a strategic lighting regime for the better management of lighting. To reduce constraints and open up opportunities, facility managers should inform the stringency of manageability and flexibility to the design process and meanwhile ensure that the clients and investors recognise this essentiality

Individual Professional Practice in the Company

Import 23/08/2017Cílem této bakalářské práce je popsat absolvování odborné praxe ve firmě HS Interactive s.r.o. Praxe byla zaměřena na vývoj mobilní aplikace pro operační systém Android. Aplikace je mobilním klientem pro sociální síť MatchToMe. V úvodu popisuji důvody, které vedly k výběru odborné praxe. Dále se věnuji úkolům, které mi byly zadány s jejich implementací a postupem řešení problémů, které se objevily při vývoji. Závěr práce je věnován zhodnocení získaných zkušeností a dosažených výsledků.Purpose of this bachelor thesis is to describe a professional practice in company HS Interactive s.r.o. Practice was focused on the development of mobile application for the operating system Android. The application is a mobile client for social network MatchToMe. In the introduction I describe reasons that led to the selection of professional practice. Then I describe tasks that I have been awarded with their implementations and process of solution issues that have emerged during development. The conclusion of thesis is dedicated to the evaluation of the experience gained and the results achieved.440 - Katedra telekomunikační technikyvýborn

Role of CaMKIIα Leading to Inflammatory and Neuropathic Pain

CaMKII is a major protein kinase that is capable of regulating the activities of many ion channels and receptors. In this study, three animal models were employed to investigate the role of CaMKII in the initiation and maintenance of pain. Inhibition of CaMKII by KN93 dose-dependently reversed inflammatory pain behavior induced by complete Freund’s adjuvant (CFA), neuropathic pain induced by spinal nerve ligation (SNL), as well as opioid-induced hyperalgesia (OIH). To elucidate the specific CaMKII isoform involved, CaMKIIα was targeted by small interfering RNA. Our finding demonstrated that knockdown of spinal CaMKIIα attenuated OIH. Furthermore, morphine failed to induce OIH in CaMKIIαT286A point mutant mice, although wild-type littermate mice developed robust OIH after repeated treatments with morphine. These data implicate an essential role of CaMKIIα as a cellular mechanism leading to inflammatory and neuropathic pain

Template-Free Synthesis of Hollow G‑C₃N₄ Polymer with Vesicle Structure for Enhanced Photocatalytic Water Splitting

As always, layered graphitic carbon nitride (g-C₃N₄) polymer demonstrated importance in the field of artificial photocatalysis. Many modified works have been operated on defected g-C₃N₄ to improve its limited photocatalytic performance. Two-dimensional g-C₃N₄ exploitation is attractive for researchers because it provides distinct photoelectric effect and large surface area. However, a great deal of studies focus on nanosheet-like g-C₃N₄ based on its stratified structure and mountains of discussion about it have been made. Other two-dimensional morphologies still lack research. Herein, a novel two-dimensional g-C₃N₄ nanoplate with a hollow vesicle structure was constructed through traditional solid-phase synthesis. The prepared process is simple and complete in one step without any guiding agent. Cyanuric chloride was chosen as precursor and coacted with elemental sulfur which was used here to fix cyanuric chloride and modify the texture of the resulting sample. Compared with the traditional g-C₃N₄, the surface area of the new sample is greatly enhanced, and the activity of photocatalytic water splitting into H₂ is improved as well

Table_2_Association between cheese and fish consumption and the occurrence of depression based on European population: mediating role of metabolites.XLSX

BackgroundThe consumption of cheese and fish has been linked to the onset of depression. However, the connection between consuming cheese, consuming fish, experiencing depression, and the pathways that mediate this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential association between the consumption of cheese and fish and the occurrence of depression. Moreover, it is important to identify any metabolites that might be involved and understand their respective roles and functions.MethodsA two-step, two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study was conducted using genome-wide association study (GWAS) data on cheese, non-oily fish, and oily fish consumption and depression, along with 12 alternate mediators. The study included a total of 451,486 participants in the cheese consumption group, 460,880 in the non-oily fish consumption group, 460,443 in the oily fish consumption group, and 322,580 with a diagnosis of depression. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) estimates were pooled using inverse-variance weighted, weighted median, MR-Egger, simple mode, and weighted mode.ResultsThe data we collected suggested that consuming more cheese correlated with a lower likelihood of experiencing depression (OR: 0.95; 95% CI: 0.92 to 0.98). Neither non-oily fish nor oily fish consumption was directly linked to depression onset (p = 0.08, p = 0.78, respectively). Although there was a direct causal relationship with depression, the mediating relationship of triglycerides (TG), total cholesterol in large HDL, cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL, free cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL, glycine, and phospholipids to total lipids ratio in very large HDL of cheese intake on depression risk were − 0.002 (95% CI: −0.023 - 0.020), −0.002 (95% CI: −0.049 - 0.045), −0.001 (95% CI: −0.033 - 0.031), −0.001 (95% CI: −0.018 - 0.015), 0.001 (95% CI: −0.035 - 0.037), and − 0.001 (95% CI: −0.024 - 0.021), respectively. The mediating relationship of uridine, free cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL, total cholesterol in large HDL, acetoacetate, and 3-hydroxybutyrate (3-HB) between non-oily fish consumption and depression risk were 0.016 (95% CI: −0.008 - 0.040), 0.011 (95% CI: −1.269 - 1.290), 0.010 (95% CI: −1.316 - 1.335), 0.011 (95% CI: −0.089 - 0.110), and 0.008 (95% CI: −0.051 - 0.068), respectively. The mediation effect of uridine and free cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL between intake of oily fish and the risk of depression was found to be 0.006 (95% CI: −0.015 - 0.028) and − 0.002 (95% CI: −0.020 - 0.017), respectively. The correlation between eating cheese and experiencing depression persisted even when adjusting for other variables like Indian snacks, mango consumption, sushi consumption, and unsalted peanuts using multivariable MR.ConclusionThe consumption of cheese and fish influenced the likelihood of experiencing depression, and this may be mediated by certain metabolites in the body. Our study provided a new perspective on the clinical treatment of depression.</p

Analyzing cross-college course enrollments via contextual graph mining

<div><p>The ability to predict what courses a student may enroll in the coming semester plays a pivotal role in the allocation of learning resources, which is a hot topic in the domain of educational data mining. In this study, we propose an innovative approach to characterize students’ cross-college course enrollments by leveraging a novel contextual graph. Specifically, different kinds of variables, such as students, courses, colleges and diplomas, as well as various types of variable relations, are utilized to depict the context of each variable, and then a representation learning algorithm <i>node2vec</i> is applied to extracting sophisticated graph-based features for the enrollment analysis. In this manner, the relations between any pair of variables can be measured quantitatively, which enables the variable type to transform from nominal to ratio. These graph-based features are examined by the <i>random forest</i> algorithm, and experiments on 24,663 students, 1,674 courses and 417,590 enrollment records demonstrate that the contextual graph can successfully improve analyzing the cross-college course enrollments, where three of the graph-based features have significantly stronger impacts on prediction accuracy than the others. Besides, the empirical results also indicate that the student’s course preference is the most important factor in predicting future course enrollments, which is consistent to the previous studies that acknowledge the course interest is a key point for course recommendations.</p></div

Table_1_Association between cheese and fish consumption and the occurrence of depression based on European population: mediating role of metabolites.DOCX

BackgroundThe consumption of cheese and fish has been linked to the onset of depression. However, the connection between consuming cheese, consuming fish, experiencing depression, and the pathways that mediate this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential association between the consumption of cheese and fish and the occurrence of depression. Moreover, it is important to identify any metabolites that might be involved and understand their respective roles and functions.MethodsA two-step, two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study was conducted using genome-wide association study (GWAS) data on cheese, non-oily fish, and oily fish consumption and depression, along with 12 alternate mediators. The study included a total of 451,486 participants in the cheese consumption group, 460,880 in the non-oily fish consumption group, 460,443 in the oily fish consumption group, and 322,580 with a diagnosis of depression. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) estimates were pooled using inverse-variance weighted, weighted median, MR-Egger, simple mode, and weighted mode.ResultsThe data we collected suggested that consuming more cheese correlated with a lower likelihood of experiencing depression (OR: 0.95; 95% CI: 0.92 to 0.98). Neither non-oily fish nor oily fish consumption was directly linked to depression onset (p = 0.08, p = 0.78, respectively). Although there was a direct causal relationship with depression, the mediating relationship of triglycerides (TG), total cholesterol in large HDL, cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL, free cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL, glycine, and phospholipids to total lipids ratio in very large HDL of cheese intake on depression risk were − 0.002 (95% CI: −0.023 - 0.020), −0.002 (95% CI: −0.049 - 0.045), −0.001 (95% CI: −0.033 - 0.031), −0.001 (95% CI: −0.018 - 0.015), 0.001 (95% CI: −0.035 - 0.037), and − 0.001 (95% CI: −0.024 - 0.021), respectively. The mediating relationship of uridine, free cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL, total cholesterol in large HDL, acetoacetate, and 3-hydroxybutyrate (3-HB) between non-oily fish consumption and depression risk were 0.016 (95% CI: −0.008 - 0.040), 0.011 (95% CI: −1.269 - 1.290), 0.010 (95% CI: −1.316 - 1.335), 0.011 (95% CI: −0.089 - 0.110), and 0.008 (95% CI: −0.051 - 0.068), respectively. The mediation effect of uridine and free cholesterol to total lipids ratio in large HDL between intake of oily fish and the risk of depression was found to be 0.006 (95% CI: −0.015 - 0.028) and − 0.002 (95% CI: −0.020 - 0.017), respectively. The correlation between eating cheese and experiencing depression persisted even when adjusting for other variables like Indian snacks, mango consumption, sushi consumption, and unsalted peanuts using multivariable MR.ConclusionThe consumption of cheese and fish influenced the likelihood of experiencing depression, and this may be mediated by certain metabolites in the body. Our study provided a new perspective on the clinical treatment of depression.</p

Statistics for the cross-college course enrollment records.

<p>Statistics for the cross-college course enrollment records.</p