Advancing Pancreas Segmentation in Multi-protocol MRI Volumes using Hausdorff-Sine Loss Function

Computing pancreatic morphology in 3D radiological scans could provide significant insight about a medical condition. However, segmenting the pancreas in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging due to high inter-patient variability. Also, the resolution and speed of MRI scanning present artefacts that blur the pancreas bound- aries between overlapping anatomical structures. This paper proposes a dual-stage automatic segmentation method: 1) a deep neural network is trained to address the problem of vague organ boundaries in high class-imbalanced data. This network integrates a novel loss function to rigorously optimise boundary delineation using the modified Hausdorff metric and a sinusoidal component; 2) Given a test MRI volume, the output of the trained network predicts a sequence of targeted 2D pan- creas classes that are reconstructed as a volumetric binary mask. An energy-minimisation approach fuses a learned digital contrast model to suppress the intensities of non-pancreas classes, which, combined with the binary volume performs a refined segmentation in 3D while reveal- ing dense boundary detail. Experiments are performed on two diverse MRI datasets containing 180 and 120 scans, in which the proposed ap- proach achieves a mean Dice score of 84.1 ± 4.6% and 85.7 ± 2.3%, respectively. This approach is statistically stable and outperforms state- of-the-art methods on MRI

The effects of nationality differences and work stressors on work adjustment for foreign nurse aides

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The main purpose of this study was to discuss the nationality differences of foreign nurse aides and the effect of work stressors influencing work adjustment. And of helping them adapt to Taiwanese society, we summarized the difficulties that foreign nurse aides face in Taiwan.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The subjects included 80 foreign nurse aides from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam who worked in long-term care facilities in Tao Yuan County. We recruited volunteers at the participating facilities to complete the anonymous questionnaires. The return rate of the questionnaire was 88.75%. The validated instruments of Hershenson's (1981) and Schaefer and Moos (1993) were adopted to measure work stressors and work adjustment, respectively. A forward-backward translation process was used in this study.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Indonesian foreign nurse aides respect their work, and are better workers than Vietnamese and Filipino nurse aids in many respects, which shows how the nationality of the foreign nurse aides might affect work adjustment. The stress created from patient care tasks influenced the foreign nurse aides' personal relationships at work and also affected their attitude when they performed their tasks. In addition, pressure from their supervisors might have affected their work skills, work habits, personal relationships, self-concepts or work attitudes. Moreover, a heavy workload and improper scheduling might have affected the personal relationships and work attitudes of the foreign nurse aides. It was found that work stressors had a significant correlation with work adjustment.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results of the present study indicate that training programs are important factors for work adjustment among foreign nurse aides. Furthermore, celebration and leisure activities could be provided to release them from work stressors. More effort should be put into improving the working environment, namely providing a more supportive and enriching atmosphere. Based on these findings, we have a better understanding of how to assist foreign nurse aides in the future.</p

Meeting the health care needs of a diverse society

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On e-I-open sets, e-I-continuous functions and decomposition of continuity

In this paper, we introduce the notations of $e-\mathcal{I}$-open sets and strong $\mathcal{B}_{I}^{\star}$ -set to obtain a decomposition of continuing via idealization. Additionally, we investigate properties of $e-\mathcal{I}$-open sets and strong $\mathcal{B}_{I}^{\star}$ -set. Also we studied some more properties of $e-\mathcal{I}$-open sets and obtained several characterizations of $e-\mathcal{I}$-continuous functions and investigate their relationship with other types of functions

Degree of (L, M)-Fuzzy Semi-Precontinuous and (L, M)-Fuzzy Semi-Preirresolute Functions

The aim of this paper is to present the degree of semi-preopenness, semi-precontinuity, and semi-preirresoluteness for functions in (L, M)-fuzzy pretopology with the help of implication operation and (L, M)-fuzzy semi-preopen operator introduced by [Ghareeb A., L-fuzzy semi-preopen operator in L-fuzzy topological spaces, Neural Comput. & Appl., 2012, 21, 87-92]. Further, we generalize the properties of semi-preopenness, semi-precontinuity and semi-preirresoluteness to (L, M)-fuzzy pretopological setting relying on graded concepts. Also, we discuss their relationships with the corresponding degrees of semiprecompactness, semi-preconnectedness and semi-preseparation axioms