CASCADING MULTIPLE CLASSIFIERS AND REPRESENTATIONS FOR OPTICAL AND PEN-BASED HANDWRITTEN DIGIT RECOGNITION

Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens, Hitachi, IAPR, NICI, IUF We discuss a multistage method, cascading, where there is a sequence of classifiers ordered in terms of complexity (of the classifier or the repre- sentation) and specificity, in that early classifiers are simple and general and later ones are more complex and are local. For building portable, low-cost handwriting recognizers, memory and computational requirements are as critical as accuracy and our proposed method, cascading, is a way to gain from having multiple classifiers, without much losing from cost. Simulation results on optical and pen-based handwriting digit recognition indicate that when compared with voting, mixture of experts and stacking, our proposed method, cascading, does stand out as the most realistic combination scheme.

A case of sudden hearing loss associated with ANCA

A case of sudden hearing loss associated with ANCA. A 46-year-old female patient presented to our clinic with complaints of aural fullness and hearing loss for two days. On audiometric examination, she had sensorineural hearing loss in the left ear. Mean pure tone audiometry (PTA) was 53dB. Her medical history was significant for oral medication-controlled diabetes mellitus and chronic thyroiditis. Laboratory studies showed an erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) of 40 mm/h and an anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody directed against myeloperoxidase (MPO-ANCA) level of 33.1 EU/ml. ANCA-associated vasculitis was considered. The patient was started on immunosuppressive treatment. Seven months after the initial episode, the patient suffered a relapse. At 17 month follow-up after the initial event, the patient is healthy with normal hearing. Serum MPO-ANCA is within normal limits