Detection and identification of mirror-image letter pairs in central and peripheral vision

AbstractReading performance is poorer in the peripheral than in the central visual field, even after size-scaling to compensate for differences in visual acuity at the different eccentricities. Since several studies have indicated that the peripheral retina is deficient with respect to spatial phase discrimination, we compared the psychometric functions for detection (D) and identification (I) of size-scaled, mirror-symmetric letters (i.e. letters differing in the phase spectra of their odd symmetric components) at three inferior field eccentricities (0, 4, and 7.5 deg) using a two-alternative, temporal, forced-choice procedure and retinal image stabilization to control retinal locus. Each subject's data were fit with Weibull functions and tested for goodness-of-fit under several hypotheses. This analysis revealed that while the psychometric functions were of constant shape across eccentricity for the respective tasks, they showed statistically significant variations in the D/I threshold ratios. However, these variations were so small that poorer reading outside the fovea is unlikely to be due to reduced letter discriminability that might occur secondary to a loss of peripheral field phase sensitivity

Loss of testosterone impairs anti-tumor neutrophil function.

In men, the incidence of melanoma rises rapidly after age 50, and nearly two thirds of melanoma deaths are male. The immune system is known to play a key role in controlling the growth and spread of malignancies, but whether age- and sex-dependent changes in immune cell function account for this effect remains unknown. Here, we show that in castrated male mice, neutrophil maturation and function are impaired, leading to elevated metastatic burden in two models of melanoma. Replacement of testosterone effectively normalized the tumor burden in castrated male mice. Further, the aberrant neutrophil phenotype was also observed in prostate cancer patients receiving androgen deprivation therapy, highlighting the evolutionary conservation and clinical relevance of the phenotype. Taken together, these results provide a better understanding of the role of androgen signaling in neutrophil function and the impact of this biology on immune control of malignancies

A compressed-sensing approach for ultrasound imaging

Ultrasonography uses multiple piezo-electric element probes to image tissues. Current time-domain beamforming techniques require the signal at each transducer-element to be sampled at a rate higher than the Nyquist criterion, resulting in an extensive amount of data to be received, stored and processed. In this work, we propose to exploit sparsity of the signal received at each transducer-element. The proposed approach uses multiple compressive multiplexers for signal encoding and solves an l1-minimization in the decoding step, resulting in the reduction of 75 % of the amount of data, the number of cables and the number of analog-to-digital converters required to perform high quality reconstruction

Perceptions of Senaputra Dance Students About the Art of Classical Dance and Traditional Creations

Around the 1970s, professional dance arts education for the general public began to grow. Students of professional dance were mostly the sons and daughters of wealthy individuals or government officials. Dance was regarded as a source of prestige for parents at the time. Such a perception exists because society is unable to contribute to the development of such status. After 50 years, though, that perception has changed. This study considered Sanggar Tari Senaputra Malang with the aim of examining the differences in perceptions among dance students at professional dance facilities. This was descriptive qualitative research and data were collected through observations of training activities and interviews with the leader of the Senaputra Dance Workshop (Siti Sofiana, 47 years old) and four trainers. Data were analyzed using phenomenological interpretation. The results demonstrated that: (1) classical dance takes a relatively long time to learn and is personal in nature to gain social prestige; and (2) traditional dance creations are simpler and faster to learn, and tend to establish social relationships. Keywords: classic dance, traditional dance, dance teacher, Sanggar Danc

Occupy: in theory and practice

This paper situates the discourse of the Occupy movement within the context of radical political philosophy. Our analysis takes place on two levels. First, we conduct an empirical analysis of the ‘official’ publications of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Occupy London (OL). Operationalising core concepts from the framing perspective within social movement theory, we provide a descriptive-comparative analysis of the ‘collective action frames’ of OWS and OL. Second, we consider the extent to which radical political philosophy speaks to the discourse of Occupy. Our empirical analysis reveals that both movements share diagnostic frames, but there were notable differences in terms of prognostic framing. The philosophical discussion suggests that there are alignments between anarchist, post-anarchist and post-Marxist ideologies at the level of both identity and strategy. Indeed, the absence of totalising anti-capitalist or anti-statist positions in Occupy suggests that – particularly with Occupy London – alignments are perhaps not so distant from typically social democratic demands

An ongoing case-control study to evaluate the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme

© 2014 Massat et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated

A compressed beamforming framework for ultrafast ultrasound imaging

Classical beamforming methods, based on Delay- And-Sum (DAS) require an extensive number of samples and delay calculations to obtain high-quality images. Compressed Beamforming (CB) proposes an alternative to DAS, based on compressed sensing, which aims at reducing the data rate. However, proposed CB approaches induce a computationally heavy measurement model that hampers their attractiveness for iterative image reconstruction. In this paper, a CB framework, applicable to either radio-frequency or in-phase quadrature data and for both plane wave and diverging wave compounding, is described. The proposed framework exploits a computationally light measurement model which leads to tractable reconstruction. It solves a convex problem and assumes sparsity in a waveletbased model to achieve high-quality image reconstruction from measurements acquired with only few transducer elements

Morphological component analysis for sparse regularization in plane wave imaging

Classical ultrasound image reconstruction mainly relies on the well-known delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming for its simplicity and real-time capability. Sparse regularization methods propose an alternative to DAS which lead to a better inversion of the ill-posed problem resulting from the acoustic wave propagation. In the following work, a new sparse regularization method is proposed which includes a component-based modelling of the radio-frequency images as well as a pointspread- function-adaptive sparsity prior. The proposed method, evaluated on the PICMUS dataset,outperforms the classical DAS in terms of contrast and resolution