Influence of age of onset on clinical features in obsessive-compulsive disorder

We compared early-onset and late-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients in terms of demographic and clinical features. One hundred sixteen outpatients whose primary diagnosis was OCD according to DSM-IV diagnostic criteria were recruited. Early-onset (n = 50) and late-onset (n = 66) OCD groups were compared with respect to demographic variables and scores obtained on various scales. A male gender predominance was found in early-onset OCD group. Symmetry/exactness obsessions, religious obsessions, boarding/saving obsessions, and boarding/collecting compulsions also were significantly more frequent in the early-onset group than in the late-onset group. The results may suggest a phenotypic difference between the two groups. Further studies are needed to investigate the differences between early-onset and late-onset OCD groups to examine the hypothesis that early-onset OCD is a distinct subtype of the disorder. Depression and Anxiety 21:112-117, 2005. (c) 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc

SVD and DWT-SVD Domain Robust Watermarking using Differential Evolution Algorithm

This study aims to develop two optimal watermarking techniques based on SVD and DWT-SVD domain for grey-scale images. The first one embeds the watermark by modifying the singular values of the host image with multiple SFs. In the second approach, a hybrid algorithm is proposed based on DWT and SVD. Having decomposed the host image into four bands, SVD is applied to each band. Then, the same watermark is embedded by modifying the singular values of each band with different SFs. Various combinations of SFs are possible, and it is difficult to obtain optimal solutions by trial and error. Thus, in order to achieve the highest possible transparency and robustness, optimization of the scaling factors is necessary. This work employs DE to obtain optimum SFs. DE can search for multiple solutions simultaneously over a wide range, and an optimum solution can be gained by combining the obtained results appropriately. Experimental results of developed techniques show both the significant improvement in transparency and the robustness under attacks. © 2009 Springer Netherlands

SSR-based molecular analysis of economically important Turkish apricot cultivars

Turkey is not only the main apricot (Prunus armeniaca) producer and exporter in the world, but it also has a wide variety of apricot germplasms, owing to its close proximity to the centers of apricot origin. However, there is little or no genetic information on many apricot cultivars that are extensively cultivated in Turkey. We examined the genetic relatedness of 25 Turkish and four exotic apricot cultivars using SSR (simple sequence repeat) markers that were either previously developed for apricot, or for peach (P. persica), a close relative of apricot. Allele diversity (with an average allele number of 6.37) at the SSR loci and the heterozygosity rates (with an average Ho value of 0.648) of these cultivars were found to be higher than in previous studies that used the same loci for apricot. This fact might be attributed to the analysis of different numbers of accessions in the different studies. No correlations were found between the genetic relatedness and the geographical distributions of these cultivars. The data reported here will assist in the prevention of confusions in the apricot propagation and breeding in Turkey. The findings can also be directly compared with other studies that used the same SSR markers on apricot

Performance evaluation of wavelet SVD-based watermarking schemes for color images

Digital image watermarking techniques have enabled imperceptible information in images to be hidden to ensure the information can be extracted later from those images. For any watermarking scheme, there are four main requirements which are imperceptibility, Robustness, capacity and security. Recently, hybrid Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based watermarking schemes in the transform domain have significantly gained a lot of attention. This is due to the characteristics of SVD and the wavelet. Most of these schemes were tested under different conditions using grey images only. However, due to the growth of digital technology and the huge use of the colour images, it is important to consider the colour images in the watermarking area. Three different SVD-based image watermarking schemes with different wavelet transforms are selected in this paper to be tested and evaluated for colour images. Two colour models are used to represent the colour images to perform the embedding and the extraction watermarking process to study these colour models’ performances and effectiveness in the watermarking area. These colour models are RGB and YCbCr. All these colour models’ channels are used as an embedding channel and then are evaluated under different attacks types. The experimental results of the selected Wavelet SVD-based watermarking schemes proved that the embedding in the RGB and YCbCr colour channels are achieved high imperceptibility. These colour channels also showed good robustness against different attacks such as cropping, cutting, rotation and JPEG compression