Navigation and Control of Automated Guided Vehicle using Fuzzy Inference System and Neural Network Technique

Automatic motion planning and navigation is the primary task of an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) or mobile robot. All such navigation systems consist of a data collection system, a decision making system and a hardware control system. Artificial Intelligence based decision making systems have become increasingly more successful as they are capable of handling large complex calculations and have a good performance under unpredictable and imprecise environments. This research focuses on developing Fuzzy Logic and Neural Network based implementations for the navigation of an AGV by using heading angle and obstacle distances as inputs to generate the velocity and steering angle as output. The Gaussian, Triangular and Trapezoidal membership functions for the Fuzzy Inference System and the Feed forward back propagation were developed, modelled and simulated on MATLAB. The reserach presents an evaluation of the four different decision making systems and a study has been conducted to compare their performances. The hardware control for an AGV should be robust and precise. For practical implementation a prototype, that functions via DC servo motors and a gear systems, was constructed and installed on a commercial vehicle

Association of multiple sclerosis and sudden sensorineural hearing loss

Peer reviewe

Deriving modified rankin scores from medical records

<p><b>Background and Purpose:</b> Modified Rankin score (mRS) is traditionally graded using a face-to-face or telephone interview. Certain stroke assessment scales can be derived from a review of a patient’s case-record alone. We hypothesized that mRS could be successfully derived from the narrative within patient case-records.</p> <p><b>Methods:</b> Sequential patients attending our cerebrovascular outpatient clinic were included. Two independent, blinded clinicians, trained in mRS, assessed case-records to derive mRS. They scored “certainty” of their grading on a 5-point Likert scale. Agreement between derived and traditional face-to-face mRS was calculated using attribute agreement analysis.</p> <p><b>Results:</b> Fifty patients with a range of disabilities were included. Case-record appraisers were poor at deriving mRS (k=0.34 against standard). Derived mRS grades showed poor agreement between observers (k=0.33). There was no relationship between certainty of derived mRS and proportion of correct grades (P=0.727).</p> <p><b>Conclusion:</b> Accurate mRS cannot be derived from standard hospital records. Direct mRS interview is still required for clinical trials.</p&gt

Meretojan taudista uutta tietoa kansallisen potilasrekisterin avulla

Tiedot Meretojan taudin eli suomalaisen perinnöllisen gelsoliiniamyloidoosin taudinkulusta ovat tähän saakka perustuneet suhteellisen pieniin potilassarjoihin. Uuden kansallisen FIN-GAR-potilasrekisterin avulla voidaan paremmin kartoittaa taudin oireita ja niiden yleisyyttä sekä sen luonnollista kulkua. Potilasrekisteriin on tähän mennessä kerätty tiedot 235 potilaasta, ja siihen toivotaan edelleen täydennystä. Rekisterin mukaan ensioireet alkavat yleensä silmistä. Taudin ensisijainen diagnostinen löydös on potilaalle tyypillisesti jo 20–30-vuotiaana kehittyvä sarveiskalvon verkkomainen rappeuma. Muut oireet ja löydökset kehittyvät suurin piirtein samanaikaisesti, mediaanien osuessa 50 ja 60 ikävuoden välille. Naisilla oireet kehittyvät keskimäärin aiemmin ja erityisesti silmäoireet ovat yleisempiä kuin miehillä. Rannekanavaoireyhtymä, sydämentahdistin ja munuaisensiirrot ovat rekisterin potilailla huomattavasti yleisempiä kuin normaaliväestössä. Näiden tarkkaa patologista yhteyttä Meretojan tautiin tutkitaan ­parhaillaan.Peer reviewe

Kielisyöpä - varhainen toteaminen parantaa ennustetta

English summar

Stroke outcome in clinical trial patients deriving from different countries

<p><b>Background and Purpose:</b> Stroke incidence and outcome vary widely within and across geographical locations. We examined whether differences in index stroke severity, stroke risk factors, mortality, and stroke outcome across geographical locations remain after adjusting for case mix.</p> <p><b>Methods:</b> We analyzed 3284 patients from the Virtual International Stroke Trials Archive (VISTA). We used logistic regression to examine the incidence of mild index stroke, functional, and neurological outcomes after accounting for age, medical history, year of trial recruitment, and initial stroke severity in the functional and neurological outcome analyses. We examined mortality between geographical regions using a Cox proportional hazards model, accounting for age, initial stroke severity, medical history, and year of trial recruitment.</p> <p><b>Results</b> Patients enrolled in the USA and Canada had the most severe index strokes. Those recruited in Austria and Switzerland had the best functional and neurological outcomes at 90 days (P<0.05), whereas those enrolled in Germany had the worst functional outcome at 90 days (P=0.013). Patients enrolled in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Spain, and Portugal had a significantly better survival rate when compared with those enrolled in USA and Canada. Patients enrolled in trials after 1998 had more severe index strokes, with no significant difference in outcome compared with those enrolled before 1998.</p> <p><b>Conclusion:</b> We identified regional variations in index stroke severity, outcome, and mortality for patients enrolled in ischemic stroke clinical trials over the past 13 years that were not fully explained by case mix. Index stroke severity was greater in patients enrolled after 1998, with no significant improvement in outcomes compared to those enrolled before 1998.</p&gt

Cavernous haemangioma of male breast

We report a rare case of a cavernous hemangioma arising in a male breast. A 53 year old man first noticed 1×1 cm nodule just below his left nipple since 2 years. It was enlarging over a period to the present size. He came to our hospital, it was size of (2×1 cm), was a firm and cystic with a rather smooth surface, and mobile with in breast just medial to left nipple. Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNA) failed to obtain proper material except for old bloody fluid or necrotic connective tissue, precluding a correct diagnosis preoperatively suggesting cystic lesion with bloody aspirate. Lumpectomy or excision biopsy was subsequently performed. Histological, it was found to be a cavernous hemangioma. In such a case, complete excision is recommended to exclude the possibility of an underlying malignant lesion

A Risk-Averse Mechanism for Suicidality Assessment on Social Media

Recent studies have shown that social media has increasingly become a platform for users to express suicidal thoughts outside traditional clinical settings. With advances in Natural Language Processing strategies, it is now possible to design automated systems to assess suicide risk. However, such systems may generate uncertain predictions, leading to severe consequences. We hence reformulate suicide risk assessment as a selective prioritized prediction problem over the Columbia Suicide Severity Risk Scale (C-SSRS). We propose SASI, a risk-averse and self-aware transformer-based hierarchical attention classifier, augmented to refrain from making uncertain predictions. We show that SASI is able to refrain from 83% of incorrect predictions on real-world Reddit data. Furthermore, we discuss the qualitative, practical, and ethical aspects of SASI for suicide risk assessment as a human-in-the-loop framework

Expression of CXCL10 is associated with response to radiotherapy and overall survival in squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue

Five-year survival for patients with oral cancer has been disappointingly stable during the last decades, creating a demand for new biomarkers and treatment targets. Lately, much focus has been set on immunomodulation as a possible treatment or an adjuvant increasing sensitivity to conventional treatments. The objective of this study was to evaluate the prognostic importance of response to radiotherapy in tongue carcinoma patients as well as the expression of the CXC-chemokines in correlation to radiation response in the same group of tumours. Thirty-eight patients with tongue carcinoma that had received radiotherapy followed by surgery were included. The prognostic impact of pathological response to radiotherapy, N-status, T-stage, age and gender was evaluated using Cox's regression models, Kaplan-Meier survival curves and chi-square test. The expression of 23 CXC-chemokine ligands and their receptors were evaluated in all patients using microarray and qPCR and correlated with response to treatment using logistic regression. Pathological response to radiotherapy was independently associated to overall survival with a 2-year survival probability of 81 % for patients showing a complete pathological response, while patients with a non-complete response only had a probability of 42 % to survive for 2 years (p = 0.016). The expression of one CXC-chemokine, CXCL10, was significantly associated with response to radiotherapy and the group of patients with the highest CXCL10 expression responded, especially poorly (p = 0.01). CXCL10 is a potential marker for response to radiotherapy and overall survival in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue

Retrieval augmented retrieval with in-context examples

We investigate whether in-context examples, widely used in decoder-only language models (LLMs), can improve embedding model performance in retrieval tasks. Unlike in LLMs, naively prepending in-context examples (query-document pairs) to the target query at inference time does not work out of the box. We introduce a simple approach to enable retrievers to use in-context examples. Our approach, RARe, finetunes a pre-trained model with in-context examples whose query is semantically similar to the target query. We apply this to adapt various base architectures (i.e., decoder-only language models, retriever models) and achieves relative performance gains of up to 12.98% (+2.72 nDCG) across various open-domain retrieval datasets (BeIR, RAR-b). In particular, we find RARe exhibits stronger out-of-domain generalization compared to models using queries without in-context examples, similar to what is seen for in-context learning in LLMs. We further provide analysis on the design choices of in-context example augmentation and lay the foundation for future work in this space.Computer Scienc