Single Subject Research: A Synthesis of Analytic Methods

Historically, the synthesis of single subject design has employed visual inspection to yield significance of results. However, current research is supporting different techniques that will facilitate the interpretation of these intervention outcomes. These methods can provide more reliable data than employing visual inspection in isolation. This article compares the different techniques, compares the benefits of utilizing these techniques in addition to visual inspection, the limitations of each technique being reviewed, and evidence for combining traditional statistical measures with visual inspection

An efficient face recognition system using local binary pattern.

Facial recognition is a critical and prominent aspect of current research into image processing and computer vision, with particular applications including confront location, confront acknowledgement and outward appearance investigation. A basic advancement towards fruitful facial picture examination is to infer a viable facial portrayal from the first face pictures. Local Binary Patterns (LBP) have recently gained increased attention as an approach for facial depiction. Neighborhood double example (LBP) is a nonparametric descriptor, which proficiently abridges the nearby structures of pictures. In this paper, there will be a complete overview of LBP and an explanation of extentions of that concept. LBP-based facial picture examination is broadly evaluated, while its fruitful expansions (which manage different aspects of facial picture investigation) are additionally featured

A Fluidic Soft Robot for Needle Guidance and Motion Compensation in Intratympanic Steroid Injections

Intratympanic steroid injections are commonly employed in treating ear diseases, such as sudden sensorineural hearing loss or Meniere's disease through drug delivery via the middle ear. Whilst being an effective treatment, the procedure has to be performed by a trained surgeon to avoid delicate regions in the patient's anatomy and is considered painful despite the use of topical anaesthesia. In this letter we introduce a fluid-driven soft robotic system which aims at increasing patient-comfort during the injection by counteracting unwanted needle motion, reducing the cognitive load of the clinician by autonomously identifying sensitive regions in the ear and de-risking the procedure by steering the needle towards the desired injection site. A design comprising of six embedded fluidic actuators is presented, which allow for translation and rotation of the needle as well as adaptive stiffening in the coupling between needle and ear canal. The system's steering-capabilities are investigated and the differential kinematics derived to demonstrate trajectory tracking in Cartesian space. A vision system is developed which enables tracking of anatomical landmarks on the tympanic membrane and thus locating the desired needle insertion site. The integrated system shows the ability to provide a safe guide for the inserted needle towards a desired target direction while significantly reducing needle motion. The proposed tracking algorithm is able to identify the desired needle insertion site and could be employed to avoid delicate anatomical regions

Placental vessel-guided hybrid framework for fetoscopic mosaicking

Fetoscopic laser photocoagulation is used to treat twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome; however, this procedure is hindered because of difficulty in visualising the intraoperative surgical environment due to limited surgical field-of-view, unusual placenta position, limited manoeuvrability of the fetoscope and poor visibility due to fluid turbidity and occlusions. Fetoscopic video mosaicking can create an expanded field-of-view image of the fetoscopic intraoperative environment, which could support the surgeons in localising the vascular anastomoses during the fetoscopic procedure. However, classical handcrafted feature matching methods fail on in vivo fetoscopic videos. An existing state-of-the-art method on fetoscopic mosaicking relies on vessel presence and fails when vessels are not present in the view. We propose a vessel-guided hybrid fetoscopic mosaicking framework that mutually benefits from a placental vessel-based registration and a deep learning-based dense matching method to optimise the overall performance. A selection mechanism is implemented based on vessels’ appearance consistency and photometric error minimisation for choosing the best pairwise transformation. Using the extended fetoscopy placenta dataset, we experimentally show the robustness of the proposed framework, over the state-of-the-art methods, even in vessel-free, low-textured, or low illumination non-planar fetoscopic views

Effect of telmisartan in hypertensive patients with impaired fasting glycaemia

Background: Telmisartan, an angiotensin II receptor blocker, has a higher affinity for AT1 receptors. It has also been recognized as partial agonist of the nuclear hormone receptor PPAR-gamma. The present study is conducted to study the effect of Telmisartan in hypertensive patients with impaired fasting glycaemia.Methods: This is a prospective and randomised study done on 50 hypertensive patients with impaired fasting glycaemia. All the patients underwent following investigations like Fasting plasma glucose, blood pressure and body mass index were also measured.Results: Fasting plasma glucose, blood pressure (SBP, DBP) showed significant decrease after intake of 40 mg Telmisartan for three months. Changes in BMI are not significant.Conclusions: The present study shows that Telmisartan is effective in controlling blood-pressure by its AT1 receptor blocking activity. It is also effective in decreasing fasting blood glucose by its insulin sensitizing activity through partial peroxisome proliferator activated receptor (PPAR) gamma activity

Globally Optimal Fetoscopic Mosaicking Based on Pose Graph Optimisation With Affine Constraints

Fetoscopic laser ablation surgery could be guided using a high-quality panorama of the operating site, representing a map of the placental vasculature. This can be achieved during the initial inspection phase of the procedure using image mosaicking techniques. Due to the lack of camera calibration in the operating room, it has been mostly modelled as an affine registration problem. While previous work mostly focuses on image feature extraction for visual odometry, the challenges related to large-scale reconstruction (re-localisation, loop closure, drift correction) remain largely unaddressed in this context. This letter proposes using pose graph optimisation to produce globally optimal image mosaics of placental vessels. Our approach follows the SLAM framework with a front-end for visual odometry and a back-end for long-term refinement. Our front-end uses a recent state-of-the-art odometry approach based on vessel segmentation, which is then managed by a key-frame structure and the bag-of-words (BoW) scheme to retrieve loop closures. The back-end, which is our key contribution, models odometry and loop closure constraints as a pose graph with affine warpings between states. This problem in the special Euclidean space cannot be solved by existing pose graph algorithms and available libraries such as G2O. We model states on affine Lie group with local linearisation in its Lie algebra. The cost function is established using Mahalanobis distance with the vectorisation of the Lie algebra. Finally, an iterative optimisation algorithm is adopted to minimise the cost function. The proposed pose graph optimisation is first validated on simulation data with a synthetic trajectory that has different levels of noise and different numbers of loop closures. Then the whole system is validated using real fetoscopic data that has three sequences with different numbers of frames and loop closures. Experimental results validate the advantage of the proposed method compared with baselines

Antimicrobial susceptibility to zinc bacitracin of Clostridium perfringens of rabbit origin

Zinc bacitracin is widely used in Italian rabbit farms to control both Epizootic Rabbit Enteropathy (ERE) and clostridiosis, and field results demonstrate useful activity. Nevertheless, data regarding the in vitro efficacy of zinc bacitracin against clostridia of rabbit origin are not available. In this study, the minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of zinc bacitracin were evaluated in 123 C. perfringens strains isolated from rabbits in Italian fattening units. The agar dilution method was performed in Brucella Agar supplemented with laked sheep blood, haemin and vitamin K1, as recommended in NCCLS document M11-A6. Most strains (94.3%) had low MIC values (£ 0.5 mg/ml), and a few strains (4%) were inhibited by a concentration of 1 mg/ml. Two isolates (1.6%) had a MIC value of 16mg/ml. The MIC values of ATCC reference strains showed a good fit between each batch. MIC required to inhibit the 90% of organisms was 0.5 mg/ml and the presence of only two strains with MIC=16 mg/ml revealed the susceptibility to zinc bacitracin of Italian isolates of C. perfringens from rabbit and the absence of acquired resistance.Agnoletti, F.; Bacchin, C.; Bano, L.; Passera, A.; Favretti, M.; Mazzolini, E. (2007). Antimicrobial susceptibility to zinc bacitracin of Clostridium perfringens of rabbit origin. World Rabbit Science. 15(1):19-22. doi:10.4995/wrs.2007.609192215

Robust fetoscopic mosaicking from deep learned flow fields

PURPOSE: Fetoscopic laser photocoagulation is a minimally invasive procedure to treat twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome during pregnancy by stopping irregular blood flow in the placenta. Building an image mosaic of the placenta and its network of vessels could assist surgeons to navigate in the challenging fetoscopic environment during the procedure. METHODOLOGY: We propose a fetoscopic mosaicking approach by combining deep learning-based optical flow with robust estimation for filtering inconsistent motions that occurs due to floating particles and specularities. While the current state of the art for fetoscopic mosaicking relies on clearly visible vessels for registration, our approach overcomes this limitation by considering the motion of all consistent pixels within consecutive frames. We also overcome the challenges in applying off-the-shelf optical flow to fetoscopic mosaicking through the use of robust estimation and local refinement. RESULTS: We compare our proposed method against the state-of-the-art vessel-based and optical flow-based image registration methods, and robust estimation alternatives. We also compare our proposed pipeline using different optical flow and robust estimation alternatives. CONCLUSIONS: Through analysis of our results, we show that our method outperforms both the vessel-based state of the art and LK, noticeably when vessels are either poorly visible or too thin to be reliably identified. Our approach is thus able to build consistent placental vessel mosaics in challenging cases where currently available alternatives fail

Deep Placental Vessel Segmentation for Fetoscopic Mosaicking

During fetoscopic laser photocoagulation, a treatment for twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), the clinician first identifies abnormal placental vascular connections and laser ablates them to regulate blood flow in both fetuses. The procedure is challenging due to the mobility of the environment, poor visibility in amniotic fluid, occasional bleeding, and limitations in the fetoscopic field-of-view and image quality. Ideally, anastomotic placental vessels would be automatically identified, segmented and registered to create expanded vessel maps to guide laser ablation, however, such methods have yet to be clinically adopted. We propose a solution utilising the U-Net architecture for performing placental vessel segmentation in fetoscopic videos. The obtained vessel probability maps provide sufficient cues for mosaicking alignment by registering consecutive vessel maps using the direct intensity-based technique. Experiments on 6 different in vivo fetoscopic videos demonstrate that the vessel intensity-based registration outperformed image intensity-based registration approaches showing better robustness in qualitative and quantitative comparison. We additionally reduce drift accumulation to negligible even for sequences with up to 400 frames and we incorporate a scheme for quantifying drift error in the absence of the ground-truth. Our paper provides a benchmark for fetoscopy placental vessel segmentation and registration by contributing the first in vivo vessel segmentation and fetoscopic videos dataset.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 202

The finite range simple effective interaction including tensor terms

The prediction of single particle level crossing phenomenon between $2p_{3/2}$ and $1f_{5/2}$ orbitals in $Ni$- and $Cu$-isotopic chains by the finite range simple effective interaction without requiring the tensor part is discussed. In this case the experimentally observed crossing could be studied as a function of nuclear matter incompressibility, $K(\rho_0)$. The estimated crossing for the neutron number $N$=46 could be reproduced by the equation of state corresponding to $K(\rho_0)$=240 MeV. However, the observed proton gaps between the $1h_{11/2}$ and $1g_{7/2}$ shells in $Sn$ and $Sb$ isotopic chain, and the neutron gaps between the $1i_{13/2}$ and $1h_{9/2}$ shells in $N$=82 isotones, as well as the shell closure properties at $N$=28 require explicit consideration of a tensor part as the central contribution is not enough to initiate the required level splittings