Black urine due to urobilinogen in a patient with alcoholic pellagra.

OBJECTIVES: Systemic exposure to drugs, chemicals and foods can cause abnormally colored urine. Food exposures are typically benign, but urine discoloration due to chemicals or drugs may indicate a potentially dangerous condition. Discolored urine can also be caused by medical problems. This brief report reviews the laboratory findings leading to lactic acidosis and elevated urine urobilinogen in an alcoholic patient with pellagra. DESIGN AND METHODS: A 66-year-old male, found unconscious in his hotel room, was brought to the emergency department (ED). Upon arrival he had hypothermia, a diffuse rash and altered mental status. During ED evaluation, a urinary catheter was placed and demonstrated black urine. Medical history noted chronic alcoholism, malnutrition, and poor self-care. RESULTS: Evaluation in the hospital suggested that his rash and neurologic changes were a result of malnutrition and vitamin deficiency. A thorough biochemical workup demonstrated that elevated urobilinogen was likely causing the patient's black urine. Serum niacin concentration was undetectable. His dermatitis improved with multivitamins, thiamine, and niacin as well as topical steroids. His mental status returned to baseline and he was discharged to a skilled nursing facility following a brief hospital stay. CONCLUSIONS: The patient's abnormal laboratory results were explained by his alcoholism and poor nutrition. Furthermore, urine color returned to normal with decreased concentration of urobilinogen, after vitamin supplementation and supportive medical care

An experiment in Interactive Retrieval for the lifelog moment retrieval task at imageCLEFlifelog2020.

The development of technology has led to an increase in mobile devices’ use to keep track of individual daily activities, as known as Lifelogging. Lifelogging has raised many research challenges, one of which is how to retrieve a specific moment in response to a user’s information need. This paper presents an efficient interactive search engine for large multimodal lifelog data which is evaluated in the ImageCLEFlifelog2020 Lifelog Moment Retrieval task (LMRT). The system is the modified version of the Myscéal demonstrator used in the Lifelog Search Challenge 2020, with the addition of visual similarity and a new method of visualising results. In interactive experimentation, our system achieved an F1@ 10 score of 0.48 in the official submission but can be significantly improved by implementing a number of post-processing steps

A VR interface for browsing visual spaces at VBS2021

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual competition in which each participant prepares an interactive video retrieval system and partakes in a live comparative evaluation at the annual MMMConference. In this paper, we introduce Eolas, which is a prototype video/image retrieval system incorporating a novel virtual reality (VR)interface. For VBS’21, Eolas represented each keyframe of the collection by an embedded feature in a latent vector space, into which a query would also be projected to facilitate retrieval within a VR environment. A user could then explore the space and perform one of a number of filter operations to traverse the space and locate the correct result

Patterns of HIV prevalence among injecting drug users in the cross-border area of Lang Son Province, Vietnam, and Ning Ming County, Guangxi Province, China

BACKGROUND: To assess patterns of injecting drug use and HIV prevalence among injecting drug users (IDUs) in an international border area along a major heroin trans-shipment route. METHODS: Cross-sectional surveys of IDUs in 5 sites in Lang Son Province, Vietnam (n = 348) and 3 sites in Ning Ming County, Guangxi Province, China (n = 308). Respondents were recruited through peer referral ("snowball") methods in both countries, and also from officially recorded lists of IDUs in Vietnam. A risk behavior questionnaire was administered and HIV counseling and testing conducted. RESULTS: Participants in both countries were largely male, in their 20s, and unmarried. A majority of subjects in both countries were members of ethnic minority groups. There were strong geographic gradients for length of drug injecting and for HIV seroprevalence. Both mean years injecting and HIV seroprevalence declined from the Vietnamese site farthest from the border to the Chinese site farthest from the border. 10.6% of participants in China and 24.5% of participants in Vietnam reported crossing the international border in the 6 months prior to interview. Crossing the border by IDUs was associated with (1) distance from the border, (2) being a member of an ethnic minority group, and (3) being HIV seropositive among Chinese participants. CONCLUSION: Reducing the international spread of HIV among IDUs will require programs at the global, regional, national, and "local cross border" levels. At the local cross border level, the programs should be coordinated on both sides of the border and on a sufficient scale that IDUs will be able to readily obtain clean injection equipment on the other side of the border as well as in their country of residence

Myscéal: a deeper analysis of an interactive lifelog search engine

There is a growing number of lifelogging retrieval systems that have been introduced in several lifelogging workshops and events. Across all systems at the LSC, which is an annual international challenge on lifelogging retrieval, our Myscéal is currently considered as the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we describe the system in detail and show how it has been upgraded through time since firstly introduced in 2020. In addition, we analyse Myscéal performance not only in the three lifelog retrieval competitions it participated in but also with additional user experiments. The result shows that the fast searching time of Myscéal is the system's most important feature that helps it get some significant advantages in competitions. On the other hand, the findings from user experiments indicate that Myscéal still needs some improvements for novice users who are unfamiliar with how to interact with the system. Moreover, the user study plays a vital role in the development of Myscéal as many updates of this system came from the feedback of the participating users. We also demonstrate the efficacy of Myscéal as a lifelog retrieval system to help the lifeloggers, who capture their daily life in images, recall memorable moments in their massive lifelog archives

Black urine due to urobilinogen in a patient with alcoholic pellagra.

OBJECTIVES: Systemic exposure to drugs, chemicals and foods can cause abnormally colored urine. Food exposures are typically benign, but urine discoloration due to chemicals or drugs may indicate a potentially dangerous condition. Discolored urine can also be caused by medical problems. This brief report reviews the laboratory findings leading to lactic acidosis and elevated urine urobilinogen in an alcoholic patient with pellagra. DESIGN AND METHODS: A 66-year-old male, found unconscious in his hotel room, was brought to the emergency department (ED). Upon arrival he had hypothermia, a diffuse rash and altered mental status. During ED evaluation, a urinary catheter was placed and demonstrated black urine. Medical history noted chronic alcoholism, malnutrition, and poor self-care. RESULTS: Evaluation in the hospital suggested that his rash and neurologic changes were a result of malnutrition and vitamin deficiency. A thorough biochemical workup demonstrated that elevated urobilinogen was likely causing the patient's black urine. Serum niacin concentration was undetectable. His dermatitis improved with multivitamins, thiamine, and niacin as well as topical steroids. His mental status returned to baseline and he was discharged to a skilled nursing facility following a brief hospital stay. CONCLUSIONS: The patient's abnormal laboratory results were explained by his alcoholism and poor nutrition. Furthermore, urine color returned to normal with decreased concentration of urobilinogen, after vitamin supplementation and supportive medical care