Automated Segmentation of Pulmonary Lobes using Coordination-Guided Deep Neural Networks

The identification of pulmonary lobes is of great importance in disease diagnosis and treatment. A few lung diseases have regional disorders at lobar level. Thus, an accurate segmentation of pulmonary lobes is necessary. In this work, we propose an automated segmentation of pulmonary lobes using coordination-guided deep neural networks from chest CT images. We first employ an automated lung segmentation to extract the lung area from CT image, then exploit volumetric convolutional neural network (V-net) for segmenting the pulmonary lobes. To reduce the misclassification of different lobes, we therefore adopt coordination-guided convolutional layers (CoordConvs) that generate additional feature maps of the positional information of pulmonary lobes. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on a few publicly available datasets and has achieved the state-of-the-art accuracy with a mean Dice coefficient index of 0.947 $\pm$ 0.044.Comment: ISBI 2019 (Oral

Loss prevention for hog farmers: Insurance, on-farm biosecurity practices, and vaccination

Using agricultural household survey data and claim records from insurers for the year 2009, this paper analyzes hog producers' choice of means of loss prevention and identifies the relationships among biosecurity practices, vaccination, and hog insurance. By combining one probit and two structural equations, we adopt three-stage estimations on a mixed-process model to obtain the results. The findings indicate that biosecurity practices provide the basic infrastructure for operating pig farms and complement both the usage of quality vaccines and the uptake of hog insurance. In addition, there is a strong relationship of substitution between quality of vaccine and demand for hog insurance. Hog farmers that implement better biosecurity practices are more likely to seek high-quality vaccines or buy into hog insurance schemes but not both. For those households with hog insurance, better biosecurity status, better management practices, and higher-quality vaccine significantly help to reduce loss ratios. However, we also find a moral hazard effect in that higher premium expenditure by the insured households might induce larger loss ratios.Biosecurity, hog insurance, loss prevention, vaccine,

A QoS-Based Services Selected Method in Service-Oriented Architectures Using Ant Colony System - A Case Study of Airflights

Semantic web is becoming more and more popular these days, and it’s an opportune moment to look at the field’s current state and future opportunities. However, most researchers focus on only one single service recommend from semantic web inference. In some situations, the Multi-Services which are combined many complex services from various service providers are better than single service. The designed Multi-Services Semantic Search System (MS4), which provides the cooperation web-based platform for all related mobile users and service providers, could strengthen the ability of Multi-Services suggestion. In this research, MS4 chooses the adaptable airflight as a case study. MS4 is a five-components system composed of the Mobile Users (MUs), UDDI Registries (UDDIRs), Service Providers (SPs), Semantic Web Services Server (SWSS), and Database Server (DS). Using SOA, OWL-S to build semantic web environment to inference user’s requirements and search various web services which are published in UDDI through the communication networks include internet and 3G/GPRS/GSM mobile networks. In this airline case, we propose the Adaptive Airflights Inference Module (AAIM) combined QoS-Based Services Selected Method (QBSSM) using Ant Colony System (ACS) to reference the adaptable airflights to MUs

Conflict of Laws on Occupational Accident Death Benefits: Presented with Actual Cases in Taiwan

When a worker dies due to an occupational accident the labor insurance death benefit being applied for by his her survivors subject to more conditions due to the revision of the Act When the survivor does not meet the requirements the labor insurance will not be paid At this time the survivor of the occupational accident worker shall instead turn to the employer for compensation to pay the labor insurance premium as the Bureau of Labor Insurance did not pay The employer had to pay out of its pocket to compensate the survivor for the absurdity of the death compensation by the Labor Standards Act A large company can take care of family members in terms of corporate responsibility or financial resources if it is a small and medium-sized enterprise or even a microenterprise it cannot pay this huge amount and family members have to fight for compensation through litigation However it is not commonly known that the premiums of the labor accident insurance are not shared by the government or workers and 100 of the total amount is paid by the employe

Terminal Deletion of Chromosome 6q

Terminal deletions of chromosome 6q are rare. Clinical features associated with 6q terminal deletion syndrome include psychomotor retardation, seizures, hypotonia, short neck, and facial abnormalities, as well as various case-specific anomalies. Here, we describe a girl with 6q terminal deletion syndrome and unusually short stature. Features of previously described patients are also summarized

Improved aerodynamic optimization for the design of wind turbine blades

A wind turbine rotor converts the kinetic energy of wind to drive a generator which in turn yields electricity. The aerodynamic analysis and the optimization of design parameters for the wind turbine blades are key techniques in the early stage of the development of wind turbine blades. In this study a computational procedure using artificial neural network and numerical optimization techniques was developed for three-dimensional blades design of a wind turbine. The procedure was applied for improving a previously studied wind turbine rotor design. Results showed that the aerodynamic performance of the new blade has remarkable improvement after optimization