4,222 research outputs found
Computed tomographic imaging characteristics of the normal canine lacrimal glands.
BackgroundThe canine lacrimal gland (LG) and accessory lacrimal gland of the third eyelid (TEG) are responsible for production of the aqueous portion of the precorneal tear film. Immune-mediated, toxic, neoplastic, or infectious processes can affect the glands directly or can involve adjacent tissues, with secondary gland involvement. Disease affecting these glands can cause keratoconjunctivitis sicca, corneal ulcers, and loss of vision. Due to their location in the orbit, these small structures are difficult to evaluate and measure, making cross-sectional imaging an important diagnostic tool. The detailed cross-sectional imaging appearance of the LG and TEG in dogs using computed tomography (CT) has not been reported to date.ResultsForty-two dogs were imaged, and the length, width, and height were measured and the volume calculated for the LGs & TEGs. The glands were best visualized in contrast-enhanced CT images. The mean volume of the LG was 0.14 cm3 and the TEG was 0.1 cm3. The mean height, width, and length of the LG were, 9.36 mm, 4.29 mm, and 9.35 mm, respectively; the corresponding values for the TEG was 2.02 mm, 9.34 mm, and 7.90 mm. LG and TEG volume were positively correlated with body weight (p < 0.05).ConclusionsContrast-enhanced CT is a valuable tool for noninvasive assessment of canine lacrimal glands
Automating Carotid Intima-Media Thickness Video Interpretation with Convolutional Neural Networks
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality yet largely
preventable, but the key to prevention is to identify at-risk individuals
before adverse events. For predicting individual CVD risk, carotid intima-media
thickness (CIMT), a noninvasive ultrasound method, has proven to be valuable,
offering several advantages over CT coronary artery calcium score. However,
each CIMT examination includes several ultrasound videos, and interpreting each
of these CIMT videos involves three operations: (1) select three end-diastolic
ultrasound frames (EUF) in the video, (2) localize a region of interest (ROI)
in each selected frame, and (3) trace the lumen-intima interface and the
media-adventitia interface in each ROI to measure CIMT. These operations are
tedious, laborious, and time consuming, a serious limitation that hinders the
widespread utilization of CIMT in clinical practice. To overcome this
limitation, this paper presents a new system to automate CIMT video
interpretation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the suggested system
significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The superior
performance is attributable to our unified framework based on convolutional
neural networks (CNNs) coupled with our informative image representation and
effective post-processing of the CNN outputs, which are uniquely designed for
each of the above three operations.Comment: J. Y. Shin, N. Tajbakhsh, R. T. Hurst, C. B. Kendall, and J. Liang.
Automating carotid intima-media thickness video interpretation with
convolutional neural networks. CVPR 2016, pp 2526-2535; N. Tajbakhsh, J. Y.
Shin, R. T. Hurst, C. B. Kendall, and J. Liang. Automatic interpretation of
CIMT videos using convolutional neural networks. Deep Learning for Medical
Image Analysis, Academic Press, 201
Reviewing Technological Solutions of Source Address Validation
It is essential to know the source IP address of a packet to prevent the IP spoofing attack which masquerades the sender\u27s true identity. If there is a way to trace back the origin of the massive DDoS attacks, we could find the responsible parties of the incidents and prevent future attacks by blocking them. Unfortunately, the original TCP/IP stacks don\u27t require the real source IP address to forward the packets to the destination. Malicious attackers can modify the source IP address to hide its true identity and able to send the fraudulent packets to the victim. One of the critical features of the next generation Internet is having a secure Internet which provides trust between participants and protects the privacy of the individuals. In this paper, we review the various approach to provide the source address validation (SAV) schemes. There are many new methods have been proposed, no single way is providing the comprehensive solution to this issue. Privacy is a critical issue to consider when the true identity is available on the network as well
Anatomy-specific classification of medical images using deep convolutional nets
Automated classification of human anatomy is an important prerequisite for
many computer-aided diagnosis systems. The spatial complexity and variability
of anatomy throughout the human body makes classification difficult. "Deep
learning" methods such as convolutional networks (ConvNets) outperform other
state-of-the-art methods in image classification tasks. In this work, we
present a method for organ- or body-part-specific anatomical classification of
medical images acquired using computed tomography (CT) with ConvNets. We train
a ConvNet, using 4,298 separate axial 2D key-images to learn 5 anatomical
classes. Key-images were mined from a hospital PACS archive, using a set of
1,675 patients. We show that a data augmentation approach can help to enrich
the data set and improve classification performance. Using ConvNets and data
augmentation, we achieve anatomy-specific classification error of 5.9 % and
area-under-the-curve (AUC) values of an average of 0.998 in testing. We
demonstrate that deep learning can be used to train very reliable and accurate
classifiers that could initialize further computer-aided diagnosis.Comment: Presented at: 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical
Imaging, April 16-19, 2015, New York Marriott at Brooklyn Bridge, NY, US
Bioreactor scalability: laboratory-scale bioreactor design influences performance, ecology, and community physiology in expanded granular sludge bed bioreactors
Studies investigating the feasibility of new, or improved, biotechnologies, such as wastewater treatment digesters, inevitably start with laboratory-scale trials. However, it is rarely determined whether laboratory-scale results reflect full-scale performance or microbial ecology. The Expanded Granular Sludge Bed (EGSB) bioreactor, which is a high-rate anaerobic digester configuration, was used as a model to address that knowledge gap in this study. Two laboratory-scale idealizations of the EGSB—a one-dimensional and a three- dimensional scale-down of a full-scale design—were built and operated in triplicate under near-identical conditions to a full-scale EGSB. The laboratory-scale bioreactors were seeded using biomass obtained from the full-scale bioreactor, and, spent water from the distillation of whisky from maize was applied as substrate at both scales. Over 70 days, bioreactor performance, microbial ecology, and microbial community physiology were monitored at various depths in the sludge-beds using 16S rRNA gene sequencing (V4 region), specific methanogenic activity (SMA) assays, and a range of physical and chemical monitoring methods. SMA assays indicated dominance of the hydrogenotrophic pathway at full-scale whilst a more balanced activity profile developed during the laboratory-scale trials. At each scale, Methanobacterium was the dominant methanogenic genus present. Bioreactor performance overall was better at laboratory-scale than full-scale. We observed that bioreactor design at laboratory-scale significantly influenced spatial distribution of microbial community physiology and taxonomy in the bioreactor sludge-bed, with 1-D bioreactor types promoting stratification of each. In the 1-D laboratory bioreactors, increased abundance of Firmicutes was associated with both granule position in the sludge bed and increased activity against acetate and ethanol as substrates. We further observed that stratification in the sludge-bed in 1-D laboratory-scale bioreactors was associated with increased richness in the underlying microbial community at species (OTU) level and improved overall performance
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