Unsupervised Saliency Estimation based on Robust Hypotheses

Visual saliency estimation based on optimization models is gaining increasing popularity recently. In this paper, we formulate saliency estimation as a quadratic program (QP) problem based on robust hypotheses. First, we propose an adaptive center-based bias hypothesis to replace the most common image center-based center-bias. It calculates the weighted center by utilizing local contrast which is much more robust when the objects are far away from the image center. Second, we model smoothness term on saliency statistics of each color. It forces the pixels with similar colors to have similar saliency statistics. The proposed smoothness term is more robust than the smoothness term based on region dissimilarity when the image has complicated background or low contrast. The primal-dual interior point method is applied to optimize the proposed QP in polynomial time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform 10 state-of-the-art methods on three public benchmark datasets

Hospital-acquired invasive pulmonary aspergillosis in patients with hepatic failure

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) is a rapid, progressive, fatal disease that occurs mostly in immunocompromised patients. Patients with severe liver disease are at a heightened risk for infections. Little is known about the clinical presentation including predisposing factors and treatment of IPA in patients with hepatic failure.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Medical records of patients with hepatic failure between November 2005 and February 2007 were reviewed for lung infection. Nine medical records of definitive diagnosis of IPA and three of probable IPA were identified.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The main predisposing factors were found to be prolonged antibiotic therapy and steroid exposure. Clinical signs and radiological findings were non-specific and atypical. Timely use of caspofungin was found to reduce the mortality due to the disease.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A high index of suspicion is required for early IPA diagnosis in patients with hepatic failure.</p