Universal Engineering Programmer - An In-house Development Tool For Developing and Testing Implantable Medical Devices In St. Jude Medical

During development and testing of the functionality of the pacemaker and defibrillator device, engineers in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division use an in-house development tool called Universal Engineering Programmer (UEP) to ensure the device functions as expected, before it can be used to test on an animal or a human during the implantation process. In addition, some applications of UEP are incorporated into the official releases of the device product. UEP has been developed and used by engineers across departments in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division (CRMD). This thesis covers the flexible and reusable design and implementation of UEP features, to allow engineers to easily and effectively develop and test the devices

A Study of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Utilization in Sunday Catechism Classes in the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City

The current study was carried out in the context of Church efforts to promote the utilization of ICT in religious activities, especially in catechism education to children and adolescents in the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City. In this day and age, information and communication technology (ICT) has become an important integrated component in every area of people’s lives from the workplace and to the school/educational environment, from social activities to religious practices. The Church acknowledges that these ICT advances provide people with various ways of learning new knowledge, sharing ideas and faith, and expanding means of communicating with other people, creatively and conveniently. This research was conducted in May, 2012. The quantitative research approach was employed by means of a survey questionnaire. Data obtained from 351 lay catechists were statistically analyzed in order to identify the types of ICT used in catechesis classes and, at the same time, to examine gender and age differences in ICT utilization. The results of data analysis revealed the following: (a) lay catechists used different types of ICT to support their teaching practice, with Internet/Catholic websites being the most frequently used ICT tool, followed by mobile phone, and then by desktop/laptop computer; (b) there are no differences within catechists’ gender in the use of ICT tools for catechism activities in catechism classes; and (c) there are no differences among catechists’ ages in the use of ICT tools for catechism activities in catechism classes.

Supervised Hashing with End-to-End Binary Deep Neural Network

Image hashing is a popular technique applied to large scale content-based visual retrieval due to its compact and efficient binary codes. Our work proposes a new end-to-end deep network architecture for supervised hashing which directly learns binary codes from input images and maintains good properties over binary codes such as similarity preservation, independence, and balancing. Furthermore, we also propose a new learning scheme that can cope with the binary constrained loss function. The proposed algorithm not only is scalable for learning over large-scale datasets but also outperforms state-of-the-art supervised hashing methods, which are illustrated throughout extensive experiments from various image retrieval benchmarks.Comment: Accepted to IEEE ICIP 201

Molecular characterization of porcine genes encoding complement components of the terminal lytic pathway and their association with hemolytic complement activity

Activation of the complement system from three different pathways (classical, alternative and lectin pathway) results in the generation of the C3-convertase enzyme, which plays a key role in formation of the membrane attack complex (C5b-C9) causing the death of target cells. The porcine C3 and C5 complement components were characterized and studied for association with hemolytic complement activity (Kumar et al. 2004, Wimmers et al. 2003). In order to gain understanding for the membrane attack complex action in the innate immune mechanism, in this study it was focussed on the terminal complement components C6, C7, C8, and C9 to characterize their molecular structure, to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), to establish their location on chromosome, and to associate their genetic variation with hemolytic complement activity in both classical and alternative pathway in the pig. The entire length of cDNA sequence of the candidate genes C6, C7, C8A, C8B, C8G and C9 were identified with 3306, 3561, 2146, 2461, 840 and 2536 bp encoding 935, 843, 589, 611, 202 and 543 amino acids, respectively. The porcine deduced protein sequence of the candidate genes showed 67-83% identities with human analogue. Respectively, screening the coding region revealed five, six, seven, nine, and two SNPs in the porcine C6, C7, C8A, C8B, and C9 but non in C8G by polymerase chain reactionrestriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). Most of the SNPs belong to the functional protein domains such as TSP1, LDLa, MACPF, CCP and FIMAC. Genotyping for several SNP sites in three porcine breeds German Landrace (LR), Pietrain (PIE) and Muong Khuong (MK) showed that European breeds (LR and PIE) had higher allelic variation than the Asian breed (MK). All genotypic frequencies fit to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium rule. Using the INRA-Minnesota porcine Radiation Hybrid mapping panel, the porcine C6, C7, and C9 were assigned to the q-arm of chromosome 16 (q1.4) whereas the porcine C8A, and C8B were mapped to chromosome 6 (q3.1-q3.5). Particularly the porcine C8G was located on chromosome 1 (q2.13). Genetic association with hemolytic complement activity in both classical (CH50) and alternative pathway (AH50) was carried out in 417 animals of a F2 DUMI resource population derived from cross between Duroc and Berlin Miniature Pig. Therefore, the F2 DUMI animals were immunized with Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae (Mh), Aujeszky (ADV) and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRSV) vaccine. Sera were isolated from blood samples taken prior and post vaccinations and measurement for CH50 and AH50 was conducted thereafter. For each gene except the porcine C8G, the SNP site with amino acid substitution 862A→G for C6, 881A→G for C7, 1544C→T for C8A, 222C→T for C8B, and 407C→G for C9, segregating in the DUMI, were used for genotyping the F2 animals using PCR-RFLP with the restriction enzymes TaqI, MboII, Hin6I, FnuDII, and HpyCH4III, respectively. The association results illustrated that significant difference in hemolysis among genotypes was found in CH50 for C7 (p=0.0080), and C9 (p=0.0488). However, this was close to significance for C6 (p=0.0853) and C8A (p=0.0650) in CH50. Therefore between homozygous genotypes CC and TT for C8A hemolytic activity showed significant difference (p=0.0522). There was no association of any of the candidate gene with hemolytic complement activity in the alternative pathway. Analyzing the interaction between genotypes and eight different immunization time points in AH50 revealed significant differences for C8A (p=0.0027), C8B (p=0.0231), and C9 (p=0.0340) whereas in CH50 this interaction was found significant for C8B (p=0.0048). Hemolytic complement activity showed the highest values at the fourth day after immunization with ADV vaccine for CH50 whereas linear increment during the experiment was performed for AH50. Along the vaccination program after each of complement stimulation by different vaccines, a short termed increment of complement activity was found, especially with ADV vaccine. Also male animals always performed higher hemolysis than females in both pathways. These results show that hemolytic complement activity depends on the genetic variation, sex, age, kind of vaccine, and interaction of complement components. In summary, the obtained results provide the means for further understanding the role of C6, C7, C8, and C9 in natural immune response of the host against pathogens. It also promotes the porcine C6, C7, C8, and C9 as candidate genes in efforts to genetically improve general animal health, a goal of breeding programmes for food animals

Selective Deep Convolutional Features for Image Retrieval

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a very powerful approach to extract discriminative local descriptors for effective image search. Recent work adopts fine-tuned strategies to further improve the discriminative power of the descriptors. Taking a different approach, in this paper, we propose a novel framework to achieve competitive retrieval performance. Firstly, we propose various masking schemes, namely SIFT-mask, SUM-mask, and MAX-mask, to select a representative subset of local convolutional features and remove a large number of redundant features. We demonstrate that this can effectively address the burstiness issue and improve retrieval accuracy. Secondly, we propose to employ recent embedding and aggregating methods to further enhance feature discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy.Comment: Accepted to ACM MM 201

Microscopic study of the isoscalar giant resonances in 208Pb induced by inelastic alpha scattering

The energetic beam of (spin and isospin zero) $\alpha$-particles remains a very efficient probe for the nuclear isoscalar giant resonances. In the present work, a microscopic folding model study of the isoscalar giant resonances in $^{208}$Pb induced by inelastic \aPb scattering at $E_{\rm lab}=240$ and 386 MeV has been performed using the (complex) CDM3Y6 interaction and nuclear transition densities given by both the collective model and Random Phase Approximation (RPA) approach. The fractions of energy weighted sum rule around the main peaks of the isoscalar monopole, dipole and quadrupole giant resonances were probed in the Distorted Wave Born Approximation analysis of inelastic \aPb scattering using the double-folded form factors given by different choices of the nuclear transition densities. The energy distribution of the $E0, E1$ and $E2$ strengths given by the multipole decomposition {analyses} of the \aap data under study are compared with those predicted by the RPA calculation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nuclear Physics