A Neural Multi-sequence Alignment TeCHnique (NeuMATCH)

The alignment of heterogeneous sequential data (video to text) is an important and challenging problem. Standard techniques for this task, including Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), suffer from inherent drawbacks. Mainly, the Markov assumption implies that, given the immediate past, future alignment decisions are independent of further history. The separation between similarity computation and alignment decision also prevents end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural architecture where alignment actions are implemented as moving data between stacks of Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) blocks. This flexible architecture supports a large variety of alignment tasks, including one-to-one, one-to-many, skipping unmatched elements, and (with extensions) non-monotonic alignment. Extensive experiments on semi-synthetic and real datasets show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2018 (Spotlight). arXiv file includes the paper and the supplemental materia

Abdominal eggshell calcifications in the newborn: meconium peritonitis

Meconium peritonitis is a sterile chemical peritonitis caused by intestinal perforation in-utero or shortly after birth and perforation usually occurs due to intrauterine obstruction. Its incidence is approximately 1 in 35,000 births and the mortality was reported to be 60-80%. The radiographic findings of meconium peritonitis are pneumoperitoneum, intestinal obstruction and abdominal calcifications. The classic eggshell calcification occurs owing to the defensive mechanism of the body against the inflammation in an effort to surround the meconium in the abdominal cavity. In a newborn with abdominal distension, meconium peritonitis should be kept in mind, especially if calcified foci are seen on plain abdominal radiographs, since timely diagnosis and surgery improves the survival rates. We present the case of a female newborn of 34 weeks' gestational age was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with marked abdominal distension. The pregnancy was complicated by maternal polyhydramnios and a cesarean section was performed due to fetal distress. The infant was noted to have a grossly distended abdomen; however, the physical examination was otherwise unremarkable. The abdominal radiograph revealed distension of the bowel loops and free air with multiple peritoneal calcifications (Figure 1). Surgery, performed on day 1 of life, demonstrated ileal atresia and perforation in the distal part of the ileum. Solid meconium, which leaked into the abdominal cavity was removed and the atresic bowel was resected and anastomosed. The infant regained bowel function on postoperative day 7 and discharged home on the third week after gradual advancement to full enteral feeding

Hanhart syndrome: hypoglossia-hypodactylia syndrome

Hanhart syndrome is a congenital disorder that causes an undeveloped tongue and malformed extremities and fingers. Small mouth, short or incompletely developed tongue (hypoglossia), absent or shortened fingers and/or toes, jaw abnormalities such as micrognathia, retrognathia or partially missing mandible (lower jaw), high-arched, narrow, palate, absent or unusually formed arms and/or legs. If the tongue and/or mouth are affected, this can worsen feeding difficulties that are already present due to the craniofacial abnormalities. A diagnosis of Hanhart syndrome is typically made based on the presence of characteristic signs and symptoms. To date, no specific disease-causing genes have been identified. We present the case of a 3000 g male infant who was born at 39 weeks' gestation to a 42-year-old gravida 2 para 2 mother via cesarean section. At the physical examination he was noted to have adactyly at two hands, micrognathia, incompletely developed tongue and high-arched palate. Tongue movements were inadequate because of the small size. When we looked at the pregnancy history the mother took thyroid drugs cause of hypothyroidism after thyroid surgery and there was no family history of congenital anomalies or consanguinity. Due to feeding difficulties he stayed at neonatal intensive care unit. Cranial and abdominal ultrasonographyic examination of the infant was otherwise normal. The infant was discharged home on full oral feedings on day 6

Egg on a string sign

A 2850g male infant was born at 36 weeks gestation to a 26-year-old gravida 1 para 1 mother who did not receive routine prenatal care. Upon delivery he was hospitalized to the neonatal intensive care unit for severe respiratory distress. On physical examination, the infant had marked central cyanosis and a soft systolic murmur. Chest X-ray showed "egg on a string" sign raising suspicion for transposition of the great arteries, which was confirmed by urgent echocardiography and cardiac catheterization. Transposition of the great arteries is the most common cyanotic congenital heart lesion that presents in neonates. The hallmark of the condition is ventriculoarterial discordance and the classic "egg on a string" appearance on chest roentgenograms is found in one third of patients. A continuous infusion of prostaglandin E1 is the mainstay of emergent treatment followed by surgical arterial switch procedure

A huge absence of skin on the trunk: aplasia cutis congenita

A 2590 g female infant was born at 39 weeks' gestation to a 34-year-old gravida 4 para 4 mother via cesarean section. Upon delivery she was noted to have an absence of skin on the huge part of the trunk. Lesion was unilateral, gelatinous and covered by a thin membrane. The pregnancy history was unremarkable, the mother denied having taken any drugs and there was no family history of congenital anomalies or consanguinity. The physical examination of the infant was otherwise unremarkable. Conservative treatment was recommended by dermatologist with gentle cleansing and application of local antibiotics. Ultrasonographic evaluation of abdomen and kranium, echocardiographic evaluation and detailed genetic assessment were normal. The patient was discharged home on full oral feedings on day 6 and recommended follow up at the outpatient dermatology clinic. Definition of aplasia cutis congenita (ACC) is, complete or partial absence or scarcity of skin at birth. ACC can occur anywhere in the body but majority of cases occur on the scalp. In most cases ACC is an isolated skin defect but some cases might be seen with congenital malformations involving the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and central nervous systems. ACC is a rare condition with an incidence of 1/10,000 to 3/10,000 births and the exact mechanism is still unknown. Several factors like genetics, teratogens, intrauterin infections can lead to this condition. Most cases occur sporadically but rare familial cases have been reported. Physicians should remember the possible co-occurrence of other congenital anomalies in these infants

A stitched jaw in the newborn: subglosso-palatal membrane

Subglosso-palatal membrane (SPM) is an extremely rare entity and only a few neonatal cases have been reported in the literature. Anatomically, SPM is a fibrous tissue, extending from the floor of the mouth to the palate. Majority of the cases are recognized during the first feeding with the inability of opening the mouth and latching, thus feeding difficulty is the major sign that prompt the physician to consider the diagnosis. Simple surgical resection of the fibrous band is sufficient for the treatment; however, the practical importance of this entity is that physicians should keep in mind the possible co-occurrence of other congenital anomalies such as cleft lip and palate, micrognathia, microglossia and temporomandibular joint disorders in these infants. We present the case of a 3230g male infant was born at 40 weeks gestation to a 30-year-old gravida 2 para 1 mother via cesarean section. Upon delivery he was noted to have severely restricted oral opening due to a mucous intra-oral band vertically connecting the floor of the mouth to the midline of the hard palate. Tongue movements were intact. The pregnancy history was unremarkable, the mother denied having taken any drugs, there was no family history of congenital anomalies or consanguinity. Immediate surgical resection of the aberrant tissue was performed in the operating room with minimal hemorrhage following excision. The physical examination of the infant was otherwise unremarkable and detailed genetic assessment was also normal. The infant was discharged home on full oral feedings on day 5

SwissDial: Parallel Multidialectal Corpus of Spoken Swiss German

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose natively acquired dialects significantly differ from the formal variety of the language. These dialects are mostly used for verbal communication and do not have standard orthography. This has led to a lack of annotated datasets, rendering the use of many NLP methods infeasible. In this paper, we introduce the first annotated parallel corpus of spoken Swiss German across 8 major dialects, plus a Standard German reference. Our goal has been to create and to make available a basic dataset for employing data-driven NLP applications in Swiss German. We present our data collection procedure in detail and validate the quality of our corpus by conducting experiments with the recent neural models for speech synthesis

Towards Universal Image Embeddings: A Large-Scale Dataset and Challenge for Generic Image Representations

Fine-grained and instance-level recognition methods are commonly trained and evaluated on specific domains, in a model per domain scenario. Such an approach, however, is impractical in real large-scale applications. In this work, we address the problem of universal image embedding, where a single universal model is trained and used in multiple domains. First, we leverage existing domain-specific datasets to carefully construct a new large-scale public benchmark for the evaluation of universal image embeddings, with 241k query images, 1.4M index images and 2.8M training images across 8 different domains and 349k classes. We define suitable metrics, training and evaluation protocols to foster future research in this area. Second, we provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the new dataset, demonstrating that existing approaches and simplistic extensions lead to worse performance than an assembly of models trained for each domain separately. Finally, we conducted a public research competition on this topic, leveraging industrial datasets, which attracted the participation of more than 1k teams worldwide. This exercise generated many interesting research ideas and findings which we present in detail. Project webpage: https://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/univ_emb/Comment: ICCV 2023 Accepte

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries