Morphology-Aware Interactive Keypoint Estimation

Diagnosis based on medical images, such as X-ray images, often involves manual annotation of anatomical keypoints. However, this process involves significant human efforts and can thus be a bottleneck in the diagnostic process. To fully automate this procedure, deep-learning-based methods have been widely proposed and have achieved high performance in detecting keypoints in medical images. However, these methods still have clinical limitations: accuracy cannot be guaranteed for all cases, and it is necessary for doctors to double-check all predictions of models. In response, we propose a novel deep neural network that, given an X-ray image, automatically detects and refines the anatomical keypoints through a user-interactive system in which doctors can fix mispredicted keypoints with fewer clicks than needed during manual revision. Using our own collected data and the publicly available AASCE dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing the annotation costs via extensive quantitative and qualitative results. A demo video of our approach is available on our project webpage.Comment: MICCAI 2022. The first two authors contributed equally. The last two authors are the co-corresponding author

DRDT: Distributed and Reliable Data Transmission with Cooperative Nodes for Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent studies have shown that in realistic wireless sensor network environments links are extremely unreliable. To recover from corrupted packets, most routing schemes with an assumption of ideal radio environments use a retransmission mechanism, which may cause unnecessary retransmissions. Therefore, guaranteeing energy-efficient reliable data transmission is a fundamental routing issue in wireless sensor networks. However, it is not encouraged to propose a new reliable routing scheme in the sense that every existing routing scheme cannot be replaced with the new one. This paper proposes a Distributed and Reliable Data Transmission (DRDT) scheme with a goal to efficiently guarantee reliable data transmission. In particular, this is based on a pluggable modular approach so that it can be extended to existing routing schemes. DRDT offers reliable data transmission using neighbor nodes, i.e., helper nodes. A helper node is selected among the neighbor nodes of the receiver node which overhear the data packet in a distributed manner. DRDT effectively reduces the number of retransmissions by delegating the retransmission task from the sender node to the helper node that has higher link quality to the receiver node when the data packet reception fails due to the low link quality between the sender and the receiver nodes. Comprehensive simulation results show that DRDT improves end-to-end transmission cost by up to about 45% and reduces its delay by about 40% compared to existing schemes

The Balloon Dilatation and Large Profile Catheter Maintenance Method for the Management of the Bile Duct Stricture Following Liver Transplantation

We dated a continuous, ∼22-m long sediment sequence from Lake Challa (Mt. Kilimanjaro area, Kenya/Tanzania) to produce a solid chronological framework for multi-proxy reconstructions of climate and environmental change in equatorial East Africa over the past 25,000 years. The age model is based on a total of 168 AMS 14C dates on bulk-organic matter, combined with a 210Pb chronology for recent sediments and corrected for a variable old-carbon age offset. This offset was estimated by i) pairing bulk-organic 14C dates with either 210Pb-derived time markers or 14C dates on grass charcoal, and ii) wiggle-matching high-density series of bulk-organic 14C dates. Variation in the old-carbon age offset through time is relatively modest, ranging from ∼450 yr during glacial and late glacial time to ∼200 yr during the early and mid-Holocene, and increasing again to ∼250 yr today. The screened and corrected 14C dates were calibrated sequentially, statistically constrained by their stratigraphical order. As a result their constrained calendar-age distributions are much narrower, and the calibrated dates more precise, than if each 14C date had been calibrated on its own. The smooth-spline age-depth model has 95% age uncertainty ranges of ∼50-230 yr during the Holocene and ∼250-550 yr in the glacial section of the record. The δ13C values of paired bulk-organic and grass-charcoal samples, and additional 14C dating on selected turbidite horizons, indicates that the old-carbon age offset in Lake Challa is caused by a variable contribution of old terrestrial organic matter eroded from soils, and controlled mainly by changes in vegetation cover within the crater basin