Postmortem Analyses Unveil the Poor Efficacy of Decontamination, Anti-Inflammatory and Immunosuppressive Therapies in Paraquat Human Intoxications

studies resulting from human PQ poisonings have assessed the relationship of these therapeutic measures with PQ toxicokinetics and related histopathological lesions, these being the aims of the present study.For that purpose, during 2008, we collected human fluids and tissues from five forensic autopsies following fatal PQ poisonings. PQ levels were measured by gas chromatography-ion trap mass spectrometry. Structural inflammatory lesions were evaluated by histological and immunohistochemistry analysis. The samples of cardiac blood, urine, gastric and duodenal wall, liver, lung, kidney, heart and diaphragm, showed quantifiable levels of PQ even at 6 days post-intoxication. Structural analysis showed diffused necrotic areas, intense macrophage activation and leukocyte infiltration in all analyzed tissues. By immunohistochemistry it was possible to observe a strong nuclear factor kappa-B (NF-κB) activation and excessive collagen deposition.Considering the observed PQ levels in all analyzed tissues and the expressive inflammatory reaction that ultimately leads to fibrosis, we conclude that the therapeutic protocol usually performed needs to be reviewed, in order to increase the efficacy of PQ elimination from the body as well as to diminish the inflammatory process

Compact video description for copy detection with precise temporal alignment

Abstract. This paper introduces a very compact yet discriminative video description, which allows example-based search in a large number of frames corresponding to thousands of hours of video. Our description extracts one descriptor per indexed video frame by aggregating a set of local descriptors. These frame descriptors are encoded using a time-aware hierarchical indexing structure. A modified temporal Hough voting scheme is used to rank the retrieved database videos and estimate segments in them that match the query. If we use a dense temporal description of the videos, matched video segments are localized with excellent precision. Experimental results on the Trecvid 2008 copy detection task and a set of 38000 videos from YouTube show that our method offers an excellent trade-off between search accuracy, efficiency and memory usage.

Clip-based hierarchical representation for near-duplicate video detection

Searching for near-duplicate content has become an important task in many multimedia applications, for example, images, videos and music. The ability to detect duplicate videos plays an important role in several video applications, for example, effective video search, copyright infringement and the study on users’ behaviour on near-duplicate video production. Current web video search systems rely only on text keywords and, hence, fail to detect many duplicate videos. In this paper, we analyse the problem of near-duplicate detection and propose a practical solution for real-time large-scale video retrieval. Unlike many existing approaches which make use of video frames or key-frames, our solution is based on a more discriminative signature of video clips. The feature used in this paper is an extension of ordinal measures which have proven to be robust to change in brightness, compression formats and compression ratios. For efficient retrieval,wepropose to use multi-probe locality sensitive hashing (MPLSH) to index the video clips for fast similarity search and high recall. MPLSH is able to filter out a large number of dissimilar clips from video database. To refine the search process, we apply a similarity voting based on video clip signatures. Experimental results on the dataset of 12,790 web videos show that the proposed approach improves average precision over the baseline colour histogram approach while satisfying real-time requirements.Sakrapee Paisitkriangkrai, Tao Meib, Jian Zhang and Xian-Sheng Hu

Comparative analysis of Middle Stone Age artifacts in Africa (CoMSAfrica)

Spatial and temporal variation among African Middle Stone Age (MSA) archeological assemblages provide essential cultural and behavioral data for understanding the origin, evolution, diversification, and dispersal of Homo sapiens—and, possibly, interactions with other hominin taxa. However, incorporating archeological data into a robust framework suited to replicable, quantitative analyses that can be integrated with observations drawn from studies of the human genome, hominin morphology, and paleoenvironmental contexts requires the development of a unified comparative approach and shared units of analysis. Lithic (stone) artifacts provide the fundamental source of information for continental‐scale comparisons of past hominin behavior because they quantitatively dominate the Paleolithic record, and unlike organic artifacts made of bone or shell, they are preserved in a larger variety of depositional settings. However, attempts to integrate African MSA lithic data from different periods or regions have suffered from divergent research traditions among archeologists that employ incompatible approaches, definitions, and data collection methods. Communication among analysts is further constrained by the presence of varied theoretical and methodological schools, including analytical grammars that may represent distinct ways of viewing, describing, measuring, and interpreting the world (i.e., attribute analysis vs. chaîne opératoire). These issues are further exacerbated by differences in geography, geology, ecology, and research intensity between different parts of Africa. Archeologists across Africa thus lack a common, intersubjective and transparent system for lithic analysis, with currently few shared basic definitions or protocols of measurements. Yet, objectivity and replicability are two functional requirements of science

L'Homme et l'obsidienne dans la Corne de l'Afrique entre OIS3 et Holocène moyen

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