Evaluating a childhood obesity program with the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework.

Primary care providers can use behavioral lifestyle interventions to effectively treat children with overweight and obesity, but implementing these interventions is challenging. Most childhood obesity intervention evaluation studies focus on effectiveness. Few studies describe implementation. Our goal was to evaluate critical components of a childhood obesity intervention in primary care. We conducted a pilot implementation study of an existing structured lifestyle intervention in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland from 2013 to 2015. The intervention consisted of 10 sessions, led by a primary care physician. It included children aged 6-8 years old, with BMI over the 90th age-adjusted percentile. We used the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance (RE-AIM) evaluation framework to describe the pilot implementation study. We stratified description of RE-AIM components at the patient- and physician-level. For Reach: 864 children were screened; 65 were overweight; 394 physicians were invited to participate in the study. For Effectiveness: BMI z-score significantly decreased (-5.6%, p = 0.01). For Adoption: 14 participating physicians treated 26 patients. Implementation: the mean number of consultations was 8. For Maintenance: 9 (35%) children discontinued the intervention; 7 (50%) of physicians continued to apply at least one component of the intervention. The summarized components of the program within the RE-AIM framework suggest the program was successful. Stakeholders can use our results if they intend to disseminate and evaluate similar interventions in different settings

The JWST early-release science program for direct observations of exoplanetary systems II: A 1 to 20 μm spectrum of the planetary-mass companion VHS 1256-1257 b

Stars and planetary system

Cost-sensitive learning in social image tagging: review, new ideas and evaluation

Visual concept learning typically requires a set of expert labeled, manual training images. However, acquiring a sufficient number of reliable annotations can be time-consuming or impractical. Therefore, in many situations it is preferable to perform unsupervised learning on user contributed tags from abundant sources such as social Internet communities and websites. Cost-sensitive learning is a natural approach toward unsupervised visual concept learning because it fundamentally optimizes the learning system accuracy regarding the cost of an error. This paper reviews the problem of cost-sensitive unsupervised learning of visual concepts from social images, presents the new ideas, and gives a comparative evaluation of representative approaches from the research literature

Efficient Content-based Image Retrieval in Digital Picture Collections Using Projections: (Near)-Copy location

Digital storage of large photo collections opens the way to computer-aided queries based on visual rather than thematic search patterns. The objective of our queries in this research was the 19th-century mass-produced studio portrait or carte-de-visite, whose front and back sides provide a testbed for gray level and binary images classes. We established a ground truth for detecting highly similar images (former copies) in different classes of B/W images. The results will serve as a reference benchmark for yet to be developed visual search methods. The similarity measure used for locating near-copies was the average distance in pixel intensity for shifted image pairs with normalized position, orientation, resolution and lighting. To measure the performance of possible hierarchical comparison and ranking protocols, we scanned in test sets of known copies and near-copies together with over a thousand similar format pictures. The results show that projections are highly effective and effic..

Toward noninvasive monitoring of ongoing electrical activity of human uterus and fetal heart and brain

Objective: To evaluate whether a full-coverage fetal-maternal scanner can noninvasively monitor ongoing electrophysiological activity of maternal and fetal organs. Methods: A simulation study was carried out for a scanner with an array of magnetic field sensors placed all around the torso from the chest to the hip within a horizontal magnetic shielding enclosure. The magnetic fields from internal organs and an external noise source were computed for a pregnant woman with a 35-week old fetus. Signal processing methods were used to reject the external and internal interferences, to visualize uterine activity, and to detect activity of fetal heart and brain. Results: External interference was reduced by a factor of 1000, sufficient for detecting signals from internal organs when combined with passive and active shielding. The scanner rejects internal interferences better than partial-coverage arrays. It can be used to estimate currents around the uterus. It clearly detects spontaneous activity from the fetal heart and brain without averaging and weaker evoked brain activity at all fetal head positions after averaging. Conclusion: The simulated device will be able to monitor the ongoing activity of the fetal and maternal organs. Significance This type of scanner may become a novel tool in fetal medicine

Systems and Architectures for Multimedia Information Retrieval

In this paper, we provide a brief survey on multimedia information retrieval and we introduce some ideas investigated in the special issue. We hope that the contributions of this issue will stimulate the readers to tackle the current challenges and problems in this highly important research direction. Such contributions are the basis of tomorrow's multimedia information systems. Our aims are to clarify some notions raised by this new technology by reviewing its current capabilities and potential usefulness to users in various areas. The research and development issues cover a wide range of fields, many of which are shared with media processing, signal processing, database technologies, and data mining