Contrast Enhancement of Brightness-Distorted Images by Improved Adaptive Gamma Correction

As an efficient image contrast enhancement (CE) tool, adaptive gamma correction (AGC) was previously proposed by relating gamma parameter with cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the pixel gray levels within an image. ACG deals well with most dimmed images, but fails for globally bright images and the dimmed images with local bright regions. Such two categories of brightness-distorted images are universal in real scenarios, such as improper exposure and white object regions. In order to attenuate such deficiencies, here we propose an improved AGC algorithm. The novel strategy of negative images is used to realize CE of the bright images, and the gamma correction modulated by truncated CDF is employed to enhance the dimmed ones. As such, local over-enhancement and structure distortion can be alleviated. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our proposed method yields consistently good CE results

DTC: A Dynamic Transaction Chopping Technique for Geo-Replicated Storage Services

Replicating data across geo-distributed datacenters is usually necessary for large scale cloud services to achieve high locality, durability and availability. One of the major challenges in such geo-replicated data services lies in consistency maintenance, which usually suffers from long latency due to costly coordination across datacenters. Among others, transaction chopping is an effective and efficient approach to address this challenge. However, existing chopping is conducted statically during programming, which is stubborn and complex for developers. In this article, we propose Dynamic Transaction Chopping (DTC), a novel technique that does transaction chopping and determines piecewise execution in a dynamic and automatic way. DTC mainly consists of two parts: a dynamic chopper to dynamically divide transactions into pieces according to the data partition scheme, and a conflict detection algorithm to check the safety of the dynamic chopping. Compared with existing techniques, DTC has several advantages: transparency to programmers, flexibility in conflict analysis, high degree of piecewise execution, and adaptability to data partition schemes. A prototype of DTC is implemented to verify the correctness of DTC and evaluate its performance. The experiment results show that our DTC technique can achieve much better performance than similar work

Correlated two-photon scattering in a one-dimensional waveguide coupled to two- or three-level giant atoms

We study the two-photon scattering processes in a one-dimensional waveguide coupled to a two- or three-level giant atom, respectively. The accumulated phase shift between the two coupling points can be utilized to alter the scattering processes. We obtain the exact interacting two-photon scattering wavefunction of these two systems following the Lippmann-Schwinger formalism, from which the analytical expressions of incoherent power spectra and second-order correlations are also derived. The incoherent spectrum, defined by the correlation of the bound state, serves as a useful indication of photon-photon correlation. The second-order correlation function gives a direct measure of photon-photon correlation. For photons scattered by the two-level giant atom, the accumulated phase shift can be used to improve photon-photon correlation,and adjust the evolution of the second-order correlation. In the system of the three-level giant atom, the photon-photon correlation can be substantially increased. Moreover, the photon-photon interactions and correlation distance of scattered photons can be further enhanced by tuning the accumulated phase shift

AdaFuse: Adaptive Medical Image Fusion Based on Spatial-Frequential Cross Attention

Multi-modal medical image fusion is essential for the precise clinical diagnosis and surgical navigation since it can merge the complementary information in multi-modalities into a single image. The quality of the fused image depends on the extracted single modality features as well as the fusion rules for multi-modal information. Existing deep learning-based fusion methods can fully exploit the semantic features of each modality, they cannot distinguish the effective low and high frequency information of each modality and fuse them adaptively. To address this issue, we propose AdaFuse, in which multimodal image information is fused adaptively through frequency-guided attention mechanism based on Fourier transform. Specifically, we propose the cross-attention fusion (CAF) block, which adaptively fuses features of two modalities in the spatial and frequency domains by exchanging key and query values, and then calculates the cross-attention scores between the spatial and frequency features to further guide the spatial-frequential information fusion. The CAF block enhances the high-frequency features of the different modalities so that the details in the fused images can be retained. Moreover, we design a novel loss function composed of structure loss and content loss to preserve both low and high frequency information. Extensive comparison experiments on several datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics. The ablation experiments also validate the effectiveness of the proposed loss and fusion strategy

Attitude and Needs Toward MTM Applications of Chronic Disease in China: A Questionnaire Survey

ObjectiveChronic diseases are characterized by high incidence, long-term medication, and complex types of medication. There are also many corresponding medication therapy management (MTM) applications on the market, such as iCarea, and Medisafe. However, the existing research mainly focuses on how to choose high-quality MTM applications, and few researchers consider the expectations of MTM applications from potential users. The aims of this study were to investigate the demand, attitude, and expectations of the Chinese patients for the MTM applications to support.MethodsFrom August 2019 to December 2019, we created a questionnaire to have knowledge of user needs, preferences, and expectations for MTM applications among 302 chronic patients in Hunan, Guangdong, and other provinces in China. Logistic regression analysis was performed to analyze the risk factors of affecting patients' attitudes toward MTM applications. Then, respondents' expectations and preferences for MTM applications were statistically analyzed. The survey data were merged to provide information for the design of targeted chronic disease MTM applications.ResultsA total of 260 (86.09%) out of 302 patients the respondents were willing to use the MTM applications of chronic disease. The independent influencing factors for using the MTM applications were long-term medication history (OR = 4.45, P < 0.001), willing to learn about medicine knowledge (OR = 3.01, P = 0.04), and wanting to get more professional medication knowledge via Internet (OR = 2.86, P = 0.005). It was worth noting that among those willing to use MTM applications, 55.00% of respondents were willing to use the WeChat applet for MTM, while only 23.46% of respondents preferred other applications. As to the more prevalent WeChat applet for MTM, the majority of participants expected the inclusion of useful modules, such as medication log (62.81%), medication reminder (62.81%), and medication recommendations (57.79%).ConclusionThe participants are willing to use MTM applications of chronic disease, with a preference for the WeChat applet. Patients tended to use MTM applications if they had a long-term medication history or a desire for medical knowledge, especially if they want to get more professional medication knowledge via the Internet. Participants are expected to include in the WeChat applet as medication logs, medication reminders, and medication recommendations which should be taken into serious account for the further development of MTM applications

Immobilization of lipase on chitosan beads for removal of pitch particles from whitewater during papermaking

Pitch deposits originating from alkaline peroxide bleaching of mechanical pulps can seriously decrease the runnability of the paper machine when efforts have been made to increase the reuse of process water. In order to degrade pitch particles present in whitewater, lipase was immobilized on chitosan beads using a binary method. The operational stability of the immobilized lipase and its efficacy for treating whitewater were also preliminary studied. The results showed that the highest activity of immobilized lipase was achieved by using 0.5% 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC) for activation and 0.0025% glutaraldehyde for cross-linking chitosan. The immobilized lipase also exhibited very good operational stability, and the pitch particles present in whitewater could be reduced by 66.8% after treatment with the immobilized lipase

Assessment of the feasibility and coverage of a modified universal hearing screening protocol for use with newborn babies of migrant workers in Beijing

BACKGROUND: Although migrant workers account for the majority of newborns in Beijing, their children are less likely to undergo appropriate universal newborn hearing screening/rescreening (UNHS) than newborns of local non-migrant residents. We hypothesised that this was at least in part due to the inadequacy of the UNHS protocol currently employed for newborn babies, and therefore aimed to modify the protocol to specifically reflect the needs of the migrant population. METHODS: A total of 10,983 healthy babies born to migrant mothers between January 2007 and December 2009 at a Beijing public hospital were investigated for hearing abnormalities according to a modified UNHS protocol. This incorporated two additional/optional otoacoustic emissions (OAE) tests at 24–48 hours and 2 months after birth. Infants not passing a screening test were referred to the next test, until any hearing loss was confirmed by the auditory brainstem response (ABR) test. RESULTS: A total of 98.91% (10983/11104) of all newborn children underwent the initial OAE test, of which 27.22% (2990/10983) failed the test. 1712 of the failed babies underwent the second inpatient OAE test, with739 failing again; thus significantly decreasing the overall positive rate for abnormal hearing from 27.22% to 18.36% ([2990–973 /10983)]; p = 0). Overall, 1147(56.87%) babies underwent the outpatient OAE test again after1-month, of whom 228 failed and were referred for the second outpatient OAE test (i.e. 2.08% (228/10983) referral rate at 1month of age). 141 of these infants underwent the referral test, of whom 103 (73.05%) tested positive again and were referred for a final ABR test for hearing loss (i.e. final referral rate of 1.73% ([228-38/10983] at 2 months of age). Only 54 infants attended the ABR test and 35 (0.32% of the original cohort tested) were diagnosed with abnormal hearing. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows that it is feasible and practical to achieve high coverage rates for screening hearing loss and decrease the referral rates in newborn babies of migrant workers, using a modification of the currently employed UNHS protocol