260 research outputs found
On the Spectrum of a Class of Distance-transitive Graphs
Let be the Cayley graph on the cyclic additive group where , \dots , are the inverse-closed subsets of for any , . In this paper, we will show that if and only if . Also, we will show that if is an even integer and then where and in this case, we show that is an integral graph
Assessment of cd93 stem cell growth and survival on three-dimensional biodegradable pcl-gelatin scaffold
Background and purpose: Application of three-dimensional scaffolds with the ability to simulate a three-dimensional in vivo environment has opened new perspective on targeted differentiation and therapeutic use of stem cells. In this study we examined the compatibility of CD93 stem cells with biodegradable pcl- gelatin scaffold. Materials and methods: In this experimental study, three-dimensional scaffolds made of PCL -gelatin using electrospining synthesis and its molecular structure was tested by SEM electron microscopy. The scaffold surface was disinfected by UV ray. The hematopoietic CD93stem cells of those isolated previously were divided into two groups including normal cultured (plate) and culture on scaffolds (scaffold + cell). The survival and growth of the cells were measured through MTT assay and electron microscopy at 7, 14, and 28 days after culturing. Results: Electron microscopic analysis on the seventh day showed appropriate adhesion of CD93 cells on scaffold fibers and secretion of extracellular matrix. Survival rate of the cells at 7, 14, and 28 days after culturing were not significantly different between the two groups. But at the same days significant differences were observed in the Scaffold + Cell group (P< 0.05). Conclusion: This study suggests that PCL nanofiber scaffolds has high compatibility with CD93 stem cells and proximity to this scaffold lead to increased survival and growth of the cells. Further studies on the treatment of tissue damage and scarring by CD93 stem cells using this scaffold can be effective in increasing treatment efficiency. © 2016, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved
Trading-off Mutual Information on Feature Aggregation for Face Recognition
Despite the advances in the field of Face Recognition (FR), the precision of
these methods is not yet sufficient. To improve the FR performance, this paper
proposes a technique to aggregate the outputs of two state-of-the-art (SOTA)
deep FR models, namely ArcFace and AdaFace. In our approach, we leverage the
transformer attention mechanism to exploit the relationship between different
parts of two feature maps. By doing so, we aim to enhance the overall
discriminative power of the FR system. One of the challenges in feature
aggregation is the effective modeling of both local and global dependencies.
Conventional transformers are known for their ability to capture long-range
dependencies, but they often struggle with modeling local dependencies
accurately. To address this limitation, we augment the self-attention mechanism
to capture both local and global dependencies effectively. This allows our
model to take advantage of the overlapping receptive fields present in
corresponding locations of the feature maps. However, fusing two feature maps
from different FR models might introduce redundancies to the face embedding.
Since these models often share identical backbone architectures, the resulting
feature maps may contain overlapping information, which can mislead the
training process. To overcome this problem, we leverage the principle of
Information Bottleneck to obtain a maximally informative facial representation.
This ensures that the aggregated features retain the most relevant and
discriminative information while minimizing redundant or misleading details. To
evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on
popular benchmarks and compared our results with state-of-the-art algorithms.
The consistent improvement we observed in these benchmarks demonstrates the
efficacy of our approach in enhancing FR performance.Comment: Accepted to 22 IEEE International Conference on Machine
Learning and Applications 2023 (ICMLA
PRM78 Impact of multiple treatment comparison meta-analysis on value of information evaluations: a case study of pharmacotherapies for chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases
Remyelination of the corpus callosum by olfactory ensheathing cell in an experimental model of multiple sclerosis
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) causes loss of the myelin sheath, which leads to loss of neurons. Regeneration of myelin sheath stimulates axon regeneration and neurons� survival. In this study, olfactory ensheathing cell (OEC) transplantation is investigated to restore myelin sheath in an experimental model of MS in male mice.OECs were isolated from the olfactory mucosa of seven-day-old infant rats and cultured. Then, cells were evaluated and approved by flow cytometry by p75 and GFAP markers. A total of 32 mice (C57BL /6) were studied in four groups; 1) without any treatment (control), 2) Sham (receiving PBS), 3) MS model and 4) MS and OEC transplantation. MS was induced by adding Cuprizon in the diet of animals for six weeks. After the expiration of 20 days, histologic analysis was performed with approval of the presence of cells in the graft area and the removal of myelin and myelin regeneration with two types of luxal fast blue (LFB) staining and immunohistochemistry. The purity of the cells ensheathing the olfactory was 90. There was a significant difference in Myelin percentage of PBS and OEC recipient groups (P�0.05). MBP and PLP of the myelin sheath in the group receiving OECs were more than MS group.According to the findings, in MS model MBP and PLP of the myelin sheath is reduced. In the group receiving OECs, it was returned to a normal level significantly compared to the sham group received only PBS significant differences were observed. The OECs transplantation can improve myelin restoration. © 2015 Tehran University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved
Multi-Context Dual Hyper-Prior Neural Image Compression
Transform and entropy models are the two core components in deep image
compression neural networks. Most existing learning-based image compression
methods utilize convolutional-based transform, which lacks the ability to model
long-range dependencies, primarily due to the limited receptive field of the
convolution operation. To address this limitation, we propose a
Transformer-based nonlinear transform. This transform has the remarkable
ability to efficiently capture both local and global information from the input
image, leading to a more decorrelated latent representation. In addition, we
introduce a novel entropy model that incorporates two different hyperpriors to
model cross-channel and spatial dependencies of the latent representation. To
further improve the entropy model, we add a global context that leverages
distant relationships to predict the current latent more accurately. This
global context employs a causal attention mechanism to extract long-range
information in a content-dependent manner. Our experiments show that our
proposed framework performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in terms
of rate-distortion performance.Comment: Accepted to IEEE 22 International Conference on Machine Learning
and Applications 2023 (ICMLA) - Selected for Oral Presentatio
Association between Women Empowerment and Social Support in the Reproductive Decision-Making of the Women Referring to the Health Centers in Sari, Iran (2017)
Background: Empowerment of women is considered to be a critical developmental strategy.
Objectives: Today, empowerment of women is not only a priority, but it also is an urgent need of women as a one of the most important populations considering their roles in the family and community. Social support and empowerment of women are regarded as an investment for future generations, which will result in sustainable development. The present study aimed to explore the association between the social support and empowerment of women with their reproductive decisions in the health centers in Sari, Iran.
Methods: This descriptive-correlational study was conducted on 400 women referring to the health centers in Sari, Iran in 2017. The subjects who met the inclusion criteria were selected via multistage cluster sampling. Data were collected using a demographic and reproductive characteristics questionnaire, multidimensional scale of perceived social support, and the questionnaire of women empowerment and reproductive behavior. Data analysis was performed in SPSS version 16.
Results: The subjects had a moderate level of empowerment in their reproductive decisions. On the other hand, favorable and poor empowerment levels were observed in the dimensions of cultural background and family planning, respectively. Furthermore, social support had a direct, significant correlation with the empowerment of women in reproductive decisions (P=0.001; r=0.34).
Conclusion: According to the results, the empowerment and social support of women are imperative issues that require special attention and investment considering the key role of women in promoting community health
Frequency Disentangled Features in Neural Image Compression
The design of a neural image compression network is governed by how well the
entropy model matches the true distribution of the latent code. Apart from the
model capacity, this ability is indirectly under the effect of how close the
relaxed quantization is to the actual hard quantization. Optimizing the
parameters of a rate-distortion variational autoencoder (R-D VAE) is ruled by
this approximated quantization scheme. In this paper, we propose a
feature-level frequency disentanglement to help the relaxed scalar quantization
achieve lower bit rates by guiding the high entropy latent features to include
most of the low-frequency texture of the image. In addition, to strengthen the
de-correlating power of the transformer-based analysis/synthesis transform, an
augmented self-attention score calculation based on the Hadamard product is
utilized during both encoding and decoding. Channel-wise autoregressive entropy
modeling takes advantage of the proposed frequency separation as it inherently
directs high-informational low-frequency channels to the first chunks and
conditions the future chunks on it. The proposed network not only outperforms
hand-engineered codecs, but also neural network-based codecs built on
computation-heavy spatially autoregressive entropy models.Comment: Accepted to 30 IEEE International Conference on Image
Processing (ICIP 2023
On the response to hygrothermal aging of pultruded FRPs used in the civil engineering sector
This paper presents the effects of hygrothermal aging on the durability of a pultruded flat sheet, immersed in distilled water at 25oC, 40oC, 60oC or 80oC for a period of 224 days. Elevated temperatures noticeably increase the moisture diffusion coefficient and moisture uptake behaviour. Measured changes in the tensile and in-plane shear mechanical properties were examined after 28, 56, 112 or 224 days. Tensile properties remained practically unaffected by aging whereas matrix dominated shear properties revealed an initial drop which was recovered to a substantial degree after further hygrothermal aging. Visco-elastic property changes due to the superimposing mechanisms of plasticization, additional cross-linking etc. were recorded. Scanning Electron Microscopy micrographs indicate that the fibre/matrix interface remained practically intact, even after the most aggressive hot/wet aging. X-Ray Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy analysis showed no chemical degradation incidents on the fibre reinforcement surfaces and infrared spectroscopy revealed superficial chemical alteration in the aging matrix. Optical microscopy revealed matrix cracking in samples aged at 80oC for 112 days. Lastly, Computed Tomography scans of un-aged material showed internal imperfections that undoubtedly enhanced moisture transport. After aging at 60oC for 112 days, Computed Tomography detected preferentially situated water pockets
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