The CorDis Corpus Mark-up and Related Issues

CorDis is a large, XML, TEI-conformant, POS-tagged, multimodal, multigenre corpus representing a significant portion of the political and media discourse on the 2003 Iraqi conflict. It was generated from different sub-corpora which had been assembled by various research groups, ranging from official transcripts of Parliamentary sessions, both in the US and the UK, to the transcripts of the Hutton Inquiry, from American and British newspaper coverage of the conflict to White House press briefings and to transcriptions of American and British TV news programmes. The heterogeneity of the data, the specificity of the genres and the diverse discourse analytical purposes of different groups had led to a wide range of coding strategies being employed to make textual and meta-textual information retrievable. The main purpose of this paper is to show the process of harmonisation and integration whereby a loose collection of texts has become a stable architecture. The TEI proved a valid instrument to achieve standardisation of mark-up. The guidelines provide for a hierarchical organisation which gives the corpus a sound structure favouring replicability and enhancing the reliability of research. In discussing some examples of the problems encountered in the annotation, we will deal with issues like consistency and re-usability, and will examine the constraints imposed on data handling by specific research objectives. Examples include the choice to code the same speakers in different ways depending on the various (institutional) roles they may assume throughout the corpus, the distinction between quotations of spoken or written discourse and quotations read aloud in the course of a spoken text, and the segmentation of portions of news according to participants interaction and use of camera/voiceover

Operative and nonoperative management for renal trauma. Comparison of outcomes. A systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: Preservation of kidney and renal function is the goal of nonoperative management (NOM) of renal trauma (RT). The advantages of NOM for minor blunt RT have already been clearly described, but its value for major blunt and penetrating RT is still under debate. We present a systematic review and meta-analysis on NOM for RT, which was compared with the operative management (OM) with respect to mortality, morbidity, and length of hospital stay (LOS). METHODS: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses statement was followed for this study. A systematic search was performed on Embase, Medline, Cochrane, and PubMed for studies published up to December 2015, without language restrictions, which compared NOM versus OM for renal injuries. RESULTS: Twenty nonrandomized retrospective cohort studies comprising 13,824 patients with blunt (2,998) or penetrating (10,826) RT were identified. When all RT were considered (American Association for the Surgery of Trauma grades 1-5), NOM was associated with lower mortality and morbidity rates compared to OM (8.3% vs 17.1%, odds ratio [OR] 0.471; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.404-0.548; P<0.001 and 2% vs 53.3%, OR 0.0484; 95% CI 0.0279-0.0839, P<0.001). Likewise, NOM represented the gold standard treatment resulting in a lower mortality rate compared to OM even when only high-grade RT was considered (9.1% vs 17.9%, OR 0.332; 95% CI 0.155-0.708; P=0.004), be they blunt (4.1% vs 8.1%, OR 0.275; 95% CI 0.0957-0.788; P=0.016) or penetrating (9.1% vs 18.1%, OR 0.468; 95% CI 0.398-0.0552; P<0.001). CONCLUSION: Our meta-analysis demonstrated that NOM for RT is the treatment of choice not only for AAST grades 1 and 2, but also for higher grade blunt and penetrating RT

What is the best data augmentation for 3D brain tumor segmentation?

Training segmentation networks requires large annotated datasets, which in medical imaging can be hard to obtain. Despite this fact, data augmentation has in our opinion not been fully explored for brain tumor segmentation. In this project we apply different types of data augmentation (flipping, rotation, scaling, brightness adjustment, elastic deformation) when training a standard 3D U-Net, and demonstrate that augmentation significantly improves the network's performance in many cases. Our conclusion is that brightness augmentation and elastic deformation work best, and that combinations of different augmentation techniques do not provide further improvement compared to only using one augmentation technique. Our code is available at https://github.com/mdciri/3D-augmentation-techniques

Vox2Vox: 3D-GAN for Brain Tumour Segmentation

Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histological sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edema, necrotic core, enhancing and non-enhancing tumour core. Although brain tumours can easily be detected using multi-modal MRI, accurate tumor segmentation is a challenging task. Hence, using the data provided by the BraTS Challenge 2020, we propose a 3D volume-to-volume Generative Adversarial Network for segmentation of brain tumours. The model, called Vox2Vox, generates realistic segmentation outputs from multi-channel 3D MR images, segmenting the whole, core and enhancing tumor with mean values of 87.20%, 81.14%, and 78.67% as dice scores and 6.44mm, 24.36mm, and 18.95mm for Hausdorff distance 95 percentile for the BraTS testing set after ensembling 10 Vox2Vox models obtained with a 10-fold cross-validation

Homogeneously alloyed CdSe1-xSx QDs (0 ≤ x ≤ 1) : an efficient synthesis for full optical tunability

In the field of fluorescent semiconductor quantum dots (QDs), alloyed QDs open up new possibilities and opportunities. Indeed, these systems allow to tune the optical properties of the nanocrystals without changing their size. This is of particular interest for the integration of the QDs in devices such as LEDs or for their use as biological labels. We recently developed a novel method for the synthesis of CdSe and ZnSe binary QDs in colloidal solutions that is fast and highly efficient. This method is based on a heterogeneous Se-ODE precursor consisting of a simple dispersion of Se powder (200 mesh) in octadecene (ODE) and showing very high reactivity towards Cd precursor. In this contribution we will demonstrate that this method can be extended to the synthesis of CdSe1-xSx homogeneously alloyed QDs (0 ≤ x ≤ 1)

Hollow viscus injuries. Predictors of outcome and role of diagnostic delay

INTRODUCTION: Hollow viscus injuries (HVIs) are uncommon but potentially catastrophic conditions with high mortality and morbidity rates. The aim of this study was to analyze our 16-year experience with patients undergoing surgery for blunt or penetrating bowel trauma to identify prognostic factors with particular attention to the influence of diagnostic delay on outcome. METHODS: From our multicenter trauma registry, we selected 169 consecutive patients with an HVI, enrolled from 2000 to 2016. Preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative data were analyzed to assess determinants of mortality, morbidity, and length of stay by univariate and multivariate analysis models. RESULTS: Overall mortality and morbidity rates were 15.9% and 36.1%, respectively. The mean length of hospital stay was 23±7 days. Morbidity was independently related to an increase of white blood cells (P=0.01), and to delay of treatment >6 hours (P=0.033), while Injury Severity Score (ISS) (P=0.01), presence of shock (P=0.01), and a low diastolic arterial pressure registered at emergency room admission (P=0.02) significantly affected postoperative mortality. CONCLUSION: There is evidence that patients with clinical signs of shock, low diastolic pressure at admission, and high ISS are at increased risk of postoperative mortality. Leukocytosis and delayed treatment (>6 hours) were independent predictors of postoperative morbidity. More effort should be made to increase the preoperative detection rate of HVI and reduce the delay of treatment

O IDOSO NA WEB: a concepção de uma identidade mercadológica no espaço discursivo publicitário da marca Plenitud na Internet.

Este estudo buscou identificar a relação do idoso com a Internet; se para ele esse espaço não é apenas um modismo, não é usado apenas para demonstrar que está inserido no mundo digital, e sim, para torna-se um consumidor/cliente/usuário/cidadão ativo. Para isso utilizamos as estratégias metodológicas constituídas pelas observações e transcrições em um Grupo Focal e entrevistas individuais com idosos do Programa Aquarela - UMESP, completando com a análise do discurso dos espaços virtuais apresentados para os participantes. O corpus selecionado para realizar esta pesquisa foi construído com recortes do site e da página no Facebook da marca Plenitud, especificamente da roupa intima descartável Plenitud Protect Plus. A pesquisa revelou anseios desse público, trazendo à tona o prazer de usar a Internet, tornando-se mais participativo, com a sensação de sentir-se mais jovem

Modelli della meccanica respiratoria nel neonato

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A METHODOLOGY TO DISAGGREGATE SPEED DATA COLLECTED BY ROAD DETECTORS

The paper introduces an algorithm that disaggregate speed data collected with automatic road detectors which can only measure speed frequency in intervals only. The objective is to obtain back-calculated “artificial” individual speeds to operate with continuous distribution functions rather than discrete ones. This allows the derivation of more robust, basic descriptive measures (average, variance, and percentiles) according to Normal, LogNormal, and Gamma probability distribution functions. The information produced in this way is more useful than that calculated from standard aggregated speed reports and can be used for further processing purposes. In this investigation, individual speed data collected from video cameras were used to derive reference distributions and descriptive measures on the same road sections where inductive double-loop detectors were installed. The comparisons between the back-calculated individual speeds and those collected from video cameras support the validity of the proposed algorithm