Color Textured Image Segmentation Using ICICM - Interval Type-2 Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Hybrid Approach

Segmentation is an essential process in image because of its wild application such as image analysis, medical image analysis, pattern reorganization, etc. Color and texture are most significant low-level features in an image. Normally, color-textured image segmentation consists of two steps: (i) extracting the feature and (ii) clustering the feature vector. This paper presents the hybrid approach for color texture segmentation using Haralick features extracted from the Integrated Color and Intensity Co-occurrence Matrix (ICICM). Then, Extended- Interval Type-2 Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster the obtained feature vectors into several classes corresponding to the different regions of the textured image. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach could obtain better cluster quality and segmentation results compared to state-of-art image segmentation algorithms

Is women’s economic empowerment really worthwhile to the men counterpart?

Compared to the earlier decade’s women are increasingly entering the workforce particularly in the professional works and organized sectors still there remains a large number of invisible women workers in unorganized sectors. Today, many women have established their own economy i.e., entrepreneurial empire and are now ruling their world as they wished to. According to the World Bank 2011 report women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property. Women usually invest a higher proportion of their earnings in their families and communities than men. Women are becoming empowered in various fields, though still inequality between men and women runs across the board, including in education, economic opportunities, representation in governance, family life and other fields also. Hence the present study aims to identify men’s perception towards women economic empowerment

The Choice Function Framework for Online Policy Improvement

There are notable examples of online search improving over hand-coded or learned policies (e.g. AlphaZero) for sequential decision making. It is not clear, however, whether or not policy improvement is guaranteed for many of these approaches, even when given a perfect evaluation function and transition model. Indeed, simple counter examples show that seemingly reasonable online search procedures can hurt performance compared to the original policy. To address this issue, we introduce the choice function framework for analyzing online search procedures for policy improvement. A choice function specifies the actions to be considered at every node of a search tree, with all other actions being pruned. Our main contribution is to give sufficient conditions for stationary and non-stationary choice functions to guarantee that the value achieved by online search is no worse than the original policy. In addition, we describe a general parametric class of choice functions that satisfy those conditions and present an illustrative use case of the framework's empirical utility

A study to assess the effectiveness of activity therapy on the level of improving the self esteem among women with mental illness, admitted at Institute of Mental Health, Kilpauk, Chennai.

Title: A study to assess the effectiveness of activity therapy on the level of improving the self esteem among women with mental illness, admitted Self-esteem and social functioning, perceived quality of life, depression, and psychotic symptoms. All activities are also designed to keep their mind active all the time, which helps to restore normal function. Need for study Self-esteem is a most important and the psychiatric patients are more prone to get affected with low self-esteem. The investigator in the rehabilitation department or in the wards use activity therapy engage them and to promote their quality of life. Objectives 1) To assess the pre-test level of self esteem before activity therapy among the women with mentally ill clients. 2) To evaluate the post test level of self esteem after activity therapy among the women mentally ill clients. 3) To determine the effectiveness of activity therapy among the women with mentally ill clients. Methodology Research approach: Quantitative approach. Study setting: Psychiatric inpatient wards at Institute of Mental Health Study population: women with mental illness. Sample size: 60 samples Design: pre experimental one group pre test one group pre test and post test design Sampling technique: No

A pre experimental study to assess the effectiveness of structured teaching programme on the level of knowledge regarding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among primary school teachers in a selected school, at Erode District

A pre experimental study to assess the effectiveness of structured teaching programme on the level of knowledge regarding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among primary school teachers in a selected school, at erode district. The Objectives of the study were: To assess the pretest and posttest level of knowledge regarding attention deficit hyperactive disorder among primary school teachers. To assess the effectiveness of structured teaching programme on the level of knowledge regarding attention deficit hyperactive disorder among primary school teachers. To find out the association between the posttest level of knowledge regarding attention deficit hyperactive disorder among primary school teachers with their selected demographic variables. The findings of the study revealed that there was a significant difference in the pretest score and the posttest score on the level of knowledge regarding Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The implications, limitations, recommendations and conclusion were clearly spelt

Learning and Improving Policies for Probabilistic Planning Problems

In this work, we study the problem of learning and improving policies for probabilistic planning problems. In the first part, we train neural network policies for probabilistic planning problems modeled as factored Markov decision problems. The objective is to train problem-specific neural networks via supervised learning to imitate the action choices of expert planners. In the second part, we focus on the problem of online policy improvement, where we try to improve on a given base policy via online search. Since search trees for these problems tend to be huge, in practice, action branches need to be pruned, which can affect policy improvement adversely. We formalize this notion by introducing the choice function framework and establish sufficient conditions on actions expanded in search trees for guaranteed policy improvement. In the next part, we draw attention to the fact that theoretical guarantees of policy improvement can fail when the ideal conditions assumed in theory do not hold in practice. We propose benchmark problems, baselines and metrics to assess the empirical performance of online policy improvement algorithms. In the final part, we focus on approximation via state aggregation in MDPs and study the theoretical guarantees of several aggregation schemes

Profile of Lipid and Protein Autacoids in Diabetic Vitreous Correlates With the Progression of Diabetic Retinopathy

OBJECTIVE: This study was aimed at obtaining a profile of lipids and proteins with a paracrine function in normal and diabetic vitreous and exploring whether the profile correlates with retinal pathology. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Vitreous was recovered from 47 individuals undergoing vitreoretinal surgery: 16 had nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR), 15 had proliferative diabetic retinopathy, 7 had retinal detachments, and 9 had epiretinal membranes. Protein and lipid autacoid profiles were determined by protein arrays and mass spectrometry-based lipidomics. RESULTS: Vitreous lipids included lipoxygenase (LO)- and cytochrome P450 epoxygenase (CYP)-derived eicosanoids. The most prominent LO-derived eicosanoid was 5-hydroxyeicosate traenoic acid (HETE), which demonstrated a diabetes-specific increase (P = 0.027) with the highest increase in NPDR vitreous. Vitreous also contained CYP-derived epoxyeicosatrienoic acids; their levels were higher in nondiabetic than diabetic vitreous (P < 0.05). Among inflammatory, angiogenic, and angiostatic cytokines and chemokines, only vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) showed a significant diabetes-specific profile (P < 0.05), although a similar trend was noted for tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha. Soluble VEGF receptors R1 and R2 were detected in all samples with lowest VEGF-R2 levels (P < 0.05) and higher ratio of VEGF to its receptors in NPDR and PDR vitreous. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to demonstrate diabetes-specific changes in vitreous lipid autacoids including arachidonate and docosahexanoate-derived metabolites indicating an increase in inflammatory versus anti-inflammatory lipid mediators that correlated with increased levels of inflammatory and angiogenic proteins, further supporting the notion that inflammation plays a role the pathogenesis of this disease

Vascular Cellular Adhesion Molecule-1 (VCAM-1) Expression in Mice Retinal Vessels Is Affected by Both Hyperglycemia and Hyperlipidemia

BACKGROUND: Inflammation has been proposed to be important in the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. An early feature of inflammation is the release of cytokines leading to increased expression of endothelial activation markers such as vascular cellular adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1). Here we investigated the impact of diabetes and dyslipidemia on VCAM-1 expression in mouse retinal vessels, as well as the potential role of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Expression of VCAM-1 was examined by confocal immunofluorescence microscopy in vessels of wild type (wt), hyperlipidemic (ApoE(-/-)) and TNFα deficient (TNFα(-/-), ApoE(-/-)/TNFα(-/-)) mice. Eight weeks of streptozotocin-induced diabetes resulted in increased VCAM-1 in wt mice, predominantly in small vessels (<10 µm). Diabetic wt mice had higher total retinal TNFα, IL-6 and IL-1β mRNA than controls; as well as higher soluble VCAM-1 (sVCAM-1) in plasma. Lack of TNFα increased higher basal VCAM-1 protein and sVCAM-1, but failed to up-regulate IL-6 and IL-1β mRNA and VCAM-1 protein in response to diabetes. Basal VCAM-1 expression was higher in ApoE(-/-) than in wt mice and both VCAM-1 mRNA and protein levels were further increased by high fat diet. These changes correlated to plasma cholesterol, LDL- and HDL-cholesterol, but not to triglycerides levels. Diabetes, despite further increasing plasma cholesterol in ApoE(-/-) mice, had no effects on VCAM-1 protein expression or on sVCAM-1. However, it increased ICAM-1 mRNA expression in retinal vessels, which correlated to plasma triglycerides. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Hyperglycemia triggers an inflammatory response in the retina of normolipidemic mice and up-regulation of VCAM-1 in retinal vessels. Hypercholesterolemia effectively promotes VCAM-1 expression without evident stimulation of inflammation. Diabetes-induced endothelial activation in ApoE(-/-) mice seems driven by elevated plasma triglycerides but not by cholesterol. Results also suggest a complex role for TNFα in the regulation of VCAM-1 expression, being protective under basal conditions but pro-inflammatory in response to diabetes

Inflammation and diabetic retinal microvascular complications

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most common complications of diabetes and is a leading cause of blindness in people of the working age in Western countries. A major pathology of DR is microvascular complications such as non-perfused vessels, microaneurysms, dot/blot hemorrhages, cotton-wool spots, venous beading, vascular loops, vascular leakage and neovascularization. Multiple mechanisms are involved in these alternations. This review will focus on the role of inflammation in diabetic retinal microvascular complications and discuss the potential therapies by targeting inflammation