Navigating roundabouts and unprotected turns in autonomous driving

© 2024 IEEE. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1109/TFR.2024.3421389The development of a fully autonomous driving vehicle (AV) requires various traffic situations to be handled efficiently. One of the most common driving manoeuvres which an AV experiences in daily traffic is giving way (yielding) to other traffic participants. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient method of yielding that doesn’t query yielding areas of interests from map API making it hassle free to use without having to rely on digitized yielding areas. We incorporated our method into one of the well-known open-source autonomy stacks called Autoware. The proposed method makes use of high-definition (HD) map elements including lanes and stoplines for filtering vehicles which participate in yielding decision making. Our method estimates future collisions of filtered vehicles of interest with AV’s planned trajectory and outputs a binary yielding decision for ego vehicle. Our method covers different yielding areas including a roundabout and an unprotected turn. We tested and evaluated the decision making of our method on various simulated scenarios and afterwards successful real-world tests were conducted using an in-house AV. An in-depth analysis of our approach shows that the proposed yielding solution works reasonably well i.e. 87% successful yielding area navigation ratio on real data.Peer reviewe

Generic Patterns in Discussion Sections: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Academic Moves Structures in Dissertations in Pakistan

Writing discussion in dissertation, though has textual generics, yet is influenced by the context, research domain, and writers’ linguistic competence. In Pakistan, graduates, despite being non-native English writers, know about the generics of writing discussion; yet, their mother tongue and cultural context influence their writing. In order to compare and contrast the generics of writing discussion, and identify the commonalities and variation; this research aims to explore the academic move-structures in the discussion sections. By adopting Corpus-based research tools corpora of M.Phil.and Ph.D.dissertations from the field of English Linguistics and Education were compiled. Based on Yang and Allison (2003) modelthe data was analyzed through Antmover(text structure analyzer software). Different types of moves in discussion section, such as obligatory, conventional, and optional moves, were analyzed in accordance with the strategies of Kanoksilapatham (2005). The commonalities and contrast in the moves of writing discussion has enabled the researcher in identifying 5-moves generic pattern that can serve as a guideline for novice researchers in writing discussion of the dissertations in the fields of English Linguistics and Education in Pakistan. Furthermore, paying attention to the ways in which these disciplines use specific structural moves would facilitate researchers to become more aware of the need for employing these structural moves in properly discussing the data and results in research

Infection of CD8+CD45RO+ Memory T-Cells by HIV-1 and Their Proliferative Response

CD8+ T-cells are involved in controlling HIV-1 infection by eliminating infected cells and secreting soluble factors that inhibit viral replication. To investigate the mechanism and significance of infection of CD8+ T-cells by HIV-1 in vitro, we examined the susceptibility of these cells and their subsets to infection. CD8+ T-cells supported greater levels of replication with T-cell tropic strains of HIV-1, though viral production was lower than that observed in CD4+ T-cells. CD8+ T-cell infection was found to be productive through ELISA, RT-PCR and flow cytometric analyses. In addition, the CD8+CD45RO+ memory T-cell population supported higher levels of HIV-1 replication than CD8+CD45RA+ naïve T-cells. However, infection of CD8+CD45RO+ T-cells did not affect their proliferative response to the majority of mitogens tested. We conclude, with numerous lines of evidence detecting and measuring infection of CD8+ T-cells and their subsets, that this cellular target and potential reservoir may be central to HIV-1 pathogenesis

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

A Survey on Motion Prediction of Pedestrians and Vehicles for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicle (AV) industry has evolved rapidly during the past decade. Research and development in each sub-module (perception, state estimation, motion planning etc.) of AVs has seen a boost, both on the hardware (variety of new sensors) and the software sides (state-of-the-art algorithms). With recent advancements in achieving real-time performance using onboard computational hardware on an ego vehicle, one of the major challenges that AV industry faces today is modelling behaviour and predicting future intentions of road users. To make a self-driving car reason and execute the safest motion plan, it should be able to understand its interactions with other road users. Modelling such behaviour is not trivial and involves various factors e.g. demographics, number of traffic participants, environmental conditions, traffic rules, contextual cues etc. This comprehensive review summarizes the related literature. Specifically, we identify and classify motion prediction literature for two road user classes i.e. pedestrians and vehicles. The taxonomy proposed in this review gives a unified generic overview of the pedestrian and vehicle motion prediction literature and is built on three dimensions i.e. motion modelling approach, model output type, and situational awareness from the perspective of an AV

Cost of care in a paediatric intensive care unit of a tertiary-care university hospital of Pakistan

Objective: To assess the cost of treatment for families of children hospitalised in paediatric intensive care unit of a tertiary care teaching hospital.Methods: The retrospective cohort study was conducted in Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, and comprised record of all children admitted to the paediatric intensive care unit from January 1 to June 30, 2013. Demographic data, diagnosis at the time of admission, co-morbidity, length of stay in intensive care and outcome were recorded. The record of all hospital charges for each day the patient was cared for were also recorded. The finance department itemised the cost into major categories like pharmacy, radiology, laboratory, etc. SPSS 19 was used for statistical analysis.Results: Record of 148 patients represented the study sample. Of them, 98(66%) were males. Overall median age was 2.7 yrs (interquartile range: 1 month to 16 years) and 93(62.8%) were below 5 years of age. Median length of stay was 3.5 days (range: 2-5 days) and total patient days in intensive care were 622. The median cost per admission was PKR 217,238 (range: (114,550-368,808) and mean cost per day was PKR 57,535 (43,911-85,527). The major cost distributions were bed charges PKR 8,092,080 (18.02%), physician charges PKR 6,398653(14.25%), medical-surgical supplies PKR 8,000772(17.8%), laboratory charges PKR 8,403,615(18.9%) and pharmacy charges PKR 5,852.226(13.03%).CONCLUSIONS: The cost of paediatric intensive care unit was expensive. Cost distribution was almost evenly distributed. Hence, a better admission policy is needed for resource utilisation and cost-effectiveness

An automated reading of semi-quantitative hemagglutination results in microplates: Micro-assay for plant lectins

An automated, qualitative and semi-quantitative micro-assay for the detection of plant lectins also known as phyto-agglutinins (glycoproteins; have exciting applications in medicines) is described as an alternative to conventional assays. The method developed in this work is based on hemagglutination (HA) assay that can simultaneously detect the presence and concentration (titer) of lectins in as many as 96 different samples without the aid of an expert eye. We used rice (Oryza sativa L.) seeds for making clarified lectin extracts and Arabic gum as positive control in phosphate buffer saline; the method is applicable to all kinds and parts of the plants. Rabbit red blood cells were used in order to carry out the HA assay in a miniaturized experiment using U-welled microplates (MPs). 25 µL of plant extract is sufficient to carry out HA micro-assay at incubation temperature of 38°C for 20 min. The method was standardized with an expert eye and automated by using MP reader. Moreover, a standard curve for the direct interpretation of lectin concentration is also developed by conversion of absorbance values into titer. The method described will save time, material, labor, and simplify the rapid semi-quantification of plant lectins