Oxytocin and Psychiatric Disorders

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that plays critical role in mother-infant bonding, pair bonding and prosocial behaviors. Several neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, affective disorders, anxiety disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, alcohol/substance addiction, aggression, suicide, eating disorders and personality disorders show abnormalities of oxytocin system. These findings have given rise to the studies searching therapeutic use of oxytocin for psychi-atric disorders. The studies of oxytocin interventions in psychiatric disorders yielded potentially promising findings. This paper reviews the role of oxytocin in emotions, behavior and its effects in psychiatric disorders. [Psikiyatride Guncel Yaklasimlar - Current Approaches in Psychiatry 2016; 8(2): 102-113

Seamless video access for mobile devices by content-aware utility-based adaptation

Today's Internet multimedia services are characterized by heterogeneous networks, a wide range of terminals, diverse user preferences, and varying natural environment conditions. Heterogeneity of terminals, networks, and user preferences impose nontrivial challenges to the Internet multimedia services for providing seamless multimedia access particularly for mobile devices (e.g., laptops, tablet PCs, PDAs, mobile phones, etc.). Thus, it is essential that advanced multimedia technologies are developed to deal with these challenges. One of these technologies is video adaptation, which has gained significant importance with its main objective of enabling seamless access to video contents available over the Internet. Adaptation decision taking, which can be considered as the "brain" of video adaptation, assists video adaptation to achieve this objective. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) offers flexibility for video adaptation through providing a comprehensive set of scalability parameters (i.e., temporal, spatial, and quality) for producing scalable video streams. Deciding the best combination of scalability parameters to adapt a scalable video stream while satisfying a set of constraints (e.g., device specifics, network bandwidth, etc.) poses challenges for the existing adaptation services to enable seamless video access. To ease such challenges, an adaptation decision taking technique employing a utility-based approach to decide on the most adequate scalability parameters for adaptation operations is developed. A Utility Function (UF), which models the relationships among the scalability parameters and weights specifying the relative importance of these parameters considering video content characteristics (i.e., motion activity and structural feature), is proposed to assist the developed technique. In order to perform the developed adaptation decision taking technique, a video adaptation framework is also proposed in this paper. The adaptation experiments performed using the proposed framework prove the effectiveness of the framework to provide an important step towards enabling seamless video access for mobile devices to enhance viewing experience of users. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Modeling user perception of 3D video based on ambient illumination context for enhanced user centric media access and consumption

For enjoying 3D video to its full extent, it is imperative that access and consumption of it is user centric, which in turn ensures improved 3D video perception. Several important factors including video characteristics, users’ preferences, contexts prevailing in various usage environments, etc have influences on 3D video perception. Thus, to assist efficient provision of user centric media, user perception of 3D video should be modeled considering the factors affecting perception. Considering ambient illumination context to model 3D video perception is an interesting research topic, which has not been particularly investigated in literature. This context is taken into account while modeling video quality and depth perception of 3D video in this paper. For the video quality perception model: motion and structural feature characteristics of color texture sequences; and for the depth perception model: luminance contrast of color texture and depth intensity of depth map sequences of 3D video are used as primary content related factors in the paper. Results derived using the video quality and depth perception models demonstrate that these models can efficiently predict user perception of 3D video considering the ambient illumination context in user centric media access and consumption environments

Improving scalable video adaptation in a knowledge-based framework

In a knowledge-based content adaptation framework, video adaptation can be performed in a series of steps, named conversions. The high-level decision phase in such a framework occasionally encounters several feasible parameter values of a specific conversion. This paper proposes to transfer further decisions to a low-level phase that decides which parameters maximise the quality of the adaptation. Particularly when more than one solution are available, an innovative quality measure is used for selecting the best values for the parameters among the set of values that fulfil the adaptation constraints in the case of scalable vide

Investigation of awareness and anxiety levels of pregnant women during pandemic process

Objectives: It is currently unknown that how pregnant women deal with the Coronavirus disease and its results. The aim of this study is to evaluate the psychological impact of the coronavirus pandemic on pregnant women and to determine whether pregnant women have sufficient knowledge and awareness for a healthy antenatal process. Material and methods: This study was conducted at two centers. Regardless of the gestational age, a questionnaire was distributed to 1003 pregnant women in total, from which 51 original questions we prepared. Five hundred twenty-six participants were included in the study. The questionnaire was delivered using the QR code method. The questionnaires were answered online by participants via SurveyMonkey. Results: The period when anxiety was highest was the 2nd trimester, whereas women in the 1st trimester had the lowest level of anxiety. High levels of awareness were observed in patients with heart disease, but patients with diabetes mellitus had a high level of anxiety. Conclusions: It is important to maintain the mental and physical health of pregnant women, who are in a more delicate condition than other individuals in the society. In this regard, healthcare professionals have important duties such as taking necessary precautions and explaining the seriousness of the situation to pregnant women

Advanced adaptive techniques for improved video perception

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Prediction of 3D Video Experience from Video Quality and Depth Perception Considering Ambient Illumination Context

1st International Conference on Future Generation Communication Technologies (FGCT) -- DEC 12-14, 2012 -- British Comp Soc, London, ENGLANDNUR YILMAZ, Gokce/0000-0002-0015-9519WOS: 0003172894000063 Dimensional (3D) video provides a realistic viewing experience to users due to the addition of depth sensation to 2-Dimensional (2D) video. Nevertheless, the advancement of 3D video technologies (e.g., transmission, coding, etc) is in its early stage. To support the proliferation of 3D video technologies for the "Future Internet" users, prediction of 3D video experience, which includes both video quality and depth perception, can be used as feedback information to modify the parameters of these technologies. Although, a few research studies are carried out for measuring the video quality and depth perception individually, same effort has not been performed for the 3D video experience. The reason behind this is that the 3D experience is influenced by several contextual factors related to both the video quality and depth perception (e.g., ambient illumination condition, content characteristics, etc). Therefore, in this paper, subjective experiments are conducted to monitor the effect of the ambient illumination on the video quality, depth perception, and 3D video experience. Using the results of these experiments, a generic mathematical function is devised to predict the 3D viewing experience of a user towards at a specific ambient illumination condition from the video quality and depth perception. The knowledge gained through this research study can be exploited in coordination with the 3D video technologies to improve the 3D viewing experience of the Future Internet users.IEEE UK&RI, IEE

A bit rate adaptation model for 3D video

NUR YILMAZ, Gokce/0000-0002-0015-9519WOS: 000367895200012Although a significant research effort has been carried out for investigating 3 Dimensional (3D) video display, transmission, coding, etc, the same is not applicable for 3D video adaptation. In addition, ambient illumination, spatial resolution and 3D video content related contexts have not been particularly considered in a hybrid manner for the 3D video adaptation purpose in literature to date. In this paper, an adaptation decision taking technique is designed to predict the bit rate of 3D video sequences to be adapted by a proposed adaptation model. The ambient illumination condition of the viewing environment is considered in these proposed technique and model together with spatial resolution, video quality, and depth perception related contexts of the 3D video. Experimental results derived by the assistance of subjective experiments prove that the proposed model is quite efficient to adapt the 3D video sequences without compromising the 3D video perception of the users