Automatic systole-diastole classification of mitral valve complex from RT-3D echocardiography based on multiresolution processing

Poster Session: UltrasoundMitral valve repair is one of the most prevalent operations for various mitral valve conditions. Echocardiography, being famous for its low-cost, non-invasiveness and speediness, is the dominant imaging modality used for carrying out mitral valve condition analysis in both pre-operative and intra-operative examinations. In order to perform analysis on different phases of a cardiac cycle, it is necessary to first classify the echocardiograhic data into volumes corresponding to the systole and diastole phases. This often requires tedious manual work. This paper presents a fully-automatic method for systole-diastole classification of real-time three-dimensional transesophageal echocardiography (RT-3D-TEE) data. The proposed method first resamples the data with radial cutting planes, segments the mitral valve by thresholding, and removes noise by median filtering. Classification is then carried out based on the number of identified mitral valve regions. A multiresolution processing scheme is proposed to further improve the classification accuracy by aggregating classification results obtained from different image resolution scales. The proposed method was evaluated against the classification results produced by a cardiologist. Experimental results show that the proposed method, without the use of computationally intensive algorithms or the use of any training database, can achieve a classification accuracy of 91.04%.published_or_final_versio

Consensus statement on ischaemic stroke care in Hong Kong

Objective. To issue guidelines for the care of acute stroke in Hong Kong, with the target audience of all health care professionals who are involved in acute stroke care. Participants. The Hong Kong Neurological Society and the Hong Kong Stroke Society. Evidence. The panel applied the 'rule of evidence' used by the United States Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. When there is insufficient evidence, the recommendation was based on customary practice and was circulated among the members and fellows of the two societies before coming to a consensus. Consensus process. Group meetings were held in 2002 to review the literature about acute care for patients with ischaemic stroke and to issue a consensus statement with reference to the local health care system. Participants of the meetings were appointed by the councils of The Hong Kong Neurological Society and the Hong Kong Stroke Society. The draft statement was circulated among the members and fellows of the two societies for comments before it was finalised. Conclusions. Ischaemic stroke is a heavy health care burden to Hong Kong. The current consensus statement provides a framework to establish a multidisciplinary approach towards its acute management.published_or_final_versio

Transient ischaemic attack patients are often underevaluated: Authors' reply

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Patients with epistaxis who need hospitalization

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A survey of chronic rhinitis in Hong Kong

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Fault Tolerant Scheduling of Tasks of Two Sizes under Resource Augmentation

Guaranteeing the eventual execution of tasks in machines that are prone to unpredictable crashes and restarts may be challenging, but is also of high importance. Things become even more complicated when tasks arrive dynamically and have different computational demands, i.e., processing time (or sizes). In this paper, we focus on the online task scheduling in such systems, considering one machine and at least two different task sizes. More specifically, algorithms are designed for two different task sizes while the complementary bounds hold for any number of task sizes bigger than one. We look at the latency and 1-completed load competitiveness properties of deterministic scheduling algorithms under worst-case scenarios. For this, we assume an adversary, that controls the machine crashes and restarts as well as the task arrivals of the system, including their computational demands. More precisely, we investigate the effect of resource augmentation—in the form of processor speedup—in the machine’s performance, by looking at the two efficiency measures for different speedups. We first identify the threshold of the speedup under which competitiveness cannot be achieved by any deterministic algorithm, and above which there exists some deterministic algorithm that is competitive. We then propose an online algorithm, name