Mediterranean Region

This book provides for the first time a Europe-wide overview on the state of the art of management of recreation and nature tourism in forests. It describes the current situation and conflicts in the different regions of Europe and provides solutions illustrated by good practise examples. It addresses traditions, differences and similarities in European forests as well as new tasks, goals and strategies. The final discussion provides a profound insight into future trends regarding forest recreation and nature based tourism. The Mediterranean countries participating in the COST Action E33 are: Cyprus, Greece, Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Fig. 5.1). Geographically, these countries are distributed from the eastern Mediterranean area to the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. Parts of France, which is treated as one of the central European countries has also parts with Mediterranean character and similar features to the other countries discussed in this chapter. Spain was not part of the Cost Action, so that there is no data available.COST E3

Atherosclerotic plaque motion analysis from ultrasound videos

In this paper, we describe a collection of algorithms that are used to provide motion trajectory estimates from atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound videos. Our approach is based on the use of four different optical flow methods to estimate motion vectors (Horn and Schunk, Lucas, Nagel and Uras). To estimate the optimal motion estimation parameters, we perform hundreds of experiments on a Linux cluster, and further validate the results using synthetic simulations. Following motion estimation, we compute pixel motion trajectories over the plaque regions and vessel walls. Pixel trajectories are then used to assess plaque deformation

EEmergency System to Support Emergency call Evaluation and Ambulance dispatch Procedures

The main purpose of this study was to create an electronic system (eEmergency system) in order to support, improve and help the procedure of handling emergency calls. An effort to reform the procedures followed for emergency call handling and Ambulance dispatch started on the Island of Cyprus since 2016; along that direction, a central call center was created. The present electronic system was designed for this call center. The main features are the support for ambulance fleet handling, the support for emergency call evaluation and triage procedure and the improvement of communication between the call center and the ambulance vehicles. The main components and the design of this system are outlined in this paper. The part of incident evaluation and ambulance handling, has been in daily practice for more than one year and since then more than 62000 calls were successfully handled and recorded with the use of this system. This system was successfully used from the beginning of the pandemic period of Covid-19

On Improving Generalization of CNN-Based Image Classification with Delineation Maps Using the CORF Push-Pull Inhibition Operator

Deployed image classification pipelines are typically dependent on the images captured in real-world environments. This means that images might be affected by different sources of perturbations (e.g. sensor noise in low-light environments). The main challenge arises by the fact that image quality directly impacts the reliability and consistency of classification tasks. This challenge has, hence, attracted wide interest within the computer vision communities. We propose a transformation step that attempts to enhance the generalization ability of CNN models in the presence of unseen noise in the test set. Concretely, the delineation maps of given images are determined using the CORF push-pull inhibition operator. Such an operation transforms an input image into a space that is more robust to noise before being processed by a CNN. We evaluated our approach on the Fashion MNIST data set with an AlexNet model. It turned out that the proposed CORF-augmented pipeline achieved comparable results on noise-free images to those of a conventional AlexNet classification model without CORF delineation maps, but it consistently achieved significantly superior performance on test images perturbed with different levels of Gaussian and uniform noise

Post cardiac surgery home-monitoring system

One of the major factors limiting but also causing the application of modern technology in medicine is the response time to patients, should they need specialized medical care. In this work we propose a solution that is aiming to help and improve the patients' life after a cardiac surgery. This is a group of patients that have to be monitored for a short period after the operation. The aim of this project is to give the opportunity to these patients to be monitored at home after their operation so as to keep their rehabilitation period as smooth as possible and avoid unnecessary visits to the hospital or prevent adverse events. This is going to be achieved by creating an integrated web- based system which can regularly monitor several biosignals like ECG, blood pressure, arterial SpO2 and parameters like body weight and provide the tools to identify any unusual events. 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

Dynamic carotid plaque imaging using ultrasonography

Objective Dynamic image analysis of carotid plaques has demonstrated that during systole and early diastole, all plaque components will move in the same direction (concordant motion) in some plaques. However, in others, different parts of the plaque will move in different directions (discordant motion). The aim of our study was (1) to determine the prevalence of discordant motion in symptomatic and asymptomatic plaques, (2) to develop a measurement of the severity of discordant motion, and (3) to determine the correlation between the severity of discordant motion and symptom prevalence. Methods A total of 200 patients with 204 plaques resulting in 50% to 99% stenosis (112 asymptomatic and 92 symptomatic plaques) had video recordings available of the plaque motion during 10 cardiac cycles. Video tracking was performed using Farneback's method, which relies on frame comparisons. In our study, these were performed at 0.1-second intervals. The maximum angular spread (MAS) of the motion vectors at 10-pixel intervals in the plaque area was measured in degrees. Plaques were classified as concordant (MAS, 120°). Results Motion was discordant in 89.1% of the symptomatic plaques but only in 17.9% of asymptomatic plaques (P 120°, the hazard ratio for the presence of symptoms was 47.7 (95% confidence interval, 18.1-125.6) compared with the rest of the plaques after adjustment for the degree of stenosis and mean pixel motion. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the prediction of the presence of symptoms using the MAS was 0.876 (95% confidence interval, 0.823-0.929). The use of the median MAS (120°) as a cutoff point classified 86% of the plaques correctly (sensitivity, 81.4%; specificity, 91.2%; positive predictive value, 90.2%; and negative predictive value, 83.0%). Conclusions The use of the MAS value to identify asymptomatic plaques at increased risk of developing symptoms and, in particular, stroke should be tested in prospective studies