Fundus2Angio: A Conditional GAN Architecture for Generating Fluorescein Angiography Images from Retinal Fundus Photography

Carrying out clinical diagnosis of retinal vascular degeneration using Fluorescein Angiography (FA) is a time consuming process and can pose significant adverse effects on the patient. Angiography requires insertion of a dye that may cause severe adverse effects and can even be fatal. Currently, there are no non-invasive systems capable of generating Fluorescein Angiography images. However, retinal fundus photography is a non-invasive imaging technique that can be completed in a few seconds. In order to eliminate the need for FA, we propose a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) to translate fundus images to FA images. The proposed GAN consists of a novel residual block capable of generating high quality FA images. These images are important tools in the differential diagnosis of retinal diseases without the need for invasive procedure with possible side effects. Our experiments show that the proposed architecture outperforms other state-of-the-art generative networks. Furthermore, our proposed model achieves better qualitative results indistinguishable from real angiograms.Comment: 14 pages, Accepted to 15th International Symposium on Visual Computing 202

Health promotion services for lifestyle development within a UK hospital – Patients' experiences and views

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>UK public health policy requires hospitals to have in place health promotion services which enable patients to improve their health through adopting healthy behaviours, i.e. health education. This study investigated hospitalised patients' experiences of health education for smoking, alcohol use, diet, physical activity, and weight, and their views concerning the appropriateness of hospitals as a setting for the delivery of health education services.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Recently discharged adult hospital patients (n = 322) were sent a questionnaire asking about their smoking, alcohol use, diet, physical activity, and weight. For each of these risk factors, participants were asked whether they agreed with screening for the risk factor, whether they received health education, whether it was "helpful", and if they wanted to change their behaviour. Participants were also asked a set of general questions concerning health education within hospitals.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>190 patients responded (59%). Over 80% agreed with screening for all risk factors. 80% of smokers, 52% consuming alcohol above recommended limits, 86% of obese, 66% consuming less than five fruit and vegetables a day, and 61% of physically inactive participants wanted to change their respective behaviour. However only a third reported receiving health education. While over 60% of patients wanted health education around discharge, the majority of those receiving health education did so at admission. The majority agreed that "hospital is a good place for patients to receive" health education (87%) and that "the hospital should provide patients with details of community organisations that provide" health education (83%). Only a minority (31%) reported a preference for health education from their GP instead of hospital.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>While the delivery of health education to patients within hospital was poor, hospitals are viewed by patients as an appropriate, and in some cases preferred setting for the screening of risk factors and delivery of health education.</p

Habilidades de manipulação do aparelho de amplificação sonora open fit por deficientes auditivos idosos

Objetivo avaliar as habilidades de manipulação do AASI do tipo open fit em indivíduos deficientes auditivos idosos, por meio do instrumento denominado Practical Hearing Aid Skills Test (PHAST), traduzido como Teste de Habilidades Práticas com Aparelho Auditivo. Métodos no estudo, desenvolvido na Divisão de Saúde Auditiva, participaram 18 idosos (idade entre 60 e 87 anos) deficientes auditivos, sendo 7 homens e 11 mulheres, novos usuários AASI tipo de open fit. Para a metodologia, na primeira etapa a pesquisadora realizou a orientação sobre o AASI aos deficientes auditivos e ao seu cuidador e, na segunda, após aproximadamente 1 mês de uso do dispositivo, foi aplicado o instrumento PHAST, o qual contém 8 questões na forma de tarefas práticas referentes ao manipulação do AASI para classificar a desenvoltura do indivíduo. Resultados foi constatado que nas tarefas referentes à limpeza do AASI e ao uso ao telefone, os indivíduos revelaram maior dificuldade de executá-las expondo as menores pontuações, em contrapartida às tarefas referentes à remoção do AASI e à abertura do compartimento de bateria, os indivíduos realizaram com maior facilidade. Quanto aos resultados do desempenho dos participantes a classificação final foi: 33,33% excelente, 22,22% boa, 27,78% satisfatório e 16,67% pobre. Conclusão 55,55% dos idosos deficientes auditivos realizaram adequadamente as tarefas referentes à manipulação do AASI open fit, obtendo classificação final no instrumento PHAST excelente e boa

Replication in the Harp File System

Harp uses the primary copy replication technique [1, 26, 27]. In this method, client calls are This paper describes the design and implementation of the directed to a single primary server, which communicates Harp file system. Harp is a replicated Unix file system with other backup servers and waits for them to respond accessible via the VFS interface. It provides highly avail- before replying to the client. The system masks failures by able and reliable storage for files and guarantees that file performing a failover algorithm in which an inaccessible operations are executed atomically in spite of concurrency server is removed from service. When a primary performs and failures. It uses a novel variation of the primary copy an operation, it must inform enough backups to guarantee replication technique that provides good performance be- that the effects of that operation will survive all subsequent cause it allows us to trade disk accesses for network com- failovers. munication. Harp is intended to be used within a file ser- Harp is one of the first implementations of a primary vice in a distributed network; in our current implemencopy scheme that runs on conventional hardware. It has tation, it is accessed via NFS. Preliminary performance some novel features that allow it to perform well. The key results indicate that Harp provides equal or better response performance issues are how to provide quick response for time and system capacity than an unreplicated implemen- user operations and how to provide good system capacity tation of NFS that uses Unix files directly. (roughly, the number of operations the system can handle in some time period while still providing good response time). Harp achieves good performance by recording the 1