14 research outputs found
Intravenous Immunoglobulin for Management of Non-paraneoplastic Autoimmune Retinopathy
Purpose: To report a case of non-paraneoplastic autoimmune retinopathy (npAIR) treated with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG).
Case report: A 12-year-old boy presented with progressive visual field loss, nyctalopia, and flashing for three months. He had suffered from common cold two weeks before the onset of these symptoms. On the basis of clinical history and paraclinical findings, he was diagnosed with npAIR, and IVIG without immunosuppressive therapy was started. During the one-year follow-up period after the first course of IVIG, flashing disappeared completely. Visual acuity remained 10/10, but nyctalopia did not improve. Multimodal imaging showed no disease progression.
Conclusion: Although established retinal degenerative changes seem irreversible in npAIR, IVIG may be a suitable choice to control the disease progression
Finasteride induced depression: a prospective study
BACKGROUND: Finasteride is a competitive inhibitor of 5 alpha-reductase enzyme, and is used for treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia and androgenetic alopecia. Animal studies have shown that finasteride might induce behavioral changes. Additionally, some cases of finasteride-induced depression have been reported in humans. The purpose of this study was to examine whether depressive symptoms or anxiety might be induced by finasteride administration. METHODS: One hundred and twenty eight men with androgenetic alopecia, who were prescribed finasteride (1 mg/day) were enrolled in this study. Information on depressed mood and anxiety was obtained by Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Participants completed BDI and HADS questionnaires before beginning the treatment and also two months after it. RESULTS: Mean age of the subjects was 25.8(± 4.4) years. At baseline, mean BDI and HADS depression scores were 12.11(± 7.50) and 4.04(± 2.51), respectively. Finasteride treatment increased both BDI (p < 0.001) and HADS depression scores significantly (p = 0.005). HADS anxiety scores were increased, but the difference was not significant (p = 0.061). CONCLUSION: This preliminary study suggests that finasteride might induce depressive symptoms; therefore this medication should be prescribed cautiously for patients with high risk of depression. It seems that further studies would be necessary to determine behavioral effects of this medication in higher doses and in more susceptible patients
CHAD: Charlotte Anomaly Dataset
In recent years, we have seen a significant interest in data-driven deep
learning approaches for video anomaly detection, where an algorithm must
determine if specific frames of a video contain abnormal behaviors. However,
video anomaly detection is particularly context-specific, and the availability
of representative datasets heavily limits real-world accuracy. Additionally,
the metrics currently reported by most state-of-the-art methods often do not
reflect how well the model will perform in real-world scenarios. In this
article, we present the Charlotte Anomaly Dataset (CHAD). CHAD is a
high-resolution, multi-camera anomaly dataset in a commercial parking lot
setting. In addition to frame-level anomaly labels, CHAD is the first anomaly
dataset to include bounding box, identity, and pose annotations for each actor.
This is especially beneficial for skeleton-based anomaly detection, which is
useful for its lower computational demand in real-world settings. CHAD is also
the first anomaly dataset to contain multiple views of the same scene. With
four camera views and over 1.15 million frames, CHAD is the largest fully
annotated anomaly detection dataset including person annotations, collected
from continuous video streams from stationary cameras for smart video
surveillance applications. To demonstrate the efficacy of CHAD for training and
evaluation, we benchmark two state-of-the-art skeleton-based anomaly detection
algorithms on CHAD and provide comprehensive analysis, including both
quantitative results and qualitative examination. The dataset is available at
https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/CHAD
Understanding Ethics, Privacy, and Regulations in Smart Video Surveillance for Public Safety
Recently, Smart Video Surveillance (SVS) systems have been receiving more
attention among scholars and developers as a substitute for the current passive
surveillance systems. These systems are used to make the policing and
monitoring systems more efficient and improve public safety. However, the
nature of these systems in monitoring the public's daily activities brings
different ethical challenges. There are different approaches for addressing
privacy issues in implementing the SVS. In this paper, we are focusing on the
role of design considering ethical and privacy challenges in SVS. Reviewing
four policy protection regulations that generate an overview of best practices
for privacy protection, we argue that ethical and privacy concerns could be
addressed through four lenses: algorithm, system, model, and data. As an case
study, we describe our proposed system and illustrate how our system can create
a baseline for designing a privacy perseverance system to deliver safety to
society. We used several Artificial Intelligence algorithms, such as object
detection, single and multi camera re-identification, action recognition, and
anomaly detection, to provide a basic functional system. We also use
cloud-native services to implement a smartphone application in order to deliver
the outputs to the end users
Exploring Public's Perception of Safety and Video Surveillance Technology: A Survey Approach
Addressing public safety effectively requires incorporating diverse
stakeholder perspectives, particularly those of the community, which are often
underrepresented compared to other stakeholders. This study presents a
comprehensive analysis of the community's general public safety concerns, their
view of existing surveillance technologies, and their perception of AI-driven
solutions for enhancing safety in urban environments, focusing on Charlotte,
NC. Through a survey approach, including in-person surveys conducted in August
and September 2023 with 410 participants, this research investigates
demographic factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, and educational level to
gain insights into public perception and concerns toward public safety and
possible solutions. Based on the type of dependent variables, we utilized
different statistical and significance analyses, such as logit regression and
ordinal logistic regression, to explore the effects of demographic factors on
the various dependent variables. Our results reveal demographic differences in
public safety concerns. Younger females tend to feel less secure yet trust
existing video surveillance systems, whereas older, educated individuals are
more concerned about violent crimes in malls. Additionally, attitudes towards
AI-driven surveillance differ: older Black individuals demonstrate support for
it despite having concerns about data privacy, while educated females show a
tendency towards skepticism.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Magnetic resonance imaging of intact globe superior subluxation into the intracranium
A 67-year-old man with right-sided blunt ocular trauma is reported here. Despite having received primary medical care, the patient complained of severe headache for 14 days. Initial computed tomography (CT) indicated hematoma in the right frontal lobe. However, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) indicated that the right globe along with its optic nerve had been intactly dislocated into the intracranium and differentiated from hematoma. In this case, the significance of MRI, in blunt ocular trauma work-up, and also regaining successful ocular function are highlighted
Combined Aneurysms of the Main Renal and Celiac Arteries: An Unusual Association
Celiac artery aneurysm (CAA) is a rare condition, which occasionally occurs in association with such visceral aneurysms as splenic, common hepatic, left hepatic, supe-rior mesenteric and renal arteries. We describe our observation of a patient with CAA and bilateral main renal artery aneurysm. To the best of our knowledge, a combination of these visceral arterial aneurysms has not been reported previously. The available literature on this topic is briefly reviewed
Osteoprotegerin and Soluble Receptor Activator of Nuclear Factor-Kappa B Ligand in Exudative Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Calcification and inflammation are among the important cases of exudative age-related macular degeneration (E-ARMD). The aim of the present study was to elucidate if there is any relationship between serum Osteoprotegerin (OPG), soluble receptor activator of nuclear factor-kappa B ligand (RANK-ligand) and E-ARMD. In a cross-sectional study, we compared 45 E-ARMD patients with 45 matched controls. Diagnosis was confirmed by fluorescein angiography. Serum samples were analyzed for OPG, RANK-ligand, low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), total cholesterol (TC), and triglyceride (TG). The levels of OPG and RANK-ligand were measured by ELISA methods. The mean age was 72.0±11.5 years in the E-ARMD group and 68.2±8.9 years in the control group (p=0.09). The level of serum OPG was 132.10±75.49 pg/ml in the E-ARMD group and 94.88±61.65 pg/ml in the control subjects. E-ARMD patients had significantly high levels of OPG (p=0.012), as well as significantly high levels of LDL-C and TC (p=0.001 and p=0.005, respectively). We could not find any significant difference in RANK-ligand, HDL-C, or TG between two study groups (p>0.05). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the levels of OPG in E-ARMD patients. The present study showed that E-ARMD patients had high levels of serum OPG. It may act as a protective factor for E-ARMD or only as a secondary phenomenon of different processes of E-ARMD. Further prospective studies would be necessary for prognostic and predictive significance of OPG in patients affected by E-ARMD