973 research outputs found
Moral Foundations and Mask Use: Worldview Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented many unique challenges to governments across the nation and around the world. One such issue is how to handle the issue of face masks in a remarkably polarized environment. While the research seems to indicate that a high rate of masking is important to managing the spread of COVID-19, a subset of the population has shown themselves reluctant to adopt regular mask usage. With much of this divide taking place along partisan lines, this research sought to better understand the worldview impact on mask usage by using an approach informed by moral foundations theory. This research shows that there does exist a positive relationship between the individualizing foundations (which are often favoured by political liberals) and voluntary mask usage, but no meaningful relationship is apparent between masking and the binding foundations favoured by conservatives. Furthermore, while the relationship between masking and political ideology is stronger than the relationship between masking and any of the moral foundations, political conservatives’ reluctance to mask appears to somewhat diminish the more they associate with mainstream political parties. While moral foundations-based appeals may still have some utility in this area, several more generic policy tools that were not directly tailored to particular moral foundations also showed themselves promising. These positive indicators suggest that future government efforts to encourage masking, in addition to the somewhat definitive solution of mask mandates, may have a range of softer tools through which they can effectively reach their target
Property Assessments and Information Asymmetry in Residential Real Estate
This paper presents a game theoretic model of property tax assessment that allows a tax appraiser to either choose a high or a low assessment. The owner either accepts or challenges this assessment. A ‘‘fixed effects’’ regression model is used to evaluate the differences in the assessed values of a sample of houses from Bexar County, Texas during 2000 and 2001. Where the owner of the house is identified as a state licensed property tax consultant, the assessed value, after adjusting for size, age, and other economic characteristics, ranged from a statistically robust 2.5% to 6.2% lower than neighboring houses.
Nitric oxide and cardiovascular effects: new insights in the role of nitric oxide for the management of osteoarthritis
Nitric oxide (NO) is an important mediator in both health and disease. In addition to its effects on vascular tone and platelet function, it plays roles in inflammation and pain perception that may be of relevance in osteoarthritis. Many patients with osteoarthritis take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) long term for pain control. Over recent years concern has been raised about the possible cardiovascular side effects of NSAIDs. The reasons for this possible increased cardiovascular risk with NSAIDs are not yet entirely clear, although changes in blood pressure, renal salt handling and platelet function may contribute. Recently, drugs that chemically link a NSAID with a NO donating moiety (cyclo-oxygenase-inhibiting NO-donating drugs [CINODs]) were developed. NO is an important mediator of endothelial function, acting as a vasodilator and an inhibitor of platelet aggregation, and having anti-inflammatory properties. The potential benefits of CINODs include the combination of effective analgesic and anti-inflammatory actions with NO release, which might counterbalance any adverse cardiovascular effects of NSAIDs. Effects of CINODs in animal studies include inhibition of vasopressor responses, blood pressure reduction in hypertensive rats and inhibition of platelet aggregation. CINODs may also reduce ischemic damage to compromised myocardial tissue. In addition, endothelial dysfunction is a recognized feature of inflammatory arthritides, and therefore a drug that might provide slow release of NO to the vasculature while treating pain is an attractive prospect in these conditions. Further studies of the effects of CINODs in humans are required, but these agents represent a potential exciting advance in the management of osteoarthritis
Predicting Slice-to-Volume Transformation in Presence of Arbitrary Subject Motion
This paper aims to solve a fundamental problem in intensity-based 2D/3D
registration, which concerns the limited capture range and need for very good
initialization of state-of-the-art image registration methods. We propose a
regression approach that learns to predict rotation and translations of
arbitrary 2D image slices from 3D volumes, with respect to a learned canonical
atlas co-ordinate system. To this end, we utilize Convolutional Neural Networks
(CNNs) to learn the highly complex regression function that maps 2D image
slices into their correct position and orientation in 3D space. Our approach is
attractive in challenging imaging scenarios, where significant subject motion
complicates reconstruction performance of 3D volumes from 2D slice data. We
extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our approach quantitatively on
simulated MRI brain data with extreme random motion. We further demonstrate
qualitative results on fetal MRI where our method is integrated into a full
reconstruction and motion compensation pipeline. With our CNN regression
approach we obtain an average prediction error of 7mm on simulated data, and
convincing reconstruction quality of images of very young fetuses where
previous methods fail. We further discuss applications to Computed Tomography
and X-ray projections. Our approach is a general solution to the 2D/3D
initialization problem. It is computationally efficient, with prediction times
per slice of a few milliseconds, making it suitable for real-time scenarios.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 6 pages supplemental material, currently under
review for MICCAI 201
Amphibia: Anura: Hylidae Scarthyla vigilans (Solano 1971): Range Extension and New Country Record for Trinidad, W.I. With Notes on Tadpoles, Habitat, Behaviour and Biogeographical Significance.
We report a range extension and new country record for Scarthyla vigilans in Trinidad, West Indies. The species
was previously known only from populations on mainland South America. We include notes on behavior, habitat and tadpole
development, and discuss the biogeographical significance of the species’ presence in Trinidad, particularly with respect to
consequences for understanding colonization events on this Caribbean island
Accounting Hall of Fame 2000 induction: Ross M. Skinner
For the induction of Robert M. Skinner: Remarks by Robert T. Rutherford, The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants; Citation prepared by Daniel L. Jensen, The Ohio State University, Read by Robert T. Rutherford; Response by Ross M. Skinner, Clarkson Gordo
Combined Diffusion-Relaxometry MRI to Identify Dysfunction in the Human Placenta
Purpose: A combined diffusion-relaxometry MR acquisition and analysis
pipeline for in-vivo human placenta, which allows for exploration of coupling
between T2* and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) measurements in a sub 10
minute scan time.
Methods: We present a novel acquisition combining a diffusion prepared
spin-echo with subsequent gradient echoes. The placentas of 17 pregnant women
were scanned in-vivo, including both healthy controls and participants with
various pregnancy complications. We estimate the joint T2*-ADC spectra using an
inverse Laplace transform.
Results: T2*-ADC spectra demonstrate clear quantitative separation between
normal and dysfunctional placentas.
Conclusions: Combined T2*-diffusivity MRI is promising for assessing fetal
and maternal health during pregnancy. The T2*-ADC spectrum potentially provides
additional information on tissue microstructure, compared to measuring these
two contrasts separately. The presented method is immediately applicable to the
study of other organs
PVR: Patch-to-Volume Reconstruction for Large Area Motion Correction of Fetal MRI
In this paper we present a novel method for the correction of motion
artifacts that are present in fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of
the whole uterus. Contrary to current slice-to-volume registration (SVR)
methods, requiring an inflexible anatomical enclosure of a single investigated
organ, the proposed patch-to-volume reconstruction (PVR) approach is able to
reconstruct a large field of view of non-rigidly deforming structures. It
relaxes rigid motion assumptions by introducing a specific amount of redundant
information that is exploited with parallelized patch-wise optimization,
super-resolution, and automatic outlier rejection. We further describe and
provide an efficient parallel implementation of PVR allowing its execution
within reasonable time on commercially available graphics processing units
(GPU), enabling its use in the clinical practice. We evaluate PVR's
computational overhead compared to standard methods and observe improved
reconstruction accuracy in presence of affine motion artifacts of approximately
30% compared to conventional SVR in synthetic experiments. Furthermore, we have
evaluated our method qualitatively and quantitatively on real fetal MRI data
subject to maternal breathing and sudden fetal movements. We evaluate
peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and
cross correlation (CC) with respect to the originally acquired data and provide
a method for visual inspection of reconstruction uncertainty. With these
experiments we demonstrate successful application of PVR motion compensation to
the whole uterus, the human fetus, and the human placenta.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Medical
Imaging. v2: wadded funders acknowledgements to preprin
DeepCut: Object Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks
In this paper, we propose DeepCut, a method to obtain pixelwise object
segmentations given an image dataset labelled with bounding box annotations. It
extends the approach of the well-known GrabCut method to include machine
learning by training a neural network classifier from bounding box annotations.
We formulate the problem as an energy minimisation problem over a
densely-connected conditional random field and iteratively update the training
targets to obtain pixelwise object segmentations. Additionally, we propose
variants of the DeepCut method and compare those to a naive approach to CNN
training under weak supervision. We test its applicability to solve brain and
lung segmentation problems on a challenging fetal magnetic resonance dataset
and obtain encouraging results in terms of accuracy
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Neurological, Cognitive, and Psychological Findings Among Survivors of Ebola Virus Disease From the 1995 Ebola Outbreak in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo: A Cross-sectional Study.
BackgroundClinical sequelae of Ebola virus disease (EVD) have not been described more than 3 years postoutbreak. We examined survivors and close contacts from the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and determined prevalence of abnormal neurological, cognitive, and psychological findings and their association with EVD survivorship.MethodsFrom August to September 2017, we conducted a cross-sectional study in Kikwit, DRC. Over 2 decades after the EVD outbreak, we recruited EVD survivors and close contacts from the outbreak to undergo physical examination and culturally adapted versions of the Folstein mini-mental status exam (MMSE) and Goldberg anxiety and depression scale (GADS). We estimated the strength of relationships between EVD survivorship and health outcomes using linear regression models by comparing survivors versus close contacts, adjusting for age, sex, educational level, marital status, and healthcare worker status.ResultsWe enrolled 20 EVD survivors and 187 close contacts. Among the 20 EVD survivors, 4 (20%) reported at least 1 abnormal neurological symptom, and 3 (15%) had an abnormal neurological examination. Among the 187 close contacts, 14 (11%) reported at least 1 abnormal neurologic symptom, and 9 (5%) had an abnormal neurological examination. EVD survivors had lower mean MMSE and higher mean GADS scores as compared to close contacts (MMSE: adjusted coefficient: -1.85; 95% confidence interval [CI]: -3.63, -0.07; GADS: adjusted coefficient: 3.91; 95% CI: 1.76, 6.04).ConclusionsEVD survivors can have lower cognitive scores and more symptoms of depression and anxiety than close contacts more than 2 decades after Ebola virus outbreaks
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