RECONSTRUCTION OF ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE WITH SYMMETRICAL COMPONENTS

Data capturing through either Lidar or photogrammetry, often results in incomplete and partial information related to a surface due to occlusion or inaccessibility of the clear object vision. In case of asymmetrical objects yet the reconstruction is unattainable by any means, meanwhile the approach for the development of the missing information could be done in cases of symmetrical objects. In this paper we have advised a semi-automatic approach for recreating missing or incomplete information from the partially captured data using space sub-division and 3D transformation. The study has been done on a 175 year-old building whose scanned information is available for only one side and captures a façade with four columns. The idea is to first extract the symmetrical parts through segmentation of different building parts. Then the columns with partial information have been oriented as per a reference plane based on the pose and centre computed from the horizontal parts. The instance is then used to fill in the lost information through duplication and transformation. This approach can be used to recreate structures with symmetrical elements, which are partially destroyed from withering, disaster, or any human intervention

How effective are continuous flow left ventricular assist devices in lowering high pulmonary artery pressures in heart transplant candidates?

Background: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is considered a risk factor for morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing heart transplantation. Medical therapy with oral and pharmacologic agents is not always effective in reducing pulmonary artery (PA) pressures. Left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) have been used to reduce PA pressures in cases of PH unresponsive to medical therapy. Methods and results: Our study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of axial- and centrifugal- continuous flow LVADs in reversing PH in heart transplant candidates. Hemodynamics were assessed pre- and post-operatively in nine patients undergoing HeartMate II and six patients undergoing HeartWare continuous flow LVADs. Mean PA pressures were reduced from 31.9 ± 10.6 mm Hg to 22.1 ± 6.6 mm Hg (p = 0.001), and pulmonary vascular resistance was reduced from 3.08 ± 1.6 mm Hg to 1.8 ± 1.0 mm Hg (p = 0.007). This improvement was seen within seven days of LVAD implantation. Three of 15 patients were successfully transplanted, with 100% survival at an average of 199 days post-transplant. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that both axial- and centrifugal-continuous flow LVADs are effective in immediately lowering PA pressures in heart transplant candidates with PH. (Cardiol J 2012; 19, 2: 153–158

Safety and efficacy of endoscopic submucosal dissection for rectal neoplasia: a multicenter North American experience.

Background and aims  Rectal lesions traditionally represent the first lesions approached during endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) training in the West. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of rectal ESD in North America. Methods  This is a multicenter retrospective analysis of rectal ESD between January 2010 and September 2018 in 15 centers. End points included: rates of en bloc resection, R0 resection, adverse events, comparison of pre- and post-ESD histology, and factors associated with failed resection. Results  In total, 171 patients (median age 63 years; 56 % men) underwent rectal ESD (median size 43 mm). En bloc resection was achieved in 141 cases (82.5 %; 95 %CI 76.8-88.2), including 24 of 27 (88.9 %) with prior failed endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR). R0 resection rate was 74.9 % (95 %CI 68.4-81.4). Post-ESD bleeding and perforation occurred in 4 (2.3 %) and 7 (4.1 %), respectively. Covert submucosal invasive cancer (SMIC) was identified in 8.6 % of post-ESD specimens. There was one case (1/120; 0.8 %) of recurrence at a median follow-up of 31 weeks; IQR: 19-76 weeks). Older age and higher body mass index (BMI) were predictors of failed R0 resection, whereas submucosal fibrosis was associated with a higher likelihood of both failed en bloc and R0 resection. Conclusion  Rectal ESD in North America is safe and is associated with high en bloc and R0 resection rates. The presence of submucosal fibrosis was the main predictor of failed en bloc and R0 resection. ESD can be considered for select rectal lesions, and serves not only to establish a definitive tissue diagnosis but also to provide curative resection for lesions with covert advanced disease

Acute Gastrointestinal Bleeding in COVID-19 Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background/Aims More than 100 million people to date have been affected by the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Patients with COVID-19 have a higher risk of bleeding complications. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the outcomes of COVID-19 patients with signs and symptoms of acute gastrointestinal bleeding (GIB). Methods A systematic literature search was carried out for articles published until until November 11, 2020, in the Embase, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library databases. We included studies on COVID-19 patients with signs and symptoms of GIB. Results Our search yielded 49 studies, of which eight with a collective 127 patients (86 males and 41 females) met our inclusion criteria. Conservative management alone was performed in 59% of the patients, endoscopic evaluation in 31.5%, and interventional radiology (IR) embolization in 11%. Peptic ulcer disease was the most common endoscopic finding, diagnosed in 47.5% of the patients. Pooled overall mortality was 19.1% (95% confidence interval [CI]; 12.7%-27.6%) and pooled mortality secondary to GIB was 3.5% (95% CI; 1.3%–9.1%). The pooled risk of rebleeding was 11.3% (95% CI; 6.8%–18.4%). Conclusions The majority of COVID-19 patients with GIB responded to conservative management, with a low mortality rate associated with GIB and the risk of rebleeding. Thus, we suggest limiting endoscopic and IR interventions to those with hemodynamic instability and those for whom conservative management was unsuccessful

FACTIFY3M: A Benchmark for Multimodal Fact Verification with Explainability through 5W Question-Answering

Combating disinformation is one of the burning societal crises -- about 67% of the American population believes that disinformation produces a lot of uncertainty, and 10% of them knowingly propagate disinformation. Evidence shows that disinformation can manipulate democratic processes and public opinion, causing disruption in the share market, panic and anxiety in society, and even death during crises. Therefore, disinformation should be identified promptly and, if possible, mitigated. With approximately 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared online daily on social media platforms, scalable detection of multimodal disinformation requires efficient fact verification. Despite progress in automatic text-based fact verification (e.g., FEVER, LIAR), the research community lacks substantial effort in multimodal fact verification. To address this gap, we introduce FACTIFY 3M, a dataset of 3 million samples that pushes the boundaries of the domain of fact verification via a multimodal fake news dataset, in addition to offering explainability through the concept of 5W question-answering. Salient features of the dataset include: (i) textual claims, (ii) ChatGPT-generated paraphrased claims, (iii) associated images, (iv) stable diffusion-generated additional images (i.e., visual paraphrases), (v) pixel-level image heatmap to foster image-text explainability of the claim, (vi) 5W QA pairs, and (vii) adversarial fake news stories.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.0432