Car that Knows Before You Do: Anticipating Maneuvers via Learning Temporal Driving Models

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have made driving safer over the last decade. They prepare vehicles for unsafe road conditions and alert drivers if they perform a dangerous maneuver. However, many accidents are unavoidable because by the time drivers are alerted, it is already too late. Anticipating maneuvers beforehand can alert drivers before they perform the maneuver and also give ADAS more time to avoid or prepare for the danger. In this work we anticipate driving maneuvers a few seconds before they occur. For this purpose we equip a car with cameras and a computing device to capture the driving context from both inside and outside of the car. We propose an Autoregressive Input-Output HMM to model the contextual information alongwith the maneuvers. We evaluate our approach on a diverse data set with 1180 miles of natural freeway and city driving and show that we can anticipate maneuvers 3.5 seconds before they occur with over 80\% F1-score in real-time.Comment: ICCV 2015, http://brain4cars.co

Cost-effectiveness of a European preventive cardiology programme in primary care: A Markov modelling approach

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license.OBJECTIVE: To investigate the longer-term cost-effectiveness of a nurse-coordinated preventive cardiology programme for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) compared to routine practice from a health service perspective. DESIGN: A matched, paired cluster-randomised controlled trial. SETTING: Six pairs of general practices in six countries. PARTICIPANTS: 1019 patients were randomised to the EUROACTION intervention programme and 1005 patients to usual care (UC) and who completed the 1-year follow-up. OUTCOME MEASURES: Evidence on health outcomes and costs was based on patient-level data from the study, which had a 1-year follow-up period. Future risk of CVD events was modelled, using published risk models based on patient characteristics. An individual-level Markov model for each patient was used to extrapolate beyond the end of the trial, which was populated with data from published sources. We used an 11-year time horizon and investigated the impact on the cost-effectiveness of varying the duration of the effect of the intervention beyond the end of the trial. Results are expressed as incremental cost per quality-adjusted life-year gained. RESULTS: Unadjusted results found the intervention to be more costly and also more effective than UC. However, after adjusting for differences in age, gender, country and baseline risk factors, the intervention was dominated by UC, but this analysis was not able to take into account the lifestyle changes in terms of diet and physical activity. CONCLUSIONS: Although the EUROACTION study achieved healthier lifestyle changes and improvements in management of blood pressure and lipids for patients at high risk of CVD, compared to UC, it was not possible to show, using available risk equations which do not incorporate diet and physical activity, that the intervention reduced longer-term cardiovascular risk cost-effectively. Whether or not an intervention such as that offered by EUROACTION is cost-effective requires a longer-term trial with major cardiovascular events as the outcome.This study is sponsored solely by AstraZeneca through the provision of an unconditional educational grant

Influence of clipping and water stress on growth performance and nutrient value of four range grasses

The paper examines the effect of water stress and clipping treatments on growth behaviour and nutrient value of 4 grasses, viz.,Lolium perenne, Poa pratensis (both C3 plants), Chloris gayana and Panicum coloratum (both C4 plants). Biomass, net production, relative growth rates were affected more markedly and adversely in the two C4 species due to water stress. The effect of clipping varied with species and was generally more marked and adverse in two C4 species. The C3 plants developed higher R:S ratio under water stress. Water stress resulted in a greater decline of total non-structural carbohydrate and protein content in the two Q species. Clipping affected adversely the non-structural carbohydrate content and again the effect was more marked in the two C4species. On the other hand, protein content in shoots of all plants increased due to clipping

Ruptured ectopic pregnancy in the rudimentary horn of bicornuate uterus: a case report

Rupture uterus in first and second trimester in a non-scarred uterus is generally seen with associated mullerian anomalies. A 22 year old primigravida with 16 weeks gestational age presented with pain in abdomen since 6 hours prior to admission and hypovolemic shock. Though she had taken regular antenatal visits and a transabdominal scan at 14-16wks with the report opining a normal study, the diagnosis of the fetus in the rudimentary horn was missed. A provisional diagnosis of rupture of right rudimentary horn of a bicornuate uterus was made afet clinical examination and the TVS showing the cervix continuing into a normal uterus with no fetus within it and a vague right adnexal mass. Transabdominal scan also showed vague hypoechoic mass in the right adnexa with a fetus of 16-17 weeks above the mass with absent cardiac activity. Emergency laparotomy with resuscitation and excision of the ruptured horn and blood transfusion saved the life of the patient.