Detection of Iris Presentation Attacks Using Feature Fusion of Thepade's Sorted Block Truncation Coding with Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix Features.

Iris biometric detection provides contactless authentication, preventing the spread of COVID-19-like contagious diseases. However, these systems are prone to spoofing attacks attempted with the help of contact lenses, replayed video, and print attacks, making them vulnerable and unsafe. This paper proposes the iris liveness detection (ILD) method to mitigate spoofing attacks, taking global-level features of Thepade's sorted block truncation coding (TSBTC) and local-level features of the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of the iris image. Thepade's SBTC extracts global color texture content as features, and GLCM extracts local fine-texture details. The fusion of global and local content presentation may help distinguish between live and non-live iris samples. The fusion of Thepade's SBTC with GLCM features is considered in experimental validations of the proposed method. The features are used to train nine assorted machine learning classifiers, including naïve Bayes (NB), decision tree (J48), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and ensembles (SVM + RF + NB, SVM + RF + RT, RF + SVM + MLP, J48 + RF + MLP) for ILD. Accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure are used to evaluate the performance of the projected ILD variants. The experimentation was carried out on four standard benchmark datasets, and our proposed model showed improved results with the feature fusion approach. The proposed fusion approach gave 99.68% accuracy using the RF + J48 + MLP ensemble of classifiers, immediately followed by the RF algorithm, which gave 95.57%. The better capability of iris liveness detection will improve human-computer interaction and security in the cyber-physical space by improving person validation

Traditional clay pottery of Odisha, India

325-332Pottery making is an important event of past. It has marked the beginning of the revolution in Neolithic period in human society. It all started with mud that indicates the emergence of civilization leading to development of culture. Pottery was introduced from different civilizations and was accepted, developed, changed and adapted. Few of the traditional communities in the world still maintain this tradition as their occupation. The present paper discusses the pottery making process and related activities in rural areas of Bhadrak district of Odisha, India. The field survey was conducted during the year 2015-2017 to access the present status of this unique clay-based craft as well as the condition of the artisans involved in this craft making. The information on pottery technique was obtained through semi-structured questionnaires, complemented by free interviews and informal conversations with 79 artisans. The result revealed that making artifacts from clay is exclusively the hand work of rural Kumbhara community. Most of these artisans are marginal farmers while making such craft is their primary occupation. They collect the raw material, i.e., clay from the nearby field, river bed or shallow land, process it and make varieties of attractive craft items for traditional domestic use as well as in socio-religious rituals. The existing conditions of this folk craft as well as the artisans were analysed. Some remedial measures are suggested to save this endangered craft from oblivion

Traditional clay pottery of Odisha, India

325-332Pottery making is an important event of past. It has marked the beginning of the revolution in Neolithic period in human society. It all started with mud that indicates the emergence of civilization leading to development of culture. Pottery was introduced from different civilizations and was accepted, developed, changed and adapted. Few of the traditional communities in the world still maintain this tradition as their occupation. The present paper discusses the pottery making process and related activities in rural areas of Bhadrak district of Odisha, India. The field survey was conducted during the year 2015-2017 to access the present status of this unique clay-based craft as well as the condition of the artisans involved in this craft making. The information on pottery technique was obtained through semi-structured questionnaires, complemented by free interviews and informal conversations with 79 artisans. The result revealed that making artifacts from clay is exclusively the hand work of rural Kumbhara community. Most of these artisans are marginal farmers while making such craft is their primary occupation. They collect the raw material, i.e., clay from the nearby field, river bed or shallow land, process it and make varieties of attractive craft items for traditional domestic use as well as in socio-religious rituals. The existing conditions of this folk craft as well as the artisans were analysed. Some remedial measures are suggested to save this endangered craft from oblivion

A clinico-histopathological correlation of elective abdominal hysterectomy in a university Hospital

Introduction: The objective of this study was to correlate preoperative indications of abdominal hysterectomy with histopathological findings. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Patan Hospital from April 2016 to March 2018 in all the patients who underwent elective abdominal hysterectomy. Demographic characteristics, clinical symptoms, preoperative diagnosis and final histopathological diagnosis were studied. Preoperative indications were correlated with histopathological diagnosis. Results: A total of 203 elective abdominal hysterectomies were performed. Menorrhagia was the leading symptom found in 67 (33.00%) patients followed by pain abdomen in 62 (30.54%) patients. Leiomyoma was the most common preoperative diagnosis seen in 105 (51.72%) patients followed by ovarian tumor in 34 (16.75%) patients. The most common histopathological diagnosis was leiomyoma observed in 87 (42.86%) patients followed by ovarian tumor in 35 (17.24%) patients. Clinical and histopathological correlation was 100% in cases of ovarian tumor, complex endometrial atypical hyperplasia, pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), fibroid polyp and chronic cervicitis. Only 40% of preoperatively diagnosed postmenopausal bleeding cases were correlated histopathologically while the rest were missed preoperatively which included endometrial polyp (40%) and adult granulosa cell tumor (20%). Conclusions: Leiomyoma was the most common preoperative and histopathological diagnosis. Clinical and histopathological correlation was 100% in cases of ovarian tumor, complex endometrial atypical hyperplasia, PID, fibroid polyp and chronic cervicitis. Keywords: histopathological diagnosis, hysterectomy, preoperative indication

Detection of Iris Presentation Attacks Using Hybridization of Discrete Cosine Transform and Haar Transform with Machine Learning Classifiers and Ensembles

Iris biometric identification allows for contactless authentication, which helps to avoid the transmission of diseases like COVID-19. Biometric systems become unstable and hazardous due to spoofing attacks involving contact lenses, replayed video, cadaver iris, synthetic Iris, and printed iris. This work demonstrates the iris presentation attacks detection (Iris-PAD) approach that uses fragmental coefficients of transform iris images as features obtained using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Haar Transform, and hybrid Transform. In experimental validations of the proposed method, three main types of feature creation are investigated. The extracted features are utilized for training seven different machine learning classifiers alias Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), and decision tree(J48) with ensembles of SVM+RF+NB, SVM+RF+RT, and RF+SVM+MLP (multi-layer perceptron) for proposed iris liveness detection. The proposed iris liveness detection variants are evaluated using various statistical measures: accuracy, Attack Presentation Classification Error Rate (APCER), Normal Presentation Classification Error Rate (NPCER), Average Classification Error Rate (ACER). Six standard datasets are used in the investigations. Total nine iris spoofing attacks are getting identified in the proposed method. Among all investigated variations of proposed iris-PAD methods, the 4 ×4 of fragmental coefficients of a Hybrid transformed iris image with RF algorithm have shown superior iris liveness detection with 99.95% accuracy. The proposed hybridization of transform for features extraction has demonstrated the ability to identify all nine types of iris spoofing attacks and proved it robust. The proposed method offers exceptional performances against the Synthetic iris spoofing images by using a random forest classifier. Machine learning has massive potential in a similar domain and could be explored further based on the research requirements

Genetic Improvement of Rice for Multiple Stress Tolerance in Unfavorable Rainfed Ecology

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Expression Profiling of CYP1B1 in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma: Counterintuitive Downregulation in Tumors

Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) has a very flagitious treatment regime. A prodrug approach is thought to aid in targeting chemotherapy. CYP1B1, a member of cytochrome P450 family, has been implicated in chemical carcinogenesis. There exists a general accordance that this protein is overexpressed in a variety of cancers, making it an ideal candidate for a prodrug therapy. The activation of the prodrug facilitated by CYP1B1 would enable the targeting of chemotherapy to tumor tissues in which CYP1B1 is specifically overexpressed as a result reducing the non-specific side effects that the current chemotherapy elicits. This study was aimed at validating the use of CYP1B1 as a target for the prodrug therapy in OSCC. The expression profile of CYP1B1 was analysed in a panel of 51 OSCC tumors, their corresponding normal tissues, an epithelial dysplasia lesion and its matched normal tissue by qRT-PCR, Western blotting and Immunohistochemistry. CYP1B1 was found to be downregulated in 77.78% (28/36) tumor tissues in comparison to their corresponding normal tissues as well as in the epithelial dysplasia lesion compared to its matched normal tissue at the transcriptional level, and in 92.86% (26/28) of tumor tissues at the protein level. This report therefore clearly demonstrates the downregulation of CYP1B1 at the transcriptional and translational levels in tumor tissues in comparison to their corresponding normal tissues. These observations indicate that caution should be observed as this therapy may not be applicable universally to all cancers and also suggest the possibility of a prophylactic therapy for oral cancer

Nascentome Analysis Uncovers Futile Protein Synthesis in Escherichia coli

Although co-translational biological processes attract much attention, no general and easy method has been available to detect cellular nascent polypeptide chains, which we propose to call collectively a “nascentome.” We developed a method to selectively detect polypeptide portions of cellular polypeptidyl-tRNAs and used it to study the generality of the quality control reactions that rescue dead-end translation complexes. To detect nascent polypeptides, having their growing ends covalently attached to a tRNA, cellular extracts are separated by SDS-PAGE in two dimensions, first with the peptidyl-tRNA ester bonds preserved and subsequently after their in-gel cleavage. Pulse-labeled nascent polypeptides of Escherichia coli form a characteristic line below the main diagonal line, because each of them had contained a tRNA of nearly uniform size in the first-dimension electrophoresis but not in the second-dimension. The detection of nascent polypeptides, separately from any translation-completed polypeptides or degradation products thereof, allows us to follow their fates to gain deeper insights into protein biogenesis and quality control pathways. It was revealed that polypeptidyl-tRNAs were significantly stabilized in E. coli upon dysfunction of the tmRNA-ArfA ribosome-rescuing system, whose function had only been studied previously using model constructs. Our results suggest that E. coli cells are intrinsically producing aberrant translation products, which are normally eliminated by the ribosome-rescuing mechanisms

Rehabilitation of hand function after spinal cord injury using a novel handgrip device: a pilot study

BackgroundActivity-based therapy (ABT) for patients with spinal cord injury (SCI), which consists of repetitive use of muscles above and below the spinal lesion, improves locomotion and arm strength. Less data has been published regarding its effects on hand function. We sought to evaluate the effects of a weekly hand-focused therapy program using a novel handgrip device on grip strength and hand function in a SCI cohort.MethodsPatients with SCI were enrolled in a weekly program that involved activities with the MediSens (Los Angeles, CA) handgrip. These included maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) and a tracking task that required each subject to adjust his/her grip strength according to a pattern displayed on a computer screen. For the latter, performance was measured as mean absolute accuracy (MAA). The Spinal Cord Independence Measure (SCIM) was used to measure each subject's independence prior to and after therapy.ResultsSeventeen patients completed the program with average participation duration of 21.3 weeks. The cohort included patients with American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Impairment Scale (AIS) A (n = 12), AIS B (n = 1), AIS C (n = 2), and AIS D (n = 2) injuries. The average MVC for the cohort increased from 4.1 N to 21.2 N over 20 weeks, but did not reach statistical significance. The average MAA for the cohort increased from 9.01 to 21.7% at the end of the study (p = .02). The cohort's average SCIM at the end of the study was unchanged compared to baseline.ConclusionsA weekly handgrip-based ABT program is feasible and efficacious at increasing hand task performance in subjects with SCI