How to separate between Machine-Printed/Handwritten and Arabic/Latin Words?

This paper gathers some contributions to script and its nature identification. Different sets of features have been employed successfully for discriminating between handwritten and machine-printed Arabic and Latin scripts. They include some well established features, previously used in the literature, and new structural features which are intrinsic to Arabic and Latin scripts. The performance of such features is studied towards this paper. We also compared the performance of five classifiers: Bayes (AODEsr), k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Decision Tree (J48), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) used to identify the script at word level. These classifiers have been chosen enough different to test the feature contributions. Experiments have been conducted with handwritten and machine-printed words, covering a wide range of fonts. Experimental results show the capability of the proposed features to capture differences between scripts and the effectiveness of the three classifiers. An average identification precision and recall rates of 98.72% was achieved, using a set of 58 features and AODEsr classifier, which is slightly better than those reported in similar works

Integration and mining of malaria molecular, functional and pharmacological data: how far are we from a chemogenomic knowledge space?

The organization and mining of malaria genomic and post-genomic data is highly motivated by the necessity to predict and characterize new biological targets and new drugs. Biological targets are sought in a biological space designed from the genomic data from Plasmodium falciparum, but using also the millions of genomic data from other species. Drug candidates are sought in a chemical space containing the millions of small molecules stored in public and private chemolibraries. Data management should therefore be as reliable and versatile as possible. In this context, we examined five aspects of the organization and mining of malaria genomic and post-genomic data: 1) the comparison of protein sequences including compositionally atypical malaria sequences, 2) the high throughput reconstruction of molecular phylogenies, 3) the representation of biological processes particularly metabolic pathways, 4) the versatile methods to integrate genomic data, biological representations and functional profiling obtained from X-omic experiments after drug treatments and 5) the determination and prediction of protein structures and their molecular docking with drug candidate structures. Progresses toward a grid-enabled chemogenomic knowledge space are discussed.Comment: 43 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Malaria Journa

Changes of Peel Essential Oil Composition of Four Tunisian Citrus during Fruit Maturation

The present work investigates the effect of ripening stage on the chemical composition of essential oil extracted from peel of four citrus: bitter orange (Citrus aurantium), lemon (Citrus limon), orange maltaise (Citrus sinensis), and mandarin (Citrus reticulate) and on their antibacterial activity. Essential oils yields varied during ripening from 0.46 to 2.70%, where mandarin was found to be the richest. Forty volatile compounds were identified. Limonene (67.90–90.95%) and 1,8-cineole (tr-14.72%) were the most represented compounds in bitter orange oil while limonene (37.63–69.71%), β-pinene (0.63–31.49%), γ-terpinene (0.04–9.96%), and p-cymene (0.23–9.84%) were the highest ones in lemon. In the case of mandarin, the predominant compounds were limonene (51.81–69.00%), 1,8-cineole (0.01–26.43%), and γ-terpinene (2.53–14.06%). However, results showed that orange peel oil was dominated mainly by limonene (81.52–86.43%) during ripening. The results showed that ripening stage influenced significantly the antibacterial activity of the oils against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This knowledge could help establish the optimum harvest date ensuring the maximum essential oil, limonene, as well as antibacterial compounds yields of citrus

Characterisation of musk lime (Citrus microcarpa) seed oil

BACKGROUND: The seeds of musk lime (Citrus microcarpa) represent a substantial waste product of small‐scale citrus‐processing factories, as they constitute about 100.0 ± 3.2 g kg−1 of the whole fruit and contain a considerable amount of crude fat (338.0 ± 11.3 g kg−1). Thus the aim of the present study was to determine the physicochemical properties of this fat with a view to potential applications. RESULTS: The iodine and saponification values and unsaponifiable matter and free fatty acid contents of the freshly extracted oil were 118.0 g I2 per 100 g oil, 192.6 mg KOH g−1 oil, 22 mg g−1 oil and 18 mg oleic acid g−1 oil respectively. The oil had a Lovibond colour index of 33.1 Y + 1.1 B. Its fatty acid profile indicated that 73.6% of the fatty acids present were unsaturated. Linoleic (L, 31.8%), oleic (O, 29.6%) and palmitic (P, 21.4%) acids were the predominant fatty acids, existing mainly as the triacylglycerols POL (18.9%), PLL (13.7%) and OLL (11.9%). The melting and cooling points of the oil were 10.7 and − 45.2 °C respectively. Electronic nose qualitative analysis of the oil showed the presence of volatile (aroma) compounds, although the concentrations of the more volatile compounds were lower than those present in the seeds. CONCLUSION: Musk lime seeds are a rich source of oil, which is unusual in having linoleic, oleic and palmitic acids dominating the fatty acid composition. This property should make the oil both relatively stable to thermal oxidation owing to the combined presence of oleic and palmitic acids (61.0%) and highly nutritive owing to its high concentration of unsaturated fatty acids (73.6%)

A System for an automatic reading of student information sheets

ISBN: 978-1-4577-1350-7International audienceIn this paper we present a student information sheet reading system. Relevant algorithm is proposed to locate and label handwritten answer field. As information sheets can be filled in Arabic and/or in French, automating the script language differentiation is a pre-recognition required in the proposed system. We have developed a robust and fast field classification and script language identification method, based on a decision tree, to make these processing practical for sheet recognition. To this end, the system uses several novel features (loops, descenders, diacritics) and analyses the lower profile of script. The classification rates are 92.5% for numeric fields, 94.34% for Arabic scripts and 94.66% for French scripts. Experimental results, carried on 80 sheets, show our system provides an effective way to convert printed sheets into computerized format or collect information for database from printed sheets

Arabic/Latin and Machine-printed/Handwritten Word Discrimination using HOG-based Shape Descriptor

In this paper, we present an approach for Arabic and Latin script and its type identification based onHistogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) descriptors. HOGs are first applied at word level based on writingorientation analysis. Then, they are extended to word image partitions to capture fine and discriminativedetails. Pyramid HOG are also used to study their effects on different observation levels of the image.Finally, co-occurrence matrices of HOG are performed to consider spatial information between pairs ofpixels which is not taken into account in basic HOG. A genetic algorithm is applied to select the potentialinformative features combinations which maximizes the classification accuracy. The output is a relativelyshort descriptor that provides an effective input to a Bayes-based classifier. Experimental results on a set ofwords, extracted from standard databases, show that our identification system is robust and provides goodword script and type identification: 99.07% of words are correctly classified

Élaboration d'un guide méthodologique de contrôles en cours de production dans un service de stérilisation

La prévention du risque infectieux représente un enjeu majeur de santé publique, tout au long de la prise de charge chirurgicale des patients, en particulier lors de l’utilisation des dispositifs médicaux réutilisables (DMR). Le procédé de stérilisation des dispositifs médicaux est un procédé spécial qui se base sur la maîtrise de l’ensemble du procédé et non le contrôle du produit fini. La mise en place de contrôles en cours de production au sein d’une unité de stérilisation hospitalière permet de contrôler la conformité de chaque étape au regard des bonnes pratiques, des normes de qualité et de sécurité. L’objectif de ce travail est d’élaborer un guide méthodologique d’aide à la mise en place de contrôles en cours de production à destination des pharmaciens responsables de l’activité de stérilisation hospitalière. Pour cela, un concept a été créé autour de la méthodologie de la certification des établissements de santé adapté à un service de stérilisation hospitalière : DMR traceur, zoom processus, traçabilité check et contrôle flash. Une phase pilote a été réalisée afin de tester les grilles de contrôle et la méthodologie du guide qui a été appliquée à la stérilisation du CHU de Clermont-Ferrand. Un retour d’expérience à 6 mois est prévu afin de vérifier la pérennité de la méthode et de tester son applicabilité dans d’autres services de stérilisation

La dermatite de contact irritante et allergique : de la physiopathologie à la prise en charge à l'officine

La dermatite de contact ou eczéma de contact, est un ensemble de pathologies cutanées qui peuvent être classées en deux entités majeures : la dermatite de contact irritante et la dermatite de contact allergique. Elles entraînent une inflammation, une éruption cutanée, des démangeaisons suite à un contact avec un agent irritant/allergique. La dermatite de contact irritante peut concerner la majorité d’entre nous. En effet, toute substance peut conduire à un eczéma de contact en fonction de sa concentration, de sa durée d’exposition. Seules quelques personnes développeront une allergie.La dermatite de contact peut devenir particulièrement invalidante lorsqu’elle est liée à notre domaine professionnel. Voilà pourquoi il est important d’accompagner et de conseiller les patients sur l’utilisation des traitements, les soins complémentaires qu’ils peuvent trouver en pharmacie ainsi que les bonnes habitudes à adopter dans la vie de tous les jours afin d’améliorer leur quotidien