Book Review:B. BITTON-ASHKELONY - D. KRUEGER, Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, Routledge 2017.

Book Review:B. Bitton-Ashkelony - D. Krueger, Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, Routledge 2017, pp. xvii+ 31

Book Review:B. BITTON-ASHKELONY - D. KRUEGER, Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, Routledge 2017.

Book Review:B. Bitton-Ashkelony - D. Krueger, Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, Routledge 2017, pp. xvii+ 31

Prevention of Cardiomyopathy in Transfusion-Dependent Homozygous Thalassaemia Today and the Role of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Transfusion and iron chelation therapy revolutionised survival and reduced morbidity in patients with transfusion-dependent beta thalassaemia major. Despite these improvements, cardiac disease remained the most common cause of death in those patients. Recently the ability to determine the degree of cardiac iron overload, through cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) has allowed more logical approaches to iron removal, particularly from the heart. The availability of two oral chelators, deferiprone and deferasirox has reduced the need for the injectable chelator deferrioxamine and an additional benefit has been that deferiprone has been shown to be more cardioprotective than deferrioxamine. This review on the prevention of cardiac disease makes recommendations on the chelation regime that would be desirable for patients according to their cardiac iron status as determined by CMR determined by CMR. It also discusses approaches to chelation management should CMR not be available

Measuring pain self-efficacy and health related quality of life among hemodialysis patients in Greece: a cross-sectional study

Patients suffering from end-stage kidney disease often complain about pain. It is also known that the presence of chronic pain greatly impacts upon patients’ quality of life (QOL) and can play a crucial role in the co-morbidity of mental health symptoms such as depression and anxiety. The main aim of this study protocol is the investigation of pain self-efficacy, QOL as well as their relation in patients undergoing hemodialysis treatment. The final sample size will be around 70-80 patients. Each subject’s QOL and pain self-efficacy will be measured using the following instruments: i) the Missoula-ITAS Quality of Life Index-15 and ii) the Pain Self-Efficacy Questionnaire. QOL is expected to be related to pain self-efficacy scores. This probable association will be indicated performing regression as well as correlation analysis after controlling for gender, age, education and marital status

Intravitreal Bevacizumab for Photodynamic Therapy-Induced Massive Macular Detachment in Acute Central Serous Chorioretinopathy

We present a long followed up case of acute central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) complicated by a severe visual loss due to massive pigment epithelium detachment of the macula after a full-dose photodynamic therapy (PDT). Rapid anatomical and functional improvement was observed after a single intravitreal injection of bevacizumab. To our knowledge, we report the first case of PDT-treated CSC complicated by severe visual loss. We can only speculate that the serous detachment of the posterior pole might have been caused by PDT-induced VEGF overexpression, explaining such an impressive response to Avastin treatment

Image summarisation: human action description from static images

Dissertação de Mestrado, Processamento de Linguagem Natural e Indústrias da Língua, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais, Universidade do Algarve, 2014The object of this master thesis is Image Summarisation and more specifically the automatic human action description from static images. The work has been organised into three main phases, with first one being the data collection, second the actual system implementation and third the system evaluation. The dataset consists of 1287 images depicting human activities belonging in fours semantic categories; "walking a dog", "riding a bike", "riding a horse" and "playing the guitar". The images were manually annotated with an approach based in the idea of crowd sourcing, and the annotation of each sentence is in the form of one or two simple sentences. The system is composed by two parts, a Content-based Image Retrieval part and a Natural Language Processing part. Given a query image the first part retrieves a set of images perceived as visually similar and the second part processes the annotations following each of the images in order to extract common information by using a graph merging technique of the dependency graphs of the annotated sentences. An optimal path consisting of a subject-verb-complement relation is extracted and transformed into a proper sentence by applying a set of surface processing rules. The evaluation of the system was carried out in three different ways. Firstly, the Content-based Image Retrieval sub-system was evaluated in terms of precision and recall and compared to a baseline classification system based on randomness. In order to evaluate the Natural Language Processing sub-system, the Image Summarisation task was considered as a machine translation task, and therefore it was evaluated in terms of BLEU score. Given images that correspond to the same semantic as a query image the system output was compared to the corresponding reference summary as provided during the annotation phase, in terms of BLEU score. Finally, the whole system has been qualitatively evaluated by means of a questionnaire. The conclusions reached by the evaluation is that even if the system does not always capture the right human action and subjects and objects involved in it, it produces understandable and efficient in terms of language summaries.O objetivo desta dissertação é sumarização imagem e, mais especificamente, a geração automática de descrições de ações humanas a partir de imagens estáticas. O trabalho foi organizado em três fases principais: a coleta de dados, a implementação do sistema e, finalmente, a sua avaliação. O conjunto de dados é composto por 1.287 imagens que descrevem atividades humanas pertencentes a quatro categorias semânticas: "passear o cão", "andar de bicicleta", "andar a cavalo" e "tocar guitarra". As imagens foram anotadas manualmente com uma abordagem baseada na ideia de 'crowd-sourcing' e a anotação de cada frase foi feita sob a forma de uma ou duas frases simples. O sistema é composto por duas partes: uma parte consiste na recuperação de imagens baseada em conteúdo e a outra parte, que envolve Processamento de Língua Natural. Dada uma imagem para procura, a primeira parte recupera um conjunto de imagens percebidas como visualmente semelhantes e a segunda parte processa as anotações associadas a cada uma dessas imagens, a fim de extrair informações comuns, usando uma técnica de fusão de grafos a partir dos grafos de dependência das frases anotadas. Um caminho ideal consistindo numa relação sujeito-verbo-complemento é então extraído desses grafos e transformado numa frase apropriada, pela aplicação de um conjunto de regras de processamento de superfície. A avaliação do sistema foi realizado de três maneiras diferentes. Em primeiro lugar, o subsistema de recuperação de imagens baseado em conteúdo foi avaliado em termos de precisão e abrangência (recall) e comparado com um limiar de referência (baseline) definido com base num resultado aleatório. A fim de avaliar o subsistema de Processamento de Linguagem Natural, a tarefa de sumarização imagem foi considerada como uma tarefa de tradução automática e foi, portanto, avaliada com base na medida BLEU. Dadas as imagens que correspondem ao mesmo significado da imagem de consulta, a saída do sistema foi comparada com o resumo de referência correspondente, fornecido durante a fase de anotação, utilizando a medida BLEU. Por fim, todo o sistema foi avaliado qualitativamente por meio de um questionário. Em conclusão, verificou-se que o sistema, apesar de nem sempre capturar corretamente a ação humana e os sujeitos ou objetos envolvidos, produz, no entanto, descrições compreensíveis e e linguisticamente adequadas.Erasmus Mundu

Experimental data from flesh quality assessment and shelf life monitoring of high pressure processed European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) fillets

Fresh fish are highly perishable food products and their short shelf-life limits their commercial exploitation and leads to waste, which has a negative impact on aquaculture sustainability. New non-thermal food processing methods, such as high pressure (HP) processing, prolong shelf-life while assuring high food quality. The effect of HP processing (600MPa, 25 °C, 5min) on European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) fillet quality and shelf life was investigated. The data presented comprises microbiome and proteome profiles of control and HP-processed sea bass fillets from 1 to 67 days of isothermal storage at 2 °C. Bacterial diversity was analysed by Illumina high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene in pooled DNAs from control or HP-processed fillets after 1, 11 or 67 days and the raw reads were deposited in the NCBI-SRA database with accession number PRJNA517618. Yeast and fungi diversity were analysed by high-throughput sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region for control and HP-processed fillets at the end of storage (11 or 67 days, respectively) and have the SRA accession number PRJNA517779. Quantitative label-free proteomics profiles were analysed by SWATH-MS (Sequential Windowed data independent Acquisition of the Total High-resolution-Mass Spectra) in myofibrillar or sarcoplasmic enriched protein extracts pooled for control or HP-processed fillets after 1, 11 and 67 days of storage. Proteome data was deposited in the ProteomeXchange Consortium via the PRIDE partner repository with the dataset identifiers PXD012737. These data support the findings reported in the associated manuscript "High pressure processing of European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) fillets and tools for flesh quality and shelf life monitoring", Tsironi et al., 2019, JFE 262:83-91, doi.org/10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2019.05.010.FCT (Foundation of Science and Technology) COFASP/0002/2015; Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology UID/Multi/04326/2019 POCI-01-0145-FEDER007440 UID/NEU/04539/2019info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio