Andien alkuperäisväestö ja siirtomaa-ajan kirjallinen kulttuuri

Arvosteltu teos: Beyond the lettered city: Indigenous literacies in the Andes / Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2012

Keisari Kaarle V ja hänen aikakautensa

Arvosteltu teos: Puolen maailman valtias: Kaarle V:n 1500-luku ja Euroopan mahdin synty / Pekka Valtonen. Helsinki : Gaudeamus, 2015

Refining Coarse Manual Segmentations with Stable Probability Regions

Most feature-based lesion detection and computer-aided diagnosis methods for medical images require representative data of each region of interest (ROI) for parameter selection. Furthermore, the spatial accuracy of the segmentation of the ROIs from the background can significantly affect certain image features extracted from the ROIs. How- ever, requiring spatially accurate manual segmentations of the ROIs to be used as the ground truth is infeasible for large image sets due to the amount of manual work involved. To relax the requirement of spatial accuracy and to enable spatial refinement of coarse manual segmentations to have more representative feature data, a method based on color information and maximally stable extremal regions of lesion likelihoods is presented. The proposed method is quantitatively compared to several segmentation approaches by using a challenging set of retinal images with spatially accurate ground truth of exudates. The experiments show that the proposed method produces good results measured as Dice coefficients between the refined segmentation and ground truth

Comparison of image registration methods for composing spectral retinal images

Spectral retinal images have signficant potential for improving the early detection and visualization of subtle changes due to eye diseases and many systemic diseases. High resolution in both the spatial and the spectral domain can be achieved by capturing a set of narrowband channel images from which the spectral images are composed. With imaging techniques where the eye movement between the acquisition of the images is unavoidable, image registration is required. In this paper, the applicability of the state-of-the-art image registration methods for the composition of spectral retinal images is studied. The registration methods are quantitatively compared using synthetic channel image data of an eye phantom and semisynthetic set of retinal channel images subjected to known transformations. The experiments show that Generalized dual-bootstrap iterative closest point method outperforms the other evaluated methods in registration accuracy and the number of successful registrations

Mining Emotions from the Finnish War Letter Collection, 1939–1944

Our paper analyses emotional language used by Finnish soldiers and civilians in their private communication during World War II. The dataset consists of 7,000 handwritten letters converted into a machine-readable corpus with rich metadata. The dataset offers a unique opportunity to make a statistical analysis of people’s emotional responses to the war. We engage in key questions of the cultural history of war, such as the connection between soldiers’ emotional language and violence: did soldiers’ emotional language become more laconic in the course of the war? While computational approaches to mining emotions have been common in fields like computer science and linguistics, they have not gained wider popularity in historical research. Pioneering attempts have been based on individual emotion words carefully chosen by an historian, or on readily available, more generic emotion lexicons. Compared to machine-learning solutions, lexicon-based approaches require less computational effort and are more transparent to interpret. Our methodology combines the ready-made word list FEIL with contextual knowledge of historians. FEIL gives around 7,000 Finnish words an emotion category and intensity ratings. First, the emotion lexicon was filtered based on high intensity. Then the domain expert manually removed words not particularly emotionally intensive in the context of war letters. The expert also annotated the list of the most frequent words in the war letter collection and handpicked emotionally intensive words not included in FEIL. Our final list covered 298 emotion words. We quantified changes in their use over time. In contrast to earlier research, our analysis indicates that soldiers’ and civilians’ emotionality did not significantly differ during World War II. Soldiers’ use of emotion words saw a decline in the last stages of the war, but overall their letters were almost as emotional as the civilians’ letters. We did indeed identify some changes in the individual emotion words used by the soldiers in their letters: patriotic words in particular decreased in the course of the war. In addition to empirical findings, our paper sheds light on the problem of universal emotion lexicons in historical research: linguistic, cultural and temporal differences between present-day lexicons and historical datasets can lead to biased interpretations. Thus, our paper contributes not only to the history of emotions but also to emotion mining, which is historically sensitive.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Caffeine content in newborn hair correlates with maternal dietary intake

Purpose High-maternal caffeine intake during pregnancy may be harmful for perinatal outcomes and future child health, but the level of fetal cumulative exposure has been difficult to measure thus far. Here, we present maternal dietary caffeine intake during the last trimester and its correlation to caffeine content in newborn hair after birth. Methods Maternal third trimester diets and dietary caffeine intake were prospectively collected in Kuopio Birth Cohort (KuBiCo) using a 160-item food frequency questionnaire (n = 2840). Newborn hair was collected within 48 h after birth and analyzed by high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) for caffeine (n = 316). Correlation between dietary caffeine intake and neonatal hair caffeine content was evaluated from 203 mother-child pairs. Results Mean dietary caffeine intake was 167 mg/days (95% CI 162-172 mg/days), of which coffee comprised 81%. Caffeine in the maternal diet and caffeine content in newborn hair correlated significantly (r = 0.50; p <0.001). Older, multiparous, overweight women, and smokers had the highest caffeine levels in the maternal diet, as well as in their newborn babies' hair. Conclusion Caffeine exposure, estimated from newborn hair samples, reflects maternal third trimester dietary caffeine intake and introduces a new method to assess fetal cumulative caffeine exposure. Further studies to evaluate the effects of caffeine exposure on both perinatal and postnatal outcomes are warranted, since over 40% of pregnant women consume caffeine more than the current suggested recommendations (European Food Safety Association, EFSA recommendations).Peer reviewe

Vector Competence of Northern European Culex pipiens Biotype pipiens and Culex torrentium to West Nile Virus and Sindbis Virus

The West Nile Virus (WNV) and Sindbis virus (SINV) are avian-hosted mosquito-borne zoonotic viruses that co-circulate in some geographical areas and share vector species such as Culex pipiens and Culex torrentium. These are widespread in Europe, including northern parts and Finland, where SINV is endemic, but WNV is currently not. As WNV is spreading northwards in Europe, we wanted to assess the experimental vector competence of Finnish Culex pipiens and Culex torrentium mosquitoes to WNV and SINV in different temperature profiles. Both mosquito species were found susceptible to both viruses and got infected via infectious blood meal at a mean temperature of 18 °C. WNV-positive saliva was detected at a mean temperature of 24 °C, whereas SINV-positive saliva was detected already at a mean temperature of 18 °C. Cx. torrentium was found to be a more efficient vector for WNV and SINV over Cx. pipiens. Overall, the results were in line with the previous studies performed with more southern vector populations. The current climate does not seem optimal for WNV circulation in Finland, but temporary summertime transmission could occur in the future if all other essential factors are in place. More field data would be needed for monitoring and understanding the northward spreading of WNV in Europe

Recent establishment of tick-borne encephalitis foci with distinct viral lineages in the Helsinki area, Finland

Number of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) cases has increased and new foci have emerged in Finland during the last decade. We evaluated risk for locally acquired TBE in the capital region inhabited by 1.2 million people. We screened ticks and small mammals from probable places of TBE virus (TBEV) transmission and places without reported circulation. The TBEV positive samples were sequenced and subjected to phylogenetic analysis. Within the study period 2007-2017, there was a clear increase of both all TBE cases and locally acquired cases in the Helsinki area. The surveillance of ticks and small mammals for TBEV confirmed four distinct TBEV foci in the Helsinki area. All detected TBEV strains were of the European subtype. TBEV genome sequences indicated that distinct TBEV lineages circulate in each focus. Molecular clock analysis suggested that the virus lineages were introduced to these foci decades ago. In conclusion, TBE has emerged in the mainland of Helsinki area during the last decade, with at least four distinct virus lineages independently introduced into the region previously. Although the overall annual TBE incidence is below the threshold for recommending general vaccinations, the situation requires further surveillance to detect and prevent possible further emergence of local TBE clusters.Peer reviewe