Automatic graph cut based segmentation of retinal optic disc by incorporating blood vessel compensation.

Glaucoma is one of the main causes of blindness worldwide. Periodical retinal screening is highly recommended in order to detect any sign of the disease and apply the appropriated treatment. Different systems for the analysis of retinal images have been designed in order to assist this process. The segmentation of the optic disc is an important step in the development of a retinal screening system. In this paper we present an unsupervised method for the segmentation of the optic disc. The main obstruction in the optic disc segmentation process is the presence of blood vessels breaking the continuity of the object. While many other methods have addressed this problem trying to eliminate the vessels, we have incorporated the blood vessel information into our formulation. The blood vessels inside of the optic disc are used to give continuity to the object to segment. Our approach is based on the graph cut technique, where the graph is constructed by considering the relationship between neighbouring pixels and by the likelihood of them belonging to the foreground and background from prior information. Our method was tested on two public datasets, DIARETDB1 and DRIVE. The performance of our method was measured by calculating the overlapping ratio (Oratio), sensitivity and the mean absolute distance (MAD) with respect to the manually labeled images

Men who Sell Sex in Peru: Evolving Technology and Sexual Cultures.

Men who sell sex in Peru today comprise an extremely diverse group. The ways in which they work, and the meanings their work carries, are similarly varied. Moreover, these men have adapted rapidly to recent changes in communication technologies with concomitant effects on aspects of sexual culture

Software development environments and tools in MDE

Abstract. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is the notion that we can construct a model of a system that we can then transform into the real thing. The development of software in MDE using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) has two phases. First, the development of artifacts such as DSLs and  transformation mechanisms by the modeling experts. Second, people non-technical experts (domain expert or end user) using the artifacts created develop applications simply because of the high level of abstraction allowed by technology. Several factors are considered to limit the use of MDE. One of them,  is the lack of knowledge the tools and the development activities with MDE. To support the MDE initiative, the present work makes a description of the theoretical foundations of MDE, also describes the main activities to build several MDE artifacts with some of the tools most known in this technology

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions

A continuación presentaré el reporte de las actividades realizadas durante el período de Primavera 2022 en el PAP “PAP4N01 PROGRAMA DE GESTION E INNOVACION EN INGENIERIA DE PRODUCTO I”. Estas actividades fueron realizadas en la empresa Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions y consisten en el inicio de mi vida profesional, esto porque es el primer programa de becario en el que participo. Mostraré el desarrollo de mi proyecto durante este período, así como planeaciones e identificación de necesidades técnicas para poder completar de manera exitosa el trabajo que me ha sido encomendado. Además de todo lo mencionado anteriormente, daré a conocer mis reflexiones sobre este primer acercamiento con una empresa local, mis motivaciones para comenzar mi desarrollo profesional de esta manera y las conclusiones a las que llegué después de completar este primer Proyecto de Aplicación Profesional.ITESO, A.C

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions

ITESO, A.C

Effectiveness of a Surgery Admission Unit for patients undergoing major elective surgery in a tertiary university hospital

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The increasing demand on hospitalisation, either due to elective activity from the waiting lists or due to emergency admissions coming from the Emergency Department (ED), requires looking for strategies that lead to effective bed management. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a surgery admission unit for major elective surgery patients who were admitted for same-day surgery.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We included all patients admitted for elective surgery in a university tertiary hospital between the 1st of September and the 31st of December 2006, as well as those admitted during the same period of 2008, after the introduction of the Surgery Admission Unit. The main outcome parameters were global length of stay, pre-surgery length of stay, proportion of patients admitted the same day of the surgery and number of cancellations. Differences between the two periods were evaluated by the T-test and Chi-square test. Significance at P < 0.05 was assumed throughout.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We included 6,053 patients, 3,003 during 2006 and 3,050 patients during 2008. Global length of stay was 6.2 days (IC 95%:6.4-6) in 2006 and 5.5 days (IC 95%:5.8-5.2) in 2008 (p < 0.005). Pre-surgery length of stay was reduced from 0.46 days (IC 95%:0.44-0.48) in 2006 to 0.29 days (IC 95%:0.27-0.31) in 2008 (p < 0.005). The proportion of patients admitted for same-day surgery was 67% (IC 95%:69%-65%) in 2006 and 76% (IC 95%:78%-74%) in 2008 (p < 0.005). The number of cancelled interventions due to insufficient preparation was 31 patients in 2006 and 7 patients in 2008.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The implementation of a Surgery Admission Unit for patients undergoing major elective surgery has proved to be an effective strategy for improving bed management. It has enabled an improvement in the proportion of patients admitted on the same day as surgery and a shorter length of stay.</p

Conductive material based on cellulose and polyaniline for active packaging applications

In this research a conductive material was developed with the aim to obtain a smart packaging material that sensors the alteration of a food stuff product through the electrical changes caused in the developed material. To achieve this a formulation was obtained by combining the properties of nano complex gel base on cellulose and the conductive property of the oxidized aniline. The electrical impedance as answer variable allowed to determine the best process condition for obtaining the smart film.The research work was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation and was partly supported by RFBR grant 18-29-12129mk

Retinal blood vessels extraction using probabilistic modelling

© 2014 Kaba et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.The analysis of retinal blood vessels plays an important role in detecting and treating retinal diseases. In this review, we present an automated method to segment blood vessels of fundus retinal image. The proposed method could be used to support a non-intrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology for early detection of retinal diseases, treatment evaluation or clinical study. This study combines the bias correction and an adaptive histogram equalisation to enhance the appearance of the blood vessels. Then the blood vessels are extracted using probabilistic modelling that is optimised by the expectation maximisation algorithm. The method is evaluated on fundus retinal images of STARE and DRIVE datasets. The experimental results are compared with some recently published methods of retinal blood vessels segmentation. The experimental results show that our method achieved the best overall performance and it is comparable to the performance of human experts.The Department of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University