Anti-Malassezia-Specific IgE Antibodies Production in Japanese Patients with Head and Neck Atopic Dermatitis: Relationship between the Level of Specific IgE Antibody and the Colonization Frequency of Cutaneous Malassezia Species and Clinical Severity

Atopic dermatitis of the head and neck (HNAD) is recognized as a separate condition. Malassezia, the predominant skin microbiota fungus, is considered to exacerbate atopic dermatitis (AD), especially HNAD. In the present study, we investigated the relationships between the levels of specific IgE antibodies, colonization frequency of eight predominant Malassezia species, and clinical severity in 61 patients with HNAD (26 mild, 24 moderate, and 11 severe cases). As clinical severity increased, the levels of specific IgE antibodies against eight Malassezia species also increased. Species diversity of the Malassezia microbiota in scale samples from patients was analyzed by nested PCR using species-specific primers. The clinical severity of HNAD was correlated with the total level of specific IgE antibodies against Malassezia species and the number of Malassezia species detected

A robust haze-removal scheme in polarimetric dehazing imaging based on automatic identification of sky region

<p> Quality enhancement of images acquired in hazy conditions is a significant research area in civil and military applications. The polarimetric dehazing methods have been exploited to dehaze hazy images and have proven to be effective in enhancing their quality. In this paper, by combining the polarimetric imaging technique and the dark channel prior technique, a robust haze-removal scheme is presented for the first time. On the one hand, the polarimetric imaging technique has advantages in recovering detailed information well, especially in dense hazy conditions; on the other hand, the dark channel prior technique provides a much more precise and convenient way to estimate the airlight radiance through extracting the sky region automatically. The experiments verify the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed dehazing scheme in quality enhancement of hazy images. Furthermore, comparison study demonstrates that the proposed scheme is superior to some sophisticated methods in terms of the visibility and contrast. We believe this scheme is beneficial in the image dehazing applications, especially for real-time applications. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.</p