Spatio-temporal interactive fusion based visual object tracking method

Visual object tracking tasks often struggle with utilizing inter-frame correlation information and handling challenges like local occlusion, deformations, and background interference. To address these issues, this paper proposes a spatio-temporal interactive fusion (STIF) based visual object tracking method. The goal is to fully utilize spatio-temporal background information, enhance feature representation for object recognition, improve tracking accuracy, adapt to object changes, and reduce model drift. The proposed method incorporates feature-enhanced networks in both temporal and spatial dimensions. It leverages spatio-temporal background information to extract salient features that contribute to improved object recognition and tracking accuracy. Additionally, the model’s adaptability to object changes is enhanced, and model drift is minimized. A spatio-temporal interactive fusion network is employed to learn a similarity metric between the memory frame and the query frame by utilizing feature enhancement. This fusion network effectively filters out stronger feature representations through the interactive fusion of information. The proposed tracking method is evaluated on four challenging public datasets. The results demonstrate that the method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and significantly improves tracking accuracy in complex scenarios affected by local occlusion, deformations, and background interference. Finally, the method achieves a remarkable success rate of 78.8% on TrackingNet, a large-scale tracking dataset

Synergistic Interferon-Alpha-Based Combinations for Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Viral Infections

Background: There is an urgent need for new antivirals with powerful therapeutic potential and tolerable side effects. Methods: Here, we tested the antiviral properties of interferons (IFNs), alone and with other drugs in vitro. Results: While IFNs alone were insufficient to completely abolish replication of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), IFNα, in combination with remdesivir, EIDD-2801, camostat, cycloheximide, or convalescent serum, proved to be more effective. Transcriptome and metabolomic analyses revealed that the IFNα–remdesivir combination suppressed SARS-CoV-2-mediated changes in Calu-3 cells and lung organoids, although it altered the homeostasis of uninfected cells and organoids. We also demonstrated that IFNα combinations with sofosbuvir, telaprevir, NITD008, ribavirin, pimodivir, or lamivudine were effective against HCV, HEV, FLuAV, or HIV at lower concentrations, compared to monotherapies. Conclusions: Altogether, our results indicated that IFNα can be combined with drugs that affect viral RNA transcription, protein synthesis, and processing to make synergistic combinations that can be attractive targets for further pre-clinical and clinical development against emerging and re-emerging viral infections

Molecular targets of alcohol action: translational research for pharmacotherapy development and screening.

Alcohol abuse and dependence are multifaceted disorders with neurobiological, psychological, and environmental components. Research on other complex neuropsychiatric diseases suggests that genetically influenced intermediate characteristics affect the risk for heavy alcohol consumption and its consequences. Diverse therapeutic interventions can be developed through identification of reliable biomarkers for this disorder and new pharmacological targets for its treatment. Advances in the fields of genomics and proteomics offer a number of possible targets for the development of new therapeutic approaches. This brain-focused review highlights studies identifying neurobiological systems associated with these targets and possible pharmacotherapies, summarizing evidence from clinically relevant animal and human studies, as well as sketching improvements and challenges facing the fields of proteomics and genomics. Concluding thoughts on using results from these profiling technologies for medication development are also presented

Формирование эмоциональной культуры как компонента инновационной культуры студентов

Homozygosity has long been associated with rare, often devastating, Mendelian disorders1 and Darwin was one of the first to recognise that inbreeding reduces evolutionary fitness2. However, the effect of the more distant parental relatedness common in modern human populations is less well understood. Genomic data now allow us to investigate the effects of homozygosity on traits of public health importance by observing contiguous homozygous segments (runs of homozygosity, ROH), which are inferred to be homozygous along their complete length. Given the low levels of genome-wide homozygosity prevalent in most human populations, information is required on very large numbers of people to provide sufficient power3,4. Here we use ROH to study 16 health-related quantitative traits in 354,224 individuals from 102 cohorts and find statistically significant associations between summed runs of homozygosity (SROH) and four complex traits: height, forced expiratory lung volume in 1 second (FEV1), general cognitive ability (g) and educational attainment (nominal p<1 × 10−300, 2.1 × 10−6, 2.5 × 10−10, 1.8 × 10−10). In each case increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months less education. Similar effect sizes were found across four continental groups and populations with different degrees of genome-wide homozygosity, providing convincing evidence for the first time that homozygosity, rather than confounding, directly contributes to phenotypic variance. Contrary to earlier reports in substantially smaller samples5,6, no evidence was seen of an influence of genome-wide homozygosity on blood pressure and low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits. Since directional dominance is predicted for traits under directional evolutionary selection7, this study provides evidence that increased stature and cognitive function have been positively selected in human evolution, whereas many important risk factors for late-onset complex diseases may not have been

Improving Semantic Segmentation via Decoupled Body and Edge Information

In this paper, we propose a method that uses the idea of decoupling and unites edge information for semantic segmentation. We build a new dual-stream CNN architecture that fully considers the interaction between the body and the edge of the object, and our method significantly improves the segmentation performance of small objects and object boundaries. The dual-stream CNN architecture mainly consists of a body-stream module and an edge-stream module, which process the feature map of the segmented object into two parts with low coupling: body features and edge features. The body stream warps the image features by learning the flow-field offset, warps the body pixels toward object inner parts, completes the generation of the body features, and enhances the object’s inner consistency. In the generation of edge features, the current state-of-the-art model processes information such as color, shape, and texture under a single network, which will ignore the recognition of important information. Our method separates the edge-processing branch in the network, i.e., the edge stream. The edge stream processes information in parallel with the body stream and effectively eliminates the noise of useless information by introducing a non-edge suppression layer to emphasize the importance of edge information. We validate our method on the large-scale public dataset Cityscapes, and our method greatly improves the segmentation performance of hard-to-segment objects and achieves state-of-the-art result. Notably, the method in this paper can achieve 82.6% mIoU on the Cityscapes with only fine-annotated data

Effectiveness of double ABCX-based psychotherapy for psychological distress among women undergoing in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer: a three-arm randomized controlled trial

AbstractObjective This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of double ABCX-based psychotherapy for psychological distress during in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer (IVF-ET) among a female group (FG), couple group (CoG) and control group (CG).Methods A total of 201 women undergoing their first IVF-ET cycle were randomized into three groups. The 6-session intervention was delivered at each visit to the IVF clinic. The primary outcomes were depression and anxiety, and the secondary outcomes included sleep quality, serum cortisol (nmol/L) levels and the clinical pregnancy rate, which were assessed before and after the intervention.Results The group-by-time effects were significant for depression, anxiety, sleep quality and serum cortisol levels, with larger effect sizes in the FG than in the CoG. There was no significant difference in the pregnancy rate among the three groups.Conclusion Psychotherapy effectively mitigated psychological distress, suggesting greater effectiveness for couples undergoing IVF couples than for women only. It is structured and easy to use during the IVF treatment cycle.Trial registration number https://register.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03931187, retrospectively registered on April 23, 2019

A Citizen-Contributed GIS Approach for Evaluating the Impacts of Land Use on Hurricane-Harvey-Induced Flooding in Houston Area

Hurricane Harvey (2017) caused widespread flash flooding by extremely heavy rainfall and resulted in tremendous damage, including 82 fatalities and huge economic loss in the Houston, Texas area. To reduce hazards, loss, and to improve urban resilience, it is important to understand the factors that influence the occurrence of flooding events. People rely on natural resources and different land uses to reduce the severity of flood impacts and mitigate the risk. In this study, we focused the impacts of land use on Hurricane-Harvey-induced flooding inside and outside the Houston city center. With the recent trend that more citizen scientists serve in delivering information about natural disaster response, local residents in Houston areas participated in delineating the flooded areas in Hurricane Harvey. The flooding information used here generated a published map with citizen-contributed flooding data. A regional model framework with spatial autocovariates was employed to understand those interactions. Different land use patterns and types affected the potential of flooding events differently inside and outside Houston&#8217;s city center. Explicitly, we found agricultural and open space were associated with high risk of flooding outside the city center, industrial lands increased the high risk of flooding in city center, and residential areas reduced the potential of flooding both inside and outside the city center. The results can assist with future land use strategy in Houston and other areas, and mitigate potential flash flooding. This study also highlighted the contribution of citizen science to responses to natural hazards

Selective Adsorption of Sodium Silicate on the Surface of Bastnaesite and Fluorite in Salicylhydroxamic Acid System under Alkaline Conditions

During the flotation separation process of bastnaesite, it is difficult to separate bastnaesite from fluorite effectively. In this present study, sodium silicate (SS) can effectively improve the flotation separation effect of bastnaesite and fluorite in salicylhydroxamic acid (SHA) systemasa. Through relevant analyses, such as Zeta potential measurements, adsorption capacity tests, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopic analyses and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) tests, the selective suppressor of SS on fluorite was proven. At pH 10, the single mineral flotation results show that with the increase of SS dosage, the flotation recovery of fluorite rapidly decreases from 61.5% to 35.31%, while the flotation rate of bastnaesite is still high (recovery is 80.02%). Then, the experiment of artificial mixed ore proved that the flotation separation of fluorite and bastnaesite was effective under the appropriate dosage of inhibitor. The results of potentiodynamic measurement and an adsorption capacity test showed that the SiOOH3− structure of SS more easily reacted with fluorite, which further prevented the adsorption of SHA on the fluorite surface. FTIR test results and XPS analysis further showed that SS had a strong binding effect with the Ca site on the fluorite surface, but a weak binding effect with the Ce site on the bastnaesite surface. Consequently, SS can be used as an effective inhibitor in the flotation separation of fluorite and bastnaesite