Three-dimensional video coding on mobile platforms

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 2009.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2009.Includes bibliographical references leaves 83-87.With the evolution of the wireless communication technologies and the multimedia capabilities of the mobile phones, it is expected that three-dimensional (3D) video technologies will soon get adapted to the mobile phones. This raises the problem of choosing the best 3D video representation and the most efficient coding method for the selected representation for mobile platforms. Since the latest 2D video coding standard, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, provides better coding efficiency over its predecessors, coding methods of the most common 3D video representations are based on this standard. Among the most common 3D video representations, there are multi-view video, video plus depth, multi-view video plus depth and layered depth video. For using on mobile platforms, we selected the conventional stereo video (CSV), which is a special case of multi-view video, since it is the simplest among the available representations. To determine the best coding method for CSV, we compared the simulcast coding, multi-view coding (MVC) and mixed-resolution stereoscopic coding (MRSC) without inter-view prediction, with subjective tests using simple coding schemes. From these tests, MVC is found to provide the best visual quality for the testbed we used, but MRSC without inter-view prediction still came out to be promising for some of the test sequences and especially for low bit rates. Then we adapted the Joint Video Team’s reference multi-view decoder to run on ZOOMTM OMAP34xTM Mobile Development Kit (MDK). The first decoding performance tests on the MDK resulted with around four stereo frames per second with frame resolutions of 640×352. To further improve the performance, the decoder software is profiled and the most demanding algorithms are ported to run on the embedded DSP core. Tests resulted with performance gains ranging from 25% to 60% on the DSP core. However, due to the design of the hardware platform and the structure of the reference decoder, the time spent for the communication link between the main processing unit and the DSP core is found to be high, leaving the performance gains insignificant. For this reason, it is concluded that the reference decoder should be restructured to use this communication link as infrequently as possible in order to achieve overall performance gains by using the DSP core.Bal, CanM.S

The relationship between social support and spousal support perceived by women in the postpartum period and readiness for discharge

Abstract Aim: The study was conducted to determine the relationship between puerperal hospital readiness for discharge and social and spousal support. Materials and Methods:The descriptive and relationship-seeking study was conducted with 388 women hospitalized in the maternity ward of a public hospital. Personal Information Form, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), Spouse Support Scale Perceived by Women in Early Postpartum Period (SSSPWEPP) and Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale–New Mother Form (RHD-NMF) were used to collect the data. Results:The average score of postpartum women from RHD-NMF was 171.41±28.55 with 89.9% of them to be ready for discharge. There was a weak positive correlation between total scores from RHD-NMF and MSPSS and its sub-dimensions (family, friends) (r=.164, r=.177, r=.156, respectively; p<0.01); whilst there was a weak positive correlation between total scores from RHD-NMF and SSSPWEPP and its sub-dimensions (emotional, physical, social) (r=.249, r=.199, r=.194, r=.232, respectively;p<0.01). Conclusion and Suggestions:The study found that most of the postpartum women were ready for discharge. There was a positive correlation between preparedness for discharge and social and family support and support from friends in the puerperium period; also, more physical, emotional and social support from the spouse translated into more readiness for discharge from the hospital. In addition, it was found that the most important variablee affecting readiness for discharge from the hospital was the support of friends and physical support of the spouse

In a real-life setting, direct-acting antivirals to people who inject drugs with chronic hepatitis c in Turkey

Background: People who inject drugs (PWID) should be treated in order to eliminate hepatitis C virus in the world. The aim of this study was to compare direct-acting antivirals treatment of hepatitis C virus for PWID and non-PWID in a real-life setting. Methods: We performed a prospective, non-randomized, observational multicenter cohort study in 37 centers. All patients treated with direct-acting antivirals between April 1, 2017, and February 28, 2019, were included. In total, 2713 patients were included in the study among which 250 were PWID and 2463 were non-PWID. Besides patient characteristics, treatment response, follow-up, and side effects of treatment were also analyzed. Results: Genotype 1a and 3 were more prevalent in PWID-infected patients (20.4% vs 9.9% and 46.8% vs 5.3%). The number of naïve patients was higher in PWID (90.7% vs 60.0%), while the number of patients with cirrhosis was higher in non-PWID (14.1% vs 3.7%). The loss of follow-up was higher in PWID (29.6% vs 13.6%). There was no difference in the sustained virologic response at 12 weeks after treatment (98.3% vs 98.4%), but the end of treatment response was lower in PWID (96.2% vs 99.0%). In addition, the rate of treatment completion was lower in PWID (74% vs 94.4%). Conclusion: Direct-acting antivirals were safe and effective in PWID. Primary measures should be taken to prevent the loss of follow-up and poor adherence in PWID patients in order to achieve World Health Organization’s objective of eliminating viral hepatitis

Use of ovary culture techniques in reproductive toxicology

Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Acknowledgements The author's studies in this field are supported by MRC grants G1002118 (NS and RAA) and G110357 (RAA), MR/L010011/1 (PAF), the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 212885 (PAF) and the Wellcome Trust (080388 to PAF). AS was funded by a BBSRC CASE Studentship co-funded by AstraZeneca.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Comparison of Depth Image-Based Rendering and Image Domain Warping in 3D Video Coding

3D became successful in the movie theaters but failed to become mainstream for home use. The inconvenience of wearing glasses is arguably the reason and researchers have been investigating solutions for glasses-free 3D displays. Today, the most promising solution is the autostereoscopic display, which require many views of the same scene to be displayed simultaneously for a comfortable viewing experience. However, coding 3D video (3DV) with too many views is impractical with current networks and the 3DV coding standard, H.264/MVC (MVC), as the necessary bitrate is linearly proportional to the number of coded views. Instead, only a sparse set of anchor views can be compressed with some supplementary data and the remaining can be synthesized at the decoder. In this dissertation, we compare two very popular view synthesis methods, Depth Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) and Image Domain Warping (IDW), in terms of their coding efficiency and complexity. First, we establish a common formulation that allows us to compare DIBR and IDW and their associated 3DV representations mathematically. Then we provide the details of a fast DIBR-based view synthesis method and its implementation on GPU. We show that it can synthesize views with good objective quality and can provide inter-view consistency with almost constant time complexity in terms of the number of synthesized views. Moreover, we present a new coding tool, "Depth-based Prediction Mode" (DBPM), and incorporate it into the coding loop of MVC. Using DBPM, we realize a novel MVD codec and we show that view synthesis can also be used for better prediction of the anchor views. DBPM uses the supplementary depth data and DIBR to achieve up to 9.2%, 9.9% and 6.7% bitrate savings over MVC for coding MVD data, depth maps and multiview videos, respectively. Finally, we establish a codec framework based on the next generation candidate 3DV coding standard (3D-AVC), which has prediction tools similar to the DBPM already incorporated, and show that both DIBR and IDW can be used in this framework without any syntax changes to the standard. Using this framework we show that IDW achieves better coding performance than DIBR with average bitrate savings of 12.8% for anchor views and 1.5% for the synthesized views with significantly lower computational complexity. Finally, we provide an analysis on the effect of camera noise on measuring the quality of synthesized views with DIBR and IDW and show that camera noise produce a bias towards better measurements for DIBR. Recalculating the bitrate savings on sequences without camera noise shows that IDW can actually achieve average bitrate savings of 8.8% in the synthesized views instead of 1.5

Zihni Aksoy

Ankara : İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent Üniversitesi İktisadi, İdari ve Sosyal Bilimler Fakültesi, Tarih Bölümü, 2017.This work is a student project of the The Department of History, Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University.by Çekiç, Can Eyüp

A proposal for a problem-oriented pharmacobiochemistry course in dental education

Problem-oriented learning is an effective method of learning that increases students' learning motivation, improves the relationship amongst students and results in open-minded discussions. In this study, a new problem-oriented pharmacobiochemistry course related to oxidative metabolism of drugs by cytochrome P450 (CYP450) systems' was designed. Students were divided into seven groups. Three keywords related to drug interaction through CYP450 were provided to each group in order for them to conduct research on the information given. After 1month, the groups attended a session under the supervision of a tutor to solve a simulated problem case that was designed using the keywords. At the end of the integrated course, a multiple-choice examination was given. The success rate of 76 students who attended the course was found to be significantly higher than the success rate of the students who received the lecture-based course only (P<0.0001). A questionnaire containing 20 items (Cronbach's alpha: 0.92) was administered to the students to learn about their perception regarding this educational model. The questionnaire was evaluated using the Likert scale. Student feedback was very positive, with fourteen answers rated as agree' and the remaining six rated as strongly agree'. Students thought that the problem-oriented model was very enjoyable and useful in regard to dental education. Based on these results, we conclude that this course model may help achieve an integrated curriculum for dental school programmes

Epoxy-based paints from glycolysis products of postconsumer PET bottles: synthesis, wet paint properties and film properties

Glycolysis of waste polyethylene terephthalate (PET) flakes obtained from grinding postconsumer bottles was carried out at 180-190A degrees C, and molar ratios of PET/EG were taken as 1/6. Reaction product was extracted by hot water, and water soluble crystallizable fraction and water insoluble fraction were obtained. These fractions were characterized by hydroxyl value determination. Water soluble crystallizable fraction obtained from glycolysis product was used for synthesis of PET-based epoxy resin. Two epoxy-based paints were prepared using different amounts of PET-based epoxy resin. Wet paint properties, and chemical and physical film properties of paints containing waste PET were determined. Increasing the rate of PET-based epoxy resin in paint formulation did not have a negative effect on the wet paint properties and dry film properties of epoxy-based paints containing waste PET