Image Restoration Techniques

Image restoration is the process of restoring degraded images which cannot be taken again or the process of obtaining the image again is costlier. We can restore the images by prior knowledge of the noise or the disturbance that causes the degradation in the image. Image restoration is done in two domains: spatial domain and frequency domain. In spatial domain the filtering action for restoring the images is done by directly operating on the pixels of the digital image. In frequency domain the filtering action is done by mapping the spatial domain into the frequency domain by taking fourier transform of the image function. By mapping the image into frequency domain an image can provide an insight for filtering operations. After the filtering, the image is remapped into spatial domain by inverse fourier transform to obtain the restored image. Different noise models were studied. Different filtering techniques in both spatial and frequency domains, were studied and improved algorithms were written and simulated using matlab. Restoration efficiency was checked by taking peak signal to noise ratio(psnr) and mean square error(mse) into considerations

Point-of-Care Ultrasound Assessment of Tropical Infectious Diseases—A Review of Applications and Perspectives

The development of good quality and affordable ultrasound machines has led to the establishment and implementation of numerous point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) protocols in various medical disciplines. POCUS for major infectious diseases endemic in tropical regions has received less attention, despite its likely even more pronounced benefit for populations with limited access to imaging infrastructure. Focused assessment with sonography for HIV-associated TB (FASH) and echinococcosis (FASE) are the only two POCUS protocols for tropical infectious diseases, which have been formally investigated and which have been implemented in routine patient care today. This review collates the available evidence for FASH and FASE, and discusses sonographic experiences reported for urinary and intestinal schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, viral hemorrhagic fevers, amebic liver abscess, and visceral leishmaniasis. Potential POCUS protocols are suggested and technical as well as training aspects in the context of resource-limited settings are reviewed. Using the focused approach for tropical infectious diseases will make ultrasound diagnosis available to patients who would otherwise have very limited or no access to medical imaging

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Auditing Keyword Queries Over Text Documents

Designing a robust data management system, requires securing access to all the three types of data, namely structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. In this paper, we present an auditing model to secure text document access. Given a sensitive docu- ment, we compute the candidate suspicious keyword queries that may have accessed the sensitive document. Our auditing model allows users to specify either the full document or some specific portion of the document as sensitive. All queries that have accessed a sensitive document may not lead to disclosure of the sensitive document, some of them might be very regular accesses. We present an outlier mining based algorithm to find top-k anomalous queries from candidate suspicious queries. Data security and privacy is an issue of growing importance in healthcare domain. Query auditing is often used in healthcare domain to detect privacy violation. However, as unstructured healthcare data, such as medical reports, etc., are not easily available for public research. In this paper, we show how one can use the publically available DBLP data to create an equivalent healthcare data, which can be used for experimental evaluation

TRAFAN: Road traffic analysis using social media web pages

In this paper, we present TRAFAN, a system to analyze traffic activities of various cities in India. Traffic information is publicly available on various social networking sites. We aim to analyze the transportation data moving through the most popular social networking site Facebook. We take the data from various Facebook traffic pages as input to our system. Our system performs three important functions: fast browsing through keyword search result, compare Facebook pages and get statistical summaries about the Facebook pages. Our system can assist the government organizations to know the most chaotic traffic issue in a city. Organizations can retrieve all the problems in a city related to a traffic issue. The system also allows to compare the severity of an issue across the cities. We perform our experiment on Facebook pages containing 21,000 posts and 0.5 million reactions. We show through experimental results that our system effectively analyzes the traffic activities of cities. We present the results using information visualization techniques to improve the usability of our proposed TRAFAN interface

Pulmonary alveolar proteinosis in children: An unusual presentation with significant clinical impact

Pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (PAP) – an unusual diffuse lung disease characterized by alveolar accumulation of phospholipoprotein material, with a peak incidence in third to fourth decade and male predominance is also described in children. Recorded prevalence is 0.1/100,000 individuals. Major clinicopathogenetic subtypes include autoimmune (idiopathic) associated with granulocyte–macrophage colony-stimulating factor autoantibodies, secondary form, and the congenital form (associated with surfactant gene mutations). Common presenting features include dyspnea, cough, low-grade fever, inspiratory crackles, and digital clubbing. Pulmonary function shows a restrictive ventilatory defect. X-rays show bilateral patchy to extensive consolidations, and bronchial lavage yields a milky fluid. Characteristic microscopic findings on lung biopsy include filling of terminal bronchioles and alveolar spaces by deep pink granular PAS-positive material. Whole lung lavage is the safest and most effective form of treatment. We present brief profiles of two young children identified as having PAP, along with follow-up data on one of them

A Method for the Determination of Mixing Temperatures of Different Components of Recycled Hot Mix Asphalt Mixtures

To produce reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) mixes in plant using hot recycling technique, virgin aggregate is super-heated to heat the RAP by conduction. The temperature to which virgin aggregates are to be heated will depend on the RAP percentage in the mix, quality of RAP and the quantity and quality of virgin binder and RAP preheat temperature. In the present study an investigation has been carried out to examine the heat transfer characteristics of RAP mixes to propose a simple method for determination of superheated virgin aggregate and RAP temperatures to be adopted for preparation of RAP mixes. For this purpose an empirical equation has been developed for estimating the super-heating temperature of virgin aggregates as a function of RAP content, RAP preheat temperature and mixing temperature. Effect of mixing temperature on bulk density and mechanical properties was also evaluated in this study. Correlations were developed between mixing temperature and bulk density, mechanical properties (Indirect tensile strength and resilient modulus). Effect of RAP preheat temperatures and virgin aggregate temperatures are having higher effect on mechanical properties for lower RAP content when compared with higher RAP content. It is also observed that using higher percentages of RAP will require either higher preheating temperatures of RAP or higher virgin aggregate temperatures. From the ANOVA analysis it was observed that for lower RAP contents (up to 25%) preheat temperature of RAP material had significant effect on mechanical properties, on the other hand for higher RAP contents (40%) both RAP preheat and superheated virgin aggregate temperature played an equal role on the mechanical properties. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering

Single and bivalent metal-cations co-doped ZnO nanopowders: synthesis and characterization

Ultraviolet light-based devices have received great attention due to their applications in various fields including health, industry, and water purification. In this view, we have developed energetic ultraviolet light-emitting zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticle powders by co-doping of single and bivalent metal-ions namely silver and manganese ions, i.e., Ag1+ and Mn2+. The as-synthesized ZnO nanoparticle powders were analyzed by characterizing with X-ray diffractometry, field-emission scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Raman microscopy, UV-Vis spectrometry, and Photoluminescence techniques. ZnO nanoparticle powders developed at a typical metal-ions doping concentration exhibited an enhanced optical band gap (similar to 8.5%). Though the morphology and crystal structures of ZnO nanoparticle powders remain unchanged, their particle size decreased from 30 to 13 nm, and optical emission gradually decreased while increasing the doping concentrations of metal ions.FALS