Facial Recognition and Face Mask Detection Using Machine Learning Techniques

Facial recognition, as a biometric system, is a crucial tool for the identification procedures. When using facial recognition, an individual\u27s identity is identified using their unique facial features. Biometric authentication system helps in identifying individuals using their physiological and behavioral features. Physiological biometrics utilize human features such as faces, irises, and fingerprints. In contrast, behavioral biometric rely on features that humans do, such as voice and handwritings. Facial recognition has been widely used for security and other law enforcement purposes. However, since COVID-19 pandemic, many people around the world had to wear face masks. This thesis introduces a neural network system, which can be trained to identify people’s facial features while half of their faces are covered by face masks. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model using transfer learning technique has achieved remarkable accuracy even the original dataset is very limited. One large Face mask detection dataset was first used to train the model, while the original much smaller Face mask detector dataset was used to adapt and finetune this model that was previously generated. During the training and testing phases, network structures, and various parameters were adjusted to achieve the best accuracy results for the actual small dataset. Our adapted model was able to achieve a 97.1% accuracy

Peer Assisted Learning Strategies for Reading Skills Improvement by Children with Social, Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Elementary grade students with reading difficulties do not always receive effective intervention; this can prevent them from becoming fluent readers. Students with social, emotional and behavioral disorders (SEBD) often lack appropriate social skills, which can augment challenges associated with learning to read. Response to Intervention (RTI), using a multi-tiered system of support, adapts to a student’s learning and/or behavioral difficulties by applying evidence-based interventions to address individual student needs. This study evaluated the effects of combining a Tier 1 core reading instruction program with a Tier 2 intervention, Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) for reading for students with SEBD. It was hypothesized that PALS would improve students’ overall reading skills. Using a multiple baseline across dyads design, six students with both reading difficulties and SEBD participated in daily PALS peer tutoring sessions. Students’ oral reading fluency was measured semiweekly using curriculum-based measures. The percentages of active listening and prompting, as broadly defined by the PALS intervention manual, also were calculated. Although the results indicate the intervention did not work as hypothesized, the findings highlight factors that should be considered when developing reading instruction programs for students with SEBD. Implications for school practice are discussed

Commentary: The History of Neurosurgery at Albany Medical College and Albany Medical Center Hospital, Albany, New York.

The origins of the Department of Neurosurgery at Albany Medical College closely parallel the development of early America and the establishment of modern health care.The tales of Washington Irving, the works of the Hudson River School of painters, and summers in the Catskill Mountains or Adirondacks are the stories that color the history of Upstate New York (Figure1). As a social, industrial, and political hub of the American colonies, New England’s need for centers providing structured medicine led to the creation of Albany Medical College in1839, one of the earliest such institutions in the young nation.1 Rapid progress in nearly every other realm of life required medical advancements as well, prompting subspecialization and the development of neurosurgery in the region

Beneficiation of some Egyptian Glass Sands

The attrition-scrubbing of some Egyptian glass sands was necessary for the disintegration of the ferruginous clayey coating on quartz grains. The effects of time of attrition-ing, impeller speed and solid/liquid ration were investi-gated. Classification of the scrubbed sands resulted in the removal of a slimy fraction and yielded a product having 0.065% Fe. Acid attritioning of sand with commer-cial HCL at room temperature did not affect the iron, coat-ing quartz particles

Electrical studies and plasma characterization of an atmospheric pressure plasma jet operated at low frequency

Low-temperature, high-pressure plasma jets have an extensive use in medical and biological applications. Much work has been devoted to study these applications while comparatively fewer studies appear to be directed to the discharge itself. In this work, in order to better understand the kind of electrical discharge and the plasma states existing in those devices, a study of the electrical characteristics of a typical plasma jet, operated at atmospheric pressure, using either air or argon, is reported. It is found that the experimentally determined electrical characteristics are consistent with the model of a thermal arc discharge, with a highly collisional cathode sheet. The only exception is the case of argon at the smallest electrode separation studied, around 1 mm in which case the discharge is better modeled as either a non-thermal arc or a high-pressure glow. Also, variations of the electrical behavior at different gas flow rates are interpreted, consistently with the arc model, in terms of the development of fluid turbulence in the external jet.Fil: Giuliani, Leandro Estanislao. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física del Plasma. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física del Plasma; ArgentinaFil: Xaubet Brea, Magalí Noel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física del Plasma. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física del Plasma; ArgentinaFil: Grondona, Diana Elena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física del Plasma. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física del Plasma; ArgentinaFil: Minotti, Fernando Oscar. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física del Plasma. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física del Plasma; ArgentinaFil: Kelly, Hector Juan. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física del Plasma. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física del Plasma; Argentin

HealthCyberMap: Mapping the Health Cyberspace Using Hypermedia GIS and Clinical Codes

HealthCyberMap () is a Semantic Web service for healthcare professionals and librarians, patients and the public m general that aims at mappmg parts of medical/ health information resources in cyberspace in novel ways to improve their retrieval and navigation. The Semantic Web ( and ) aims to be the next-generation World Wide Web by giving machine-readable semantics and context to the currently presentation-based Web pages. HealthCyberMap features an unconventional use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to map conceptual spaces occupied by collections of medical/ health information resources. Besides mapping the semantic and non-geographical aspects of these resources using suitable spatial metaphors, HealthCyberMap also collects and maps the geographical provenance of these resources. Some of HealthCyberMap Web interfaces are visual (maps for browsing resources by clinical/ health topic, by provenance and by type), while others are textual (multilingual interfaces for browsing resources by language, and a directory of topical resource categories, besides HealthCyberMap Semantic Subject Search Engine that goes beyond conventional free-text and keyword-based search engines, and supports synonyms, disease variants, subtypes, as well as some semantic relationships between terms). HealthCyberMap adopts a clinical metadata framework built upon a clinical coding scheme (vocabulary or ontology—ICD-9-CM* clinical classification in the current pilot service). Clinical coding schemes serve as a reliable common backbone for topical resource indexing, automated topical classification, topical visualisation and navigation of coded resource pools (using suitable metaphors), and enhanced information retrieval and linking. A resource metadata base based on Dublin Core metadata set with HealthCyberMap’s own extensions holds information about selected high-quality resources. HealthCyberMap then uses GIS spatialisation methods to generate interactive navigational cybermaps from the metadata base. These visual cybermaps are based on familiar metaphors for image-word association to give users a broad overview and understanding of what is available in this complex conceptual space of medical/ health Internet resources and help them navigate it more efficiently and effectively. HealthCyberMap cybermaps can be considered as semantically-spatialised, ontology-based browsing views of the underlying resource metadata base. Using a clinical coding scheme as a metric for spatialisation (“semantic distance”) is unique to HealthCyberMap and is very much suited for the semantic categorisation and navigation of medical/ health Internet information resources. HealthCyberMap also introduces a useful form of cyberspatial analysis for the detection of topical coverage gaps in its resource pool using choropleth (shaded) maps of human body systems. The project features a cost-effective method for serving Web hypermaps with dynamic metadata base drill-down functionality. It also demonstrates the feasibility of Electronic Patient Record to Online Information Services (like HealthCyberMap) Problem to Knowledge Linking using clinical codes as crisp problem-knowledge linkers or knowledge hooks. The Semantic Subject Search Engine queries the same HealthCyberMap resource metadata base. Explicit concepts in resource metadata map onto a brokering domain ontology (ICD-9-CM) allowing the search engine to infer implicit meanings (synonyms and semantic relationships) not directly mentioned in either the resource or its metadata. Similarly, user queries would map to the same ontology allowing the search engine to infer the implicit semantics of user queries and use them to optimise retrieval. A formative evaluation study of HealthCyberMap pilot service using an online user evaluation questionnaire, in addition to analysis of HealthCyberMap server transaction log, has been conducted during the period from 18 April 2002 to 1 June 2002 with very encouraging results. This two-method evaluation approach was guided by methodologies described in NIH Web Site Evaluation and Performance Measures Toolkit among other resources. Many exciting future possibilities have been also investigated by the author, including the further development of HealthCyberMap as a customisable, location-based medical/ health information service

Situation analysis of the integration of family planning services in postpartum, postabortion and prevention of mother to child transmission programs in Haiti

This report presents the results of a situation analysis of the provision and use of contraception in postpartum, postabortion, and Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services in Haiti. FRONTIERS provided the Centre d’Évaluation et de Recherche Appliqueé (Center for Evaluation and Applied Research or CERA) with technical assistance for the data collection, cleaning, and entry processes. The study found that there is a substantial unmet need for family planning services among postpartum women and many missed opportunities to provide these services during the pregnancy-extended postpartum period continuum. Most outpatient services have adequately implemented HIV counseling for pregnant women, and at least three-quarters of the private and mixed facilities were offering HIV testing, but there is a need to strengthen HIV testing in public establishments. Based on the findings, a number of recommendations are proposed, including efforts to link family planning services to the health care of women living with HIV

Antibiotic susceptibility of Neochlamydia hartmanellae and Parachlamydia acanthamoebae in amoebae.

Parachlamydia acanthamoebae and Neochlamydia hartmanellae are Chlamydia-related bacteria naturally infecting free-living amoebae. These strict intracellular bacteria might represent emerging pathogens. Recent studies report an association with lower respiratory tract infections, especially with pneumonia where they have been identified as a potential causative agent in 1-2% of cases. In this study, we defined the antibiotic susceptibility of N. hartmanellae, two strains of P. acanthamoebae and two yet unclassified Parachlamydiaceae strains using a quantitative approach. We confirmed the results obtained earlier for P. acanthamoebae strain Bn9 in an observational study. Macrolides (MICs < 0.06-0.5 μg/ml), rifampicin (MICs 0.25-2) and doxycycline (2-4 μg/ml) were active against P. acanthamoebae strains and Neochlamydia. All strains were resistant to amoxicillin, ceftriaxone and imipenem (MIC ≥32 μg/ml). Similarly to other Chlamydia-related bacteria, all investigated Parachlamydiaceae were resistant to quinolones (MICs ≥ 16 μg/ml). Therefore, we recommend a treatment with macrolides for Parachlamydia-associated pneumonia

Neuroinfection survey at a neurological ward in a Brazilian tertiary teaching hospital

OBJECTIVES: This study was undertaken to characterize the neuroinfection profile in a tertiary neurological ward. INTRODUCTION: Neuroinfection is a worldwide concern and bacterial meningitis, tetanus and cerebral malaria have been reported as the commonest causes in developing countries. METHODS: From 1999 to 2007, all patients admitted to the Neurology Ward of Hospital das Clínicas, São Paulo University School of Medicine because of neuroinfection had their medical records reviewed. Age, gender, immunological status, neurological syndrome at presentation, infectious agent and clinical outcome were recorded. RESULTS: Three hundred and seventy four cases of neuroinfectious diseases accounted for 4.2% of ward admissions and the identification of infectious agent was successful in 81% of cases. Mean age was 40.5 + 13.4 years, 63.8% were male, 19.7% were immunocompromised patients and meningoencephalitis was the most common clinical presentation despite infectious agent. Viruses and bacteria were equally responsible for 29.4% of neuroinfectious diseases; parasitic, fungal and prion infections accounted for 28%, 9.6% and 3.5% respectively. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1), Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Treponema pallidum, Taenia solium, Schistosoma mansoni, Cryptococcus neoformans and Histoplasma capsulatum were the more common infectious pathogens in the patients. Infection mortality rate was 14.2%, of which 62.3% occurred in immunocompetent patients. CONCLUSION: Our institution appeared to share some results with developed and developing countries. Comparison with literature may be considered as quality control to health assistance