Neutrosophic Hough Transform

Hough transform (HT) is a useful tool for both pattern recognition and image processing communities. In the view of pattern recognition, it can extract unique features for description of various shapes, such as lines, circles, ellipses, and etc. In the view of image processing, a dozen of applications can be handled with HT, such as lane detection for autonomous cars, blood cell detection in microscope images, and so on. As HT is a straight forward shape detector in a given image, its shape detection ability is low in noisy images. To alleviate its weakness on noisy images and improve its shape detection performance, in this paper, we proposed neutrosophic Hough transform (NHT). As it was proved earlier, neutrosophy theory based image processing applications were successful in noisy environments. To this end, the Hough space is initially transferred into the NS domain by calculating the NS membership triples (T, I, and F). An indeterminacy filtering is constructed where the neighborhood information is used in order to remove the indeterminacy in the spatial neighborhood of neutrosophic Hough space. The potential peaks are detected based on thresholding on the neutrosophic Hough space, and these peak locations are then used to detect the lines in the image domain. Extensive experiments on noisy and noise-free images are performed in order to show the efficiency of the proposed NHT algorithm. We also compared our proposed NHT with traditional HT and fuzzy HT methods on variety of images. The obtained results showed the efficiency of the proposed NHT on noisy images

THE EFFECTS OF FACE MASK USE DURING COVID-19 ON SPEECH COMPREHENSION IN GERIATRIC PATIENTS WITH HEARING LOSS WHO USE LIP-READING FOR COMMUNICATION: A PROSPECTIVE CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY

Objective: Communication difficulties are considered the most significant consequence of hearing loss. This study aimed to determine whether surgical face masks, which have been mandatory throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, have an effect on speech comprehension scores in geriatric lip-reading patients with hearing loss and to raise awareness of the need for solutions to this problem. Materials and Method: Patients with moderate and higher sensorineural or mixed bilateral symmetrical hearing loss who stated that they lip-read to better understand during communication were included in the study. The patients’ speech comprehension scores were gathered while the audiologist wore a surgical mask and then a transparent mask, respectively. Results: Twelve (33,3%) of the patients were female, and 24 (66.7%) were male. The mean age of the patients was 66.64±1.53 years. The mean speech comprehension scores of the patients when the audiologist was wearing a surgical mask (38.25±14.33) and a transparent mask (67.81 ± 14.30), respectively, were compared. The surgical mask significantly affected speech comprehension scores, and the Cohen d value of the effect size was 2.06. As such, the surgical face mask had a great effect on these patients’ speech comprehension scores. Conclusions: In elderly lip-reading patients who suffer from hearing loss, seeing the lip movements of the speaker, especially in hospital applications, promotes more effective communication. Transparent face masks can be considered a solution. © 2022, Geriatrics Society. All rights reserved

Deep convolutional neural networks for airport detection in remote sensing images

This study investigated the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in providing a solution for the problem of airport detection in remote sensing images (RSIs). In recent years, Deep CNNs have gained much attention with numerous applications having been undertaken in the area of computer vision. Researchers generally approach airport detection as a pattern recognition problem, in which first various distinctive features are extracted, and then a classifier is adopted to detect airports. CNNs not only ensure a tuned feature vector, but also yield better classification accuracy. The method proposed in this study first detects various regions on RSIs and then uses these candidate regions to train CNN architecture. The CNN model used has five convolution and three fully connected layers. Normalization and dropout layers were employed in order to build efficient architecture. A data augmentation strategy was used to reduce overfitting. Several experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of CNNs. Comparative work validated the efficiency of the proposed method and yielded an accuracy of 95.21%

Phenolic compounds and antioxidant and antimicrobial properties of Helichrysum species collected from eastern Anatolia, Turkey

The antioxidant activity of the methanolic extracts of 4 plants from genus Helichrysum Mill. (Asteraceae) [H. arenarium (L.) Moench subsp. erzincanicum Davis & Kupicha, H. arenarium (L.) Moench subsp. rubicundum (C.Koch.) Davis & Kupicha, H. armenium DC. subsp. araxinum (Kirp.) Takht., and H. plicatum DC. subsp. pseudoplicatum (Nab.) Davis & Kupicha] was investigated with 2 complementary test systems, DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) radical scavenging and phosphomolybdenum assay. H. plicatum subsp. pseudoplicatum showed the highest level of total antioxidant activity (161.79 +/- 0.3 mg ascorbic acid equivalent/g extract) in the phosphomolybdenum assay. H. arenarium subsp. erzincanicum showed the highest level of free radical scavenging activity, with an IC50 value of 23.03 mu g/mL. The total phenolic contents of the extracts ranged from 71.81 to 144.50 mg gallic acid/g dry extract. Chlorogenic acid, apigenin-7-glucoside, and apigenin were found by HPLC analysis to be the main components in the extracts. Antimicrobial activity was investigated with the agar diffusion method. The methanolic extracts had antibacterial activity against Aeromonas hydrophila, Bacillus brevis, B. cereus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 29213. However, no activity was found against Escherichia coli, Morganella morganii, Mycobacterium smegmatis, Proteus mirabilis, Yersinia enterocolitica, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae

A Retinal Vessel Detection Approach Based on Shearlet Transform and Indeterminacy Filtering on Fundus Images

A fundus image is an effective tool for ophthalmologists studying eye diseases. Retinal vessel detection is a significant task in the identification of retinal disease regions. This study presents a retinal vessel detection approach using shearlet transform and indeterminacy filtering. The fundus image’s green channel is mapped in the neutrosophic domain via shearlet transform. The neutrosophic domain images are then filtered with an indeterminacy filter to reduce the indeterminacy information. A neural network classifier is employed to identify the pixels whose inputs are the features in neutrosophic images. The proposed approach is tested on two datasets, and a receiver operating characteristic curve and the area under the curve are employed to evaluate experimental results quantitatively. The area under the curve values are 0.9476 and 0.9469 for each dataset respectively, and 0.9439 for both datasets. The comparison with the other algorithms also illustrates that the proposed method yields the highest evaluation measurement value and demonstrates the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method

Efficient Airport Detection Using Line Segment Detector and Fisher Vector Representation

In this letter, a two-stage method for airport detection on remote sensing images is proposed. In the first stage, a new algorithm composed of several line-based processing steps is used for extraction of candidate airport regions. In the second stage, the scale-invariant feature transformation and Fisher vector coding are used for efficient representation of the airport and nonairport regions and support vector machines employed for classification. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on airports around the world with different layouts. The measures used in the evaluation are accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 94.6%, which was benchmarked with two previous methods to prove its superiority

Cytogenetic effects of Helichrysum arenarium in human lymphocytes cultures

Helichrysum Mill., belonging to the family Asteraceae, is commonly known as "everlasting'. Helichrysum species have been used as herbal tea for centuries in Turkey against gallbladder disorders because of their bile regulatory and diuretic properties. However, there are few reports in the literature regarding the genotoxic effects of these plants. In the present study, the genotoxic effects induced by aqueous (decoction) and methanol extracts of Helichrysum arenarium (L.) Moench subsp. rubicundum (K.Koch) P.H.Davis & Kupicha, H. arenarium (L.) Moench subsp. aucheri (Boiss.) P.H.Davis & Kupicha, and H. arenarium (L.) Moench subsp. erzincanicum P.H.Davis & Kupicha on human lymphocyte cultures at 0.01, 0.05, 0.1, 0.5, and 1 mg/mL concentrations were evaluated. Three different parameters (micronucleus, mitotic, and replication indexes) were used. H. arenarium subsp. erzincanicum induced the formation of micronuclei and decreased the mitotic and replication indexes as well. H. arenarium subsp. rubicundum and H. arenarium subsp. aucheri did not affect these parameters. Our results clearly indicate that H. arenarium subsp. erzincanicum has genotoxic effects. Therefore, this plant should not be used freely in alternative medicine although its antiproliferative activity may suggest antimitotic and anticarcinogenic properties. H. arenarium subsp. rubicundum and H. arenarium subsp. aucheri, on the other hand, do not have genotoxic effects. Thus, they can be used freely in alternative medicine. Further studies are needed to determine the effects of the main bioactive components isolated from H. arenarium on the micronucleus, mitotic index, and replication index

IN VITRO CYTOTOXIC EFFECTS OF METHANOL EXTRACTS OF SIX HELICHRYSUM TAXA USED IN TRADITIONAL MEDICINE

Helichrysum Mill., (Asteraceae) species have been used in folk medicine for thousands of years in the world. The In vitro cytotoxic effects in human lymphocytes of 6 Helichrysum taxa used in Turkey folk medicine were investigated. Blood samples were obtained from healthy donors, nonsmoking volunteers, which were incubated and exposed to increasing concentrations of methanol extracts of Helichrysum taxa (0.01, 0.05, 0.1, 0.5 and 1 mg/mL). According to results, other taxa outside H. peshmenianum and H. goulandriorum affected MN rates at high concentrations (0.5 and 1 mg/mL). However mitotic and replication indexes rates of H. pallasii and H. chionophilum did not show a cytotoxic effect