Image Retrieval Using Circular Hidden Markov Models with a Garbage State

Shape-based image and video retrieval is an active research topic in multimedia information retrieval. It is well known that there are significant variations in shapes of the same category extracted from images and videos. In this paper, we propose to use circular hidden Markov models for shape recognition and image retrieval. In our approach, we use a garbage state to explicitly deal with shape mismatch caused by shape deformation and occlusion. We will propose a modi¯ed circular hidden Markov model (HMM)for shape-based image retrieval and then use circular HMMs with a garbage state to further improve the performance. To evaluate the proposed algorithms, we have conducted experiments using the database of the MPEG-7 Core Experiments Shape-1, Part B. The experiments show that our approaches are robust to shape deformations such as shape variations and occlusion. The performance of our approaches is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art shape-based image retrieval systems in terms of accuracy and speed

Missing an osteoporotic vertebral fracture.

This case illustrates an 80-year-old lady who presented with acute low back pain and finally succumbed from complications of osteoporotic vertebral fracture. Among the contributing factors are delayed diagnosis and a lack of continuity of care. It reminds the practitioners of the importance to look out for red flag symptoms and to have a high index of suspicion for vertebral fracture in high risk patients presenting with low back pain

Prevalence of rubella susceptibility among pregnant mothers in a community-based antenatal clinic in Malaysia: A cross-sectional study.

Introduction: Routine rubella antibody screening is not done for antenatal mothers in community health clinics in Malaysia. However, congenital rubella syndrome has persisted with its associated health burden. Objectives: To determine the prevalence of rubella susceptibility among pregnant mothers and its associated risk factors. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was carried out in the Petaling district, Selangor, Malaysia, where 500 pregnant mothers were recruited, and face-to-face interviews were conducted. Rubella IgG tests were performed. Results: The prevalence of rubella susceptibility among pregnant mothers was 11.4%. Using logistic regression, a history of not having received rubella vaccination or having unknown rubella vaccination status was found to be a significant predictor for mothers to be rubella susceptible (odds ratio = 2.691; 95% confidence interval = 1.539-4.207). Conclusions: Routine rubella IgG screening tests need to be offered to all antenatal mothers in view of the high prevalence found

Effect of Yaw Angle on Large Scale Three-blade Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines

Offshore Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) are used globally as a source of clean and renewable energy. Turbine efficiency can be improved by optimizing the geometry of the turbine blades. Turbines are generally designed in a way that its orientation is adjustable to ensure the wind direction is aligned with the axis of the turbine shaft. The deflection angle from this position is defined as yaw angle of the turbine. Understanding the effects of the yaw angle on the wind turbine performance is important for the turbine safety and performance analysis. In this study, performance of a yawed HAWT is studied by computational fluid dynamics. The wind flow around the turbine is simulated by solving the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations using software ANSYS Fluent. The principal aim of this study is to quantify the yaw angle on the efficiency of the turbine and to check the accuracy of existing empirical formula. A three-bladed 100-m diameter prototype HAWT was analysed through comprehensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The turbine efficiency reaches its maximum value of 33.9% at 0° yaw angle and decreases with the increase of yaw angle. It was proved that the cosine law can estimate the turbine efficiency with a yaw angle with an error less 10% when the yaw angle is between –30° and 30°. The relative error of the cosine law increase at larger yaw angles because of the power is reduced significantly

Quality of care for adult Type 2 diabetes mellitus at a University Primary Care Centre in Malaysia.

Background: Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2D) with its concurrent cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension and dyslipidaemia and its complications has now accounted for the majority of national and global morbidity and mortality. Aims & Objective: The study aimed to determine the prevalence of complications appearing in diabetic patients despite therapy, addressing to an urban academic primary care centre. Methods: This was a sub-analysis of a cross-sectional study on 212 patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) conducted from June to September 2006. Patients aged ≥ 30 years, non-smokers and under follow-up care of senior doctors were recruited. The average of the three most recent readings of fasting plasma sugar, HbA1c, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and lipid profiles was taken as measures of respective disease control. Results: Two thirds of the patients were female. The mean age was 62.7 (SD± 10.8) years and the duration of T2D was 11.74 (SD± 6.7) years. A total of 23.6% achieved HbA1c ≤ 7.0%, 26.2% attained LDL-C ≤ 2.6 mmol/L and 24.5% achieved target blood pressure < 130/ 80 mmHg. The most prevalent co-morbid condition was hypertension (77.3%). A total of 27.2% patients had diabetic complications, out of which 86.5% had one complication. Proteinuria < 1gm/L and coronary artery disease were the two most common complications. There were only 16% on subcutaneous insulin and this was significantly associated with fasting plasma glucose (t = 5.38, df= 204, p < 0.0001) and HbA1c (t = 4.31, df= 206, p < 0.0001). Conclusions: Many T2D patients at this centre did not achieve treatment goals. Insulin and lipid-lowering drugs use should be optimized to improve control rates. More structured care processes are urgently needed in order to achieve good glycaemic control

Determination of Heavy Metals in Water and Sediment of Batang Baleh

This study determines the concentration of selected heavy metals (Cd, Cu, Fe, Pb, Mn, Ni, Zn, and Hg) in water and sediment samples in order to assess the heavy metal pollution status in Batang Baleh. Composites of water and sediment samples were collected simultaneously at 18 sampling stations. Selected metals were analyzed using an atomic absorption spectrophotometer and a mercury analyzer. Metal concentrations of water ranged between 0.039-0.435 mg/L for Fe, 0.005-0.026 mg/L for Pb, 0.062-0.097 mg/L for Mn, 0.007-0.008 mg/L for Ni, and 0.006-0.015 µg/L for Hg. Meanwhile, for sediment, it ranged between 11.58-20.75 mg/kg for Cu, 12626.70-38623.37 mg/kg for Fe, 2.26-18.90 mg/kg for Pb, 35.51-389.77 mg/kg for Mn, 7.43-36.11 mg/kg for Ni, 17.78-58.48 mg/kg for Zn, and 0.0005-0.0747 mg/kg for Hg. The average metal concentrations in the water were lower than the National Water Quality Standards, Canadian Water Quality Guidelines, and National Recommended Water Quality Criteria by USEPA. The average concentration of studied metals in sediment was well below the Ontario Sediment Standards and Canadian Freshwater Sediment Guidelines. Assessment of contamination status by contamination factor, geo-accumulation index, and pollution load index suggests that there is no risk of contamination at the moment

Chronic respiratory disease in low-income and middle-income countries: From challenges to solutions

In 2019, the British Thoracic Society (BTS) launched a Global Health Group in partnership with the Pan African Thoracic Society (PATS). Each year, this group proposes a symposium at the BTS Winter meeting exploring issues of respiratory disease and care which are most relevant to respiratory health across the life course in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The first symposium, offered in February 2021, described the burden of five key respiratory exposures/diseases of interest in LMICs, including childhood pneumonia, air pollution, post-TB lung diseases, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a summary of the discussion has previously been published in the PATS journal. The second symposium, conducted in November 2021, discussed barriers to the management of chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs) in LMICs, with perspectives presented from Malaysia, The Gambia, Kenya, and sub-Saharan Africa more broadly. These presentations highlighted the challenges of chronic respiratory care in LMICs, while a presentation from the World Health Organization (WHO) officer for CRDs described the role and remit of the WHO in providing leadership and guidance in this area. A summary of this second symposium is presented here, and we discuss the pathways from challenges to solutions for CRD care in low- and middle-income countries

Polycystic kidney disease in a Persian cat

A 6-year-old intact Persian cat was presented for the primary complaint of inappetence and weight loss. Irregular surface of kidneys was palpated during physical examination. Abdominal radiograph findings were indicative of renomegaly. Ultrasonography revealed multiple anaechoic structures within the renal parenchyma. The cortex, medulla and renal pelvis were unable to be differentiated. Both radiographic and ultrasonographic findings were suggestive of polycystic kidney disease. Blood test revealed normochromic, normocytic anaemia with azotaemia whereas urinalys is findings were hypostenuria and proteinuria, consistent of chronic kidney disease due to polycystic kidney. Ultrasound is a useful antemortem diagnostic tool to diagnose polycystic kidney disease in cats

Effectiveness of RSS feed item duplication detection using word matching

Users of feed aggregators know that duplicated articles are found occasionally on the feeds they subscribe to. It can be time consuming to read all articles and stumble upon duplicated items they have already read. Our work here is to determine the effectiveness of using basic word matching to remove duplicated items and only show the most relevant item, thus saving readers’ time. The method described in this paper to remove duplicates involves word matching heuristics with an appropriate matching percentage. The duplicated feeds are then ranked to only display the highest ranked article. Ranking is done using the number of search items found on the titles of the news feeds where the highest number returned will be considered the highest ranked article. Using Malaysian online news feeds, our method found that with a matching percentage of 40%, our method will be able to minimize duplicates effectively with minimal errors. We did further empirical studies using 9 technology blog feeds over a longer period to provide us with a better averaging results. The matching percentage obtained is also within the same quantum. The method described here has a low overhead in terms of processing for the duplicates and with careful selection of matching percentage, the system will effectively remove the majority of duplicate