Should we treat soft tissue injuries with Actovegin?

Actovegin is a biological drug produced from deproteinised hemodialysate of calf serum with over 50 years of history for its clinical use. There have been many in vitro studies to speculate its potential role and mechanism of action in cells; due to the nature of this drug and serum based culture techniques for most in vitro experiments, presumptuous conclusions and claims from these studies on performance enhancement should be cautiously interpreted. There have been well-designed human in vivo studies suggesting it does not enhance human performance, and has potentially good clinical applications to treat injuries, strokes and diabetes. Recently, evidence has emerged suggesting Actovegin has anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic effects on injured tissues; further clinical research is needed to define these effects. This article also provides a narrative review of Actovegin summarizing outcomes from recent publications

Confluence: A Robust Non-IoU Alternative to Non-Maxima Suppression in Object Detection

Confluence is a novel non-Intersection over Union (IoU) alternative to Non-Maxima Suppression (NMS) in bounding box post-processing in object detection. It overcomes the inherent limitations of IoU-based NMS variants to provide a more stable, consistent predictor of bounding box clustering by using a normalized Manhattan Distance inspired proximity metric to represent bounding box clustering. Unlike Greedy and Soft NMS, it does not rely solely on classification confidence scores to select optimal bounding boxes, instead selecting the box which is closest to every other box within a given cluster and removing highly confluent neighboring boxes. Confluence is experimentally validated on the MS COCO and CrowdHuman benchmarks, improving Average Precision by up to 2.3-3.8% and Average Recall by up to 5.3-7.2% when compared against de-facto standard and state of the art NMS variants. Quantitative results are supported by extensive qualitative analysis and threshold sensitivity analysis experiments support the conclusion that Confluence is more robust than NMS variants. Confluence represents a paradigm shift in bounding box processing, with potential to replace IoU in bounding box regression processes.Comment: 13 page

Fingerprint Matching using A Hybrid Shape and Orientation Descriptor

From the privacy perspective most concerns arise from the storage and misuse of biometric data (Cimato et al., 2009). ... is provided with a in-depth discussion of the state-of-the-art in iris biometric cryptosystems, which completes this work

Actovegin equal to performance enhancing drug doping: fact or fiction?

Actovegin is a biological drug that has been used for the treatment of sports muscle injuries. Several in vitro studies have shed light on potential mechanisms of action and the drug has consistently demonstrated its potential to reduce return from injury time for muscle tears in elite athletes. Yet it was banned for a time under the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as a blood doping agent, this ban was based on presumptuous conclusions and subsequently lifted after no indisputable evidence could be provided. This editorial aims to provide readers with some of the key, objective facts relating to Actovegin and then based on this, will offer an informed opinion on its role in sports medicine. We also hope to highlight the importance of evidence-based medicine, particularly in the volatile field of Sports Medicine, and the need for facts, not fiction

Should we treat soft tissue injuries with Actovegin

Actovegin is a biological drug produced from deproteinised hemodialysate of calf serum with over 50 years of history for its clinical use. There have been many in vitro studies to speculate its potential role and mechanism of action in cells; due to the nature of this drug and serum based culture techniques for most in vitro experiments, presumptuous conclusions and claims from these studies on performance enhancement should be cautiously interpreted. There have been well-designed human in vivo studies suggesting it does not enhance human performance, and has potentially good clinical applications to treat injuries, strokes and diabetes. Recently, evidence has emerged suggesting Actovegin has anti-inflammatory and anti apoptotic effects on injured tissues; further clinical research is needed to define these effects. This article also provides a narrative review of Actovegin summarizing outcomes from recent publications

A novel shape descriptor based on salient keypoints detection for binary image matching and retrieval

We introduce a shape descriptor that extracts keypoints from binary images and automatically detects the salient ones among them. The proposed descriptor operates as follows: First, the contours of the image are detected and an image transformation is used to generate background information. Next, pixels of the transformed image that have specific characteristics in their local areas are used to extract keypoints. Afterwards, the most salient keypoints are automatically detected by filtering out redundant and sensitive ones. Finally, a feature vector is calculated for each keypoint by using the distribution of contour points in its local area. The proposed descriptor is evaluated using public datasets of silhouette images, handwritten math expressions, hand-drawn diagram sketches, and noisy scanned logos. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptor compares strongly against state of the art methods, and that it is reliable when applied on challenging images such as fluctuated handwriting and noisy scanned images. Furthermore, we integrate our descripto

A Markov chain model for studying suicide dynamics: an illustration of the Rose theorem

Background: High-risk strategies would only have a modest effect on suicide prevention within a population. It is best to incorporate both high-risk and population-based strategies to prevent suicide. This study aims to compare the effectiveness of suicide prevention between high-risk and population-based strategies. Methods: A Markov chain illness and death model is proposed to determine suicide dynamic in a population and examine its effectiveness for reducing the number of suicides by modifying certain parameters of the model. Assuming a population with replacement, the suicide risk of the population was estimated by determining the final state of the Markov model. Results: The model shows that targeting the whole population for suicide prevention is more effective than reducing risk in the high-risk tail of the distribution of psychological distress (i.e. the mentally ill). Conclusions: The results of this model reinforce the essence of the Rose theorem that lowering the suicidal risk in the population at large may be more effective than reducing the high risk in a small population

Merger and acquisition pricing using agent based modelling

Merger & Acquisition pricing utilises traditional financial models like Discount Cash flow analysis and industry multiples. These methods do not consider behaviour finance biases, for example, prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). This paper analyses merger & acquisition pricing using behavioural bias of risk aversion (acquiring company behavioural trait) and optimism (target company trait). It then extends the study to include loss aversion from prospect theory, differences in the way humans view gains and losses based on low or high probability based on cumulative prospect theory, and finally the certainty effect (where humans prefer certain outcome to probabilistic outcomes). All these factors have an impact on merger & acquisition pricing for potential deals as acquiring and target companies behave differently and such impacts are not considered by traditional finance models. Results show that as loss aversion reduces, the positive impact of risk taking and optimism behaviours improve. Also, probabilistic gains and losses can have a positive impact, but certainty has the greatest impact. Humans prefer certain outcomes and acquirers and target company behaviours are more effective in such conditions with increasing utility for both parties under such circumstances. However, in the multiple acquirer setting, competition between the acquirer significantly increases the utility, and the loss aversion co-efficient works in the opposite direction as the perceptive difference between gains and losses decreases