Invariant behavioural based discrimination for individual representation

Writer identification based on cursive words is one of the extensive behavioural biometric that has involved many researchers to work in. Recently, its main idea is in forensic investigation and biometric analysis as such the handwriting style can be used as individual behavioural adaptation for authenticating an author. In this study, a novel approach of presenting cursive features of authors is presented. The invariants-based discriminability of the features is proposed by discretizing the moment features of each writer using biometric invariant discretization cutting point (BIDCP). BIDCP is introduced for features perseverance to obtain better individual representations and discriminations. Our experiments have revealed that by using the proposed method, the authorship identification based on cursive words is significantly increased with an average identification rate of 99.80%

Finger vein identification based on maximum curvature directional feature extraction

Finger vein identification has become an important area of study especially in the field of biometric identification and has further potential in the field of forensics. The finger vein pattern has highly discriminative features that exhibit universality, uniqueness and permanence characteristics. Finger vein identification requires living body identification, which means that only vein in living finger can be captured and used for identification. Acquiring useful features from finger vein in order to reflect the identity of an individual is the main issues for identification. This research aims at improving the scheme of finger vein identification take advantage of the proposed feature extraction, which is Maximum Curvature Directional Feature (MCDF). Experimental results based on two public databases, SDUMLA-HMT datasets and PKU datasets show high performance of the proposed scheme in comparison with state-of-the art methods. The proposed approach scored 0.001637 of equal error rate (EER) for SDUMLAHMT dataset and 0.00431 of equal error rate for PKU dataset

Conserved transcription factor binding sites of cancer markers derived from primary lung adenocarcinoma microarrays

Gene transcription in a set of 49 human primary lung adenocarcinomas and 9 normal lung tissue samples was examined using Affymetrix GeneChip technology. A total of 3442 genes, called the set M AD, were found to be either up- or down-regulated by at least 2-fold between the two phenotypes. Genes assigned to a particular gene ontology term were found, in many cases, to be significantly unevenly distributed between the genes in and outside M AD. Terms that were overrepresented in M AD included functions directly implicated in the cancer cell metabolism. Based on their functional roles and expression profiles, genes in M AD were grouped into likely co-regulated gene sets. Highly conserved sequences in the 5 kb region upstream of the genes in these sets were identified with the motif discovery tool, MoDEL. Potential oncogenic transcription factors and their corresponding binding sites were identified in these conserved regions using the TRANSFAC 8.3 database. Several of the transcription factors identified in this study have been shown elsewhere to be involved in oncogenic processes. This study searched beyond phenotypic gene expression profiles in cancer cells, in order to identify the more important regulatory transcription factors that caused these aberrations in gene expressio

Conserved transcription factor binding sites of cancer markers derived from primary lung adenocarcinoma microarrays

Gene transcription in a set of 49 human primary lung adenocarcinomas and 9 normal lung tissue samples was examined using Affymetrix GeneChip technology. A total of 3442 genes, called the set M(AD), were found to be either up- or down-regulated by at least 2-fold between the two phenotypes. Genes assigned to a particular gene ontology term were found, in many cases, to be significantly unevenly distributed between the genes in and outside M(AD). Terms that were overrepresented in M(AD) included functions directly implicated in the cancer cell metabolism. Based on their functional roles and expression profiles, genes in M(AD) were grouped into likely co-regulated gene sets. Highly conserved sequences in the 5 kb region upstream of the genes in these sets were identified with the motif discovery tool, MoDEL. Potential oncogenic transcription factors and their corresponding binding sites were identified in these conserved regions using the TRANSFAC 8.3 database. Several of the transcription factors identified in this study have been shown elsewhere to be involved in oncogenic processes. This study searched beyond phenotypic gene expression profiles in cancer cells, in order to identify the more important regulatory transcription factors that caused these aberrations in gene expression

Writer Identification for chinese handwriting

Abstract Chinese handwriting identification has become a hot research in pattern recognition and image processing. In this paper, we present overview of relevant papers from the previous related studies until to the recent publications regarding to the Chinese Handwriting Identification. The strength, weaknesses, accurateness and comparison of well known approaches are reviewed, summarized and documented. This paper provides broad spectrum of pattern recognition technology in assisting writer identification tasks, which are at the forefront of forensic and biometrics based on identification application

Multi-center real-world comparison of the fully automated Idylla (TM) microsatellite instability assay with routine molecular methods and immunohistochemistry on formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue of colorectal cancer

Microsatellite instability (MSI) is present in 15-20% of primary colorectal cancers. MSI status is assessed to detect Lynch syndrome, guide adjuvant chemotherapy, determine prognosis, and use as a companion test for checkpoint blockade inhibitors. Traditionally, MSI status is determined by immunohistochemistry or molecular methods. The Idylla (TM) MSI Assay is a fully automated molecular method (including automated result interpretation), using seven novel MSI biomarkers (ACVR2A, BTBD7, DIDO1, MRE11, RYR3, SEC31A, SULF2) and not requiring matched normal tissue. In this real-world global study, 44 clinical centers performed Idylla (TM) testing on a total of 1301 archived colorectal cancer formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue sections and compared Idylla (TM) results against available results from routine diagnostic testing in those sites. MSI mutations detected with the Idylla (TM) MSI Assay were equally distributed over the seven biomarkers, and 84.48% of the MSI-high samples had >= 5 mutated biomarkers, while 98.25% of the microsatellite-stable samples had zero mutated biomarkers. The concordance level between the Idylla (TM) MSI Assay and immunohistochemistry was 96.39% (988/1025); 17/37 discordant samples were found to be concordant when a third method was used. Compared with routine molecular methods, the concordance level was 98.01% (789/805); third-method analysis found concordance for 8/16 discordant samples. The failure rate of the Idylla (TM) MSI Assay (0.23%; 3/1301) was lower than that of referenced immunohistochemistry (4.37%; 47/1075) or molecular assays (0.86%; 7/812). In conclusion, lower failure rates and high concordance levels were found between the Idylla (TM) MSI Assay and routine tests.Peer reviewe

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition)

In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. For example, a key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process versus those that measure fl ux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process including the amount and rate of cargo sequestered and degraded). In particular, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation must be differentiated from stimuli that increase autophagic activity, defi ned as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (inmost higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium ) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the fi eld understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. It is worth emphasizing here that lysosomal digestion is a stage of autophagy and evaluating its competence is a crucial part of the evaluation of autophagic flux, or complete autophagy. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. Along these lines, because of the potential for pleiotropic effects due to blocking autophagy through genetic manipulation it is imperative to delete or knock down more than one autophagy-related gene. In addition, some individual Atg proteins, or groups of proteins, are involved in other cellular pathways so not all Atg proteins can be used as a specific marker for an autophagic process. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field

The impact of discretization methods on Chinese handwriting identification

Identification based on Chinese handwriting is an interesting research in the field of pattern recognition and computer vision. Recently, many innovative methods and approaches have been developed for writer identification. Unlike character of western alphabet such as English, German, French, some oriental character such as Korean, Arabic and Chinese have structural characteristics. These structural characteristics, particularly on Chinese character have a complex structure due to the numerous strokes that warped into a cursive shape and have much larger set of characters. Hence, more features are needed to be generated prior to the classification phase for better identification. However, these features need to be well-represented for identification purposes. Hence in this study, an improved discretization is implemented to transform the range of continuous quantitative values of writer’s features into a number of appropriate intervals, denoted as an integer label. Several experiments have been conducted with two different types of datasets: pre-discretized and post-discretized datasets. Post-discretized datasets is the extarcted features that have performed with discretization process; while pre-discretized are the original features, obtained from Direction-based Feature Extraction (DFE) technique. For reliable identification performance through discretization, 10, 7 and 5 crossvalidations (CV) have been tested on both datasets. The experiments have shown that the overall best result are obtained with discretized data, with identification accuracy above 94.0% compared to pre-discretized with identification accuracy below 50.0%. It can be concluded that the discretization process is efficient for representing the writers’ features in obtaining higher identification rates for better forensic document analysis

LITERACY DEVELOPMENT AND VISUAL SEARCH : THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN READING AND SPELLING

Bachelor'sBACHELOR OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (HONOURS

A descriptive study of publicity efforts by non-profit charity organisations in Singapore, inclusive of a publicity campaign for very special arts Singapore.

This project consists of 4 parts: The first part of the project will provide the theoretical background to which subsequent parts can be developed from. This background will include compiling information related to the topic, for example definition of terms, and literature reviews such as past studies of similar nature and media clippings. The second part of this project will involve a survey of local VWOs. This survey aims to: 1. Determine the extent to which special events are used as a tool of publicity. 2. Find out how the planning and implementation are carried out. 3. Help identify the problems these organisations faced in organising the special events. 4. Identify possible solutions to overcome them. The third part of the project will be the planning and implementation of a special event for Very Special Arts Singapore (VSAS). This organisation is a charity launched in September 1993 that provides people with disabilities the opportunities to use the arts for rehabilitation and social integration. The final part of the project will combine the findings from both the survey and the evaluation of the special event. This will allow the authors to draw a conclusion of the climate of voluntary welfare organisations sector in Singapore with regards to publicity. The authors will also be able to make recommendations for voluntary welfare organisations to improve their publicity functions.Bachelor of Communication Studie