Molecular genetics in aquaculture

Great advances in molecular genetics have deeply changed the way of doing research in aquaculture, as it has already done in other fields. The molecular revolution started in the 1980’s, thanks to the widespread use of restriction enzymes and Polymerase Chain Reaction technology, which makes it possible to easily detect the genetic variability directly at the DNA level. In aquaculture, the molecular data are used for several purposes, which can be clustered into two main groups. The first one, focused on individuals, includes the sex identification and parentage assignment, while the second one, focused on populations, includes the wide area of the genetic characterization, aimed at solving taxonomic uncertainties, preserving genetic biodiversity and detecting genetic tags. For the future, the increase in the number of molecular markers and the construction of high density genetic maps, as well as the implementation of genomic resources (including genome sequencing), are expected to provide tools for the genetic improvement of aquaculture species through Marked Assisted Selection. In this review the characteristics of different types of molecular markers, along with their applications to a variety of aquaculture issues are presented

On the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Visual Tracking: a Survey

This paper aims at highlighting cutting-edge research results in the field of visual tracking by deep reinforcement learning. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is an emerging area combining recent progress in deep and reinforcement learning. It is showing interesting results in the computer vision field and, recently, it has been applied to the visual tracking problem yielding to the rapid development of novel tracking strategies. After providing an introduction to reinforcement learning, this paper compares recent visual tracking approaches based on deep reinforcement learning. Analysis of the state-of-the-art suggests that reinforcement learning allows modeling varying parts of the tracking system including target bounding box regression, appearance model selection, and tracking hyper-parameter optimization. The DRL framework is elegant and intriguing, and most of the DRL-based trackers achieve state-of-the-art results

Iterative Multiple Bounding-Box Refinements for Visual Tracking

Single-object visual tracking aims at locating a target in each video frame by predicting the bounding box of the object. Recent approaches have adopted iterative procedures to gradually refine the bounding box and locate the target in the image. In such approaches, the deep model takes as input the image patch corresponding to the currently estimated target bounding box, and provides as output the probability associated with each of the possible bounding box refinements, generally defined as a discrete set of linear transformations of the bounding box center and size. At each iteration, only one transformation is applied, and supervised training of the model may introduce an inherent ambiguity by giving importance priority to some transformations over the others. This paper proposes a novel formulation of the problem of selecting the bounding box refinement. It introduces the concept of non-conflicting transformations and allows applying multiple refinements to the target bounding box at each iteration without introducing ambiguities during learning of the model parameters. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves the iterative single refinement in terms of accuracy and precision of the tracking results

Activity Monitoring Made Easier by Smart 360-degree Cameras

This paper proposes the use of smart 360-degree cameras for activity monitoring. By exploiting the geometric properties of these cameras and adopting off-the-shelf tracking algorithms adapted to equirectangular images, this paper shows how simple it becomes deploying a camera network, and detecting the presence of pedestrians in predefined regions of interest with minimal information on the camera, namely its height. The paper further shows that smart 360-degree cameras can enhance motion understanding in the environment and proposes a simple method to estimate the heatmap of the scene to highlight regions where pedestrians are more often present. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Gesture Modeling by Hanklet-based Hidden Markov Model

In this paper we propose a novel approach for gesture modeling. We aim at decomposing a gesture into sub-trajectories that are the output of a sequence of atomic linear time invariant (LTI) systems, and we use a Hidden Markov Model to model the transitions from the LTI system to another. For this purpose, we represent the human body motion in a temporal window as a set of body joint trajectories that we assume are the output of an LTI system. We describe the set of trajectories in a temporal window by the corresponding Hankel matrix (Hanklet), which embeds the observability matrix of the LTI system that produced it. We train a set of HMMs (one for each gesture class) with a discriminative approach. To account for the sharing of body motion templates we allow the HMMs to share the same state space. We demonstrate by means of experiments on two publicly available datasets that, even with just considering the trajectories of the 3D joints, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while competing well with methods that employ more complex models and feature representations

Genetic variability in tench (Tinca tinca L.) as revealed by PCR-RFLP analysis of mitochondrial DNA

Four mitochondrial DNA segments, ND1, ND6, cyt b and D-loop, were analysed by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment lenght polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) in 14 tench (Tinca tinca L.) populations located in Europe and Asia; also data on five Italian populations previously analysed for the same mtDNA segments were included in the study. All the considered segments were polymorphic and originated a total of 9 composite haplotypes, which were clustered into two haplogroups, A and B, possibly corresponding to the Western and Eastern phylogroups previously described in tench. Nine out of 19 populations showed polymorphism, with haplotype diversity ranging from 0.246 to 0.643 and nucleotide diversity from 0.009 to 0.078. Seventy-five percent of the pairwise comparisons were significant, indicating a high between-population variability. The Neighbour-Joining tree revealed the presence of three clusters, including purepopulations, with only A or B haplogroup, and mixedpopulations, with both haplogroups. The possibility of identifying populations with different haplotypes has practical implications for both conservation and supportive stocking

Persistence of Trypanosoma cruzi in the chronic phase of Chagas disease

One of the most important determinants of congestive heart failure and sudden death in Latin America is Chagas disease, provoked by infection with the intracellular protozoan parasiteTrypanosoma cruzi. It affects approximately 20 million people [1] and represents a serious public health problem in Central and South America.Fil: Miller, Noemí. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Blasco, Romina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Fernández, Guillermo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Ferrero, Mercedes. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Asís, Liliana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Lo Presti, Silvana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Lo Presti, Silvana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Salud; Argentina.Fil: Bazán, Carolina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Bazán, Carolina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Salud; Argentina.Fil: Rivarola, Héctor Walter. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Paglini, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Enfermedades Infecciosa

Evaluación de pacientes chagásicos crónicos, sus características clínicas y su relación con la presencia del trypanosoma cruzi en circulación

La cardiopatía chagásica crónica es un importante problema de Salud Pública ya que puede afectar a poblaciones en edad productiva. Además, el por qué el 30% de los individuos infectados con T. cruzi evolucionan hacia una enfermedad cardíaca y el 70% permanece asintomático, con serología persistente, es un tema aún no resuelto. Es por ello que en el presente trabajo se relevaron 45 pacientes con epidemiología positiva para Chagas para determinar, mediante la reacción en cadena de la polimerasa (PCR), si el T. cruzi persiste en circulación en pacientes chagásicos crónicos, y establecer si existe alguna correlación con la sintomatología clínica cardíaca. Para ello se realizó inspección clínica, ECG y ecocardiograma.Fil: Miller, Noemí. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Ferrero, Mercedes. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fi: Asís Liliana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Blasco, Romina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Lo Presti, Silvana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Lo Presti, Silvana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Salud; Argentina.Fil: Bazán, Carolina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Bazán, Carolina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Salud; Argentina.Fil: Strauss, Mariana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Strauss, Mariana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Salud; Argentina.Fil: Rivarola, Héctor Walter. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Fil: Paglini, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Centro de Estudio e Investigacón de la Enfermedad de Chagas y Leishmaniasis; Argentina.Enfermedades Infecciosa