Music revisited: The revision process in the twentieth century.

The process of revision constitutes an important aspect of the compositional technique and has been practised by composers throughout the years. This phenomenon is characteristic of any culture and it is observed in all genres of music. This study concentrates on the revision process in the twentieth century. It provides a set of categories representative of different kinds and aspects of revision that are encountered and can be verified in twentieth-century music pieces. These categories not only offer a detailed look at the technical facets of revision, but they also shed light on the reasons that lead composers to revise; revisions and reasons behind them can in some cases be interwoven

The Cypriotization of Beethoven or Beethoven’s Cypriotization: The Composer’s Traces Throughout the Foundation of the “Westernized” Cypriot Music Scene

The focus of this paper is the reception of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the establishment of symphony orchestras and other cultural institutions. These works include symphonic and chamber music, performed in the framework of symphonic concerts as presented by the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra and chamber music as presented by chamber music festivals. This paper will shine a light onto the preserved concert programs of the orchestras, as well as other concerts that can be traced in newspapers and other printed magazines, in order to demonstrate how Beethoven’s compositions became part of the concert programming. The rapid but simultaneously abrupt growth of the cultural scene in the twentieth century, was interweaved with what kind of compositions and what composers could be included in concert programs, taking into consideration the restrictions that governed large performances such as performers’ numbers and the diversity of instrumental players, who would support the staging of certain works. The reception of Beethoven’s works is studied in the changing local political, historical, social and cultural context

Semi-random PCR markers for DNA fingerprinting of rice hybrids and theirs corresponding parents

Molecular markers technology provides novel tools for DNA fingerprinting of rice hybrids to assess hybrid seed purity. Semi-random PCR primers targeting intron-exon splice junctions (ISJ) were used to analyze the rice genome with the aim of evaluating potential of these markers for identification and classification of rice hybrids. A total of 21 primers were tested for screening eight hybrid combination and their corresponding parents. Among 185 amplification products, 42.7% have polymorphic bands. The average number of bands per primer and genotype were 15.41 and 11.56, respectively. The genetic similarity between lines ranged from 0.47 to 0.95 with an average similarity index of 0.75. Cluster analysis based on Dice's similarity coefficient using UPGMA procedure grouped the cultivar into 5 clusters. A set of 5 semi-random primers characterized all the genotypes from each other, which can be used for identification of these hybrid and their parental lines. IT/10-1 and IT31/15 multilocus primers were the most-informative loci for DNA profiling and differentiation. Because of its rapidity and reliability of semi- random primers, it seems to be a suitable method for DNA typing and discrimination of rice hybrids

Quantitative MRI Brain Studies in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease: A Methodological Review

Classifying and predicting Alzheimer's disease (AD) in individuals with memory disorders through clinical and psychometric assessment is challenging especially in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) subjects. Quantitative structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) acquisition methods in combination with Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) are currently being used for the assessment AD. These acquisitions methods include: i) Voxel-based Morphometry (VBM), ii) volumetric measurements in specific Regions of Interest (ROIs), iii) cortical thickness measurements, iv) shape analysis and v) texture analysis. This review evaluates the aforementioned methods in the classification of cases into one of the following 3 groups: Normal Controls (NC), MCI and AD subjects. Furthermore, the performance of the methods is assessed on the prediction of conversion from MCI to AD. In parallel, it is also assessed which ROIs are preferred in both classification and prognosis through the different states of the disease. Structural changes in the early stages of the disease are more pronounced in the Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) especially in the entorhinal cortex, whereas with disease progression both entorhinal cortex and hippocampus offer similar discriminative power. However, for the conversion from MCI subjects to AD, entorhinal cortex provides better predictive accuracies rather than other structures, such as the hippocampus

Micropropagation and assessment of somaclonal variation in Galanthus transcaucasicus in vitro plantlets

In vitro culture of twin-scaling explants of Galanthus transcaucasicus with different concentrations of plant growth regulators (PGRs) including 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 mg L-1 naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) and 0.5, 1, 2, 3, and 4 mg L-1 benzyladenine (BA) was studied. After 18 weeks, the number of regenerated bulblets and intensity of callus was measured. Subsequently, bulblets were transferred to a medium with 0.5, 1, 2, 3, and 4 mg L-1 NAA and 0.5, 1, 2, 3, and 4 mg L-1 BA and, after 15 weeks, the bulblets length and diameter were measured. The highest intensity of callus was obtained on 4 mg L-1 NAA or 8 mg L-1 NAA with 1 mg L-1 BA. The highest number of regenerated bulblets was detected with 6 mg L-1 NAA and 2 mg L-1 BA. The highest diameter of bulblets occurred on four mgL-1 NAA (9.4 mm), while the lowest was observed on 0.5 mg L-1 BA (1.83 mm). The analysis of genetic variation using ISSR revealed that there was no somaclonal variation among the regenerated plants from BA and low level of NAA, but there was a significant somaclonal variation at high concentrations of NAA

An overview of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging analysis studies in the assessment of alzheimer’s disease

Medical image analysis and visualization, can contribute in quantitative and qualitative analysis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) towards an earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Moreover, the early detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has recently attracted a lot of attention. The main objective of this paper is to present a survey of recent key papers focused on the classification of MCI and AD and the prediction of conversion from MCI to AD using volume, shape and texture analysis. The most frequent anatomical features used in the assessment of AD, is the hippocampus, the cortex and the local concentration of grey matter. Shape analysis can identify the signs of early hippocampal atrophy, whereas volume analysis evaluates the structure as a whole. Shape analysis seems to be a more accurate technique both in classification of patients and in prognostic prediction. Compared to volume, shape and voxel based morphometry (VBM) techniques, texture analysis can be used to identify the microstructural changes before the larger-scale morphological characteristics which are detected by the other aforementioned techniques. We concluded that quantitative MRI measurements can be used as an in vivo surrogate for the classification of patients and furthermore, for the tracking the Alzheimer’s disease progression

Klasifikacija dojki prema gustoći izborom značajki

Mammography as an x-ray method usually gives good results for lower density breasts while higher breast tissue densities significantly reduce the overall detection sensitivity and can lead to false negative results. In automatic detection algorithms knowledge about breast density can be useful for setting an appropriate decision threshold in order to produce more accurate detection. Because the overall intensity of mammograms is not directly correlated with the breast density we have decided to observe breast density as a texture classification problem. In this paper we propose breast density classification using feature selection process for different classifiers based on grayscale features of first and second order. In feature selection process different selection methods were used and obtained results show the improvement on overall classification by choosing the appropriate method and classifier. The classification accuracy has been tested on the mini-MIAS database and KBD-FER digital mammography database with different number of categories for each database. Obtained accuracy stretches between 97.2 % and 76.4 % for different number of categories.Mamografija je rendgenska metoda koja daje dobre rezultate pri slikanju dojki koje imaju manju gustoću, dok joj osjetljivost značajno opada pri snimanju dojki veće gustoće i time može doći do lažno pozitivnih rezultata. Poznavanje gustoće dojke može biti korisno kod algoritama za automatsku detekciju zbog mogućnosti određivanja praga odluke na osnovi tog znanja. S obzirom na to da ukupni intenzitet pojedinog mamograma nije izravno povezan s gustoćom, odlučili smo se promatrati gustoću kao problem klasifikacije teksture. U ovom radu predlažemo klasifikaciju dojki prema gustoći izborom izdvojenih značajki intenziteta prvog i drugog reda za različite klasifikatore. Za određivanje prikladnih značajki koristili smo različite metode i tako dobivene značajke pokazale su bolju točnost klasifikacije za odabrane klasifikatore. Točnost klasifikacije testirali smo na bazi mamografskih slika mini-MIAS i bazi digitalnih mamografskih slika KBD-FER s različitim brojem kategorija u koje su slike bile podijeljene. Postignuta točnost klasifikacije proteže se između 97,2 % i 76,4 % za različit broj kategorija u koje su mamogrami podijeljeni

Hippocampal and entorhinal cortex volume changes in Alzheimer's disease patients and mild cognitive impairment subjects.

Hippocampal and entorhinal cortex as scanned in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), are two of the most commonly used Regions of Interest (ROIs) for the assessment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Both structures are used for the classification between Normal Controls (NC), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and AD subjects and for the disease prognosis. The objective of this study was to evaluate how the volume of these two structures changes between the following groups: NC vs AD, NC vs MCI, MCI vs MCI converters (MCIc - subjects who had converted to AD within 48 months), and AD vs MCIc subjects. Both structures were significantly reduced in volume for MCIc and AD subjects compared to NC. For both MCI and MCIc groups, the atrophy rate was correlated for both structures. In AD subjects, entorhinal cortex was more affected by atrophy. In conclusion, structural MRI and volumetric measurements of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex can be used as early signs for the assessment of AD, and this is in agreement with previous studies

Constrained snake vs. conventional snake for carotid ultrasound automated IMT measurements on multi-center data sets

Accurate intima-media thickness (IMT) measurement of the carotid artery from minimal plaque ultrasound images is a relevant clinical need, since IMT increase is related to the progression of atherosclerosis. In this paper, we describe a novel dual snake-based model for the high-performance carotid IMT measurement, called Carotid Measurement Using Dual Snakes (CMUDS). Snakes (which are deformable contours) adapt to the lumen-intima (LI) and media-adventitia (MA) interfaces, thus enabling the IMT computation as distance between the LI and MA snakes. However, traditional snakes might be unable to maintain a correct distance and in some spatial location along the artery, it might even collapse between them or diverge. The technical improvement of this work is the definition of a dual snake-based constrained system, which prevents the LI and MA snakes from collapsing or bleeding, thus optimizing the IMT estimation. The CMUDS system consists of two parametric models automatically initialized using the far adventitia border which we automatically traced by using a previously developed multi-resolution approach. The dual snakes evolve simultaneously and are constrained by the distances between them, ensuring the regularization of LI/MA topology. We benchmarked our automated CMUDS with the previous conventional semi-automated snake system called Carotid Measurement Using Single Snake (CMUSS). Two independent readers manually traced the LIMA boundaries of a multi-institutional, multi-ethnic, and multi-scanner database of 665 CCA longitudinal 2D images. We evaluated our system performance by comparing it with the gold standard as traced by clinical readers. CMUDS and CMUSS correctly processed 100% of the 665 images. Comparing the performance with respect to the two readers, our automatically measured IMT was on average very close to that of the two readers (IMT measurement biases for CMUSS was equal to −0.011 ± 0.329 mm and −0.045 ± 0.317 mm, respectively, while for CMUDS, it was 0.030 ± 0.284 mm and −0.004 ± 0.273 mm, respectively). The Figure-of-Merit of the system was 98.5% and 94.4% for CMUSS, while 96.0% and 99.6% for CMUDS, respectively. Results showed that the dual-snake system CMUDS reduced the IMT measurement error accuracy (Wilcoxon, p < 0.02) and the IMT error variability (Fisher, p < 3 × 10−2). We propose the CMUDS technique for use in large multi-centric studies, where the need for a standard, accurate, and automated IMT measurement technique is require