Decline in Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction during Follow-up in Patients with Severe Aortic Stenosis

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the prognostic impact of the decline in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) at 1-year follow-up in patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS) managed conservatively. Background: No previous study has explored the association between LVEF decline during follow-up and clinical outcomes in patients with severe AS. Methods: Among 3, 815 patients with severe AS enrolled in the multicenter CURRENT AS (Contemporary Outcomes After Surgery and Medical Treatment in Patients With Severe Aortic Stenosis) registry in Japan, 839 conservatively managed patients who underwent echocardiography at 1-year follow-up were analyzed. The primary outcome measure was a composite of AS-related deaths and hospitalization for heart failure. Results: There were 91 patients (10.8%) with >10% declines in LVEF and 748 patients (89.2%) without declines. Left ventricular dimensions and the prevalence of valve regurgitation and atrial fibrillation or flutter significantly increased in the group with declines in LVEF. The cumulative 3-year incidence of the primary outcome measure was significantly higher in the group with declines in LVEF than in the group with no decline (39.5% vs. 26.5%; p 10% declines in LVEF at 1 year after diagnosis had worse AS-related clinical outcomes than those without declines in LVEF under conservative management. (Contemporary Outcomes After Surgery and Medical Treatment in Patients With Severe Aortic Stenosis Registry; UMIN000012140

Character Shape Restoration of Binarized Historica l Documents by Smoothing via Geodesic Morphology

2013年度～2017年度科学研究費補助金基盤研究(S) 研究成果報告書（課題番号25220401

A prototyping of crossover character pattern retrieval service for digital historical document archives

2013年度～2017年度科学研究費補助金基盤研究(S) 研究成果報告書（課題番号25220401

Plasma–liquid interactions: a review and roadmap

Plasma–liquid interactions represent a growing interdisciplinary area of research involving plasma science, fluid dynamics, heat and mass transfer, photolysis, multiphase chemistry and aerosol science. This review provides an assessment of the state-of-the-art of this multidisciplinary area and identifies the key research challenges. The developments in diagnostics, modeling and further extensions of cross section and reaction rate databases that are necessary to address these challenges are discussed. The review focusses on non-equilibrium plasmas

Guided Facial Skin Color Correction

This paper proposes an automatic image correction method for portrait photographs, which promotes consistency of facial skin color by suppressing skin color changes due to background colors. In portrait photographs, skin color is often distorted due to the lighting environment (e.g., light reflected from a colored background wall and over-exposure by a camera strobe). This color distortion is emphasized when artificially synthesized with another background color, and the appearance becomes unnatural. In our framework, we, first, roughly extract the face region and rectify the skin color distribution in a color space. Then, we perform color and brightness correction around the face in the original image to achieve a proper color balance of the facial image, which is not affected by luminance and background colors. Our color correction process attains natural results by using a guide image, unlike conventional algorithms. In particular, our guided image filtering for the color correction does not require a perfectly-aligned guide image required in the original guide image filtering method proposed by He et al. Experimental results show that our method generates more natural results than conventional methods on not only headshot photographs but also natural scene photographs. We also show automatic yearbook style photo generation as another application

ID Insertion and Data Tracking with Frequency Offset for Physical Wireless Parameter Conversion Sensor Networks

As the applications of the internet of things are becoming widely diversified, wireless sensor networks require real-time data reception, accommodation of access from several sensors, and low power consumption. In physical wireless parameter conversion sensor networks (PhyC-SN), all the sensors use frequency shift keying as the modulation scheme and then access the channel to the fusion center, simultaneously. As a result, the fusion center can recognize the statistical tendency of all the sensing results at a time from the frequency spectrum of the received signal. However, the information source, i.e., the sensor, cannot be specified from the received signal because no ID-indicating sensor is inserted to the signal. The data-tracking technique for tracing the time continuity of the sensing results is available for decomposing the sequence of the sensing results per sensor but the error tracking, which is a wrong recognition between the sensing results and the sensor, occurs owing to the similarity of the sensing results. This paper proposes the sensing result separation technique using a fractional carrier frequency offset (CFO) for PhyC-SN. In the proposed scheme, the particular fractional CFO is assigned to each user and it is useful for the ID specifying sensor. The fractional CFO causes inter-carrier interference (ICI). The ICI cancellation of the narrowband wireless communications is proposed. The two types of data-tracking techniques are proposed and are selectively used by the fusion center. Since the proposed data-tracking technique is multi-dimensional, high accuracy of data tracking is achieved even under the similar tendency of the sensing results. Based on computer simulation, we elucidate the advantage of the proposed sensing results separation