Lung Nodule Detection in CT Images using Neuro Fuzzy Classifier

Automated lung cancer detection using computer aided diagnosis (CAD) is an important area in clinical applications. As the manual nodule detection is very time consuming and costly so computerized systems can be helpful for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a computerized system for lung nodule detection in CT scan images. The automated system consists of two stages i.e. lung segmentation and enhancement, feature extraction and classification. The segmentation process will result in separating lung tissue from rest of the image, and only the lung tissues under examination are considered as candidate regions for detecting malignant nodules in lung portion. A feature vector for possible abnormal regions is calculated and regions are classified using neuro fuzzy classifier. It is a fully automatic system that does not require any manual intervention and experimental results show the validity of our system

Personal Identification Using Ear Recognition

 Biometric authentication for personal identification is very popular now a days. Human ear recognition system is a new technology in this field. The change of appearance with the expression was a major problem in face biometrics but in case of ear biometrics the shape and appearance is fixed. That is why it is advantageous to use it for personal identification. In this paper, we have proposed a new approach for an automated system for human ear identification. Our proposed method consists of three stages. In the first stage, preprocessing of ear image is done for its contrast enhancement and size normalization. In the second stage, features are extracted through Haar wavelets followed by ear identification using fast normalized cross correlation in the third stage. The proposed method is applied on USTB ear image database and IIT Delhi. Experimental results show that our proposed system achieves an average accuracy of 97.2% and 95.2% on these databases respectively

A Clinical Audit of blood component transfusion practices in Paediatric intensive care unit of a Tertiary Care Hospital, Rawalpindi

Background: To audit the practices involved in blood component transfusion in the management of patients in paediatric intensive care unit of our hospital and to determine the appropriateness of transfusion after comparing them with clinical practice guidelines recommended by Royal Children Hospital (RCH). Methods: All patients admitted in pediatric intensive care which were managed with blood component transfusions were retrospectively audited for 8 weeks. Management details including indications of transfusion and its appropriateness were recorded. Clinical practice guidelines recommended by Royal Children Hospital (RCH) were used as standards. Results: One hundred and ninety-two transfusions were done during the study period out of which 58 percent were done to males and 41 percent to females. Majority of transfusions were done in infants (44%) and O Positive blood group was found rampant among blood groups of all recipients (33.3%). Red cell concentrates were predominantly (55.7%) and appropriately (72%) transfusion among all blood components. Platelet concentrates were most inappropriately transfused (57%) followed by fresh frozen plasma (54%) and red cell concentrates (27%). There was significant percentage of inappropriate transfusion of all blood components (p=0.00). Conclusion: All blood components were significantly found inappropriately transfused, commonest component being platelet concentrates

Retinal Image Preprocessing: Background and Noise Segmentation

Medical imaging is very popular research area these days and includes computer aided diagnosis of different diseases by taking digital images as input. Digital retinal images are used for the screening and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease. An automated system for the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy should highlight all signs of disease present in the image and in order to improve the accuracy of the system, the retinal image quality must be improved. In this article, we present a method to improve the quality of input retinal image and we consider this method as a preprocessing step in automated diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. The preprocessing consists of background estimation and noise removal from retinal image by applying coarse and fine segmentation. We perform extensive results to check the validity of proposed preprocessing technique using standard fundus image database

Blood Vessel Enhancement and Segmentation for Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease caused by the increase of insulin in blood and it is one of the main cuases of blindness in idusterlized countries. It is a progressive disease and needs an early detection and treatment. Vascular pattern of human retina helps the ophthalmologists in automated screening and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. In this article, we present a method for vascular pattern ehnacement and segmentation. We present an automated system which uses wavelets to enhance the vascular pattern and then it applies a piecewise threshold probing and adaptive thresholding for vessel localization and segmentation respectively. The method is evaluated and tested using publicly available retinal databases and we further compare our method with already proposed techniques.

Risk-sharing deposits in islamic banks: do interest rates have any influence on them?

It has been proven time and again, that Islamic banking performance tends to imitate that of conventional banks, especially since Islamic banks seem to be vulnerable to the same type of risks, whether it is because of monetary policy actions leading to changes in interest rates or other macroeconomic variables. We would like to take a closer look at this verdict and see if it truly holds true if we separate risk-based instruments of financing in Islamic banks and analyze their performance specifically. Our focus is on analyzing the level of impact of interest rates on risk-based deposits in Islamic banks. We use dynamic panel techniques in the form of difference GMM to come to the conclusion that separating risk-based from relatively fixed-rate instruments of financing can provide us with very different results. Our findings suggest that interest rates do not play a significant role in determining the level of deposits that are risk-based in nature and do not depend on a given and guaranteed rate of return. Based on this finding, we see that risk-based deposits and financing can prove to be the antidote that not only Islamic banks but the whole financial industry can think of, to deal with the detrimental effects of an interest-based system

Analyzing the impact of financial sector growth on female empowerment: A focus on the United States of America

It is believed that institutional economics takes into account factors that are often neglected in neoclassical economics. Of these is the role of cultural expectations, societal norms and gender-related expectations. To test whether gender does play a significant role in impacting an individual’s well-being is our broad objective. On a more specific level, we want to test the effect of the presence and penetration of the financial industry, measured by deposit accounts and also represented by GDP growth in this paper, on female empowerment, measured by female labour workforce participation. We also use unemployment figures to check if it is affected in a similar fashion to our main dependent variable and if not, why there is a difference of impact between overall employment and that which is specific to the female gender only. We assume that active workforce participation represents an individual’s level of financial independence and consequently, one’s level of empowerment within the society. We use the Auto Regressive Distributive Lag(ARDL) technique to investigate an issue which is often studied based on a cross-country analysis rather than on a time-series scale. We also chose to make the United States of America our focus, as we would like to test if the impact on a developed country is similar to that of developing countries. Amongst our major findings are the lack of impact formal financial institutions seem to have on female participation in an economy, while we notice a significant level of correlation between unemployment, female participation and GDP

Risk-sharing deposits in islamic banks: do interest rates have any influence on them?

It has been proven time and again, that Islamic banking performance tends to imitate that of conventional banks, especially since Islamic banks seem to be vulnerable to the same type of risks, whether it is because of monetary policy actions leading to changes in interest rates or other macroeconomic variables. We would like to take a closer look at this verdict and see if it truly holds true if we separate risk-based instruments of financing in Islamic banks and analyze their performance specifically. Our focus is on analyzing the level of impact of interest rates on risk-based deposits in Islamic banks. We use dynamic panel techniques in the form of difference GMM to come to the conclusion that separating risk-based from relatively fixed-rate instruments of financing can provide us with very different results. Our findings suggest that interest rates do not play a significant role in determining the level of deposits that are risk-based in nature and do not depend on a given and guaranteed rate of return. Based on this finding, we see that risk-based deposits and financing can prove to be the antidote that not only Islamic banks but the whole financial industry can think of, to deal with the detrimental effects of an interest-based system