An Evaluation of the Center of Pressure by the Multi-Layers Rubber Mats Using Image-base Rapid Pressure Measuring System

The Multi-Layers Rubber Mats (MLRM) ink footprint has been used to analyze plantar pressure in qualitative data and foot arch index for the customized insole which reflected pressure beneath barefoot. In this study, the MLRM was evaluated the center of pressure (COP) in quantify data by image-base measuring system. The footprint in static and dynamics states were performed to investigate significant difference of the COP. Subsequently, the COP results were compared with a pressure platform. The results showed that, there were some estimate disparity in XCOP (17.4%, p<0.001) and showed good relationship on the YCOP (4.23%, p=0.278) coordinate where compared with the pressure platform. Then, the COP from dynamic state which affected of accumulated pressure during performed dynamic action and the results showed good relation in disparity to static state. Therefore, the evaluation of the COP by image-base measuring system is helpful for clinician or insole maker which able to check the COP from MLRM ink footprint

Ontology-based Fuzzy Markup Language Agent for Student and Robot Co-Learning

An intelligent robot agent based on domain ontology, machine learning mechanism, and Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) for students and robot co-learning is presented in this paper. The machine-human co-learning model is established to help various students learn the mathematical concepts based on their learning ability and performance. Meanwhile, the robot acts as a teacher's assistant to co-learn with children in the class. The FML-based knowledge base and rule base are embedded in the robot so that the teachers can get feedback from the robot on whether students make progress or not. Next, we inferred students' learning performance based on learning content's difficulty and students' ability, concentration level, as well as teamwork sprit in the class. Experimental results show that learning with the robot is helpful for disadvantaged and below-basic children. Moreover, the accuracy of the intelligent FML-based agent for student learning is increased after machine learning mechanism.Comment: This paper is submitted to IEEE WCCI 2018 Conference for revie

Real-time Automatic M-mode Echocardiography Measurement with Panel Attention from Local-to-Global Pixels

Motion mode (M-mode) recording is an essential part of echocardiography to measure cardiac dimension and function. However, the current diagnosis cannot build an automatic scheme, as there are three fundamental obstructs: Firstly, there is no open dataset available to build the automation for ensuring constant results and bridging M-mode echocardiography with real-time instance segmentation (RIS); Secondly, the examination is involving the time-consuming manual labelling upon M-mode echocardiograms; Thirdly, as objects in echocardiograms occupy a significant portion of pixels, the limited receptive field in existing backbones (e.g., ResNet) composed from multiple convolution layers are inefficient to cover the period of a valve movement. Existing non-local attentions (NL) compromise being unable real-time with a high computation overhead or losing information from a simplified version of the non-local block. Therefore, we proposed RAMEM, a real-time automatic M-mode echocardiography measurement scheme, contributes three aspects to answer the problems: 1) provide MEIS, a dataset of M-mode echocardiograms for instance segmentation, to enable consistent results and support the development of an automatic scheme; 2) propose panel attention, local-to-global efficient attention by pixel-unshuffling, embedding with updated UPANets V2 in a RIS scheme toward big object detection with global receptive field; 3) develop and implement AMEM, an efficient algorithm of automatic M-mode echocardiography measurement enabling fast and accurate automatic labelling among diagnosis. The experimental results show that RAMEM surpasses existing RIS backbones (with non-local attention) in PASCAL 2012 SBD and human performances in real-time MEIS tested. The code of MEIS and dataset are available at https://github.com/hanktseng131415go/RAME

Application of artificial intelligence in measuring novel pH-impedance metrics for optimal diagnosis of GERD

Novel metrics extracted from pH-impedance monitoring can augment the diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Artificial intelligence (AI) is being widely used to improve the diagnostic capabilities of various diseases. In this review, we update the current literature regarding applications of artificial intelligence in measuring novel pH-impedance metrics. AI demonstrates high performance in the measurement of impedance metrics, including numbers of reflux episodes and post-reflux swallow-induced peristaltic wave index and, furthermore, extracts baseline impedance from the entire pH-impedance study. AI is expected to play a reliable role in facilitating measuring novel impedance metrics in patients with GERD in the near future

Evaluation of the efficacy and tolerability of miglitol in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus inadequately controlled by diet and sulfonylureas

The objective of this study is to examine the efficacy and tolerability of miglitol with respect to improving glycemic control in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus inadequately controlled by diet and sulfonylurea treatment. This was a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, multicenter study. A total of 105 patients were randomized to receive 24 weeks of treatment with miglitol (n = 52; titrated from 50 mg to 100 mg 3 times daily) or placebo (n = 53). Concomitant sulfonylurea treatment and diet remained unchanged. The primary endpoint was change in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) from baseline at 24 weeks. Secondary endpoints were changes in fasting plasma glucose (FPG), postprandial plasma glucose (PPG), and postprandial serum insulin (PSI). The miglitol treatment group showed significantly greater reductions in HbA1c and PPG levels compared with the placebo group. With respect to adverse events, abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, and hypoglycemia occurred with similar frequency in both groups. Results of this study indicate that miglitol significantly improves metabolic control in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Miglitol is safe and well tolerated, with the exception of abdominal discomfort. Therefore, miglitol may be a useful adjuvant therapy for Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus inadequately controlled by diet and sulfonylurea treatment

Atrasentan and renal events in patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease (SONAR): a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial

Background: Short-term treatment for people with type 2 diabetes using a low dose of the selective endothelin A receptor antagonist atrasentan reduces albuminuria without causing significant sodium retention. We report the long-term effects of treatment with atrasentan on major renal outcomes. Methods: We did this double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial at 689 sites in 41 countries. We enrolled adults aged 18–85 years with type 2 diabetes, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)25–75 mL/min per 1·73 m 2 of body surface area, and a urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR)of 300–5000 mg/g who had received maximum labelled or tolerated renin–angiotensin system inhibition for at least 4 weeks. Participants were given atrasentan 0·75 mg orally daily during an enrichment period before random group assignment. Those with a UACR decrease of at least 30% with no substantial fluid retention during the enrichment period (responders)were included in the double-blind treatment period. Responders were randomly assigned to receive either atrasentan 0·75 mg orally daily or placebo. All patients and investigators were masked to treatment assignment. The primary endpoint was a composite of doubling of serum creatinine (sustained for ≥30 days)or end-stage kidney disease (eGFR <15 mL/min per 1·73 m 2 sustained for ≥90 days, chronic dialysis for ≥90 days, kidney transplantation, or death from kidney failure)in the intention-to-treat population of all responders. Safety was assessed in all patients who received at least one dose of their assigned study treatment. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT01858532. Findings: Between May 17, 2013, and July 13, 2017, 11 087 patients were screened; 5117 entered the enrichment period, and 4711 completed the enrichment period. Of these, 2648 patients were responders and were randomly assigned to the atrasentan group (n=1325)or placebo group (n=1323). Median follow-up was 2·2 years (IQR 1·4–2·9). 79 (6·0%)of 1325 patients in the atrasentan group and 105 (7·9%)of 1323 in the placebo group had a primary composite renal endpoint event (hazard ratio [HR]0·65 [95% CI 0·49–0·88]; p=0·0047). Fluid retention and anaemia adverse events, which have been previously attributed to endothelin receptor antagonists, were more frequent in the atrasentan group than in the placebo group. Hospital admission for heart failure occurred in 47 (3·5%)of 1325 patients in the atrasentan group and 34 (2·6%)of 1323 patients in the placebo group (HR 1·33 [95% CI 0·85–2·07]; p=0·208). 58 (4·4%)patients in the atrasentan group and 52 (3·9%)in the placebo group died (HR 1·09 [95% CI 0·75–1·59]; p=0·65). Interpretation: Atrasentan reduced the risk of renal events in patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease who were selected to optimise efficacy and safety. These data support a potential role for selective endothelin receptor antagonists in protecting renal function in patients with type 2 diabetes at high risk of developing end-stage kidney disease. Funding: AbbVie

Analysis of Parallel Multidimensional Wave Digital Filtering Network on IBM Cell Broadband Engine

As an alternative approach for the numerical integration of physical systems, the MDWDF technique has become of importance in the field of numerical analysis due to its attractive features, for example, massive parallelism and high accuracy both inherent in nature. In this study, speed-up efficiencies of a MDWDF network are studied for the linearized shallow water system, which plays an important role in fluid dynamics. To achieve the goal, the full parallelism of the MDWDF network is established in the first place based on the chained MD retiming technique. Following the implementation on the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE), excellent performance of the full parallel architecture is revealed. The IBM Cell/BE containing 1 power processor element (PPE) and 8 synergistic processor elements (SPEs) perfectly fits the architecture of the retimed MDWDF model. Empirical results have demonstrated that the full parallelized model with 8 processors (1PPE + 7SPEs) outperforms the other three models: partial right/left-loop retimed models and the full sequential model with 4× improvements for scheduled grids 51×51. In addition, for scheduled fine grids 201×201, the full parallel model is shown to possess significant performance over these models by up to 7× improvements

Towards smart-pixel-based implementation of wideband active sonar echolocation system for multi-target detection

A modified adaptive noise cancelling (ANC) hybrid algorithm incorporating techniques of optimal wideband FIR filtering operation and the trimmed mean (TM)-levelization, a dynamic level-based thresholding process, is described in this paper for wideband active sonar echolocation system. This novel technique performs effective suppression of unwanted part of the training data thus localizing potentials of target returns. Furthermore, due to a massive parallelism in the system although the current electronic processing units such as GPU (graphic processing unit) and GPGPU (general-purpose GPU) work well, we propose the concept of smart-pixel (SP) as a possible solution towards hardware implementation of the above algorithm. In this architecture of parallelism, an array of optical devices is integrated onto one chip and then utilized as a computational cell to provide an alternative solution towards parallel implementation of the ANC hybrid algorithm

[[alternative]]A Study of Ceneralizing Human Resource Personnel Office in Taipei County Municipal Elementary School and Junior High School

[[abstract]]The thesis is aimed to understand current situation and the problems and difficulties occurring during the implementation, and furthermore discuss the causes and improvement strategy to provide as a reference to the Taipei County Government to evaluate the “policy of centralizing human resource personnel’s office”. This research covers five main themes: “Flexibility of Human Resource Adjustment”, “Effective Implementation of Human Resource Policy”, “Improving Human Source Service Efficiency”, “Centralizing Office”, and “Improvement Strategies”. Questionnaire survey of “Research Investigation of Centralizing Human Resource Personnel Office in Taipei County Municipal Elementary School and Junior High School” is administered to the entire personnel staff and the school teachers in 58 elementary and junior high schools. The total subjects conducted are 602 in terms of random sampling. In addition, in-depth interview was undertaken to collect some complementary data. The raw data was analyzed by means of Frequencies , Percentage , t-Test, oneway ANOVA and Scheffe' Method. The conclusions are as follows: 1. The district center of centralizing office is duty-driven. Its format is not legalized and the director of district center is not properly identified and positioned; thus the district center is not able to fully utilize its functions. 2. Centralizing office has limited quota , and can allocate for more than one of the institutions. Even though the human source is streamlined, but has resulted manpower allocation diversity between the urban areas and rural ones. Rural area with less manpower has more pressure. Metropolitan area also sees some problem, when the school institution does not receive professional service because the manpower transfers from time to time. 3. The school has to accommodate the HR personnel to provide assistance. While this is giving extra workload for the school staff, but also reduce the workload for the school’s HR staff. 4. There is increasing amount of omits occur during the documentation procedure. The official documents need to be returned to the school or to the district center for approval stamp. This is causing longer than expected delay or low efficiency in dealing with the official documents. Paperwork and budget reconciliation must be communicated between the district center and the school. The time in this process does not necessarily simplify or shorten the processing time. 5. In accordance with the standard operational procedure of centralizing the office, internet or email attached spreadsheets really does not the HR service become more effective in the process. Proper authorization also helps improve the efficiency. However, on the other hand, excessive power authorized would also have the concern of not able to monitor the procedure. 6. After implementing centralizing office, the HR personnel must return to the school to provide service once a week or at unspecified time. During the short stay in the school, the HR policy is not able be implemented properly because the role of duty is not fully served. Not able to provide customer-first oriented service, the HR function is then limited to approval process only. 7.Over-estimating the cost reduction of HR is actually increasing the cost of equipment and office miscellaneous items. The expected reduction on the hourly pay of the teaching HR personnel is actually not saving the money. The time cost and travel expense incurred for the personnel to commute in between the district center and the school is hard to meet the forecasted plan. 8.The schools are against of this policy. HR personnel commutes between district center and the schools are adding extra personal time, transportation burden, body tolerance and increase safety risks. Due to the fact that the centralized office is isolated from the schools, the morale of the personnel is diminished. 9.From the improvement strategy perspective, the two centralized offices have received low agreement on this policy. This has caused burden to the school’s human resource structure. 10.From the improvement strategy perspective, the three independent office strategies have received agreement leaning to the center. They agree on the HR personnel returning to the school, and the school without HR personnel shall consider alternative improvement strategy. 11.HR personnel should return to the school to work. Small-size schools, which do not have the HR personnel, can get HR personnel in accordance to the regional union of schools regulation. Household Control, Land Control, and such professional agencies can have joint HR personnel. 12.This research is in accordance to the qualities, functions and duties of personnel and accounting systems to work out the system restructure policy. The following suggestions are provided as follows: 1. Suggestion to the HR supervising department in the central government” (1) To establish more flexible and diverse structure format to meet the needs of restructuring (2) Certain regulations must be loosen up to foresee reform of the structuring 2. Suggestion to the Taipei County Government: (1) To create formula for appropriate system of quota allocation (2) To provide legal reference for the centralized office in district center and the director of the district center. (3) HR procedure must improve electronic procedures (4) To improve county’s professionalism and teamwork cooperation. (5) To encourage the morale of the county HR personnel 3. Suggestions to the Taipei County Municipal elementary schools and junior high schools: (1) To treat HR personnel as a team (2) To clarify the duties between each other 4. Suggestions to the HR personnel: (1) Improve personal professional abilities (2) To develop the second talent 5. Suggestions for further studies: (1) The system must be able to investigate the thinking and comments of the HR personnel in the centralized office, and as well as those of the other schools in the Taipei County, and County Government decision makers, administration staff and related bureau staff. (2) The formation at early stage, policy-making, and the finding of the problems after implementation are all suitable topics for the researchers to study further.