Back Complaints in the Elders (BACE); design of cohort studies in primary care: an international consortium

Background: Although back complaints are common among older people, limited information is available in the literature about the clinical course of back pain in older people and the identification of older persons at risk for the transition from acute back complaints to chronic back pain. The aim of this study is to assess the course of back complaints and identify prognostic factors for the transition from acute back complaints to chronic back complaints in older people who visit a primary health care physician. Methods/design. The design is a prospective cohort study with one-year follow-up. There will be no interference with usual care. Patients older than 55 years who consult a primary health care physician with a new episode of back complaints will be included in this study. Data will be collected using a questionnaire, physical examination and X-ray at baseline, and follow-up questionnaires afte

Forensic face recognition as a means to determine strength of evidence: A survey

This paper surveys the literature on forensic face recognition (FFR), with a particular focus on the strength of evidence as used in a court of law. FFR is the use of biometric face recognition for several applications in forensic science. It includes scenarios of ID verification and open-set identification, investigation and intelligence, and evaluation of the strength of evidence. We present FFR from operational, tactical, and strategic perspectives. We discuss criticism of FFR and we provide an overview of research efforts from multiple perspectives that relate to the domain of FFR. Finally, we sketch possible future directions for FFR

ForenFace: A unique annotated forensic facial image dataset and toolset

Few facial image datasets are suitable for forensic research. In this study, the authors present ForenFace, a facial image and video dataset. It contains video sequences and extracted images of 97 subjects recorded with six different surveillance camera of various types. Moreover, it also contains high-resolution images and 3D scans. The novelty of this dataset lies in two aspects: (i) a subset of 435 images (87 subjects, five images per subject) has been manually annotated, yielding a very rich forensically relevant annotation of almost 19.000 facial parts, and (ii) making available a toolset to create, view, and extract the annotation. The authors present protocols and the result of a baseline experiment in which two commercial software packages and an annotated facial feature contained in this dataset are compared. The dataset, the annotation and tools are available under a usage license