A Comparative Study of the Efficacy of Surfactant Administration through a Thin Intratracheal Catheter and its Administration via an Endotracheal Tube in Neonatal Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Background: The cornerstone of the treatment of respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) is respiratory support and surfactant replacement therapy. The administration of surfactant through a thin intratracheal catheter is one of the methods used to reduce one of the standard technique complications of a surfactant injection (Intubation-SurfactantExtubation method [INSURE]). The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of this method on the treatment of RDS in neonates with one of the INSURE technique. Methods: In this double blind clinical trial, 104 neonates with RDS were randomly allocated to two groups, one group received surfactant via an endotracheal tube (INSURE) and the other received surfactant without intubation (SWI) via a thin intratracheal catheter. Subsequently the outcomes of the two groups were compared. Results: The incidence of hypoxemia during surfactant administration was significantly lower in the SWI group (11.5%) than in the INSURE group (28.8% , P< 0.05). no significant difference was observed in the need for intubation and mechanical ventilation during the first 72 hours of life, the duration of mechanical ventilation, the need for nasal continuous positive airway pressure (NCPAP), the need for oxygen, the incidence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, intraventricular hemorrhage, pulmonary hemorrhage ,and death in the two groups. Conclusion: Administration of surfactant through a thin intratracheal catheter is a safe and easy technique. This method is as effective as the INSURE method in improving the outcomes of RDS treatmen

Using wavelet transform self-similarity for effective multiple description video coding

10th International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing, ICICS 2015 -- 2 December 2015 through 4 December 2015 -- -- 121516Video streaming over unreliable networks requires preventive measures to avoid quality deterioration in the presence of packet losses. However, these measures result in redundancy in the transmitted data which is utilized to estimate the missing packets lost in the delivered portions. In this paper, we have used the self-similarity property if the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to minimize the redundancy and improve the fidelity of the delivered video streams in presence of data loss. Our proposed method decomposes the video into multiple descriptions after applying the DWT. The descriptions are organized in such a way that when one of them is lost during transmission, it is estimated using the delivered portions by means of self-similarity between the DWT coefficients. In our experiments, we compare video reconstruction in the presence of data loss in one or two descriptions. Based on the experimental results, we have ascertained that our estimation method for missing coefficients by means of self-similarity is able to improve the video quality by 2.14dB and 7.26dB in case of one description and two descriptions, respectively. Moreover, our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art Forward Error Correction (FEC) method in case of higher bit-rates

Is it Really a Man’s World? Using Real-Life Negotiations to Reframe the Negotiation Gender Gap

Much has been written regarding the gender negotiation gap. However, the existing literature frequently involves only hypothetical negotiations where the participants do not experience the effects of the negotiation as one would in real life. This first-of-its-kind study utilizes a dataset of over 1,000 negotiations from the television show Pawn Stars to analyze the role gender plays in negotiations. Negotiation best practices analyzed in this study include the willingness to walk away from the negotiation, use of a counteroffer, use of objective language, and the implementation of cognitive anchoring by making extreme initial offers. The results shed light on traditional notions of the gender negotiation gap, gender-based negotiation advice, and future research on the subject

Spatial multiple description coding for scalable video streams

The need for adapting video stream delivery over heterogeneous and unreliable networks requires self-adaptive and error resilient coding. Network bandwidth fluctuations can be handled by means of a video coding scheme which adapts to the channel conditions. However, packet losses which are frequent in wireless networks can cause a mismatch during the reconstruction in the receiver end and result in an accumulation of errors which deteriorates the quality of the delivered video. A combination of multiple description coding in pixel domain and scalable video coding schemes which addresses both video adaptation and robustness to data loss is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme combines error concealment with spatial video scalability. In order to improve the fidelity of the reconstructed to the original frames in presence of packet loss, a multilayer polyphase spatial decomposition algorithm is proposed. Classical multiple description methods interpolate the missing data which results in smoothing and artifact at object boundaries. The proposed algorithm addresses the quality degradation due to low-pass filtering effect of interpolation methods. We also comparatively analyze the trade-off between robustness to channel errors and coding efficiency. © 2014 Roya Choupani et al

A Drift-Reduced Hierarchical Wavelet Coding Scheme for Scalable Video Transmissions

Abstract—Scalable video coding allows for the capability of (partially) decoding a video bitstream when faced with communication deficiencies such as low bandwidth or loss of data resulting in lower video quality. As the encoding is usually based on perfectly reconstructed frames, such deficiencies result in differently decoded frames at the decoder than the ones used in the encoder and, therefore, leading to errors being accumulated in the decoder. This is commonly referred to as the drift error. Drift-free scalable video coding methods also suffer from the low performance problem as they do not combine the residue encoding scheme of the current standards such as MPEG-4 and H.264 with scalability characteristics. We propose a scalable video coding method which is based on the motion compensation and residue encoding methods found in current video standards combined with the scalability property of discrete wavelet transform. Our proposed method aims to reduce the drift error while preserving the compression efficiency. Our results show that the drift error has been greatly reduced when a hierarchical structure for frame encoding is introduced

Hierarchical SNR scalable video coding with adaptive quantization for reduced drift error

Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC)10th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, VISAPP 2015 -- 11 March 2015 through 14 March 2015 -- -- 112690In video coding, dependencies between frames are being exploited to achieve compression by only coding the differences. This dependency can potentially lead to decoding inaccuracies when there is a communication error, or a deliberate quality reduction due to reduced network or receiver capabilities. The dependency can start at the reference frame and progress through a chain of dependent frames within a group of pictures (GOP) resulting in the so-called drift error. Scalable video coding schemes should deal with such drift errors while maximizing the delivered video quality. In this paper, we present a multi-layer hierarchical structure for scalable video coding capable of reducing the drift error. Moreover, we propose an optimization to adaptively determine the quantization step size for the base and enhancement layers. In addition, we address the trade-off between the drift error and the coding efficiency. The improvements in terms of average PSNR values when one frame in a GOP is lost are 3.70(dB) when only the base layer is delivered, and 4.78(dB) when both the base and the enhancement layers are delivered. The improvements in presence of burst errors are 3.52(dB) when only the base layer is delivered, and 4.50(dB) when both base and enhancement layers are delivered. Copyright © 2015 SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications All rights reserved