Maternal Deaths and Their Causes in Ankara,Turkey, 1982-2001

This study was carried out to determine the incidence and causes of maternal deaths about a 20-year period at the Zekai Tahir Burak Women's Health Education and Research Hospital (ZTBWHERH), Ankara, Turkey. All maternal deaths from January 1982 to July 2001 were reviewed and classified retrospectively. Using a computer-generated list, 348 patients admitted to the Labour Department of ZTBWHERH during 1982-2001 were selected as controls. Medical records were reviewed for demographic data, history of antenatal care, route of delivery, referral history, and perinatal mortality. Cases and controls were compared, and standard tests were used for calculating odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) for the association of demographic and delivery characteristics. During this period, there were 174 maternal deaths and 430,559 livebirths, giving a maternal mortality ratio of 40.4/100,000 livebirths. The mortality rate declined from 85.1/100,000 in 1982 to 11.6/100,000 in 2001. One hundred thirty (74.7%) deaths were due to direct obstetric causes and 24 (13.7%) were abortion- related, while 20 (11.4%) were due to indirect obstetric causes. The most common cause of direct obstetric deaths was pre-eclampsia/eclampsia, followed by obstetric haemorrhage and embolism. Abortion-related sepsis and haemorrhage, anesthesia-related deaths, obstetric sepsis, acute fatty liver of pregnancy, and ectopic pregnancy accounted for other causes of deaths. Cardiovascular disease was the leading indirect cause of death. Referral, lack of antenatal care, and foetal death at admittance were associated with 8-, 3-, and 6-fold increased risk of maternal mortality respectively (OR 8.89, 95% CI 5.7- 13.8; OR 3.74, 95% CI 2.5-5.5; OR 6.38, 95% CI 3.1-13.1). Although maternal mortality ratios have declined at the hospital, especially in the past five years, the rate is still high, and further improvements are needed. The problem of maternal mortality remains multifactorial. Short-term objectives should be focused on improving both medical and administrative practices. Improving the status of women will necessarily remain a long-term objective

A CIRCLE DETECTION APPROACH BASED ON RADON TRANSFORM

In this paper a novel fast circle detection algorithm is proposed which depends on the spatial properties of the connected components on the image. Two 1-D transforms of each connected component is obtained by taking the Radon Transform of the image for two different directions, which are in fact the integrations of the image through horizontal and vertical directions. Circles are detected using the similarities of detected peaks on the transformed functions and the characteristics of the values in between those peaks. The success of the method is analyzed using synthetic images and the performance of the method is presented and compared with Modified Hough Transform (MHT) using synthetic images

Quantization index modulation based watermarking using holography

In this paper, we propose a blind watermarking method where watermark is chosen as the hologram of the signal to be embedded. In the proposed approach the quantized phase of the hologram is embedded into an image using quantization index modulation (QIM). The robustness of the proposed technique is tested against several attacks such as filtering, compression, occlusion and cropping. Also the effects of quantization of the hologram on the reconstruction quality are demonstrated. © (2006) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only

Quantization index modulation-based image watermarking using digital holography

We propose a blind watermarking method where the watermark is a hologram itself. In the proposed approach, the quantized phase of the hologram is embedded into the wavelet-transformed host image using quantization index modulation. In the detection stage, wavelet transform of the watermarked image followed by a minimum distance decoder is used. The proposed method is blind since it requires only information about the quantizers and the parameters of the hologram recording process. The robustness of the proposed technique is tested against several attacks such as filtering, compression, occlusion, and cropping. Moreover, we discuss the effect of quantization of the hologram on the reconstruction quality. (c) 2006 Optical Society of Americ