2,205 research outputs found
New Distribution Records of Ground Beetles From the North Central United States (Coleoptera: Carabidae)
We report 39 ground beetles new to five states in the upper midwestern United States. These species records include 19 new to Illinois (all but one from Lake County), 11 from Iowa, three from South Dakota, eight from Wisconsin, and two from Michigan. (Three species are new to more than one state). Enigmatically disjunct collections include the myrmecophile, Helluomorphoides nigripennis from western Illinois, known previously only from the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain and piedmont, and Chlaenius amoenus, reported only from southeastern states and now from northeast Iowa
CIDI-Lung-Seg: A Single-Click Annotation Tool for Automatic Delineation of Lungs from CT Scans
Accurate and fast extraction of lung volumes from computed tomography (CT)
scans remains in a great demand in the clinical environment because the
available methods fail to provide a generic solution due to wide anatomical
variations of lungs and existence of pathologies. Manual annotation, current
gold standard, is time consuming and often subject to human bias. On the other
hand, current state-of-the-art fully automated lung segmentation methods fail
to make their way into the clinical practice due to their inability to
efficiently incorporate human input for handling misclassifications and praxis.
This paper presents a lung annotation tool for CT images that is interactive,
efficient, and robust. The proposed annotation tool produces an "as accurate as
possible" initial annotation based on the fuzzy-connectedness image
segmentation, followed by efficient manual fixation of the initial extraction
if deemed necessary by the practitioner. To provide maximum flexibility to the
users, our annotation tool is supported in three major operating systems
(Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS X). The quantitative results comparing our free
software with commercially available lung segmentation tools show higher degree
of consistency and precision of our software with a considerable potential to
enhance the performance of routine clinical tasks.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; to appear in the proceedings of 36th Annual
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
Society (EMBC 2014
Host-Bacteria Interactions in Foreign Body Infections
Persistent staphylococcal infections are a major medical problem, especially when they occur on implanted materials or intravascular catheters. This review describes some of the recently discovered molecular mechanisms of Staphylococcus aureus attachment to host proteins coating biomedical implants. These interactions involve specific surface proteins, called bacterial adhesins, that recognize specific domains of host proteins deposited on indwelling devices, such as fibronectin, fibrinogen, or fibrin. Elucidation of molecular mechanisms of S aureus adhesion to the different host proteins may lead to the development of specific inhibitors blocking attachment of S aureus, which may decrease the risk of bacterial colonization of indwelling device
Barriers and facilitators to participating in cardiac rehabilitation and physical activity in a remote and rural population: A cross-sectional survey
Background: Cardiac disease requires ongoing active management which may include attendance at formal cardiac rehabilitation (CR) and increased physical activity (PA). However, uptake rates are sub-optimal. This study aimed to identify factors associated with attendance at CR and PA in a rural Scottish population.Methods: A cross-sectional postal survey assessing factors potentially associated with attending CR and participating in PA. Data were also collected from hospital electronic medical records. Binary logistic and ordinal regressions were used to identify barriers and facilitators to participation.Results: The cohort consisted of 840 participants referred to the CR department of a regional Scottish hospital. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria, 567 patients were sent a questionnaire. The number of returned questionnaires was 295 (52.0%). Responders were predominantly male (75.9%), with a mean age of 68.7 years. At the multivariate level, the only factor associated with CR attendance was a lack of perceived need (odds ratio [OR] 0.02, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01–0.06). Analyses of PA associations identified self-efficacy as the only significant facilitator (OR 1.29, 95% CI 1.05–1.59), and a lack of willpower as the only barrier (OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.18–0.97). Other factors were linked to CR attendance and PA at a univariate level only.Conclusions: This study characterised CR and PA participation, and explored demographic, medical, and psychological factors associated with both activities — with the most important being perceived need, self-efficacy and willpower. These findings may be beneficial in clinical practice by targeting these factors to increase CR attendance and PA levels
Barriers and facilitators to participating in cardiac rehabilitation and physical activity in a remote and rural population : A cross-sectional survey
The authors are grateful to the staff of the Research, Development and Innovation offices, who assisted in the distribution and collection of questionnaires, and the Cardiac Rehabilitation staff. The authors would like to thank all patients involved in this study. Funding: DC was funded by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (project number HMS 9353763)Peer reviewedPublisher PD
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