Diversity in Ancestral Caddo Vessel Forms in East Texas Archaeological Sites

Ceramic vessels from ancestral Caddo sites in East Texas are diverse in form, size, manufacture, and decoration, both spatially and temporally. Variation in these attributes, including vessel form, also “is connected with particular local and regional traditions. In this study, I am concerned with defining the character and formal identification of Caddo vessel forms on sites in the region. To both appreciate and understand the meaning of vessel form diversity in Caddo vessel assemblages in East Texas— or any other part of the much larger southern Caddo area—the consistent identification of different vessel forms and vessel shapes is crucial. The formal identification of the diverse vessel forms and vessel shapes, in conjunction with other vessel attributes, most notably decorative motifs and elements, present in Caddo vessel assemblages should contribute to delimiting the existence and spatial distribution of communities of Caddo potters that were sharing or not sharing ceramic practices and traditions in both short-term and long-term spatial scales, and illuminating small or expansive networks of social groups tied together through regional interaction

REVIEW - A reference data set for retinal vessel profiles

This paper describes REVIEW, a new retinal vessel reference dataset. This dataset includes 16 images with 193 vessel segments, demonstrating a variety of pathologies and vessel types. The vessel edges are marked by three observers using a special drawing tool. The paper also describes the algorithm used to process these segments to produce vessel profiles, against which vessel width measurement algorithms can be assessed. Recommendations are given for use of the dataset in performance assessment. REVIEW can be downloaded from http://ReviewDB.lincoln.ac.uk

Effigy Vessel Documentation, Caddo Collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin

Ceramic vessels from ancestral Caddo sites in East Texas are diverse in form, size, manufacture, and decoration, both spatially and temporally. Variation in these attributes, including vessel form as well as any attachments, also “is connected with particular local and regional traditions” (Brown 1996:335). To both appreciate and understand the meaning of vessel form diversity in Caddo vessel assemblages in East Texas—or any other part of the much larger southern Caddo area—the consistent identification of different vessel forms and vessel shapes is crucial. The formal identification of the diverse vessel forms and vessel shapes, in conjunction with other vessel attributes, most notably decorative motifs and elements, present in Caddo vessel assemblages should contribute to delimiting the existence and spatial distribution of communities of Caddo potters that were sharing or not sharing ceramic practices and traditions in both short-term and long-term spatial scales, and illuminating small or expansive networks of social groups tied together through regional interaction. In this study, the focus is on ceramic effigy vessels from Caddo sites in East Texas that are in the collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL). Ceramic effigy vessels are a very rare vessel form found on Caddo sites, as they comprise about 1 percent of the more than 3100 Caddo vessels currently in the TARL collections. Three different effigy bowl shapes have been identified in East Texas Caddo vessel assemblages. The differences primarily resolve around the character of the effigy head (both bird and abstract forms) as well as the nature of any other appendages, such as tab tails and tail riders. The effigy bowls themselves are simple in form, with rounded body wall contours

A Recursive Bayesian Approach To Describe Retinal Vasculature Geometry

Demographic studies suggest that changes in the retinal vasculature geometry, especially in vessel width, are associated with the incidence or progression of eye-related or systemic diseases. To date, the main information source for width estimation from fundus images has been the intensity profile between vessel edges. However, there are many factors affecting the intensity profile: pathologies, the central light reflex and local illumination levels, to name a few. In this study, we introduce three information sources for width estimation. These are the probability profiles of vessel interior, centreline and edge locations generated by a deep network. The probability profiles provide direct access to vessel geometry and are used in the likelihood calculation for a Bayesian method, particle filtering. We also introduce a geometric model which can handle non-ideal conditions of the probability profiles. Our experiments conducted on the REVIEW dataset yielded consistent estimates of vessel width, even in cases when one of the vessel edges is difficult to identify. Moreover, our results suggest that the method is better than human observers at locating edges of low contrast vessels.Comment: 26 pages,13 figures, journal pape

Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Vessel Density in Healthy, Glaucoma Suspect, and Glaucoma Eyes.

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to compare retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness and optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A) retinal vasculature measurements in healthy, glaucoma suspect, and glaucoma patients.MethodsTwo hundred sixty-one eyes of 164 healthy, glaucoma suspect, and open-angle glaucoma (OAG) participants from the Diagnostic Innovations in Glaucoma Study with good quality OCT-A images were included. Retinal vasculature information was summarized as a vessel density map and as vessel density (%), which is the proportion of flowing vessel area over the total area evaluated. Two vessel density measurements extracted from the RNFL were analyzed: (1) circumpapillary vessel density (cpVD) measured in a 750-μm-wide elliptical annulus around the disc and (2) whole image vessel density (wiVD) measured over the entire image. Areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUROC) were used to evaluate diagnostic accuracy.ResultsAge-adjusted mean vessel density was significantly lower in OAG eyes compared with glaucoma suspects and healthy eyes. (cpVD: 55.1 ± 7%, 60.3 ± 5%, and 64.2 ± 3%, respectively; P < 0.001; and wiVD: 46.2 ± 6%, 51.3 ± 5%, and 56.6 ± 3%, respectively; P < 0.001). For differentiating between glaucoma and healthy eyes, the age-adjusted AUROC was highest for wiVD (0.94), followed by RNFL thickness (0.92) and cpVD (0.83). The AUROCs for differentiating between healthy and glaucoma suspect eyes were highest for wiVD (0.70), followed by cpVD (0.65) and RNFL thickness (0.65).ConclusionsOptical coherence tomography angiography vessel density had similar diagnostic accuracy to RNFL thickness measurements for differentiating between healthy and glaucoma eyes. These results suggest that OCT-A measurements reflect damage to tissues relevant to the pathophysiology of OAG

Validation of vessel size imaging (VSI) in high-grade human gliomas using magnetic resonance imaging, image-guided biopsies, and quantitative immunohistochemistry.

To evaluate the association between a vessel size index (VSIMRI) derived from dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) perfusion imaging using a custom spin-and-gradient echo echoplanar imaging (SAGE-EPI) sequence and quantitative estimates of vessel morphometry based on immunohistochemistry from image-guided biopsy samples. The current study evaluated both relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV) and VSIMRI in eleven patients with high-grade glioma (7 WHO grade III and 4 WHO grade IV). Following 26 MRI-guided glioma biopsies in these 11 patients, we evaluated tissue morphometry, including vessel density and average radius, using an automated procedure based on the endothelial cell marker CD31 to highlight tumor vasculature. Measures of rCBV and VSIMRI were then compared to histological measures. We demonstrate good agreement between VSI measured by MRI and histology; VSIMRI = 13.67 μm and VSIHistology = 12.60 μm, with slight overestimation of VSIMRI in grade III patients compared to histology. rCBV showed a moderate but significant correlation with vessel density (r = 0.42, p = 0.03), and a correlation was also observed between VSIMRI and VSIHistology (r = 0.49, p = 0.01). The current study supports the hypothesis that vessel size measures using MRI accurately reflect vessel caliber within high-grade gliomas, while traditional measures of rCBV are correlated with vessel density and not vessel caliber

A Xenon Condenser with a Remote Liquid Storage Vessel

We describe the design and operation of a system for xenon liquefaction in which the condenser is separated from the liquid storage vessel. The condenser is cooled by a pulse tube cryocooler, while the vessel is cooled only by the liquid xenon itself. This arrangement facilitates liquid particle detector research by allowing easy access to the upper and lower flanges of the vessel. We find that an external xenon gas pump is useful for increasing the rate at which cooling power is delivered to the vessel, and we present measurements of the power and efficiency of the apparatus.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures Corrected typos in authors lis

Retinal vessel segmentation using Gabor Filter and Textons

This paper presents a retinal vessel segmentation method that is inspired by the human visual system and uses a Gabor filter bank. Machine learning is used to optimize the filter parameters for retinal vessel extraction. The filter responses are represented as textons and this allows the corresponding membership functions to be used as the framework for learning vessel and non-vessel classes. Then, vessel texton memberships are used to generate segmentation results. We evaluate our method using the publicly available DRIVE database. It achieves competitive performance (sensitivity=0.7673, specificity=0.9602, accuracy=0.9430) compared to other recently published work. These figures are particularly interesting as our filter bank is quite generic and only includes Gabor responses. Our experimental results also show that the performance, in terms of sensitivity, is superior to other methods