Risk taking, such as heavy alcohol use, is commonplace among adolescents. Nevertheless, prolonged alcohol use at this age can lead to severe health problems. The goal of this study was to develop and ...evaluate a serious game training ("The Fling"), aimed at increasing behavioral control in adolescents and thereby helping them to improve control over their alcohol use. The game training was compared to a game placebo and a nongame training version in a randomized controlled trial.
A sample of 185 adolescents (mean age 14.9 years) in secondary education participated in the study. They performed four sessions of training, as well as a set of questionnaires and cognitive assessment tasks before and after the training. The basis for the training was the stop-signal paradigm, aimed at increasing behavioral control.
The game variants were shown to motivate adolescents beyond the level of the nongame version. Behavioral control improved significantly over time, but this effect was also present in the game placebo, suggesting that the game activities alone may have had a beneficial effect on our measures of behavioral control. As baseline drinking levels were low, no significant training effects on drinking behavior were found.
Although the current results are not yet conclusive as to whether "The Fling" is effective as a cognitive training, they do warrant further research in this direction. This study also shows that serious games may be uniquely suitable to bridge the gap between an evidence-based training paradigm and an attractive, motivating training environment.
This paper focuses on recognizing image concepts by introducing the ISTOP model. The model parses the images from scene to object׳s parts by using a context sensitive grammar. Since there is a gap ...between the scene and object levels, this grammar proposes the “Visual Term” level to bridge the gap. Visual term is a higher concept level than the object level representing a few co-occurring objects. The grammar used in the model can be embodied in an And–Or graph representation. The hierarchical structure of the graph decomposes an image from the scene level into the visual term, object level and part level by terminal and non-terminal nodes, while the horizontal links in the graph impose the context and constraints between the nodes. In order to learn the grammar constraints and their weights, we propose an algorithm that can perform on weakly annotated datasets. This algorithm searches in the dataset to find visual terms without supervision and then learns the weights of the constraints using a latent SVM. The experimental results on the Pascal VOC dataset show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in recognizing image concepts.
•In understanding an image there is a significant gap between scene level and object level.•ISTOP model can parse an image form scene level to visual term, object and part level by context sensitive grammar.•The visual term is a new concept which can bridge the gap between scene level and object level.•The context used in the grammar can improve object detection as well as visual term detection.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
The stable isotopic signatures (δ13C, δD) of CH4 from four German and Dutch landfill sites have been characterized using different techniques for isotope analysis (tunable diode laser absorption ...spectroscopy and isotope ratio mass spectrometry). Samples taken directly from the gas collection systems show fairly uniform, biogenic δ13C‐δD isotopic signatures δ13C = (−59.0±2.2)‰ VPDB (n = 104); δD = (−304±10)‰ VSMOW (n = 46). In contrast, emission samples taken with static chambers on soil‐covered landfill areas exhibit a considerable δ13C‐δD variability, mainly due to the influence of aerobic bacterial CH4 oxidation, which occurs when the biogas CH4 encounters atmospheric oxygen available in the uppermost region of the cover soil. Soil gas samples from the landfill covers clearly show the progressive isotopic enrichment within the aerobic regions of the soil. Isotope fractionation factors due to CH4 oxidation were determined to be α(δ13C) = 1.008±0.004 and α(δD) = 1.039±0.026. On average, about 80% (70–97%) of CH4 is oxidized during the transport through cover soils, while no significant CH4 oxidation was found in uncovered areas consisting of freshly dumped waste. Area‐integrated δ13C values of total emissions were derived from upwind‐downwind measurements around the landfill and show very little temporal and site‐to‐site variation (δ13C = (−55.4±1.4)‰ VPDB (n = 13; four different landfills)). CH4 budgets were established for two landfill sites, indicating that projected CH4 surface emissions from uncovered and covered areas are significantly lower compared to total CH4 production (for a landfill without gas collection) or compared to the difference between CH4 production and recovery (for a landfill with a gas collection system). For these two landfill sites the overall fraction of CH4 oxidation is estimated to be 46 and 39% (53%) of total CH4 production (minus recovery). Furthermore, the δ13C balance (comparing the δ13C values of the different emission pathways with the area‐integrated δ13C results) implies that direct CH4 emissions via cracks or leakages constituted the major transport pathway (∼70%) into the atmosphere in both landfills.
Background
Covert brain infarcts are associated with important neurological morbidity. Their incidence in patients with embolic stroke of undetermined source (ESUS) is unknown.
Aims
To assess the ...incidence of covert brain infarcts and cerebral microbleeds using MRI in a prospective substudy of the NAVIGATE ESUS randomized trial and to evaluate the effects of antithrombotic therapies.
Methods
At 87 sites in 15 countries, substudy participants were randomly assigned to receive rivaroxaban 15 mg daily or aspirin 100 mg daily and underwent brain MRI near randomization and after study termination. The primary outcome was incident brain infarct (clinical ischemic stroke or covert brain infarct). Brain infarcts and microbleeds were ascertained centrally by readers unaware of treatment. Treatment effects were estimated using logistic regression.
Results
Among the 718 substudy participants with interpretable, paired MRIs, the mean age was 67 years and 61% were men with a median of 52 days between the qualifying ischemic stroke and randomization and a median of seven days between randomization and baseline MRI. During the median (IQR) 11 (12) month interval between scans, clinical ischemic strokes occurred in 27 (4%) participants, while 60 (9%) of the remaining participants had an incident covert brain infarct detected by MRI. Assignment to rivaroxaban was not associated with reduction in the incidence of brain infarct (OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.49, 1.2) or of covert brain infarct among those without clinical stroke (OR 0.85, 95% CI 0.50, 1.4). New microbleeds were observed in 7% and did not differ among those assigned rivaroxaban vs. aspirin (HR 0.95, 95% CI 0.52–1.7).
Conclusions
Incident covert brain infarcts occurred in twice as many ESUS patients as a clinical ischemic stroke. Treatment with rivaroxaban compared with aspirin did not significantly reduce the incidence of covert brain infarcts or increase the incidence of microbleeds, but the confidence intervals for treatment effects were wide.
Registration: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT 02313909
Full text
Available for:
NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Background: Embolic stroke of undetermined source (ESUS) identifies patients with cryptogenic ischemic stroke presumed due to embolism from several unidentified sources. Among patients with recent ...ESUS, we sought to determine independent predictors of recurrent ischemic stroke during treatment with aspirin or rivaroxaban and to assess the relative effects of these treatments according to risk. Methods: Exploratory analyses of 7213 participants in the NAVIGATE ESUS international trial who were randomized to aspirin 100 mg/day or rivaroxaban 15 mg/day and followed for a median of 11 months, during which time there were 309 first recurrent ischemic strokes (4.6% per year). Baseline features were correlated with recurrent stroke by multivariate analysis. Results: The 7 independent predictors of recurrent stroke were stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) prior to the qualifying stroke (hazard ratio HR 2.03 95% confidence internal CI 1.58-2.60), current tobacco user (HR 1.62, 95% CI 1.24-2.12), age (HR 1.02 per year increase, 95%CI 1.01-1.03), diabetes (HR 1.28, 95% CI 1.01-1.64), multiple acute infarcts on neuroimaging (HR 1.49, 95% CI 1.09-2.02), aspirin use prior to qualifying stroke (HR 1.34, 95% CI 1.02-1.70), and time from qualifying stroke to randomization (HR .98, 95% CI .97-.99). The rate of recurrent stroke rate was 2.6% per year for participants without any of these risk factors, and increased by an average of 45% for each independent predictor (P < .001). There were no significant interactions between treatment effects and independent stroke predictors or stroke risk status. Conclusions: In this large cohort of ESUS patients, several features including prior stroke or TIA, advanced age, current tobacco user, multiple acute infarcts on neuroimaging, and diabetes independently identified those with an increased risk of ischemic stroke recurrence. The relative effects of rivaroxaban and aspirin were similar across the spectrum of independent stroke predictors and recurrent stroke risk status.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•Presenting a multi-stream CNN architecture to incorporate multiple complementary features trained in appearance and motion networks.•Demonstrating that using full-frame, human body, and ...motion-salient body part regions together is effective to improve recognition performance.•Proposing methods to detect the actor and motion-salient body part precisely.•Verifying that high-quality flow is critically important to learn accurate video representations for action recognition.
The most successful video-based human action recognition methods rely on feature representations extracted using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Inspired by the two-stream network (TS-Net), we propose a multi-stream Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to recognize human actions. We additionally consider human-related regions that contain the most informative features. First, by improving foreground detection, the region of interest corresponding to the appearance and the motion of an actor can be detected robustly under realistic circumstances. Based on the entire detected human body, we construct one appearance and one motion stream. In addition, we select a secondary region that contains the major moving part of an actor based on motion saliency. By combining the traditional streams with the novel human-related streams, we introduce a human-related multi-stream CNN (HR-MSCNN) architecture that encodes appearance, motion, and the captured tubes of the human-related regions. Comparative evaluation on the JHMDB, HMDB51, UCF Sports and UCF101 datasets demonstrates that the streams contain features that complement each other. The proposed multi-stream architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on these four datasets.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
This paper compares fixed partitioning and salient points schemes for dividing an image into patches, in combination with low-level MPEG-7 visual descriptors to represent the patches with particular ...patterns. A clustering technique is applied to construct a compact representation by grouping similar patterns into a cluster codebook. The codebook will then be used to encode the patterns into visual keywords. In order to obtain high-level information about the relational context of an image, a correlogram is constructed from the spatial relations between visual keyword indices in an image. For classifying images a
k-nearest neighbors (
k-NN) and a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm are used and compared. The techniques are compared to other methods on two well-known datasets, namely Corel and PASCAL. To measure the performance of the proposed algorithms, average precision, a confusion matrix, and ROC-curves are used. The results show that the cluster correlogram outperforms the cluster histogram. The saliency based scheme performs similarly to the fixed partitioning scheme and the SVM significantly outperforms the
k-NN classifier. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness to noise, photometric, and geometric distortions.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Patients who receive rehabilitation after hip replacement surgery are shown to have increased muscle strength and better functional performance. However, traditional physiotherapy is often tedious ...and leads to poor adherence. Exercise games, provide ways for increasing the engagement of elderly patients and increase the uptake of rehabilitation exercises.
The objective of this study was to evaluate Fietsgame (Dutch for cycling game), which translates existing rehabilitation exercises into fun exercise games. The system connects exercise games with a patient's personal record and a therapist interface by an Internet of Things server. Thus, both the patient and physiotherapist can monitor the patient's medical status.
This paper describes a pilot study that evaluates the usability of the Fietsgame. The study was conducted in a rehabilitation center with 9 participants, including 2 physiotherapists and 7 patients. The patients were asked to play 6 exercise games, each lasting about 5 min, under the guidance of a physiotherapist. The mean age of the patients was 74.57 years (standard deviation SD 8.28); all the patients were in the recovery process after hip surgery. Surveys were developed to quantitatively measure the usability factors, including presence, enjoyment, pain, exertion, and technology acceptance. Comments on advantages and suggested improvements of our game system provided by the physiotherapists and patients were summarized and their implications were discussed.
The results showed that after successfully playing the games, 75% to 100% of the patients experienced high levels of enjoyment in all the games except the squats game. Patients reported the highest level of exertion in squats when compared with other exercise games. Lunges resulted in the highest dropout rate (43%) due to interference with the Kinect v2 from support chairs. All the patients (100%) found the game system useful and easy to use, felt that it would be a useful tool in their further rehabilitation, and expressed that they would like to use the game in the future. The therapists indicated that the exercise games highly meet the criteria of motor rehabilitation, and they intend to continue using the game as part of their rehabilitation treatment of patients. Comments from the patients and physiotherapists suggest that real-time corrective feedback when patients perform the exercises wrongly and a more personalized user interface with options for increasing or decreasing cognitive load are needed.
The results suggest that Fietsgame can be used as an alternative tool to traditional motor rehabilitation for patients with hip surgery. Lunges and squats are found to be more beneficial for patients who have relatively better balance skills. A follow-up randomized controlled study will be conducted to test the effectiveness of the Fietsgame to investigate how motivating it is over a longer period of time.
Ambitious targets have been set by the EU Directive 2009/28/EC and the high renewable energy scenario presented in Energy Roadmap 2050 by the European Commission. In order to reach these targets it ...is required detailed analysis on the competitiveness of photovoltaics (PV) electricity. The PV PARITY project, which is supported by the European Commission in the frame of the Intelligent Energy for Europe programme, scopes to provide the necessary support to the policy-makers in order to ensure a sustainable policy framework for the PV sector. Its main tasks are: (i) definition of PV competitiveness; (ii) roadmaps to PV grid parity; (iii) definition of the relevance of PV electricity import from Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries; and (iv) cost/benefits of the PV network integration. The current paper presents briefly the main methodology putting emphasis on the role of MENA countries in the PV competitiveness.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, DOBA, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
PDF
