This 2005 book explores the evolution of Americans' first way of war, to show how war waged against Indian noncombatant population and agricultural resources became the method early Americans ...employed and, ultimately, defined their military heritage. The sanguinary story of the American conquest of the Indian peoples east of the Mississippi River helps demonstrate how early Americans embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed on noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understand US 'special operations' in the War on Terror.
Chest X-ray imaging technology used for the early detection and screening of COVID-19 pneumonia is both accessible worldwide and affordable compared to other non-invasive technologies. Additionally, ...deep learning methods have recently shown remarkable results in detecting COVID-19 on chest X-rays, making it a promising screening technology for COVID-19. Deep learning relies on a large amount of data to avoid overfitting. While overfitting can result in perfect modeling on the original training dataset, on a new testing dataset it can fail to achieve high accuracy. In the image processing field, an image augmentation step (i.e., adding more training data) is often used to reduce overfitting on the training dataset, and improve prediction accuracy on the testing dataset. In this paper, we examined the impact of geometric augmentations as implemented in several recent publications for detecting COVID-19. We compared the performance of 17 deep learning algorithms with and without different geometric augmentations. We empirically examined the influence of augmentation with respect to detection accuracy, dataset diversity, augmentation methodology, and network size. Contrary to expectation, our results show that the removal of recently used geometrical augmentation steps actually improved the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 17 models. The MCC without augmentation (MCC = 0.51) outperformed four recent geometrical augmentations (MCC = 0.47 for Data Augmentation 1, MCC = 0.44 for Data Augmentation 2, MCC = 0.48 for Data Augmentation 3, and MCC = 0.49 for Data Augmentation 4). When we retrained a recently published deep learning without augmentation on the same dataset, the detection accuracy significantly increased, with a
and a
-value of 2.23 × 10
. This is an interesting finding that may improve current deep learning algorithms using geometrical augmentations for detecting COVID-19. We also provide clinical perspectives on geometric augmentation to consider regarding the development of a robust COVID-19 X-ray-based detector.
The vertebrate respiratory system is challenging to study. The complex relationship between the lungs and adjacent tissues, the vast structural diversity of the respiratory system both within ...individuals and between taxa, its mobility (or immobility) and distensibility, and the difficulty of quantifying and visualizing functionally important internal negative spaces have all impeded descriptive, functional, and comparative research. As a result, there is a relative paucity of three-dimensional anatomical information on this organ system in all vertebrate groups (including humans) relative to other regions of the body. We present some of the challenges associated with evaluating and visualizing the vertebrate respiratory system using computed and micro-computed tomography and its subsequent digital segmentation. We discuss common mistakes to avoid when imaging deceased and live specimens and various methods for merging manual and threshold-based segmentation approaches to visualize pulmonary tissues across a broad range of vertebrate taxa, with a particular focus on sauropsids (reptiles and birds). We also address some of the recent work in comparative evolutionary morphology and medicine that have used these techniques to visualize respiratory tissues. Finally, we provide a clinical study on COVID-19 in humans in which we apply modeling methods to visualize and quantify pulmonary infection in the lungs of human patients.
Renal hyperparathyroidism (RHPT), seen in the setting of end stage renal disease (ESRD) is associated with four gland hyperplasia. If refractory to medical management, patients are referred for ...surgical evaluation for parathyroidectomy. Ectopic parathyroid glands are more common in patients with RHPT and can be found in 26%–46% of patients, sometimes representing a diagnostic imaging challenge. If not accurately distinguished on imaging, they may not be found during neck exploration, which could result in recurrent disease or failure to obtain surgical cure. Different imaging modalities such as ultrasound, 99m-technetium sestamibi scan, or dynamic contrast-enhanced parathyroid computed tomography scan are available to attempt localization of parathyroid glands prior to surgery to help direct surgical exploration. More recently, dynamic, contrast-enhanced parathyroid magnetic resonance imaging (4D-MRI) has been shown to be a useful alternative imaging modality, particularly in patients with ESRD avoiding the use of iodinated contrast. Here we report two cases of ectopic parathyroid glands detected using 4D-MRI in the setting of parathyroidectomy for RHPT.
Patient A is a 35-year-old female with a history of ESRD secondary to nephrotic syndrome whose 4th parathyroid gland was identified on 4D-MRI in the right inferior pole of the thyroid.
Patient B is a 42-year-old male with a history of ESRD secondary to membranous nephropathy who had a parathyroid lesion identified on 4D-MRI near the left common carotid artery. In both cases, 4D-MRI proved to be a useful tool for localization of the missing parathyroid gland. KCI Citation Count: 0
This 2005 book explores the evolution of Americans' first way of war, to show how war waged against Indian noncombatant population and agricultural resources became the method early Americans ...employed and, ultimately, defined their military heritage. The sanguinary story of the American conquest of the Indian peoples east of the Mississippi River helps demonstrate how early Americans embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed on noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understand US 'special operations' in the War on Terror.
Assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of proxy forces marks one of the most difficult tasks commanders and their staffs face. Differences in languages, cultural norms, and war aims often ...complicate the ability of soldiers from one culture to work well with those from another. Long before the mid-twentieth century’s codification of a doctrine of unconventional warfare—training and using indigenous and native troops to function alongside and independent of regular and conventionally focused forces—professional soldiers struggled to make the best use of proxy forces.
The early years (1755–57) of the Seven Years’ War serve as a useful case
This essay surveys recent trends (since the mid 1980s) in the historiography on warfare in the Colonial Period (1607–1765). In addition to traditional military history and biography, it focuses on ...works from the new social military history, ethnohistory, identity studies, and the new frontier and imperial histories. It identifies the current state of the field, as well as areas in need of further research and writing. Teachers can use this essay to contextualize the colonial period’s military history, undergraduate students will find it useful as bibliography/research aid, and graduate students can use it preparing for comprehensive examinations.
Maj. Gen. Lesley McNair, the officer whom the Army vested in 1940 with responsibility for building the army that eventually fought the Wehrmacht in North Africa and Northwest Europe, believed that to ...wage decisive armor warfare, the U.S. must develop a means of neutralizing enemy armor forces with capabilities other than tanks or infantry in trucks.2 An FA officer by training and inclination, he naturally turned to artillery as a possible neutralizer of Blitzkrieg. The resulting American AT doctrine therefore explained how each infantry division should possess a TD battalion that served as a highly mobile force to engage enemy armor after it breached American lines and thereby exposed its flanks. ...while each RCT should include a TD battery that supported it, commanders must avoid posting TD forces at the front. After the half-track mounted guns failed in North Africa, TD units in the field received turreted guns, which worked well, except the Army, to provide spotters a wide field of view, gave them open turrets, which meant Soldiers could not "button up" and they thereby became incredibly vulnerable to anti-personnel fire from the enemy.5 With the bean counting of resource apportionment and allocation well in hand, the time for bold action had arrived. Instead of spending more effort discussing TD organization and weapons development, or conducting further evaluation to resolve the disconnect between the initial and subsequent findings on the effectiveness of TD as compared to FA as AT forces, the War Department, with the swipe of pen, essentially created a quasi-branch, with its own insignia, for TD.6 A name change marked the first step: all divisions must designate their AT units as TD.
Purpose: The purpose of this work was to evaluate the ability of a treatment delivery verification system to detect clinically significant mechanical errors in VMAT delivery utilizing data contained ...within a commercial record and verify (RV) system, and to test whether the system can be used to reconstruct dose distributions that agree more closely with measured dose distributions than do the original treatment plans.Methods: VMAT treatment plans from five prostate patients, five head and neck patients, and five post-mastectomy chest wall patients treated at our clinic were selected for this study. Known mechanical errors were introduced into each plan, and the dosimetric effect of each error was evaluated by a radiation oncologist to determine mechanical error thresholds for clinical acceptability. Next, shifted plans were delivered on an Elekta linear accelerator, and the resulting dose distribution was measured with a two-dimensional diode array. During delivery, positions of the gantry, multi-leaf collimator (MLC), and jaws were captured in both the RV system and the linac verification interface (LVI). Following plan delivery, recorded delivery data were analyzed to characterize the ability of the recording systems to recognize true mechanical error. Finally, delivery parameters from both recording systems were imported to the treatment planning system and used to recalculate the dose delivered to the measurement phantom to test whether the system can be used to reconstruct dose distributions that agree more closely with measured dose distributions than do the original treatment plans.Results: Minimum mechanical error thresholds over all fifteen cases were found to be 1 mm for systematic MLC error, 2 mm for Gaussian-random MLC error, 3 mm for uniform-random MLC error, 3 mm for central leaf pair error and 2° for gantry error. Analyzing delivery data yielded p-values less than 0.05 for both RV and LVI systems for all central leaf pair and gantry shifts (1, 2, and 3 mm central leaf pair shifts and 1, 2, 3, and 5° rotations), which means that each system could reliably detect errors at threshold values. Reconstruction of delivery data by both RV and LVI systems failed to yield p-values less than 0.05 for prostate, head and neck, and chest wall cases.Conclusion: Both delivery verification systems examined were capable of detecting mechanical errors of 1 mm of the MLC and 2° of the gantry that produce clinically unacceptable changes in the planned dose distribution. However, dose reconstructed using the recorded delivery parameters showed no significant improvement in agreement with measured values. Thus, while the delivery verification system can detect mechanical errors, it cannot more accurately estimate the daily delivered dose than the original plans do.
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