Automatic extraction of vertebra regions from a spinal magnetic resonance (MR) image is normally required as the first step to an intelligent spinal MR image diagnosis system. In this work, we ...develop a fully automatic vertebra detection and segmentation system, which consists of three stages; namely, AdaBoost-based vertebra detection, detection refinement via robust curve fitting, and vertebra segmentation by an iterative normalized cut algorithm. In order to produce an efficient and effective vertebra detector, a statistical learning approach based on an improved AdaBoost algorithm is proposed. A robust estimation procedure is applied on the detected vertebra locations to fit a spine curve, thus refining the above vertebra detection results. This refinement process involves removing the false detections and recovering the miss-detected vertebrae. Finally, an iterative normalized-cut segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment the precise vertebra regions from the detected vertebra locations. In our implementation, the proposed AdaBoost-based detector is trained from 22 spinal MR volume images. The experimental results show that the proposed vertebra detection and segmentation system can achieve nearly 98% vertebra detection rate and 96% segmentation accuracy on a variety of testing spinal MR images. Our experiments also show the vertebra detection and segmentation accuracies by using the proposed algorithm are superior to those of the previous representative methods. The proposed vertebra detection and segmentation system is proved to be robust and accurate so that it can be used for advanced research and application on spinal MR images.
Grape seed procyanidins (GSPs), widely known for their beneficial health properties, fail to bring about the expected improvement in piglets' growth performance. The effects of dietary ...supplementation with GSPs on nutrient utilisation may be a critical influencing factor. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of dietary supplementation with GSPs on nutrient utilisation and gut function in weaned piglets. One hundred and twenty crossbred piglets were allocated randomly to four treatment groups, with three replicate pens per treatment and 10 piglets per pen. Each group was given one of the four dietary treatments: the basal diet (control group) or the basal diet with the addition of 50-, 100- or 150-mg/kg GSPs. The trial lasted 28 days. Faeces were collected from d 12 to 14 and from d 26 to 28 for measuring the coefficient of total tract apparent digestibility (CTTAD) of the nutrients. Blood samples were collected on d 14 and 28 for detecting the blood biochemical parameters. Two piglets per pen were slaughtered to collect the pancreas and intestinal digesta for evaluating the digestive enzyme activity and the coefficient of ileal apparent digestibility (CIAD) of the nutrients. On d 14 and 28, supplementation with 150-mg/kg GSPs significantly decreased the CTTAD of DM and CP in piglets. On d 14, GSPs supplementation at a concentration of 150 mg/kg led to a remarkable decrease in the CIAD of CP and gross energy (GE). On d 28, GSPs supplementation at a dose of 150 mg/kg generated a marked decline in the CIAD of DM, GE, CP and ether extract. Grape seed procyanidins supplementation at concentrations of 100 or 150 mg/kg inhibited the activities of lipase and amylase. In contrast, the jejunum mucosa maltase and sucrase activities increased due to the inclusion of GSPs at a concentration of 100 mg/kg in the piglet diet. Compared with the levels of the control group, the serum glucose and total protein levels were enhanced significantly by supplementation with GSPs at 100 mg/kg and reduced dramatically at 150 mg/kg. The serum diamine oxidase activity and endotoxin levels were decreased by GSPs supplementation in piglet diets. In conclusion, higher concentrations of GSPs in weaned piglet diets attenuated nutrient digestion and inhibited digestive enzyme activity; however, suitable concentrations of GSPs could promote brush-border enzyme activity, enhance serum glucose and total protein concentrations and decrease epithelial permeability.
Semiconducting single‐walled carbon nanotube (CNT) is a promising candidate as a channel material for advanced logic transistors, attributed to the ultra‐thin 1‐nm cylindrical geometry, high ...mobility, and high carrier injection velocity. However, the presence of undesired CNT bundles in the CNT arrays for wafer‐scale device fabrication, even when utilizing the state‐of‐the‐art dimension‐limited self‐alignment (DLSA) method, poses challenges. These CNT bundles degrade the transistor gate's efficiency in controlling the flow of charge carriers in the CNT channel, leading to pronounced device‐to‐device variability. Here, a novel method is introduced to alleviate bundling in CNT arrays assembled via DLSA, by involving small molecule additive to screen the attractive van der Waals force between neighboring CNTs during the DLSA process, resulting in over 50% reduction in CNT bundling. Furthermore, a pioneering methodology for quantifying CNT bundles is presented and employed experimentally to assess bundles in dense CNT arrays assembled by DLSA using transmission electron microscopy. Both experimental data and molecular dynamics simulation reveal that CNT bundling originates from van der Waals attraction between CNTs, and the disturbed liquid‐liquid interface by accumulating excess polar molecules. These findings illuminate new pathways for realizing dense, bundle‐free CNT arrays.
Single‐walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) offer great potential for advanced transistors. Yet, undesired CNT bundles pose challenges. This method reduces 50% of bundling by using small molecule additives to screen van der Waals attraction during assembly. The degree of CNT bundles is quantified by transmission electron microscopy. Experiment and simulation reveal that bundling originates from inter‐tube attraction and mixed liquid‐liquid interface.
We present a novel bipartite graph reasoning Generative Adversarial Network (BiGraphGAN) for two challenging tasks: person pose and facial image synthesis. The proposed graph generator consists of ...two novel blocks that aim to model the pose-to-pose and pose-to-image relations, respectively. Specifically, the proposed bipartite graph reasoning (BGR) block aims to reason the long-range cross relations between the source and target pose in a bipartite graph, which mitigates some of the challenges caused by pose deformation. Moreover, we propose a new interaction-and-aggregation (IA) block to effectively update and enhance the feature representation capability of both a person’s shape and appearance in an interactive way. To further capture the change in pose of each part more precisely, we propose a novel part-aware bipartite graph reasoning (PBGR) block to decompose the task of reasoning the global structure transformation with a bipartite graph into learning different local transformations for different semantic body/face parts. Experiments on two challenging generation tasks with three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in terms of objective quantitative scores and subjective visual realness. The source code and trained models are available at
https://github.com/Ha0Tang/BiGraphGAN
.
A nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) mass screening trial using a combination of immunoglobulin A antibodies to Epstein-Barr virus capsid antigen and nuclear antigen-1 by enzyme-linked immunosorbent ...assay in addition to indirect mirror examination in the nasopharynx and/or lymphatic palpation (IMLP) was conducted in southern China. Cantonese aged 30-59 years residing in 2 cities randomly selected by cluster sampling, Sihui and Zhongshan, were invited to participate in this screening from May 2008 through May 2010. Participants were offered fiberoptic endoscopy examination and/or pathologic biopsy if their serologic tests reached our predefined level of high risk or if results from the physical examination indicated possible cancer (i.e., were IMLP positive). A total of 28,688 individuals were voluntarily screened in the initial round. The overall NPC detection rate was 0.14% (41/28,688) with an early diagnosis rate of 68.3% (28/41) during the first year of follow-up. Thirty-eight of 41 cases (92.7%) were detected among the high-risk group, and 7 of 41 cases (17.1%) were detected among the IMLP-positive group. The 2 Epstein-Barr virus serologic tests by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay could be a feasible alternative for NPC screening in endemic areas. Further follow-up is needed to examine whether screening has an effect on decreasing mortality from NPC in these areas.
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Research on bovine embryonic stem cells (bESCs) has been hampered because bESCs are cultured in conditions that are based on information obtained from culturing mouse and human inner cell ...mass (ICM) cells. The aim of this study was to compare gene expression in ICM and trophectoderm (TE) cell lineages of bovine embryos and to discuss the findings relative to information available for mice and humans. We separated a high‐purity (>90%) ICM and TE from bovine blastocysts by magnetic‐activated cell sorting and analysed their transcriptomes by single cell RNA‐seq. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were assessed using Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases. Finally, qRT‐PCR was performed to validate the RNA‐seq results. From 207 DEGs identified (adjusted p ≤ .05; fold change ≥2), 159 and 48 had greater expression in the ICM and TE cells respectively. We validated 27 genes using qRT‐PCR and found their expression patterns were mostly similar to those of RNA‐seq, including 12 novel ICM‐dominant (HNF4A, CCL24, FGFR4, IFITM3, PTCHD2, GJB5, FN1, KLK7, PRDM14, GRP, FGF19 and GCM1) and two novel TE‐dominant (SLC10A1 and WNT4) genes. Bioinformatics analysis showed that these DEGs are involved in many important pathways, such as MAPK and cancer cell pathways, and these pathways have been shown to play essential roles in mouse and human ESCs in the self‐renewal and pluripotent maintenance. As a conclusion, there were sufficient differences to allow us to conclude that the control of pluripotency in bovine ICM cells is species‐specific.
Advances in forest carbon mapping have the potential to greatly reduce uncertainties in the global carbon budget and to facilitate effective emissions mitigation strategies such as REDD+ (Reducing ...Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Though broad-scale mapping is based primarily on remote sensing data, the accuracy of resulting forest carbon stock estimates depends critically on the quality of field measurements and calibration procedures. The mismatch in spatial scales between field inventory plots and larger pixels of current and planned remote sensing products for forest biomass mapping is of particular concern, as it has the potential to introduce errors, especially if forest biomass shows strong local spatial variation. Here, we used 30 large (8-50 ha) globally distributed permanent forest plots to quantify the spatial variability in aboveground biomass density (AGBD in Mg ha-1) at spatial scales ranging from 5 to 250 m (0.025-6.25 ha), and to evaluate the implications of this variability for calibrating remote sensing products using simulated remote sensing footprints. We found that local spatial variability in AGBD is large for standard plot sizes, averaging 46.3% for replicate 0.1 ha subplots within a single large plot, and 16.6% for 1 ha subplots. AGBD showed weak spatial autocorrelation at distances of 20-400 m, with autocorrelation higher in sites with higher topographic variability and statistically significant in half of the sites. We further show that when field calibration plots are smaller than the remote sensing pixels, the high local spatial variability in AGBD leads to a substantial "dilution" bias in calibration parameters, a bias that cannot be removed with standard statistical methods. Our results suggest that topography should be explicitly accounted for in future sampling strategies and that much care must be taken in designing calibration schemes if remote sensing of forest carbon is to achieve its promise.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and depression are conditions which commonly co-exist. Recent longitudinal studies now suggest a bidirectional association between these disorders, with inconsistent ...results. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine this relationship.
Three electronic databases (PubMed, Embase and PsycINFO) were searched from inception to September 4, 2021 for cohort studies evaluating either the risk of depression in RA patients or the risk of RA in patients with depression, as well as the secondary outcome of all-cause mortality risk in RA patients with depression. A random effects model was used to summarize the included studies.
Eleven cohort studies were included, comprising a total of 39,130 RA patients, 550,782 patients with depression and 7,802,230 controls. RA patients had a 47% greater risk of incident depression compared to controls, while patients with depression had a 34% greater risk of developing RA. Subgroup analysis by age was only significant in the ≥60 years old age group. RA patients with depression had an 80% increased risk of all-cause mortality compared to those without depression.
The results may have been confounded by factors such as differing methods of depression ascertainment across studies and overlap in presentation between the two conditions.
There exists a bidirectional association between RA and depression especially in the elderly which increases mortality risk. This invites the need for clinicians to screen and be vigilant for the presence of these conditions.
•Our meta-analysis establishes a bidirectional association between rheumatoid arthritis and depression.•Rheumatoid arthritis patients with depression had an 80% increased risk of mortality.•Clinicians should screen patients with RA for depression and vice versa.•Anti-cytokine therapies represents a potential alternative for the treatment of depression.
This paper proposes a wavelet-tree-based blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection. The wavelet coefficients of the host image are grouped into so-called super trees. The watermark is ...embedded by quantizing super trees. The trees are so quantized that they exhibit a large enough statistical difference, which will later be used for watermark extraction. Each watermark bit is embedded in perceptually important frequency bands, which renders the mark more resistant to frequency based attacks. Also, the watermark is spread throughout large spatial regions. This yields more robustness against time domain geometric attacks. Examples of various attacks will be given to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed technique.
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