Discovering causal relations among semantic factors is an emergent topic in representation learning. Most causal representation learning (CRL) methods are fully supervised, which is impractical due ...to costly labeling. To resolve this restriction, weakly supervised CRL methods were introduced. To evaluate CRL performance, four existing datasets, Pendulum, Flow, CelebA(BEARD) and CelebA(SMILE), are utilized. However, existing CRL datasets are limited to simple graphs with few generative factors. Thus we propose two new datasets with a larger number of diverse generative factors and more sophisticated causal graphs. In addition, current real datasets, CelebA(BEARD) and CelebA(SMILE), the originally proposed causal graphs are not aligned with the dataset distributions. Thus, we propose modifications to them.
Dynamics prediction, which is the problem of predicting future states of scene objects based on current and prior states, is drawing increasing attention as an instance of learning physics. To solve ...this problem, Region Proposal Convolutional Interaction Network (RPCIN), a vision-based model, was proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performance in long-term prediction. RPCIN only takes raw images and simple object descriptions, such as the bounding box and segmentation mask of each object, as input. However, despite its success, the model's capability can be compromised under conditions of environment misalignment. In this paper, we investigate two challenging conditions for environment misalignment: Cross-Domain and Cross-Context by proposing four datasets that are designed for these challenges: SimB-Border, SimB-Split, BlenB-Border, and BlenB-Split. The datasets cover two domains and two contexts. Using RPCIN as a probe, experiments conducted on the combinations of the proposed datasets reveal potential weaknesses of the vision-based long-term dynamics prediction model. Furthermore, we propose a promising direction to mitigate the Cross-Domain challenge and provide concrete evidence supporting such a direction, which provides dramatic alleviation of the challenge on the proposed datasets.
Introduction: Cardiac dysfunction in thalassemia remains of primary concern. The prevalence of these abnormalities varies in different phenotypic/genotypic groups of thalassemia.
Objective: To ...describe the difference in cardiac function among Thalassemia Major ™, Thalassemia Intermedia (TI), and Sickle-Thalassemia (ST) patients.
Methods: 66 TM, 41 TI and 17 ST patients were randomly selected from a population of 450 TM,100 TI and 26 ST patients respectively. The patients were interviewed and their charts reviewed and all had an echocardiography. Pulmonary Hypertension (PHT) was defined as Pulmonary Artery Systolic Pressure> 30mmHg.
Results: 58.8%, 50% and 41.5% of ST,TM and TI patients respectively were males. Mean age was 24.4 ± 11.6, 19.4 ± 7.6, 19.5 ± 10.9 year old for TI, TM and ST. Tricuspid Regurgitant jet was detected in 47%, 30% and 82% of TI, TM & ST patients respectively. PHT was found in 83%, 18% and 10% of TI, ST, TM patients. Deceleration Time (DT) was significantly longer in TI than in TM and ST, with no significant difference between TM and ST. End diastolic dimension (EDD) was significantly larger in TI than TM and ST (for more details about cardiac parameters refer to tables 2a and 2b). Thrombotic events occurred in 6% of TI patients and in 0 TM and ST patients.
Discussion: PHT is primarily prevalent in TI patients which further supports the notion that a different pathophysiological process leads to this than in TM and ST patients. Moreover these results stress the need for better method of assessment of PHT, because of the limited number of patients in whom a TR jet could be detected. A prolonged DT is one of the earliest sign of diastolic dysfunction in thalassemics. TI patients have revealed themselves to have more impaired diastology by both prolonged DT and Isovolumic relaxation time (IVRT). Splenectomy was performed more in Lebanese TI than that reported in the literature (87% vs 65%), because most of our TI patients were managed as TM. This was before the currently recognized association of splenectomy and PHT and thrombosis. In addition chamber sizes (EDD) was significantly more in TI than both TM and ST patients. This can be attributed to the more profound chronic dilutional volume overload secondary to uncorrected anemia. Finally as is evident TI patients are developing more complications than both TM and ST. Transfusion/ chelation therapy to avoid PHT, diastolic dysfunction and thrombosis in TI patients has been proposed as a solution. If the pathophysiology of these complications is iron-mediated then prophylactic transfusion/ chelation therapy would be more advisable than waiting for them to develop. Especially in view of the morbidity associated with thrombosis, and limitation of exercise tolerance secondary to PHT.
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الارهاب مصطلح قديم الأصل حديث الاستعمال , وقد شاع استعماله في الاونة الأخيرة للدلالة على كل حدث يحمل بين طياته شيئاً من العنف والقسوة ومجاوزة الحد , وبما أنه يرتبط بانفعالات الناس وتصرفاتهم فهو مصطلح ...خطير يترتب عليه نتائج وآثار عظيمة , وبما أن الاسلام اليوم مستضعف وقوى الكفر مهيمنة على الاعلام , فقد وصفت كثير من مبادئ الاسلام الحنيفة وشرائعه وأحكامه العادلة بوصف جائر , يراد منه تشويه صورة الاسلام , ووصف خطاباته بالارهابية , لذا كان هذا البحث بمثابة انتصار للخطاب الاسلامي وتبرئة ساحته من الارهاب او كل فعل فاحش .
وقد تضمن البحث تعريفاً للارهاب وتعداداً لأنواعه ووصفاً لبعض أعراضه , مع محاولة التنسيق والتوفيق لإيجاد الحلول المناسبة لبعض أنواعه وأقسامه .
والحمد لله رب العالمين .
To investigate the prevalence of undiagnosed type 2 diabetes (T2D) at primary health care (PHC) clinics, and to assess the quality of care of diabetic patients followed at a tertiary hospital ...diabetes center in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Between May 2009 and October 2010, adult patients attending two PHC clinics, and adult diabetic patients attending the diabetes center, were invited to participate in the study. After overnight fast, participants returned for interview and laboratory tests. Undiagnosed T2D was defined by FPG ≥ 7.0 mmol/l or HbA1c ≥ 6.5%. Quality of care was assessed by reported care practices and achievement of internationally recognized targets.
Out of 239 patients at PHC clinics without history of T2D, 14.6% had undiagnosed T2D, and 31% had increased risk of diabetes (FPG 5.6-7.0 mmol/l or HbA1c 5.7-6.5%). The independent predictors of undiagnosed T2D were age (adjusted OR per year 1.07, 95% CI 1.04-1.11, p < 0.001) and BMI ≥ 25 (adjusted OR 4.2, 95% CI 0.91-19.7, p = 0.033). Amongst all 275 diagnosed T2D patients, including those attending PHC clinics and those followed at the diabetes center, it was found that 40.1% followed dietary recommendations, 12% reported visiting a diabetes educator, 28.2% walked for exercise, and 13.5% attained recognized targets of HbA1c < 7%, blood pressure < 130/80 mmHg, and LDL cholesterol < 2.6 mmol/l.
Almost half of the adult patients attending PHC clinics had undiagnosed T2D, or increased diabetes risk. Care practices, and achievement of treatment targets, were suboptimal.
Fingerprint presentation attack detection (FPAD) is becoming an increasingly challenging problem due to the continuous advancement of attack techniques, which generate `realistic-looking' fake ...fingerprint presentations. Recently, laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) has been introduced as a new sensing modality for FPAD. LSCI has the interesting characteristic of capturing the blood flow under the skin surface. Toward studying the importance and effectiveness of LSCI for FPAD, we conduct a comprehensive study using different patch-based deep neural network architectures. Our studied architectures include 2D and 3D convolutional networks as well as a recurrent network using long short-term memory (LSTM) units. The study demonstrates that strong FPAD performance can be achieved using LSCI. We evaluate the different models over a new large dataset. The dataset consists of 3743 bona fide samples, collected from 335 unique subjects, and 218 presentation attack samples, including six different types of attacks. To examine the effect of changing the training and testing sets, we conduct a 3-fold cross validation evaluation. To examine the effect of the presence of an unseen attack, we apply a leave-one-attack out strategy. The FPAD classification results of the networks, which are separately optimized and tuned for the temporal and spatial patch-sizes, indicate that the best performance is achieved by LSTM.
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