97 research outputs found
Pose estimation using overhead imagery and semantics
No full textThis electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 87-96).As hardware improves, so does the ability to run more complex algorithms. Improvements in the portability and performance of computing units has allowed for more compact robotic systems such as Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), while developments in camera technologies has allowed for the generation of denser robot perception, such as depth and semantics, derived from environmental cues such as colour, shape and texture. Additionally, with the advent of commercial civilian satellites and initiatives like the Google Maps project, most of the earth's outdoor urban environments have been captured through satellite imagery. These overhead images contain useful information that can aid with outdoor robot navigation and localisation, by, for example, being used as prior maps in a localisation pipeline. This thesis presents a method for generating semantically consistent robot localisation updates on-board a MAV. The key contribution is a process that fuses local ground and global satellite image information through geometric alignment at the semantic level. This method uses a semantically segmented collapsed point cloud from a camera system on-board a MAV, without any notion of mapping, referencing only a potentially stale global overhead image. A particle filter is used to enable multi-hypothesis data association and allow for efficient recovery from motion uncertainty.by Yousif Farid Dawood Rouben.M. Eng.M.Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc
Effect of the proton irradiation on the thermally activated flux flow in superconducting SmBCO coated conductors
Get PDFWe investigate changes in the vortex pinning mechanism caused by proton irradiation through the measurement of the in-plane electrical resistivity for H//c in a pristine and two proton-irradiated (total doses of 1 × 1015 and 1 × 1016 cm−2) SmBa2Cu3O7-δ (SmBCO) superconducting tapes. Even though proton irradiation has no effect on the critical temperature (Tc), the resulting artificial point defect causes an increase in normal state electrical resistivity. The electrical resistivity data around Tc shows no evidence of a phase transition to the vortex glass state but only broadens with increasing magnetic field due to the vortex depinning in the vortex liquid state. The vortex depinning is well interpreted by a thermally activated flux flow model in which the activation energy shows a nonlinear temperature change U(T,H)=U0(H)(1−T/Tc)q (q = 2). The field dependence of activation energy shows a U0~H−α with larger exponents above 4 T. This field dependence is mainly due to correlated disorders in pristine sample and artificially created point defects in irradiated samples. Compared with the vortex pinning due to correlated disorders, the vortex pinning due to the appropriate amount of point defects reduces the magnitude of Uo(H) in the low magnetic field region and slowly reduces Uo(H) in high magnetic fields. © 2020, The Author(s).1
A Digital Phenotypic Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (DANO): A Pilot Study on Sociability Changes in Patients Undergoing Treatment for Brain Malignancies
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A Digital Phenotypic Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (DANO): A Pilot Study on Sociability Changes in Patients Undergoing Treatment for Brain Malignancies †
by Francesca Siddi 1,2,*,Patrick Emedom-Nnamdi 3,Michael P. Catalino 4,Aakanksha Rana 1,5ORCID,Alessandro Boaro 1,2ORCID,Hassan Y. Dawood 1ORCID,Francesco Sala 2,Jukka-Pekka Onnela 3,‡ andTimothy R. Smith 1,‡
1
Computational Neuroscience Outcomes Center, Department of Neurosurgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
2
Section of Neurosurgery, Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, 37129 Verona, Italy
3
Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
4
Department of Neurosurgery, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA
5
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
Previous Presentations: This work was virtually presented as an oral poster presentation at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the European Association of Neurosurgical Societies (eEANS), Virtual Congress, 1–7 October 2021; EP13028.
‡
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Cancers 2025, 17(1), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers17010139
Submission received: 15 October 2024 / Revised: 24 December 2024 / Accepted: 3 January 2025 / Published: 4 January 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Novel Diagnostic and Therapeutic Approaches in Diffuse Gliomas)
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Simple Summary
Nowadays, smartphones are the principal tool for interactions between people. Mobile health applications might be used to study the cognitive functions in the neuro-oncological population. Many brain tumor patients have cognitive challenges that have an impact on sociability. Digital phenotyping is able to characterize social and spatial dimensions of human behavior from mobile phone call records. The aim of this study was to start to explore this technology in brain cancer patients, focusing on sociability data. The results of this pilot study indicate that a digital assessment in neuro-oncology can be used to characterize and follow the social activity of patients’ lives. Changes in the patient’s social network relate to disease progression, suggesting a new tool to improve the complex evaluation of underserved brain cancer patients.
Abstract
Background: The digital phenotyping tool has great potential for the deep characterization of neurological and quality-of-life assessments in brain tumor patients. Phone communication activities (details on call and text use) can provide insight into the patients’ sociability. Methods: We prospectively collected digital-phenotyping data from six brain tumor patients. The data were collected using the Beiwe application installed on their personal smartphones. We constructed several daily sociability features from phone communication logs, including the number of incoming and outgoing text messages and calls, the length of messages and duration of calls, message reciprocity, the number of communication partners, and number of missed calls. We compared variability in these sociability features against those obtained from a control group, matched for age and sex, selected among patients with a herniated disc. Results: In brain tumor patients, phone-based communication appears to deteriorate with time, as evident in the trend for total outgoing minutes, total outgoing calls, and call out-degree. Conclusions: These measures indicate a possible decrease in sociability over time in brain tumor patients that may correlate with survival. This exploratory analysis suggests that a quantifiable digital sociability phenotype exists and is comparable for patients with different survival outcomes. Overall, assessing neurocognitive function using digital phenotyping appears promising
Children with HIV : a scoping review of auditory processing skills
Get PDFCITATION: Dawood, G., et al. 2019. Children with HIV : a scoping review of auditory processing skills. PLoS ONE 14(9):e0221573, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0221573.The original publication is available at https://journals.plos.org/plosonePublication of this article was funded by the Stellenbosch University Open Access Fund.Introduction: Auditory processing disorders can negatively affect academic performance in children. They can result from a number of aetiologies, including the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Although studies in paediatrics are limited, research suggests that HIV-infected children display poorer auditory processing skills than uninfected children.
Methods: The aims of this study were to scan the peer-reviewed literature on auditory processing skills in HIV-infected children, to describe how auditory processing was tested, how auditory processing skills were reported, and to identify gaps in current evidence. This systematic scoping review was conducted using a modified version of Arksey and O’Malley’s framework. Key words comprised ‘HIV’, ‘auditory processing’, ‘hearing’ and ‘child’. Electronic databases were searched for relevant articles published from 1 January 2000 to 30 April 2018, and reference lists of included studies were pearled. Two researchers reviewed the articles and extracted data on sample descriptors, auditory processing testing procedures, and auditory processing skills. A third author collated the results and resolved discrepancies. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association description of auditory processing skills framed the analysis.
Results: Five articles were included in this review (three from Brazil, one each from Mexico and Tanzania). Samples, and methods of testing were heterogeneous. Three studies reported on localization abilities, while gap detection thresholds, performance on dichotic tasks and speech discrimination scores were reported in one article each. No one study tested all areas of auditory processing skills and there was limited information about the auditory processing skills required for learning.
Conclusion:This review highlighted the current sparse evidence-base for auditory processing in HIV-infected children. It identified the need to standardise testing procedures, measures of auditory processing skills, and sample selection.https://journals.plos.org/plosonePublisher's versio
Foetal Imaging: Optimising Lugol’s Solution Staining for CT Scanning
No full textBiomedical researchers and clinicians are interested in (ab)normal foetal development because it can aid in better understanding human anatomy. To capture this foetal development non-destructive three dimensional (3D) imaging techniques like computed tomography (CT) are used. Visualising foetuses remains a challenge however, as foetuses consist mostly of soft-tissue. Visualisation of soft-tissue with CT scans is difficult because X-rays easily pass through. This consequently results into images with low contrast. Therefore, improving contrast is artificially gained by using chemical compounds called stains. The most effective stain is considered to be Lugol’s solution. A downside of using Lugol’s solution is that the staining process causes extensive soft-tissue shrinkage which is detrimental for morphological analysis. The mechanism of Lugol-induced shrinkage is largely unknown. Some research suggest it is due to an osmotic imbalance between tissue and solution, while others point towards acidification of Lugol’s solution. The goal of this study is to develop an optimum (buffered) Lugol’s solution staining protocol for post-mortem human foetal CT imaging to diminish soft-tissue shrinkage and achieve homogeneous staining. Several variables in the protocol are taken into account such as staining solution concentration, staining time and specimen size. To develop this protocol, multiple tests and measurements (pH, osmolarity, optical density, weight and CT scans) were performed on pork liver samples and two post-mortem human foetuses to monitor acidification of the staining solution, staining progress and staining intensity, while applying two distinct methods: the AMC- and Arthurs method. The main difference between these methods is that the AMC method fixates tissue well before staining (conventional method), while Arthurs method uses a mixture of a fixative and stain simultaneously on fresh tissue. The research suggests that Arthurs method seems best. Even though, both methods led to a homogeneous staining, the AMC method resulted in an average shrinkage of 4.82%, while Arthurs method resulted in a shrinkage of only 1.08%. In addition, Arthurs method leads to a shorter staining protocol.Biomedical Engineerin
Asabiyya: Re-Interpreting Value Change in Globalized Societies
Get PDFThis article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led Barro (2004) to analyze the connections between some dimensions of recent sociological religious value research with economic growth. The present essay starts from this methodological position, and links value systems with economic performance in a much wider and macrosociological framework. We further develop the well-known Inglehart and Welzel (2003) map of global values, and develop the idea of "Asabiyya" ("social cohesion"), as a counter-model to both Barro and Inglehart and Welzel approaches. A frequently asked question is whether “modernization” without "spiritual values" in a globalized world economy and world society possible in the long run? Starting from principal component analysis, it is shown that rather two factors are decisive in understanding global value change: a continuum of "traditional versus secular", and a continuum "cheating versus active society". Asabiyya in the 21st Century, as a way out from the modernization trap of societies, characterized by large-scale social anomaly, is a high secularism combined with a high active society score, thus avoiding the "modernization trap". We show that economic growth in the current world crisis is far more connected with these dimensions. We conclude that not a society based on fear is needed in the first place, but an active society of volunteer social work.index numbers and aggregation, international political economy, religion, bureaucracy, corruption
Democracy and Dissent: Reconsidering the Judicial Review of the Political Sphere
Get PDFThere is very little consensus on the Supreme Court when the topic before the justices concerns the democratic process. This paper examines the phenomenon of “dissenting about democracy”, and it argues that the high rate of dissent is driven in part by a fundamental disagreement about the nature of democracy itself. Specifically, the author argues that the Court’s law of democracy cases present the following conceptual puzzle: is the electoral system best conceived of as belonging to the overarching constitutional framework, or is it better viewed as belonging to the political activity that takes place within this framework? the author refers to this puzzle as the “framework/politics” problem, and shows that it lies at the heart of the divide between the majority and the dissenting opinions in many of the Court’s law of democracy cases. This paper provides an analysis of the Court’s opinions in the Saskatchewan Reference, Haig, Harvey, Libman, Sauvé II, Figueroa, Harper and Bryan, and it also provides a detailed examination of the Court’s 2012 decision in Opitz v. Wrzesnewskyj, a case which concerned contested elections and the entitlement to vote. In contrast to the Court’s approach in certain cases, the author claims that the electoral process is better conceived of as a dual constitutional-political entity. The main implication of this observation is that the Court should not automatically defer to the legislature on the grounds that the electoral process is “political”. The paper argues that the Court’s role is to protect the fairness and legitimacy of the democratic process, and this means that the Court must subject the political aspects of the electoral process to constitutional limits. In addition to providing a comparative and empirical discussion of the rates of dissent on the Supreme Court of Canada and the U.S. Supreme Court, this paper also considers whether dissenting opinions detract from or enhance democratic legitimacy
Roland Barthes' Theory of "The Death of the Author": A Critical Analysis: رولان بارتھس کا نظریہ” مصنف کی موت“: تنقیدی جائزہ
No full textThis paper examines the critical reception of Roland Barthes' influential essay, "The Death of the Author." Published in 1967, the essay argues that the author's role in creating and interpreting a text is not central. Instead, Barthes suggests that a text functions as a complex system of signs and codes, generating meaning through the interplay of these elements. The reader actively participates in this process, constructing meaning based on their own experiences and understanding. Barthes' concept of the "death of the author" challenged traditional literary criticism, prompting new approaches that focus on the text itself and the reader's response. However, the essay has also been criticized for downplaying the role of the author and for its potential to lead to a relativistic approach to interpretation. This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Barthes' argument, and considers its implications for the study of literature. It also examines the ways in which Barthes' essay has been interpreted and debated in the years since its publication. The paper concludes by arguing that Barthes' essay remains a valuable contribution to literary theory, even if its conclusions are not universally accepted. It offers a powerful challenge to traditional notions of authorial authority and provides a framework for understanding the role of the reader in the creation of meaning.
References:
Nasir Abbas Na'ir, Dr. "Sakhaatiyaat Ke Ahm Buniyaad Guzaar... Ta'arufiya" Mashmoola: Sakhaatiyaat Ek Ta'aruf, Islamabad: Poorb Academy, 2011, Safah: 229
Ahmad Sohil, Sakhaatiyaat, Taareekh, Nazriya Aur Tanqeed, Nayi Dehli: Bliss Offset Printing Works, 1999, Safah: 64
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"Essay, Included in “Image Music Text” translated by Stephen Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1977, P:142
Ibid
Ibid. Panaah: 145
Ibid
Maqsood Hasni, Maqaalah: "Sakhaatiyaat Pas Sakhaatiyaat Aur Radd Sakhaatiyaat Ek Asaasi Mutalah" Mashmoola: Nowadir, Sehmahi, Shumarah Number: 11, September Ta March 2005, Lahore: Dawood Bandagi Printers, Safah: 3
Identification and Safety Evaluation of Enterococcus faecium Acr4 with Special Emphasis on Molecular Characterization of Phytase
No full textThis Dissertation / Report is the outcome of investigation carried out by the creator(s) / author(s) at the department/division of Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore mentioned below in this page
Transitioning Democracies are a Risky Business in the South
Get PDFThe paper finds that trade is insignificant in explaining income inequality. The results also suggest institutions are good for inequality mitigation for a larger sample of developed and developing countries. Though, the results do not change for some institutions like rule of law when the sample is restricted to developing countries. However, for other institutions like democracy and autocracy, the author finds that former is positively related with inequality and later is negatively related. The results shed light on the fact that transition to democracies come with higher risks for the developing countries and stable economies even with autocratic setup may have more equal societies when compared to newly adopted democratic set ups
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