548 research outputs found
Supplemental material for Diagnostic determination of <i>Norovirus</i> infection as one of the major causes of infectious diarrhea in HIV patients using a multiplex polymerase chain reaction assay
No full textSupplemental Material for Diagnostic determination of Norovirus infection as one of the major causes of infectious diarrhea in HIV patients using a multiplex polymerase chain reaction assay by Siyuan Yang, Min Li, Jingwei Cheng, Gang Wan, Yunao Zhou, Hongyu Jia, Hongshan Wei, Rui Song, Linjun Sheng, Huizhu Wang, Linghang Wang and Wenhao Hua in International Journal of STD & AIDS</p
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A framework for natural disaster memorial park design 5/12 Earthquake Memorial Park design
Get PDFAn earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale rocked Sichuan on May 12, 2008, eventually claiming 69,227 lives, and 374,643 injured. The quake toppled houses and schools, virtually destroying entire villages, and irreparably changed everyone's world there. The quake severely affected an estimated 45,547,565 residents in Sichuan province, damaged approximately 4,300,000 structures, and destroyed buildings including homes, businesses, schools, and hospitals. Thousands of innocent people lost their precious lives in this disaster. Among these people, there were young students reading out beautiful poems in books; there were mamas preparing hot milk for their kids in the morning; there were...however, those bright lives, at that moment, all became cold numbers in the history books. A natural disaster memorial park is needed to memorialize all the survivors and victims of this great disaster, to tell stories of survival and loss, to encourage people surmounting the tragedy bravely, and to provide a refuge for future disasters. Throughout the research conducted after the May 12 earthquake, the author has observed that no integrated system of planning and design has been established in natural disaster memorial park design. The thesis defines the conception of a memorial landscape and natural disaster memorial park, reviews the history of natural disaster memorial parks, and sorts through many cases of memorial parks. A general design guideline and theory for natural disaster memorial park design will be summarized from case studies, and this guideline will be interpreted particularly in terms of the 5/12 Earthquake Memorial Park design in China. The result of this research is an extension of an overall knowledge base and a theory explaining the difference between "natural disaster memorials" and "war memorials" design and summarizing the basic elements that constitute the physical and psychological characteristics of natural disaster memorial park design. The 5/12 Earthquake Memorial design will be a new application of the integration of the new theory about Natural Disaster Memorial Landscape design and will provide guidance and reference for park planners and designers to promote multiple functions in memorial park design in the future
Unconventional bulk-Fermi-arc links paired third-order exceptional points splitting from a defective triple point
No full textAbstract Exceptional degeneracies, unique to open systems, are important in non-Hermitian topology. While bulk-Fermi-arcs connecting second-order exceptional points (EP2s) have been observed, the existence of bulk-Fermi-arcs linking higher-order exceptional points remains unexplored. Here, we introduce an unconventional bulk-Fermi-arc in systems with parity-time and pseudo-Hermitian symmetries, which links paired third-order exceptional points (EP3s), where three eigenvalues share identical real parts but distinct imaginary parts. We realize these systems using topological circuits and experimentally demonstrate this unconventional bulk-Fermi-arc. A winding number defined from resultant vector shows that the bulk-Fermi-arc is stabilized by the exchange of Riemannian sheets. Furthermore, analysis via eigenframe deformation and rotation reveals that the EP3 pair is topologically nontrivial and equivalent to a single defective triple point. The EP3s can split from the triple point by varying system parameters, with this splitting protected by topological equivalence. This finding offers insights into non-Hermitian topology with potential applications in wave engineering
Advances in Middle Infrared Laser Crystals and Its Applications
Get PDFIn the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in middle infrared (mid-IR) laser crystals and their application to achieve mid-IR laser radiations, which has benefited from the development of novel mid-infrared crystals and the improving quality of traditional mid-IR crystals. Moreover, these works have promoted the development of related technical applications. This Special Issue of the journal Crystals focuses on the most recent advances in mid-IR laser crystals, from materials to laser sources and applications. It aims to bring together the latest developments in novel mid-IR crystals, improvements in the quality of mid-IR crystals, mid-IR non-linear crystals and mid-IR lasers, as well as the application of mid-IR technology in spectroscopy, trace gas detection and remote sensing, optical microscopy and biomedicine. Aspiring authors are encouraged to submit their latest original research, as well as forward-looking review papers, to this Special Issue
A Unified Context Model for Web Image Retrieval
No full textContent-based web image retrieval based on the query-by-example (QBE) principle remains a challenging problem due to the semantic gap as well as the gap between a user's intent and the representativeness of a typical image query. In this article, we propose to address this problem by integrating query-related contextual information into an advanced query model to improve the performance of QBE-based web image retrieval. We consider both the local and global context of the query image. The local context can be inferred from the web pages and the click-through log associated with the query image, while the global context is derived from the entire corpus comprising all web images and the associated web pages. To effectively incorporate the local query context we propose a language modeling based approach to deal with the combined structured query representation from the contextual and visual information. The global query context is integrated by the multi-modal relevance model to "reconstruct" the query from the document models indexed in the corpus. In this way, the global query context is employed to address the noise or missing information in the query and its local context, so that a comprehensive and robust query model can be obtained. We evaluated the proposed approach on a representative product image dataset collected from the web and demonstrated that the inclusion of the local and global query contexts significantly improves the performance of QBE-based web image retrieval.Computer Science, Information SystemsComputer Science, Software EngineeringComputer Science, Theory & MethodsSCI(E)0ARTICLE3null
Detailed Facade Reconstruction for Mahattan-world Buildings
No full text3D building models play an important role in many real-world applications. Different models are suitable for different application scenarios based on their levels of detail. LOD3 models with facade details are crucial for many applications, such as virtual reality and urban simulation. Currently, 3D building models with lower LOD are largely available, but the number of LOD3 models is very limited. Most LOD3 reconstruction methods depend on manual operation, which is very time-consuming. How to automatically reconstruct the detailed facade for building models has remained a problem in computer vision. The problem can be seen as an image processing problem, but how to convert the 2D results into 3D smoothly should also be considered. In this project, we proposed a method to automatically reconstruct the detailed building models based on the Faster R-CNN. The method starts from a set of street view images, and the results are models with facade elements. A 3D point cloud can be extracted from the images using SfM and MVS, and the camera parameters can also be recovered. We take advantage of the high-quality facade images and parse the facades to detect their bounding boxes. The bounding boxes can match pretty well with the rectangular shape of the facade elements. The 2D facade elements can be added to the 3D building model based on the camera parameters. The process is very efficient and automatic. The regularity of the facade elements will be reserved, making the result more convincing. Our method includes four main steps: (1) coarse model reconstruction, (2) facade image selection and rectification, (3) facade element detection and regularization, and (4) detailed facade reconstruction. Experiment results show that our method can produce reliable building models with facade details for many different situations. It can work for both the multi-face building blocks and the street side buildings. Our test shows that the window detection performance is pretty good. The object detection is extremely fast, and the whole pipeline is lightweight and efficient. In theory, the method can also be extended to reconstruct large-scale city models, which means it has broad application prospects.Geomatic
Several Issues on Hieroglyph of Naxi Ethnic Minority
Get PDFHieroglyph of Naxi ethnic minority is the picture text, which has been so far the only “living hieroglyph”. Naxi Hieroglyph is the general name of Dongba Script, Geba Script Malimasha Script as well as Ruanke Script. Moreover, the creation of Naxi Hieroglyph is closely related to the migration routes of Naxi Geba Script, based on Do ancestors, which corresponds with the dialect areas of Naxi ethnic language, and its creation can date back to 11th century. Geba Script, is created when contacting with foreign culture, which carries the characteristics of Chinese and Tibetan writings
A Study of Language Model for Image Retrieval
No full textRecently, various language model approaches have been proposed in the information retrieval realm, with their promising performances in general document and Web page retrieval applications. Based on these achievements, in this paper, we investigate and discuss whether language model approaches can be adapted to content based image retrieval (CBIR), based on the "bag of visual words" image representation. A critical element of language model estimation is smoothing, which adjusts the maximum likelihood estimation to overcome the data sparseness problem. Therefore, we perform extensive studies over different smoothing methods, strategies, and parameters, by showing their impacts to the retrieval performances. Experiments are performed over two popular image retrieval databases, together with some insightful conclusions to facilitate the adaptation of language model approaches to CBIR.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000290247100025&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Computer Science, Information SystemsEngineering, Electrical & ElectronicEICPCI-S(ISTP)
Contextual image retrieval model
No full textA state-of-the-art query-by-region image retrieval method typically works as follows. Firstly, the user provides a query image and draws a bounding box to specify the region of interest (ROI). Then the visual words extracted from within the bounding box are used to formulate the query to retrieve images relevant with respect to the ROI. However, if ROI is small and contains only a few visual words, the relevance estimation could be unreliable, which leads to irrelevant results being returned. Since an object in an image seldom occurs in isolation, it often co-occurs with other objects, which can be said to form the search context. Following this paradigm, the visual words in the query image outside the bounding box can be regarded as a context to the ROI, which could be employed to improve the retrieval performance. Motivated by this, we propose in this paper a contextual image retrieval model based on the language modeling approach. We consider the bounding box as an uncertain observation of the latent search intention and the saliency map detected for the query image as a prior. Then a search intention score is inferred per visual word and used to weight the ROI and the context for a better estimation of the query language model. The experimental results on two datasets comprising 5K and 505K images respectively demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The proposed contextual image retrieval model achieves 5.5% and 6.9% performance improvements over the standard language modeling approach on the two datasets respectively. Copyright ? 2010 ACM.EI
Thymopentin improves the survival of septic mice by promoting the production of 15-deoxy-prostaglandin J2 and activating the PPARγ signaling pathway
No full textSepsis, a systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) caused by infection, is a major public health concern with limited therapeutic options. Infection disturbs the homeostasis of host, resulting in excessive inflammation and immune suppression. This has prompted the clinical use of immunomodulators to balance host response as an alternative therapeutic strategy. Here, we report that Thymopentin (TP5), a synthetic immunomodulator pentapeptide (Arg-Lys-Asp-Val-Tyr) with an excellent safety profile in the clinic, protects mice against cecal ligation and puncture (CLP)-induced sepsis, as shown by improved survival rate, decreased level of pro-inflammatory cytokines and reduced ratios of macrophages and neutrophils in spleen and peritoneum. Regarding mechanism, TP5 changed the characteristics of LPS-stimulated macrophages by increasing the production of 15-deoxy-Δ12,14-prostaglandin J2 (15-d-PGJ2). In addition, the improved effect of TP5 on survival rates was abolished by the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) antagonist GW9662. Our results uncover the mechanism of the TP5 protective effects on CLP-induced sepsis and shed light on the development of TP5 as a therapeutic strategy for lethal systemic inflammatory disorders.Fil: Zhang, Ye. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Yang, Xue. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Yan, Wenchao. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Li, Rui. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Ye, Qian. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: You, Linjun. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Xie, Wenhao. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Mo, Kun. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Fu, Ruifeng. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Wang, Yanxiang. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Chen, Yufei. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Hou, Hui. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Yang, Yong. China Pharmaceutical University; ChinaFil: Birnbaumer, Lutz. Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina "Santa María de los Buenos Aires". Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas; ArgentinaFil: Di, Qin. Nanjing Sport Institute; ChinaFil: Li, Xianjing. China Pharmaceutical University; Chin
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