Distinctive Face Research Articles

Assessing perceived stress, sleep disturbance, and fatigue among pilot and non-pilot trainees

Pilots operating in a distinctive professional realm face substantial stress and fatigue from the crucial responsibility of navigating airplanes at high altitudes with inherent risks. Similarly, college-level students encounter heightened stress and fatigue while pursuing academic goals and engaging in different activities. Stress, a non-specific response to various demands, and fatigue, characterized by extreme tiredness, are prevalent health conditions experienced across a spectrum of intensity in daily life. In this study, we conduct an extensive analysis to address a fundamental question: how do stress, sleep disturbance, and fatigue experiences differ between pilots and non-pilot college students? Delving into stress and fatigue levels within these populations contributes to understanding these phenomena and their potential implications for overall well-being and performance. Building on a comprehensive analysis of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Jenkins Sleep Scale (JSS), and Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory (MFI) scores, we explore variations in stress, sleep disturbance, and fatigue across multiple dimensions. Our findings indicate intriguing disparities among pilot and non-pilot cohorts. Through graphical representations and statistical tests, we reveal that non-pilot college students exhibit higher perceived stress and sleep disturbance levels. In contrast, pilots demonstrate expected higher perceived fatigue levels. Our detailed analysis of subcategories, including General Fatigue, Physical Fatigue, Reduced Activity, Reduced Motivation, and Mental Fatigue, sheds light on the complexity of these differences. Notably, pilot students experience heightened fatigue, potentially linked to the demanding nature of their tasks. In conclusion, our extended analysis contributes valuable insights into the intricate dynamics of stress, sleep disturbance, and fatigue among pilot and non-pilot college students. These findings hold implications for future research and interventions aimed at enhancing the well-being and performance of individuals in these distinct educational and professional domains.

Skeletal defects and bone metabolism in Noonan, Costello and cardio-facio-cutaneous syndromes.

Noonan, Costello and Cardio-facio-cutaneous syndromes belong to a group of disorders named RASopathies due to their common pathogenetic origin that lies on the Ras/MAPK signaling pathway. Genetics has eased, at least in part, the distinction of these entities as they are presented with overlapping clinical features which, sometimes, become more pronounced with age. Distinctive face, cardiac and skeletal defects are among the primary abnormalities seen in these patients. Skeletal dysmorphisms range from mild to severe and may include anterior chest wall anomalies, scoliosis, kyphosis, short stature, hand anomalies, muscle weakness, osteopenia or/and osteoporosis. Patients usually have increased serum concentrations of bone resorption markers, while markers of bone formation are within normal range. The causative molecular defects encompass the members of the Ras/MAPK/ERK pathway and the adjacent cascades, important for the maintenance of normal bone homeostasis. It has been suggested that modulation of the expression of specific molecules involved in the processes of bone remodeling may affect the osteogenic fate decision, potentially, bringing out new pharmaceutical targets. Currently, the laboratory imprint of bone metabolism on the clinical picture of the affected individuals is not clear, maybe due to the rarity of these syndromes, the small number of the recruited patients and the methods used for the description of their clinical and biochemical profiles.

A Large Turkish Cohort of Williams Syndrome: The Evaluation of Facial, Cardiovascular, and Neuropsychiatric Features.

Williams syndrome is caused by a microdeletion at 7q11.23 and is characterized by a distinctive face, cardiovascular disease, and intellectual disability with a specific cognitive and behavioral profile. This study aims to evaluate the clinical features and obtain important information that can guide early diagnoses and correct follow-up. The study included 78 patients whose diagnoses were confirmed by fluorescent in situ hybridization. Facial features, anthropometric measurements, and neurocognitive, endocrine, and urinary system evaluations were obtained from the medical records, and photographs of the patients were evaluated retrospectively. The most common complaints at admission were cardiovascular disease and atypical face. The mean age at admission was 39 ± 4.8 months. The mean age of patients presenting with atypical face was 41 ± 5.6 months, while it was 11 ± 3.1 months in patients presenting with cardiovascular disease. Short nose/bulbous nasal type with anteverted nares and periorbital fullness, which are diagnostic facial features, were present in all patients in the infantile/ early childhood period. 80% of the patients had cardiovascular disease; supravalvular aortic stenosis (53.8%) and peripheral pulmonary artery stenosis (41%) were the most common cardiac anomalies.Intel lectu al/de velop menta l disability was present in 75.6% of the patients. Behavioral disorders including autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were detected in 50% of our patients. Hypersensitivity to loud and/or sudden sounds was present in all patients. We highlighted that recognition of facial findings is important for early diagnosis, especially in patients without cardiovascular disease. The frequency of cardiovascular, endocrinological, renal anomalies, and intellectual disab ility /deve lopme ntal delay was described that provide valuable information in the follow-up of patients.

Face-Periocular Cross-Identification via Contrastive Hybrid Attention Vision Transformer

Traditional biometrics identification performs matching between probe and gallery that may involve the same single or multiple biometric modalities. This paper presents a cross-matching scenario where the probe and gallery are from two distinctive biometrics, i.e., face and periocular, coined as face-periocular cross-identification (FPCI). We propose a novel contrastive loss tailored for face-periocular cross-matching to learn a joint embedding, which can be used as a gallery or a probe regardless of the biometric modality. On the other hand, a hybrid attention vision transformer is devised. The hybrid attention module performs depth-wise convolution and conv-based multi-head self-attention in parallel to aggregate global and local features of the face and periocular biometrics. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model sufficiently improves the performance of FPCI. Besides that, a new face-periocular dataset in the wild, the Cross-modal Face-periocular dataset, is developed for the FPCI models training.

Simulated evolution of mating signal diversification in a primate radiation.

Divergence in allopatry and subsequent diversification of mating signals on secondary contact (reinforcement) is a major driver of phenotypic diversity. Observing this evolutionary process directly is often impossible, but simulated evolution can pinpoint key drivers of phenotypic variation. We developed evolutionary simulations in which mating signals, modelled as points in phenotype space, evolve across time under varying evolutionary scenarios. We model mate recognition signals in guenons, a primate radiation exhibiting colourful and diverse face patterns hypothesized to maintain reproductive isolation via mate choice. We simulate face pattern evolution across periods of allopatry and sympatry, identifying the role of key parameters in driving evolutionary endpoints. Results show that diversification in allopatry and assortative mate choice on secondary contact can induce rapid phenotypic diversification, resulting in distinctive (between species) and stereotyped (within species) face patterns, similar to extant guenons. Strong selection against hybrids is key to diversification, with even low levels of hybrid fitness often resulting in merged populations on secondary contact. Our results support a key role for reinforcement by assortative mating in the maintenance of species diversity and support the long-proposed prehistorical scenario for how such striking diversity was produced and maintained in perhaps the most colourful of all mammalian clades.

Clinical features of epilepsy in 5 children with Mowat-Wilson syndrome

Objective: To summarize and investigate the clinical characters of epilepsy in children with Mowat-Wilson syndrome (MWS), thus to improve the understanding of this disease. Methods: Clinical characters of epilepsy episodes in 5 children with MWS admitted to Department of Pediatrics, Peking University First Hospital from June to December 2020 were retrospectively reviewed. Clinical data including onset age of seizures, clinical features, characters of electroencephalogram (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings, results of ZEB2 gene testing and responses to the anti-seizure medications (ASM) were summarized. Results: The onset age of seizures in the 5 patients (3 males and 2 females) ranged from 6 months to 4 years. Four patients showed focal motor seizures with diverse expressions, while the other 1 patient had epileptic spasms. All the 5 patients showed distinctive face, different degrees of intellectual disability, development delay and other congenital malformations. EEG of 4 patients presented the slowing of background rhythm and epileptiform discharges mainly occurred in the posterior region of the brain. The other 1 patient showed hypsarrhythmia at the beginning of the disease, changing into multifocal discharges mainly occurred in posterior region later. Corpus callosum abnormality and white matter disability were found from investigations of MRI in 2 patients, respectively. All the 5 patients carried a de novo heterozygous variation in the ZEB2 gene, 4 were nonsense variants and 1 was frame-shift variant. Within the follow-up of 14 months to 20 months, 3 patients achieved seizure-free more than 1 year, 2 patients achieved seizure-free more than 6 months. Two patients used valproate only and 2 patients received valproate combined with other ASM. Conclusions: Epileptic seizures are common clinical phenotype of MWS. Focal motor seizure may be the most common seizure type and epileptic spasms exist. The manifestations of EEG can be age-related. The most common type of variation of the ZEB2 gene is de novo nonsense variation. Valproate might be the first-line ASM for patients with MWS.

Reconstructing Recognizable 3D Face Shapes based on 3D Morphable Models

AbstractMany recent works have reconstructed distinctive 3D face shapes by aggregating shape parameters of the same identity and separating those of different people based on parametric models (e.g. 3D morphable models (3DMMs)). However, despite the high accuracy in the face recognition task using these shape parameters, the visual discrimination of face shapes reconstructed from those parameters remains unsatisfactory. Previous works have not answered the following research question: Do discriminative shape parameters guarantee visual discrimination in represented 3D face shapes? This paper analyses the relationship between shape parameters and reconstructed shape geometry, and proposes a novel shape identity‐aware regularization (SIR) loss for shape parameters, aiming at increasing discriminability in both the shape parameter and shape geometry domains. Moreover, to cope with the lack of training data containing both landmark and identity annotations, we propose a network structure and an associated training strategy to leverage mixed data containing either identity or landmark labels. In addition, since face recognition accuracy does not mean the recognizability of reconstructed face shapes from the shape parameters, we propose the SIR metric to measure the discriminability of face shapes. We compare our method with existing methods in terms of the reconstruction error, visual discriminability, and face recognition accuracy of the shape parameters and SIR metric. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/a686432/SIR.

EP175: Recurrent SMAD4 gain-of-function pathogenic variants cause brain and spine abnormalities in 40 patients followed in the MGH Myhre Syndrome Clinic

Myhre syndrome is a rare, distinctive syndrome caused by recurrent SMAD4 gain-of-function pathogenic variants. There are abnormalities of growth (short stature), appearance (distinctive face), hearing (hearing loss), airways (laryngo-tracheal stenosis, restrictive lung disease), the cardiovascular system (aorta hypoplasia, pericarditis, restrictive cardiomyopathy, congenital heart defects), skin (thick skin, abnormal scarring), skeleton (stiff joints, arthropathy), behavior and academic issues (learning/intellectual disabilities, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder), and a fibroproliferative response.

Singapores’ Media System

Singapore is working hard to become an economic and cultural information center in Southeast Asia and even the world. The Singaporean government has different controls on the opening up of the country and the freedom of speech of the people. On the one hand, they hope that the state can provide more social space and political resources to express democracy and attract investment from foreign companies. On the other hand, it limits the freedom of speech of the people and foreign media. The impact of such a contradictory regulatory system on the Singapore media system and its impact on national development is worth exploring. This article will also focus on how Singapore’s distinctive media systems face the challenges of globalization.

Thanaka (H. crenulata, N. crenulata, L. acidissima L.): A Systematic Review of Its Chemical, Biological Properties and Cosmeceutical Applications

Thanaka (H. crenulata, N. crenulata, L. acidissima L.) is a common tree in Southeast Asia used by the people of Myanmar to create their distinctive face makeup meant for daily sun protection and skincare. Moreover, it is used as a traditional remedy to treat various diseases since it can also be applied as an insect repellent. In this systematic review, the chemical and biological properties of Thanaka have been summarised from 18 articles obtained from the Scopus database. Various extracts of Thanaka comprise a significant number of bioactive compounds that include antioxidant, anti-ageing, anti-inflammatory, anti-melanogenic and anti-microbial properties. More importantly, Thanaka exhibits low cytotoxicity towards human cell lines. The use of natural plant materials with various beneficial biological activities have been commonly replacing artificial and synthetic chemicals for health and environmental reasons as natural plant materials offer advantages such as antioxidant, antibacterial qualities while providing essential nourishment to the skin. This review serves as a reference for the research, development and commercialisation of Thanaka skincare products, in particular, sunscreen. Natural sunscreens have attracted enormous interests as a potential replacement for sun protection products made using synthetic chemicals such as oxybenzone that would cause health issues and damage to the environment.

A distinctive landmark-based face recognition system for identical twins by extracting novel weighted features

High similarity in facial appearances of twins has complicated the facial feature-based recognition task. This paper introduces a Distinctive Landmark-based Face Recognition (DLFR) system to mitigate the problem. Novel features are proposed based on the number of key points obtained from a modified scale-invariant feature transform algorithm and also the most distinctive landmark region of the face. A slightly altered genetic algorithm is used to optimize weights for the features. The weighted features are classified using a support vector machine classifier. Extensive experiments on 440 face images of identical twins and non-twin individuals show the higher performance of the DLFR system in comparison to a previous work in distinguishing between identical twins and individuals with similar facial images. Because of substantial differences of the DLFR system with most conventional face recognition systems, the work could motivate the research community to push forward the embodied novel idea further.

IEEE Sensors Journal’s Teenage Years (2012–2018)

IEEE journals are to a degree anthropomorphic: we have a bright and vivacious family, with veterans in their 70s, coexisting with ambitious newborns. On that scale, the event we are celebrating is the IEEE Sensors Journal having matured from its teenage years. As a typical 20-year old, it has put behind the doubts, the rush to test the unknown, the first disappointments, and the first dizzying success, now emerging as a publication with a distinctive face and character.

Recognition of identical twins based on the most distinctive region of the face: Human criteria and machine processing approaches

Face recognition domain has been well advanced and has achieved high accuracies in identification of individuals in recent years. But in practice, distinguishing similar faces such as an identical twin still is a great challenge for face recognition systems. It happens due to very small differences in the facial features of them. Therefore, extracting common face features is not proper for differentiating identical twins. A solution to this problem is to find the most distinctive regions in the face of identical twins. In this paper, two procedures used to find these specific regions: 1) Machine Processing: A Modified SIFT (M-SIFT) algorithm has been implemented on Identical twins’ face images. Each face image has been segmented into five regions contain eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and face curve. The location and number of mismatched keypoints represented the most distinctive face region in the face of identical twins. 2) Crowdsourcing: We have recognized differences between identical twins faces from human criteria viewpoint by enlisting crowd intelligence. Several questionnaires were designed and completed by 120 participants. The dataset of this study collected by ourselves and include 650 images for 115 pairs of identical twins and 120 non-twin individuals. The results of Machine Processing and Crowdsourcing methods showed that the face curve is the most discriminant region among every five regions in most of identical twins. Several features proposed and extracted based on the keypoints of the M-SIFT algorithm and face landmarks. The experimental results demonstrated the lowest equal error rate of identical twins recognition as 7.8, 8.1 and 10.1% for using the whole images, only frontal images and only images with PAN motions, respectively.

Changing Face of the Yoga Industry, Its Dharmic Roots and Its Message to Women: an Analysis of Yoga Journal Magazine Covers, 1975–2020

Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313 (January 2020), we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga’s depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access.

Memory across a short-delay: Systematic biases in memory for faces

From geometric figures to human faces, many visual stimuli vary along a continuum in featural space, anchored at one end by a highly distinctive constellation of features, at the other by a neutral set. Here we used a continuum of morphed faces to test whether errors in visual short-term memory are symmetric in feature space around the target or systematically biased toward one or the other end of the continuum. Participants were shown a face for 1 s. After a brief delay, participants were asked to choose the face they had been shown among three face options, which consisted of the target face, one face that was slightly more distinctive, and one face that was slightly more neutral. Continuums of morphed faces ranged from an average, neutral face to different distinctive celebrity faces two experiments, or from neutral facial expressions to highly emotional expressions a third experiment. Results showed that when participants made an incorrect response, they were more likely to incorrectly identify the more distinctive face than the more neutral or average face as the target face. This bias toward more extreme faces, however, was not observed for unfamiliar (non-celebrity) faces that were emotionally neutral. These findings suggest that visual memory encodes distinctive features of stimuli that lead to biases in later recognition.

Computer simulations show that Neanderthal facial morphology represents adaptation to cold and high energy demands, but not heavy biting.

Three adaptive hypotheses have been forwarded to explain the distinctive Neanderthal face: (i) an improved ability to accommodate high anterior bite forces, (ii) more effective conditioning of cold and/or dry air and, (iii) adaptation to facilitate greater ventilatory demands. We test these hypotheses using three-dimensional models of Neanderthals, modern humans, and a close outgroup (Homo heidelbergensis), applying finite-element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This is the most comprehensive application of either approach applied to date and the first to include both. FEA reveals few differences between H. heidelbergensis, modern humans, and Neanderthals in their capacities to sustain high anterior tooth loadings. CFD shows that the nasal cavities of Neanderthals and especially modern humans condition air more efficiently than does that of H. heidelbergensis, suggesting that both evolved to better withstand cold and/or dry climates than less derived Homo We further find that Neanderthals could move considerably more air through the nasal pathway than could H. heidelbergensis or modern humans, consistent with the propositions that, relative to our outgroup Homo, Neanderthal facial morphology evolved to reflect improved capacities to better condition cold, dry air, and, to move greater air volumes in response to higher energetic requirements.

Novel compound heterozygous mutations identified by whole exome sequencing in a Japanese patient with geroderma osteodysplastica

Geroderma osteodysplastica (GO) is a subtype of cutis laxa syndrome characterized by congenital wrinkly skin, a prematurely aged face, extremely short stature, and osteoporosis leading to recurrent fractures. GO exhibits an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern and is caused by loss-of-function mutations in GORAB, which encodes a protein important for Golgi-related transport. Using whole exome sequencing, we identified novel compound heterozygous nonsense mutations in the GORAB in a GO patient.The patient was a 14-year-old Japanese boy. Wrinkled skin and joint laxity were present at birth. At 1 year of age, he was clinically diagnosed with cutis laxa syndrome based on recurrent long bone fractures and clinical features, including wrinkled skin, joint laxity, and a distinctive face. He did not show retarded gross motor and cognitive development. At 11 years of age, he was treated with oral bisphosphonate and vitamin D owing to recurrent multiple spontaneous fractures of the vertebral and extremity bones associated with a low bone mineral density (BMD). Bisphosphonate treatment improved his BMD and fracture rate. Whole exome sequencing revealed two novel compound heterozygous nonsense mutations in the GORAB gene (p.Arg60* and p.Gln124*), and the diagnosis of GO was established. GO is a rare connective tissue disorder. Approximately 60 cases have been described to date, and this is the first report of a patient from Japan. Few studies have reported the effects of bisphosphonate treatment in GO patients with recurrent spontaneous fractures. Based on this case study, we hypothesize that oral bisphosphonate and vitamin D are effective and safe treatment options for the management of recurrent fractures in GO patients. It is important to establish a precise diagnosis of GO to prevent recurrent fractures and optimize treatment plans.

Wiedemann-Rautenstrauch syndrome: A phenotype analysis.

Wiedemann-Rautenstrauch syndrome (WRS) is a neonatal progeroid disorder characterized by growth retardation, lipodystrophy, a distinctive face, and dental anomalies. Patients reported to date demonstrate a remarkable variability in phenotype, which hampers diagnostics. We performed a literature search, and analyzed 51 reported patients, using the originally reported patients as "gold standard." In 15 patients sufficient information and photographic evidence was available to confirm the clinical diagnosis. In 12 patients the diagnosis was suggestive but lack of data prevented a definite diagnosis, and in 24 patients an alternative diagnosis was likely. Core manifestations of the syndrome are marked pre-natal and severe post-natal growth retardation, an unusual face (triangular shape, sparse hair, small mouth, pointed chin), dental anomalies (natal teeth; hypodontia), generalized lipodystrophy with localized fat masses, and-in some cases-progressive ataxia and tremor. It has been suggested that the syndrome might be caused by biallelic variants in POLR3A, identified by exome sequencing in a single patient only. Therefore, we compared the WRS phenotype with characteristics of conditions known to be caused by autosomal recessively inherited POLR3A mutations. There are major differences but there are also similarities in phenotype, which sustain the suggestion that the syndrome can be caused by disturbed POLR3A functioning.

Chitayat syndrome: hyperphalangism, characteristic facies, hallux valgus and bronchomalacia results from a recurrent c.266A>G p.(Tyr89Cys) variant in the ERF gene

BackgroundIn 1993, Chitayat et al., reported a newborn with hyperphalangism, facial anomalies, and bronchomalacia. We identified three additional families with similar findings. Features include bilateral accessory phalanx resulting in shortened...

Changing the Feminine Face of Poverty: Reading 1 Timothy 2:15 from a Socio-Economic Perspective

The distinctive feminine face of poverty in Africa is increasingly coming under the spotlight. Despite the existence of several initiatives to empower women and their place in Africa, there are still huge mountains to be moved in the process. These mountains are often not only the physical borders between people, countries and continents, but virtual divisions between traditional, modern and postmodern society, between fundamentalists and liberalists. This article will investigate the different forces that are playing in on the hermeneutical process of understanding and interpreting the role of women in modern African society. The focus will be on distinguishing the internal and lateral trichotomies within Africanisation, modernisation and the interpretation of biblical texts in this regard. The fundamentalist and modern interpretations and re-interpretations of the first letter to Timothy will be discussed, with special focus on the economic and societal role of women, ancient and modern, as well as the view on childbearing as synecdoche (1 Timothy 2:15). The article’s desired outcome is a contribution towards identifying focus areas in which attitudes and perceptions of societies (especially in Africa) can be addressed to facilitate improvement of the economic position of women in Africa.