Objective Evaluation Research Articles

Use of Augmented Reality for Training Assistance in Laparoscopic Surgery: Scoping Literature Review.

Laparoscopic surgery training is a demanding process requiring technical and nontechnical skills. Surgical training has evolved from traditional approaches to the use of immersive digital technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. These technologies are now integral to laparoscopic surgery training. This scoping literature review aimed to analyze the current augmented reality (AR) solutions used in laparoscopic surgery training. Following the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines, we conducted a scoping review using 4 databases: Scopus, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and ACM. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to select relevant articles. Exclusion criteria were studies not using AR, not focused on laparoscopic surgery, not focused on training, written in a language other than English, or not providing relevant information on the topics studied. After selecting the articles, research questions (RQs) were formulated to guide the review. In total, 2 independent reviewers then extracted relevant data, and a descriptive analysis of the results was conducted. Of 246 initial records, 172 (69.9%) remained after removing duplicates. After applying the exclusion criteria, 76 articles were selected, with 25 (33%) later excluded for not meeting quality standards, leaving 51 (67%) in the final review. Among the devices analyzed (RQ 1), AR video-based devices were the most prevalent (43/51, 84%). The most common information provided by AR devices (RQ 1) focused on task execution and patient-related data, both appearing in 20% (10/51) of studies. Regarding sensorization (RQ 2), most studies (46/51, 90%) incorporated some form of sensorized environment, with computer vision being the most used technology (21/46, 46%) and the trainee the most frequently sensorized element (41/51, 80%). Regarding training setups (RQ 3), 39% (20/51) of the studies used commercial simulators, and 51% (26/51) made use of artificial models. Concerning the evaluation methods (RQ 4), objective evaluation was the most used, featured in 71% (36/51) of the studies. Regarding tasks (RQ 5), 43% (22/51) of studies focused on full surgical procedures, whereas 57% (29/51) focused on simple training tasks, with suturing being the most common among the latter (11/29, 38%). This scoping review highlights the evolving role of AR technologies in laparoscopic surgery training, although the impact of optical see-through devices remains unclear due to their limited use. It underscores the potential of emerging technologies such as haptic feedback, computer vision, and eye tracking to further enhance laparoscopic skill acquisition. While most relevant articles from other databases were included, some studies may have been missed due to the specific databases and search strategies used. Moreover, the need for standardized evaluation metrics is emphasized, paving the way for future research into AR's full potential in laparoscopic skill acquisition.

Research on quantitative characterization methods for two-dimensional cleanliness and three-dimensional removal rate of aircraft skin laser paint removal

The quantitative assessment of aircraft skin paint removal can more objectively reflect the efficacy of laser paint stripping. Post-laser paint removal, a comprehensive evaluation was conducted through both two-dimensional image analysis and three-dimensional profile analysis. This yielded two-dimensional cleanliness parameters based on the coverage of residual paint and three-dimensional removal efficiency metrics based on the volume of the stripped coating. The findings revealed that the two-dimensional cleanliness levels achieved by laser paint removal at varying degrees were recorded as 21.17%, 45.02%, 57.35%, 79.16%, and 97.79% respectively. Correspondingly, the three-dimensional removal rates were quantified at 85.94%, 87.97%, 89.12%, 94.84%, and 99.52% respectively. This research successfully provides an intuitive and quantitative characterization of both the two-dimensional cleanliness and three-dimensional removal rate in laser paint stripping, offering valuable references and a solid foundation for the objective and practical evaluation of laser paint removal effectiveness.

Spatial Distribution Characteristics and Relationships of Salt-Based Ions and Nutrients in Old Protected Vegetable Fields

To achieve a scientific and objective evaluation of soil acidification, secondary salinization, and nutrient imbalance in old protected vegetable fields (OPVs) with over 30 years of cultivation history, a soil surface breeding vigorous moss was investigated. Here, quantitative laboratory analysis and mathematical statistics were employed to explore the spatial distribution of soil salinity and nutrients, as well as their relationships. The results revealed that OPVs exhibited slightly acidified values. The measured anions and cations in the soil salt composition constituted approximately 77% of the total ions. Among which, Ca2+ was the dominant cation, while SO42− and NO3− were predominant anions. The total water-soluble salt (TDS) content of the surface soil reached 4.52 g kg−1, exceeding the Chinese Saline Soils standard (1.0 g kg−1) by 350%. In the OPVs, nitrate nitrogen was significantly higher than ammonium nitrogen, and available phosphorus and available potassium were generally abundant. Despite exhibited various soil health concerns, a field visit survey presented consistently high and stable yields in OPVs. We hypothesize that this seemingly contradictory finding may be attributable to several factors, including the abundance of divalent cations (Ca2+ and Mg2+), the soil fertility and water retention capacity of unsaturated salt-based suitable soil, as well as good soil aggregate structure. These factors had the potential to reduce the stresses on the soil. This study provided a foundational understanding of the nutrient and salinity status of soils in OPVs, offering valuable data and theoretical groundwork for future research endeavors.

Efficient guided inpainting of larger hole missing images based on hierarchical decoding network

When dealing with images containing large hole-missing regions, deep learning-based image inpainting algorithms often face challenges such as local structural distortions and blurriness. In this paper, a novel hierarchical decoding network for image inpainting is proposed. Firstly, the structural priors extracted from the encoding layer are utilized to guide the first decoding layer, while residual blocks are employed to extract deep-level image features. Secondly, multiple hierarchical decoding layers progressively fill in the missing regions from top to bottom, then interlayer features and gradient priors are used to guide information transfer between layers. Furthermore, a proposed Multi-dimensional Efficient Attention is introduced for feature fusion, enabling more effective extraction of image features across different dimensions compared to conventional methods. Finally, Efficient Context Fusion combines the reconstructed feature maps from different decoding layers into the image space, preserving the semantic integrity of the output image. Experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating superior performance in both subjective and objective evaluations. When inpainting images with missing regions ranging from 50% to 60%, the proposed method achieves improvements of 0.02 dB (0.22 dB) and 0.001 (0.003) in PSNR and SSIM, on the CelebA-HQ (Places2) dataset, respectively.

P1007 Influence of pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic failure mechanisms on outcomes in biologic therapy sequencing in inflammatory bowel disease

Abstract Background Increasing therapeutic options for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) calls for tools to aid choice of sequencing. We investigated if pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) failure mechanisms prompting therapy change influenced subsequent outcomes when switching to a different biologic drug class. Methods Retrospective cohort study at a tertiary, Danish IBD center including all patients treated with first TNF-inhibitors, followed by vedolizumab, and then ustekinumab, as defined by national treatment regulations at time of study. Clinical and objective disease remission were defined by validated indices (HBI, SCCAI, Mayo, SES-CD). Treatment failure was defined by the treating physician and supported by clinical disease activity scorings and objective disease activity evaluations. Drug trough levels and anti-drug antibodies were measured at manifest treatment failure in routinely collected biobanked samples. PK-PD failure was defined according to maintenance drug concentrations: infliximab 8.0 µg/mL, adalimumab 12.0, golimumab 1.4, vedolizumab 15. Primary treatment failure despite dose intensification was ascribed to PD. Primary endpoints were steroid-free treatment persistence and one-year remission. Results The study included 112 patients switching from TNF-inhibitors to vedolizumab (infliximab n=61, adalimumab n=32, golimumab n=16, certolizumab pegol n=3) and 31 subsequently to ustekinumab. Treatment persistence on vedolizumab did not differ between patients discontinuing TNF-inhibitors due to PK (n=28, 31%) or PD (n=63, 69%) (mean 989 days [554-1,424] vs. 951 [659-1,242], p=0.93). One-year steroid-free clinical and objective remission rates on VDZ were also comparable between PK-PD groups (29% vs 35%, p=0.63 and 35% vs. 43%, p=0.48, respectively). Furthermore, treatment persistence on ustekinumab was neither different between patients having initially discontinued TNF-inhibitors due to PK or PD (1,553 [997-2,110], n=11) vs. 1,200 [762-1,639], n=14; p=0.42), nor later discontinued vedolizumab due to PK or PD (1,305 [832-1,778], n=11 vs. 1,323 [785-1,862], n=15; p=0.43). Clinical and objective remission on ustekinumab was also similar between these groups. Sensitivity analysis using other thresholds to define PK or PD failure were congruent to the above findings. Sensitivity analyses with exclusion of primary non-responders and multivariate analyses correcting for potential confounders also supported the findings. Conclusion Our study does not show evidence for inferior outcomes during subsequent sequencing to biologics with different modes of action in patients switching due to PK failures as compared to those with PD failure. Choice of sequencing may thus take into account other aspects such as efficacy, safety and costs.

Discrimination of Radiologists' Experience Level Using Eye-Tracking Technology and Machine Learning: Case Study.

Perception-related errors comprise most diagnostic mistakes in radiology. To mitigate this problem, radiologists use personalized and high-dimensional visual search strategies, otherwise known as search patterns. Qualitative descriptions of these search patterns, which involve the physician verbalizing or annotating the order he or she analyzes the image, can be unreliable due to discrepancies in what is reported versus the actual visual patterns. This discrepancy can interfere with quality improvement interventions and negatively impact patient care. The objective of this study is to provide an alternative method for distinguishing between radiologists by means of captured eye-tracking data such that the raw gaze (or processed fixation data) can be used to discriminate users based on subconscious behavior in visual inspection. We present a novel discretized feature encoding based on spatiotemporal binning of fixation data for efficient geometric alignment and temporal ordering of eye movement when reading chest x-rays. The encoded features of the eye-fixation data are used by machine learning classifiers to discriminate between faculty and trainee radiologists. A clinical trial case study was conducted using metrics such as the area under the curve, accuracy, F1-score, sensitivity, and specificity to evaluate the discriminability between the 2 groups regarding their level of experience. The classification performance was then compared with state-of-the-art methodologies. In addition, a repeatability experiment using a separate dataset, experimental protocol, and eye tracker was performed with 8 participants to evaluate the robustness of the proposed approach. The numerical results from both experiments demonstrate that classifiers using the proposed feature encoding methods outperform the current state-of-the-art in differentiating between radiologists in terms of experience level. An average performance gain of 6.9% is observed compared with traditional features while classifying experience levels of radiologists. This gain in accuracy is also substantial across different eye tracker-collected datasets, with improvements of 6.41% using the Tobii eye tracker and 7.29% using the EyeLink eye tracker. These results signify the potential impact of the proposed method for identifying radiologists' level of expertise and those who would benefit from additional training. The effectiveness of the proposed spatiotemporal discretization approach, validated across diverse datasets and various classification metrics, underscores its potential for objective evaluation, informing targeted interventions and training strategies in radiology. This research advances reliable assessment tools, addressing challenges in perception-related errors to enhance patient care outcomes.

Wavefront sensing: A breakthrough for objective evaluation of dynamic accommodation in accommodative dysfunctions.

The purpose of this study was to use wavefront sensing as an objective method to detect and assess dynamic accommodation in subjects with accommodative dysfunctions and symptoms related to near-vision tasks. Sixty-three subjects were divided into control (N=18), symptomatic without any accommodative dysfunction (SWD) (N=18), infacility of accommodation (INFA) (N=6), excess of accommodation (EA) (N=9), and insufficiency of accommodation (INSA) (N=12) groups. Accommodation was stimulated in different cycles of accommodation and disaccommodation while ocular aberrations were measured. Dynamic accommodation was computed from ocular wavefront aberrations and then analysed, including response time, peak velocity, and microfluctuations. Subjects with accommodative dysfunctions showed alterations in accommodative responses compared to the control group, characterized by slower and excessive/reduced responses, as well as an increase in accommodative microfluctuations and difficulty in relaxing accommodation to different accommodative demands. The SWD group showed significant changes compared to the control group, suggesting accommodative problems not previously detected in clinical examinations and explaining the symptoms reported by these subjects. The specific patterns of the characteristics of dynamic accommodation are presented for the different accommodative dysfunctions. The objective assessment of dynamic accommodation using wavefront sensing, analysed for different accommodative demands, provides a comprehensive approach to the detection and characterisation of accommodative dysfunctions. This method enables the improvement of the precision of the diagnosis of accommodative dysfunctions and allows its detection in cases that may not be detected by current clinical examinations. In addition, this method may contribute to personalized treatment planning, potentially improving patient outcomes in clinical practice.

A Novel RGB-Depth Imaging Technique for Food Volume Estimation

Evaluating nutrient intake among patients in a hospital is crucial, as it can accelerate their recovery process. Estimating calorie intake can be achieved by monitoring the quantity of food consumed by patients both before and after their meals. This approach involves various methods, including the use of digital scales, the Comstock level, and digital imaging techniques. Nonetheless, these techniques have their own limitations, particularly the risk of subjective assessments. To reduce errors arising from human factors, an objective evaluation is proposed. This paper introduces a new technique for measuring volume using RGB-Depth images. The method incorporates image segmentation and edge detection in RGB images to correspond with the depth image. Subsequently, the segmented regions and boundaries from the depth images are converted into point clouds. The volume of interest is calculated by fitting the point cloud to an ellipsoid. The lowest Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) is 2.73. It indicates that the proposed method is sufficient to measure the food volume.

Una valutazione col pilota automatico? Una riflessione sulle cose che possiamo guadagnare e quelle che rischiamo di perdere impiegando l’intelligenza artificiale nei processi valutativi

EVALUATION ON AUTOPILOT? A REFLECTION ON THE THINGS WE CAN GAIN AND THOSE WE RISK LOSING BY USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN EVALUATION PROCESSES Abstract The paper analyses pros and cons of using generative artificial intelligence in the students’ learning assessment process. In particular, the article focuses on the possibility offered by programs such as ChatGPT to reduce the time devoted to complex operations such as construction of multiple-choice questions or classification of open-ended answers. Thus, it is possible to use the generated content to support a phase of the evaluation process that normally dilutes time and makes the workload difficult to sustain. Although the benefits from this side are significant, the contribution emphasises that it is quite inappropriate to claim that generative artificial intelligence can take over the responsibility for judgement processing. Firstly, since there are no objective evaluations, such a choice would merely conceal the necessarily subjective criteria used to make well-founded value judgements. Secondly, such a choice would imply a deresponsibility with respect to judgements that have relevant practical consequences and a renunciation of the possibility of actively and consciously employing the evaluation process for the enrichment of future experiences.

The Effectiveness and Mechanisms of China's Grain Support Policies in Relation to Grain Yield-An Evaluation of a Wide Range of Policies.

Objective evaluation and in-depth systematic analysis of the effectiveness of implementing a grain support policy series represent an important entry point for improving incentives to grow food, improving grain production support and protection systems, and guaranteeing national food security. Thus, we collected and organized grain support policies during the study period according to the government work reports of 31 provinces in China from 2001 to 2022 and applied a two-way fixed-effects model based on the variables constructed using textual analysis to further explore the effects of a range of grain support policies on grain production gains. The conclusions are as follows: (1) grain support policies significantly contributed to an increase in grain production; (2) grain production gains from grain support policies are more pronounced in less industrialized and disaster-affected areas; (3) a mechanism analysis showed that grain support policies enhanced grain production by expanding the scale of food cultivation, upgrading agricultural mechanization, and strengthening soil erosion control; and (4) further analysis showed that grain support policies increased pesticide use. These conclusions are of great significance for improving grain production support and protection systems, enhancing incentives for farmers to grow food and for local governments to control food, and achieving the goal of food security.

A Review Study on the Construction of Medical Institution Service Quality Performance Evaluation System under the Background of Internet Plus

With the advent of the "Internet Plus" era, the medical service industry is undergoing a significant transformation. This paper systematically reviews and analyzes the construction process of the medical institution service quality performance evaluation system, aiming to provide theoretical support and practical guidance for the improvement of service quality in internet hospitals. The article first introduces the challenges and opportunities faced by the medical service industry under the "Internet Plus" background, then discusses the definition, dimensions, and theoretical framework of medical service quality evaluation. Through a comparative analysis of the service quality evaluation systems of Chinese and American medical institutions, the similarities and differences in the construction of medical service evaluation systems between the two countries are revealed. Finally, based on the "Internet Plus" background, the paper proposes principles, objectives, indicator system design, and implementation and feedback mechanisms for constructing a service quality performance evaluation system. The research results indicate that constructing a comprehensive and objective service quality evaluation system is of great significance for optimizing resource allocation, innovating service models, improving service efficiency, and reducing service costs, which helps to promote the implementation of the Healthy China strategy.

Feature enhanced cascading attention network for lightweight image super-resolution

Attention mechanisms have been introduced to exploit deep-level information for image restoration by capturing feature dependencies. However, existing attention mechanisms often have limited perceptual capabilities and are incompatible with low-power devices due to computational resource constraints. Therefore, we propose a feature enhanced cascading attention network (FECAN) that introduces a novel feature enhanced cascading attention (FECA) mechanism, consisting of enhanced shuffle attention (ESA) and multi-scale large separable kernel attention (MLSKA). Specifically, ESA enhances high-frequency texture features in the feature maps, and MLSKA executes the further extraction. The rich and fine-grained high-frequency information are extracted and fused from multiple perceptual layers, thus improving super-resolution (SR) performance. To validate FECAN’s effectiveness, we evaluate it with different complexities by stacking different numbers of high-frequency enhancement modules (HFEM) that contain FECA. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that FECAN outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight SR networks in terms of objective evaluation metrics and subjective visual quality. Specifically, at a × 4 scale with a 121 K model size, compared to the second-ranked MAN-tiny, FECAN achieves a 0.07 dB improvement in average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), while reducing network parameters by approximately 19% and FLOPs by 20%. This demonstrates a better trade-off between SR performance and model complexity.

PhonemeVec: A Phoneme-Level Contextual Prosody Representation For Speech Synthesis

Recently, fine-grained prosody representations have emerged and attracted growing attention to address the one-to-many problem in text-to-speech (TTS). In this paper, we propose the PhonemeVec, a pre-trained prosody representations with considering the contextual information. To obtain the contextual prosody representations, we improve the data2vec framework according to the characteristics of prosody to extract the PhonemeVec from the low-band mel-spectrogram, and pre-train on a 960 hours Chinese corpus with high quality and diverse pronunciation. PhonemeVec is subsequently integrated into FastSpeech2, supervising the prosody modeling of the text encoder. Experiments conducted on the Blizzard Challenge 2019 dataset show that the integration of PhonemeVec results in the synthesis of more natural speech. Additionally, objective evaluations confirm that the application of PhonemeVec reduces the distortions between the generated speech and original recordings in terms of duration and F0. Audio samples can be found in http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~wsmzzz/PhonemeVec/demo.html.

Assessing Facial Thermal Nociceptive Response in Female Dogs After Elective Ovariohysterectomy Anesthetized with Isoflurane and Treated with Cannabidiol and Meloxicam Analgesia.

Pain management requires the identification of certain indicators to recognize pain. Various tools have been suggested to achieve an objective evaluation, including infrared thermography (IRT). The objective of this study was to assess the facial thermal nociceptive response produced by the use of cannabidiol (CBD) alone and in combination with meloxicam in female dogs undergoing elective ovariohysterectomy anesthetized with isoflurane. Sixty-four female dogs of different breeds were randomly distributed into four study groups according to the treatment received. G1: Placebo group (n = 16); G2: Group receiving intravenous meloxicam as premedication (0.2 mg Kg-1) and every 24 h postoperatively 0.1 mg Kg-1 (n = 16); G3: Group treated with CBD (n = 16) at a dose of 2 mg kg-1 orally every 12 h; and G4: Group medicated with the combination of both treatments (n = 16). All treatments were administered for 48 h postoperatively. After the anesthetic surgical procedure, radiometric images were captured using IRT and physiological parameters during the events EBasal, E30min, E1h, E2h, E3h, E4h, E8h, E12h, E24h and E48h. Overall, it was found that the high, medium and low temperatures of the thermal windows of the eye, upper eyelid and lower eyelid, as well as the average temperature of the lacrimal gland in G1 between events, were significantly lower at E30min, E1h and E2h compared to EBasal (p = 0.01). Among treatments, a significantly higher temperature was observed in groups G2, G3 and G4 compared to G1 (p = 0.001) in the thermal windows of the upper eyelid, lower eyelid, lacrimal gland and ocular areas. Regarding physiological parameters, heart rate (HR) was higher in G1 compared to the animals in G2, G3 and G4 (p = 0.03). The respiratory rate (RR) was significantly lower in all four study groups during the postoperative events compared to their respective EBasal (p < 0.05), while among treatments, G2, G3 and G4 had a lower RR compared to G1 (p = 0.03). Mild hypothermia was observed in all study groups at E30min and E1h compared to EBasal (p = 0.001). No significant correlation was found between the temperatures of the assessed thermal regions and the physiological traits. In conclusion, CBD, whether administered alone or in combination with meloxicam, demonstrated comparable analgesic efficacy, which could control nociceptive cardiorespiratory and hemodynamic autonomic responses, as there were no significant changes in the facial thermal response between treatments G2, G3 and G4.

Feasibility study for evaluating cervical intervertebral disc degeneration using axial diffusion tensor imaging.

Intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration is the main cause of neck pain. Although conventional magnetic resonance imaging can detect morphological changes in intervertebral disc degeneration, it cannot provide accurate and objective evaluations. Magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) reflects the microstructural changes in tissues by describing the diffusion of water molecules. It was initially applied to the evaluation of lumbar disc degeneration; however, no study has used DTI to evaluate cervical disc degeneration. To conduct a prospective study to evaluate the efficacy and feasibility of DTI in quantifying cervical disc degeneration by correlating the main parameters of axial DTI of intervertebral discs, namely fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) values, using the Pfirrmann grade. The cervical discs of 30 symptomatic volunteers with neck pain and 20 asymptomatic volunteers were assessed using a 3.0 T magnetic resonance scanner. We evaluated intervertebral discs from C3/4 to C6/7 in each volunteer. The Pfirrmann grades, FA value, and MD value on the conventional magnetic resonance imaging were evaluated. The Kruskal-Wallis test and Wilcoxon rank-sum test were used to compare the FA and MD values of subjects with different degeneration levels. Statistical analysis showed that the FA value of the nucleus pulposus in patients group was significantly higher than that in the asymptomatic volunteers, and the MD value of the nucleus pulposus was significantly lower than that in the asymptomatic volunteers, and the difference was significant (P < 0.05). In the study group, with an increase in cervical intervertebral disc grade, the FA value of the nucleus pulposus also showed a gradual upward trend, and this difference was significant (P < 0.05). The MD value of the nucleus pulposus showed a gradual downward trend, except between grades I and II, which indicates that the axial FA value can better show the early pathological changes of the cervical intervertebral disc. The FA and MD values of the cervical intervertebral disc can quantitatively evaluate the degree of degeneration of the cervical intervertebral disc; axial DTI imaging technology can provide a good theoretical basis for the imaging diagnosis of cervical intervertebral disc degeneration and has important clinical application value.

Turkish Validation and Reliability Analysis of the International Female Coital Incontinence Questionnaire.

Coital incontinence (CI) is an important problem that negatively affects women's quality of life and is often underreported owing to embarrassment, indicating the importance of its assessment with validated questionnaires. The aim of this study was to validate the Turkish-translated version of the International Female Coital Incontinence Questionnaire (IFCI-Q) for the objective evaluation of women with CI in Turkish-speaking populations. Ninety women with CI filled out the Turkish-translated version of IFCI-Q. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Cronbach's alpha, and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were evaluated for the construct validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability, respectively. Known group validity, which is the ability of the scale to reveal the expected difference according to patients' demographics and PISQ-12 scores, was evaluated. The construct validity was confirmed after excluding the first and third items of the questionnaire (CFI 0.966, TLI 0.944). The first item was excluded from the CFA as all women who completed the IFCI-Q had CI and therefore answered this item questioning the existence of CI as "yes." The third item was eliminated because its factor loading was below 0.20. Cronbach's alpha value for the scale was 0.67. ICC was calculated as 0.97 (0.95-0.98; p < 0.001), indicating a strong positive agreement between the test scores at two time points 2 weeks apart. The Turkish version of IFCI-Q seems to be a reliable, consistent, and valid instrument in the screening and assessment of CI in a gynecology outpatient clinic-based cohort of Turkish-speaking women.

Disappearance of vernacular character in rural residences: An assessment of residents’ requirements for rural residential façades and environments in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

This study, framed within the context of the Harmonious and Beautiful Countryside policy, focuses on optimizing the living environment of rural housing by addressing the loss of diverse heritage in rural architecture and landscapes. Through fieldwork and importance-performance analysis methods, the research investigates the fa&amp;ccedil;ades and environments of rural houses in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. By incorporating the &amp;ldquo;vernacular&amp;rdquo; evaluation factors identified in previous studies, this study adopts a user-centered perspective to provide practical insights into rural cultural landscapes, thereby augmenting existing literature. The study reconstructs elements of rural residences and their environments to enhance residents&amp;rsquo; comprehension and yield more objective evaluation outcomes. Analysis reveals that both native and non-native residents share similar views on the importance and performance of various factors. Environmental quality and building functionality emerge as top priorities for residents, while Suzhou&amp;rsquo;s efforts to preserve traditional architectural esthetics are notably effective. However, field observations also highlight urbanization&amp;rsquo;s impact on rural housing, such as the use of non-native materials that compromise traditional rural architectural styles. To tackle these challenges, this study proposes the following strategies for rural regeneration: (i) permit integration of new materials, technologies, and spatial configurations with traditional rural architecture; (ii) incorporate historical context, cultural continuity, traditional materials, and lifestyle needs into building renovations; and (iii) establish a dynamic regulatory mechanism for rural residential architecture to aid residents in optimizing their buildings and surroundings. These strategies aim to mitigate the effects of excessive urbanization and provide a user-centered approach for future research on rural cultural landscapes.

Nasal food challenge with hen's egg white allergen

BackgroundNasal allergen provocation tests are an important part of the diagnostics of allergic diseases triggered by environmental factors. Recently, increased attention has been paid to the potential use of this method in the diagnosis of food allergy. The objective of the study was to evaluate the usefulness of the nasal allergen provocation test in a group of subjects allergic to hen's egg white allergens.MethodsThe material consisted of a group of 57 subjects (32 subjects with hen's egg white allergy and 25 healthy controls). The method consisted in a nasal allergen provocation test carried out with the use of hen's egg white allergen and assessed using the visual analog scale and optical rhinometry as well as by determination of sIgE and tryptase levels in nasal lavage fluid.ResultsSubjective nasal symptoms and objective evaluations following the application of 100 µg of hen's egg white allergen revealed a moderately positive nasal mucosal response in optical rhinometry tests (ΔE = 0.34 OD).ConclusionsNasal food challenge with hen's egg white allergen is a good diagnostic alternative in the group of food allergy patients. Due to the insufficient number of studies carried out so far, further attempts at standardization of the method are required.

Development of an image quality evaluation system for bedside chest X-ray images using scatter correction processing.

In plain radiography, scattered X-ray correction processing (Virtual Grid: VG) is used to estimate and correct scattered rays in images. We developed an objective evaluation system for bedside chest X-ray images using VG and investigated its usefulness. First, we trained the blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator (BRISQUE) on 200 images obtained by portable chest radiography. We then evaluated optimal chest phantom VG images as well as those that deviated from the VG setting conditions using BRISQUE. Furthermore, we conducted a subjective evaluation using the mean opinion score (MOS) and established an objective evaluation system for VG images. Finally, the degree of agreement between the MOS subjectively evaluated by 14 radiological technologists and that determined by the objective evaluation system for 100 clinical images obtained by portable chest radiography was calculated using Cohen's kappa coefficient. The correlation coefficient between the BRISQUE score and MOS for chest phantom images was - 0.96 (p < 0.05). The two scores showed a very high linear correlation, indicating the potential of the BRISQUE score as an alternative to MOS. The Cohen's kappa coefficient for the objective evaluation system using the optimal conversion table was 0.42. Conversely, there was a very high detection rate of 82.86% for poor-quality images. An objective evaluation system for bedside chest X-ray images using VG that uses no-reference image quality evaluation helps provide proper image quality. Furthermore, such a system can be constructed with a small amount of training data, which increases the possibility of introducing it to a variety of facilities.

TARREAN: A Novel Transformer with a Gate Recurrent Unit for Stylized Music Generation.

Music generation by AI algorithms like Transformer is currently a research hotspot. Existing methods often suffer from issues related to coherence and high computational costs. To address these problems, we propose a novel Transformer-based model that incorporates a gate recurrent unit with root mean square norm restriction (TARREAN). This model improves the temporal coherence of music by utilizing the gate recurrent unit (GRU), which enhances the model's ability to capture the dependencies between sequential elements. Additionally, we apply masked multi-head attention to prevent the model from accessing future information during training, preserving the causal structure of music sequences. To reduce computational overhead, we introduce root mean square layer normalization (RMS Norm), which smooths gradients and simplifies the calculations, thereby improving training efficiency. The music sequences are encoded using a compound word method, converting them into discrete symbol-event combinations for input into the TARREAN model. The proposed method effectively mitigates discontinuity issues in generated music and enhances generation quality. We evaluated the model using the Essen Associative Code and Folk Song Database, which contains 20,000 folk melodies from Germany, Poland, and China. The results show that our model produces music that is more aligned with human preferences, as indicated by subjective evaluation scores. The TARREAN model achieved a satisfaction score of 4.34, significantly higher than the 3.79 score of the Transformer-XL + REMI model. Objective evaluation also demonstrated a 15% improvement in temporal coherence compared to traditional methods. Both objective and subjective experimental results demonstrate that TARREAN can significantly improve generation coherence and reduce computational costs.