97 results on '"Quality Score"'
Search Results
2. Assessment of the Relationship Between the Quality of YouTube Videos on Penile Enlargement Surgery and Scholarly Profiles of Surgeons
- Author
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Emre Bülbül and Fahri Yavuz İlki
- Subjects
penile enlargement ,andrology ,publications ,h-index ,surgeon ,quality score ,Surgery ,RD1-811 ,Diseases of the genitourinary system. Urology ,RC870-923 - Abstract
Objective: To investigate the relationship between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the scholarly profiles of surgeons. Materials and Methods: A YouTube search was conducted using the keyword “penile enlargement surgery”. Of the first 200 videos from the search results, 66 that met the study criteria were included in the analyses. Two urologists scored each video using the DISCERN score, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) score, and the global quality scale (GQS) in a double-blind manner. After the video quality scores were determined, the number of publications and h-indexes of surgeons were obtained from Google Scholar. Results: Of the videos, 31 (46.9%) were uploaded by plastic surgeons and 35 (53.1%) by urologists. The median duration of the videos was 4.1 min (interquartile range: 1-8.5) minutes. Eighteen (27.2%) videos had low quality, 9 (13.6%) had medium quality, and 39 (59.1%) had high quality. A statistically significant correlation was found between the h-index of surgeons and video quality scores (DISCERN, r=0.678; JAMA, r=0.646; GQS, r=0.689; p
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
3. Assessment of the Relationship Between the Quality of YouTube Videos on Penile Enlargement Surgery and Scholarly Profiles of Surgeons.
- Author
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Bülbül, Emre and İlki, Fahri Yavuz
- Subjects
- *
PENIS surgery , *SOCIAL media , *STATISTICAL correlation , *UROLOGISTS , *MISINFORMATION , *RESEARCH , *COMMUNICATION , *PLASTIC surgery , *COMPARATIVE studies , *VIDEO recording - Abstract
Objective: To investigate the relationship between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the scholarly profiles of surgeons. Materials and Methods: A YouTube search was conducted using the keyword "penile enlargement surgery". Of the first 200 videos from the search results, 66 that met the study criteria were included in the analyses. Two urologists scored each video using the DISCERN score, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) score, and the global quality scale (GQS) in a double-blind manner. After the video quality scores were determined, the number of publications and h-indexes of surgeons were obtained from Google Scholar. Results: Of the videos, 31 (46.9%) were uploaded by plastic surgeons and 35 (53.1%) by urologists. The median duration of the videos was 4.1 min (interquartile range: 1-8.5) minutes. Eighteen (27.2%) videos had low quality, 9 (13.6%) had medium quality, and 39 (59.1%) had high quality. A statistically significant correlation was found between the h-index of surgeons and video quality scores (DISCERN, r=0.678; JAMA, r=0.646; GQS, r=0.689; p<0.0001). There was also a statistically significant correlation between the total publication counts of surgeons and the video quality scores (DISCERN, r=0.614; JAMA, r=0.569; GQS, r=0.607; p<0.0001). Lastly, a weak, statistically significant correlation was detected between the DISCERN scores of the videos and the number of likes (r=0.278, p=0.029). Conclusion: This study revealed a significant correlation between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the h-indexes and total publication counts of surgeons. This study was the first to analyze the relationship between the quality of YouTube videos on penile enlargement surgery and the scholarly profiles of surgeons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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- View/download PDF
4. A Hospital Medical Record Quality Scoring Tool (MeReQ): Development, Validation, and Results of a Pilot Study.
- Author
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Torsello, Alessandra, Aromatario, Mariarosaria, Scopetti, Matteo, Bianco, Lavinia, Oliva, Stefania, D'Errico, Stefano, and Napoli, Christian
- Subjects
EXPERIMENTAL design ,PILOT projects ,RESEARCH ,RESEARCH methodology ,RESEARCH methodology evaluation ,QUALITY assurance ,MEDICAL records ,STATISTICAL models ,ELECTRONIC health records ,RISK management in business ,DATA analysis software ,PATIENT safety - Abstract
Hospital medical records are valuable and cost-effective documents for assessing the quality of healthcare provided to patients by a healthcare facility during hospitalization. However, there is a lack of internationally validated tools that measure the quality of the whole hospital medical record in terms of both form and content. In this study, we developed and validated a tool, named MeReQ (medical record quality) tool, which quantifies the quality of the hospital medical record and enables statistical modeling using the data obtained. The tool was applied to evaluate a sample of hospital individual patient medical records from a secondary referral hospital and to identify the departments that require quality improvement interventions and the effects of improvement actions already implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Possibilities of using the results of soil rating in agricultural technologies of the Republic of Adygea
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Yu. A. Chumachenko, N. I. Mamsirov, and E. M. Baronov
- Subjects
soil ,rating ,quality score ,qualitative assessment ,soil cover ,land ,agricultural crops ,the republic of adygea ,economic efficiency ,Technology - Abstract
Soil rating is a comparative characteristic of the quality of arable land and other areas, assessed in points. It is carried out on the basis of special soil surveys, taking into account the supply of nutrients and other factors that determine the level of natural fertility. Soil rating is a necessary starting point for the economic assessment of land, determining the standard price and creating a land cadastre. The article presents the results of a comprehensive study aimed at determining the qualitative characteristics of the soil cover of the Republic of Adygea. As a result of determining the quality score, it is possible to predict how much agricultural land will be harvested in the future, as well as to determine the sowing plan for this area for the year. Determining the soil quality score is also important when resolving issues such as regulation of land relations, timely adoption of measures to improve land plots that are unsatisfactory in terms of indicators. Establishing a quality score allows for high-quality implementation of agrotechnical, hydraulic and chemical measures in those areas that are considered the worst as a result of determining soil quality. The groups of soils established during rating, which are quantitatively characterized by certain natural characteristics, form the information basis for the economic assessment of land, the data of which are important for the rational use of selected agricultural production groups, taking into account their natural characteristics. Based on the conducted research, recommendations are offered for using the obtained assessment results for the cultivation of various agricultural crops. The importance of using the results of soil assessment to improve the efficiency of land use, improve agricultural production and ensure sustainable development of the region has been emphasized.
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- 2024
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6. Blind Image Quality Evaluation Method Based on Cyclic Generative Adversarial Network
- Author
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Xiaoying Li and Shouwu He
- Subjects
Blind images ,deep learning ,attention block ,quality score ,evaluation ,Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering ,TK1-9971 - Abstract
The mission of blind image quality evaluation is currently a challenging computer vision problem. Due to the shortage of reference images, it is hard for blind image quality evaluation methods to achieve the same performance as full reference image quality evaluation methods. In addition, current quality evaluation methods are difficult to effectively forecast the quality scores of synthesized distorted images as well as real distorted images. To address such issues, this study proposed a cyclic generative adversarial network composed of a quality perception network and a quality regression network on the grounds of generative adversarial networks. For further enhancing the predictive performance of quality aware networks, this study proposed using attention blocks for adaptively fusing high-level semantic features and low-level semantic features. It extracted content and distortion information from images through an image quality evaluation method on the grounds of content perception and distortion inference. And according to the different properties of the extracted features, adaptive fusion blocks were used for adaptively fusing content features and distortion features. Experiments showcased that the Spearman order correlation coefficient and Pearson linear correlation coefficient obtained by the proposed method on multiple datasets were higher than other similar methods. At the same time, the proposed method has achieved good prediction results on various types of distorted images, and has surpassed other methods. The prediction accuracy of the proposed method on five types of distortion was 0.971, 0.963, 0.984, 0.971, and 0.926, respectively. The proposed method achieved the highest predictive accuracy on all distortion types in the LIVE dataset, with predicted accuracy values of 0.973, 0.965, 0.984, 0.963, and 0.944, respectively. In summary, the proposed method not only achieved good prediction accuracy, but also had strong generalization performance in cross dataset testing. This provides a scientific and effective research direction for blind image quality evaluation.
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- 2024
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7. Applicability of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress (WP) Website
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Singh, Debabrata, Shivamurthaiah, M, Samanta, Debabrata, Bhattacharya, Abhishek, Dutta, Soumi, Howlett, Robert J., Series Editor, Jain, Lakhmi C., Series Editor, Bhattacharyya, Siddhartha, editor, Banerjee, Jyoti Sekhar, editor, and Köppen, Mario, editor
- Published
- 2023
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8. ÉVALUATION DE LA QUALITE DES PRESCRIPTIONS MEDICALES AVANT L'INTRODUCTION D'UN FORMULAIRE THERAPEUTIQUE : CAS DU CENTRE HOSPITALIER UNIVERSITAIRE Pr BOCAR SIDY SALL DE KATI.
- Author
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Traoré, Mohamed dit Sarmoye, Traoré, Sylvestre, Sangho, Aboubacar, Coulibaly, Issa, Diarra, Abdramane, Coulibaly, Balla Fatogoma, Bah, Sékou, Ouedrago, Raogo, and Youl, Estelle Noëla Hoho
- Abstract
Objective: The general objective of this work was to evaluate the quality of medical prescriptions at the CHU Bocar SALL of Kati before the introduction of a therapeutic form. Methods: This was a crosssectional study with prospective collection covering one year (April 2021-March 2022). A simple random sampling was carried out from the prescriptions (n=1283) of the patients coming for outpatient consultations and the files (n=847) of the hospitalized patients. Results: Prescriptions were made mainly by medical specialists, including 468 prescriptions and 612 patient files. The average number of drugs per prescription was 2.66. As for hospitalized patients, they received an average of 5.75 drugs. The "Prescription quality score" obtained an average of 5.19 out of 8 points. A little more than half of the prescriptions were made on the basis of the national list of essential drugs with a rate of 53.31%.The treatments given to the patients were consistent with the diagnoses, with a score of 4.14 out of 5 points. Conclusion: Compliance with the rules of good practice for medical prescriptions not only guarantees the quality of care offered to users, but also allows good planning and control of the establishment's future public health actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
9. Regression trees to identify combinations of farming practices that achieve the best overall intrinsic quality of milk
- Author
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L. Rey-Cadilhac, A. Ferlay, M. Gelé, S. Léger, and C. Laurent
- Subjects
dairy cow ,bulk tank milk ,quality score ,dairy products ,regression analysis ,Dairy processing. Dairy products ,SF250.5-275 ,Dairying ,SF221-250 - Abstract
ABSTRACT: Many studies over the last 30 years have shown the effects of farming practices on milk compounds. Combinations of practices may have antagonistic or synergistic effects on milk compounds, but these combination effects remain underinvestigated. Research needs to focus on overall intrinsic milk quality (including sensory, technological, health, and nutritional dimensions) and identify the combinations that can optimize it. The aim of this study was to identify which combinations of farming practices achieved the best scores for sensory, technological, health, and nutritional dimensions and for overall intrinsic milk quality. Ninety-nine private farms were visited once each to sample their bulk tank milk and survey their farming practices. The surveyed practices concerned herd characteristics, feeding management, housing conditions, and milking and milk storage conditions on the day of test. Analyses of bulk tank milk were designed to evaluate the overall intrinsic quality of the milk for 2 target products: raw milk cheese and semi-skimmed UHT milk. Regression trees were then used to identify the combinations of farming practices that achieved the best scores on each dimension and on overall intrinsic quality of the milk. Breed and diet (type of forage) were the most influential factors for sensory and health dimensions and for technological and nutritional dimension scores, respectively, in the cheese assessment. Overall cheese quality was highly positively correlated with these 4 dimension scores. Therefore, breed and diet emerged as the most influential practices in the regression tree for overall cheese quality. However, the combinations of practices that resulted in the best quality scores differed according to dimension studied and product targeted. This suggests that advice on farming practices to improve intrinsic milk quality needs to be adapted according to the end-purpose of the collected milk. This innovative approach combining on-farm data and regression trees provides farm managers with a valuable and practical tool to prioritize practices in terms of their role in shaping milk quality, and to identify the combinations of practices that promote good milk quality and practice thresholds or modalities needed to achieve it.
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- 2023
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10. Identification of Torquetenovirus Species in Patients with Kawasaki Disease Using a Newly Developed Species-Specific PCR Method.
- Author
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Spezia, Pietro Giorgio, Filippini, Fabio, Nagao, Yoshiro, Sano, Tetsuya, Ishida, Takafumi, and Maggi, Fabrizio
- Subjects
- *
MUCOCUTANEOUS lymph node syndrome , *NUCLEOTIDE sequencing , *IDENTIFICATION , *VIRAL load , *SPECIES , *LONGITUDINAL method - Abstract
A next-generation sequencing (NGS) study identified a very high viral load of Torquetenovirus (TTV) in KD patients. We aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a newly developed quantitative species-specific TTV-PCR (ssTTV-PCR) method to identify the etiology of KD. We applied ssTTV-PCR to samples collected from 11 KD patients and 22 matched control subjects who participated in our previous prospective study. We used the NGS dataset from the previous study to validate ssTTV-PCR. The TTV loads in whole blood and nasopharyngeal aspirates correlated highly (Spearman's R = 0.8931, p < 0.0001, n = 33), supporting the validity of ssTTV-PCR. The ssTTV-PCR and NGS results were largely consistent. However, inconsistencies occurred when ssTTV-PCR was more sensitive than NGS, when the PCR primer sequences mismatched the viral sequences in the participants, and when the NGS quality score was low. Interpretation of NGS requires complex procedures. ssTTV-PCR is more sensitive than NGS but may fail to detect a fast-evolving TTV species. It would be prudent to update primer sets using NGS data. With this precaution, ssTTV-PCR can be used reliably in a future large-scale etiological study for KD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
11. An Iterative Model for Quality Assessment in Collaborative Content Generation Systems
- Author
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Abedinzadeh, Fariba, Amintoosi, Haleh, Allahbakhsh, Mohammad, Goos, Gerhard, Founding Editor, Hartmanis, Juris, Founding Editor, Bertino, Elisa, Editorial Board Member, Gao, Wen, Editorial Board Member, Steffen, Bernhard, Editorial Board Member, Yung, Moti, Editorial Board Member, Hacid, Hakim, editor, Aldwairi, Monther, editor, Bouadjenek, Mohamed Reda, editor, Petrocchi, Marinella, editor, Faci, Noura, editor, Outay, Fatma, editor, Beheshti, Amin, editor, Thamsen, Lauritz, editor, and Dong, Hai, editor
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- 2022
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12. Improved Image Quality Assessment by Utilizing Pre-Trained Architecture Features with Unified Learning Mechanism.
- Author
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Ryu, Jihyoung
- Subjects
DEEP learning ,PERCEIVED quality ,LEARNING - Abstract
The purpose of the no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to measure perceived image quality based on subjective judgments; however, due to the lack of a clean reference image, this is a complicated and unresolved challenge. Massive new IQA datasets have facilitated the creation of deep learning-based image quality measurements. We present a unique model to handle the NR-IQA challenge in this research by employing a hybrid strategy that leverages from pre-trained CNN model and the unified learning mechanism that extracts both local and non-local characteristics from the input patch. The deep analysis of the proposed framework shows that the model uses features and a mechanism that improves the monotonicity relationship between objective and subjective ratings. The intermediary goal was mapped to a quality score using a regression architecture. To extract various feature maps, a deep architecture with an adaptive receptive field was used. Analyses of this biggest NR-IQA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the suggested technique outperforms current state-of-the-art NR-IQA measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
13. Regression trees to identify combinations of farming practices that achieve the best overall intrinsic quality of milk.
- Author
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Rey-Cadilhac, L., Ferlay, A., Gelé, M., Léger, S., and Laurent, C.
- Subjects
- *
REGRESSION trees , *MILK quality , *AGRICULTURE , *RAW milk , *TREE farms , *MILK storage , *TRAVELING salesman problem , *DIMENSIONS - Abstract
Many studies over the last 30 years have shown the effects of farming practices on milk compounds. Combinations of practices may have antagonistic or synergistic effects on milk compounds, but these combination effects remain underinvestigated. Research needs to focus on overall intrinsic milk quality (including sensory, technological, health, and nutritional dimensions) and identify the combinations that can optimize it. The aim of this study was to identify which combinations of farming practices achieved the best scores for sensory, technological, health, and nutritional dimensions and for overall intrinsic milk quality. Ninety-nine private farms were visited once each to sample their bulk tank milk and survey their farming practices. The surveyed practices concerned herd characteristics, feeding management, housing conditions, and milking and milk storage conditions on the day of test. Analyses of bulk tank milk were designed to evaluate the overall intrinsic quality of the milk for 2 target products: raw milk cheese and semi-skimmed UHT milk. Regression trees were then used to identify the combinations of farming practices that achieved the best scores on each dimension and on overall intrinsic quality of the milk. Breed and diet (type of forage) were the most influential factors for sensory and health dimensions and for technological and nutritional dimension scores, respectively, in the cheese assessment. Overall cheese quality was highly positively correlated with these 4 dimension scores. Therefore, breed and diet emerged as the most influential practices in the regression tree for overall cheese quality. However, the combinations of practices that resulted in the best quality scores differed according to dimension studied and product targeted. This suggests that advice on farming practices to improve intrinsic milk quality needs to be adapted according to the end-purpose of the collected milk. This innovative approach combining on-farm data and regression trees provides farm managers with a valuable and practical tool to prioritize practices in terms of their role in shaping milk quality, and to identify the combinations of practices that promote good milk quality and practice thresholds or modalities needed to achieve it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
14. Quality-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Integration Network for Video Salient Object Detection.
- Author
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Zhou, Xiaofei, Gao, Hanxiao, Yu, Longxuan, Yang, Defu, and Zhang, Jiyong
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VIDEO compression ,VIDEOS ,VIDEO surveillance ,COOPERATION ,FORECASTING - Abstract
Video salient object detection has attracted growing interest in recent years. However, some existing video saliency models often suffer from the inappropriate utilization of spatial and temporal cues and the insufficient aggregation of different level features, leading to remarkable performance degradation. Therefore, we propose a quality-driven dual-branch feature integration network majoring in the adaptive fusion of multi-modal cues and sufficient aggregation of multi-level spatiotemporal features. Firstly, we employ the quality-driven multi-modal feature fusion (QMFF) module to combine the spatial and temporal features. Particularly, the quality scores estimated from each level's spatial and temporal cues are not only used to weigh the two modal features but also to adaptively integrate the coarse spatial and temporal saliency predictions into the guidance map, which further enhances the two modal features. Secondly, we deploy the dual-branch-based multi-level feature aggregation (DMFA) module to integrate multi-level spatiotemporal features, where the two branches including the progressive decoder branch and the direct concatenation branch sufficiently explore the cooperation of multi-level spatiotemporal features. In particular, in order to provide an adaptive fusion for the outputs of the two branches, we design the dual-branch fusion (DF) unit, where the channel weight of each output can be learned jointly from the two outputs. The experiments conducted on four video datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art video saliency models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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- View/download PDF
15. A Hospital Medical Record Quality Scoring Tool (MeReQ): Development, Validation, and Results of a Pilot Study
- Author
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Alessandra Torsello, Mariarosaria Aromatario, Matteo Scopetti, Lavinia Bianco, Stefania Oliva, Stefano D’Errico, and Christian Napoli
- Subjects
hospital medical record quality ,clinical risk management ,quality index ,quality score ,patient safety ,Medicine - Abstract
Hospital medical records are valuable and cost-effective documents for assessing the quality of healthcare provided to patients by a healthcare facility during hospitalization. However, there is a lack of internationally validated tools that measure the quality of the whole hospital medical record in terms of both form and content. In this study, we developed and validated a tool, named MeReQ (medical record quality) tool, which quantifies the quality of the hospital medical record and enables statistical modeling using the data obtained. The tool was applied to evaluate a sample of hospital individual patient medical records from a secondary referral hospital and to identify the departments that require quality improvement interventions and the effects of improvement actions already implemented.
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
16. CMIC: an efficient quality score compressor with random access functionality
- Author
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Hansen Chen, Jianhua Chen, Zhiwen Lu, and Rongshu Wang
- Subjects
FASTQ ,Quality score ,Random access ,Lossless compressor ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 - Abstract
Abstract Background Over the past few decades, the emergence and maturation of new technologies have substantially reduced the cost of genome sequencing. As a result, the amount of genomic data that needs to be stored and transmitted has grown exponentially. For the standard sequencing data format, FASTQ, compression of the quality score is a key and difficult aspect of FASTQ file compression. Throughout the literature, we found that the majority of the current quality score compression methods do not support random access. Based on the above consideration, it is reasonable to investigate a lossless quality score compressor with a high compression rate, a fast compression and decompression speed, and support for random access. Results In this paper, we propose CMIC, an adaptive and random access supported compressor for lossless compression of quality score sequences. CMIC is an acronym of the four steps (classification, mapping, indexing and compression) in the paper. Its framework consists of the following four parts: classification, mapping, indexing, and compression. The experimental results show that our compressor has good performance in terms of compression rates on all the tested datasets. The file sizes are reduced by up to 21.91% when compared with LCQS. In terms of compression speed, CMIC is better than all other compressors on most of the tested cases. In terms of random access speed, the CMIC is faster than the LCQS, which provides a random access function for compressed quality scores. Conclusions CMIC is a compressor that is especially designed for quality score sequences, which has good performance in terms of compression rate, compression speed, decompression speed, and random access speed. The CMIC can be obtained in the following way: https://github.com/Humonex/Cmic .
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- 2022
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17. Incorporating Variation and Quality of the Underlying Effects in Meta-Analysis.
- Author
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Fu, Jinyu and Lin, Jinguan
- Abstract
This paper proposes a model to further explore the effects of the quality information and variation of the underlying effects on the summary effect measure in meta-analysis. A shape parameter is used in this model to quantify the asymmetry of the effect sizes of studies that are included. Estimation of the proposed model parameters is carried out by the Bayesian MCMC method. Performances of the resultant estimates are examined in the simulations and empirical case with data obtained from a total of 22 meta-analyses taken from three different designs. A conclusion would be drawn that it is advisable to take the proposed model, when quality information becomes available, in particular with a situation where the underlying effects approximately follow a normal distribution. If, however, the quality information is absent, the skew-normal distribution for random effect model should be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
18. Evaluation of the loss of fingermark ridge clarity as a function of biological sex.
- Author
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Salmeron, Lily C. and De Alcaraz‐Fossoul, Josep
- Subjects
- *
HUMAN fingerprints , *MAGNETIC particles , *SEX (Biology) , *DATA analysis , *SECRETION - Abstract
Latent fingermark ridge patterns result from imprinting sweat secretions onto receiving surfaces. However, little is known about the loss of skin moisture between immediate consecutive depositions and its effects on the visual quality of ridges and their degradation over time. In practice, it is recurrently assumed that the first touch should contain the most residue and, therefore, display the highest ridge quality. Also, it is expected to observe a gradual decrease in the quantity of residue deposited and, in turn, in the clarity of ridges. In this study, a total of 480 fingermarks were obtained from 20 donors, 10 males and 10 females, to assess the pattern loss of ridge quality across six successive impressions in a depletion series. Black magnetic powder (BMP) was utilized to visualize and photograph fingermarks on glass microscope slides. After image standardization, Quality Scores (QS) as well as metrics on ridge clarity were obtained from the FBI's Universal Latent Workstation (ULW). Data analyses revealed a significant drop in ridge quality over the six consecutive depositions, but notably after deposition four. No differences in ridge clarity between sexes were detected within the first three depositions although an effect was noted beyond this point. ULW proved to be an excellent and sensitive tool in detecting minute changes in ridge quality across the depletion series. These results may contribute in determining the chronological order of events and support further research in estimating time‐since‐deposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
19. FCLQC: fast and concurrent lossless quality scores compressor
- Author
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Minhyeok Cho and Albert No
- Subjects
Concurrency ,FASTQ ,Lossless compressor ,Quality score ,Random access ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 - Abstract
Abstract Background Advances in sequencing technology have drastically reduced sequencing costs. As a result, the amount of sequencing data increases explosively. Since FASTQ files (standard sequencing data formats) are huge, there is a need for efficient compression of FASTQ files, especially quality scores. Several quality scores compression algorithms are recently proposed, mainly focused on lossy compression to boost the compression rate further. However, for clinical applications and archiving purposes, lossy compression cannot replace lossless compression. One of the main challenges for lossless compression is time complexity, where it takes thousands of seconds to compress a 1 GB file. Also, there are desired features for compression algorithms, such as random access. Therefore, there is a need for a fast lossless compressor with a reasonable compression rate and random access functionality. Results This paper proposes a Fast and Concurrent Lossless Quality scores Compressor (FCLQC) that supports random access and achieves a lower running time based on concurrent programming. Experimental results reveal that FCLQC is significantly faster than the baseline compressors on compression and decompression at the expense of compression ratio. Compared to LCQS (baseline quality score compression algorithm), FCLQC shows at least 31x compression speed improvement in all settings, where a performance degradation in compression ratio is up to 13.58% (8.26% on average). Compared to general-purpose compressors (such as 7-zip), FCLQC shows 3x faster compression speed while having better compression ratios, at least 2.08% (4.69% on average). Moreover, the speed of random access decompression also outperforms the others. The concurrency of FCLQC is implemented using Rust; the performance gain increases near-linearly with the number of threads. Conclusion The superiority of compression and decompression speed makes FCLQC a practical lossless quality score compressor candidate for speed-sensitive applications of DNA sequencing data. FCLQC is available at https://github.com/Minhyeok01/FCLQC and is freely available for non-commercial usage.
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
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20. Modeling and optimizing an agro-supply chain considering different quality grades and storage systems for fresh products: a Benders decomposition solution approach.
- Author
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Keshavarz-Ghorbani, Fatemeh and Pasandideh, Seyed Hamid Reza
- Abstract
This paper proposes a mathematical model in the context of agro-supply chain management, considering specific characteristics of agro-products to assist purchase, storage, and transportation decisions. In addition, a new method for determining the required quality score of different types of products is proposed based on their loss factors and purchasing costs. The model aims to minimize total cost imposed by purchasing fresh products, opening warehouses, holding inventories, operational activities, and transportation. Two sets of examples, including small and medium-sized problems, are implemented by general algebraic modeling language (GAMS) software to evaluate the model. Then, Benders decomposition (BD) algorithm is applied to tackle the complexity of solving large-sized instances. The results of both GAMS and BD are compared in terms of objective function values and computational time to demonstrate the efficiency of the BD algorithm. Finally, the model is applied in a real case study involving an apple supply chain to obtain managerial insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
21. Identification of Torquetenovirus Species in Patients with Kawasaki Disease Using a Newly Developed Species-Specific PCR Method
- Author
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Pietro Giorgio Spezia, Fabio Filippini, Yoshiro Nagao, Tetsuya Sano, Takafumi Ishida, and Fabrizio Maggi
- Subjects
anellovirus ,quantitative PCR ,next-generation sequencing ,primer set ,quality score ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 ,Chemistry ,QD1-999 - Abstract
A next-generation sequencing (NGS) study identified a very high viral load of Torquetenovirus (TTV) in KD patients. We aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a newly developed quantitative species-specific TTV-PCR (ssTTV-PCR) method to identify the etiology of KD. We applied ssTTV-PCR to samples collected from 11 KD patients and 22 matched control subjects who participated in our previous prospective study. We used the NGS dataset from the previous study to validate ssTTV-PCR. The TTV loads in whole blood and nasopharyngeal aspirates correlated highly (Spearman’s R = 0.8931, p < 0.0001, n = 33), supporting the validity of ssTTV-PCR. The ssTTV-PCR and NGS results were largely consistent. However, inconsistencies occurred when ssTTV-PCR was more sensitive than NGS, when the PCR primer sequences mismatched the viral sequences in the participants, and when the NGS quality score was low. Interpretation of NGS requires complex procedures. ssTTV-PCR is more sensitive than NGS but may fail to detect a fast-evolving TTV species. It would be prudent to update primer sets using NGS data. With this precaution, ssTTV-PCR can be used reliably in a future large-scale etiological study for KD.
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
22. CMIC: an efficient quality score compressor with random access functionality.
- Author
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Chen, Hansen, Chen, Jianhua, Lu, Zhiwen, and Wang, Rongshu
- Subjects
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NUCLEOTIDE sequencing , *COMPRESSORS , *TECHNOLOGICAL innovations , *SPEED - Abstract
Background: Over the past few decades, the emergence and maturation of new technologies have substantially reduced the cost of genome sequencing. As a result, the amount of genomic data that needs to be stored and transmitted has grown exponentially. For the standard sequencing data format, FASTQ, compression of the quality score is a key and difficult aspect of FASTQ file compression. Throughout the literature, we found that the majority of the current quality score compression methods do not support random access. Based on the above consideration, it is reasonable to investigate a lossless quality score compressor with a high compression rate, a fast compression and decompression speed, and support for random access. Results: In this paper, we propose CMIC, an adaptive and random access supported compressor for lossless compression of quality score sequences. CMIC is an acronym of the four steps (classification, mapping, indexing and compression) in the paper. Its framework consists of the following four parts: classification, mapping, indexing, and compression. The experimental results show that our compressor has good performance in terms of compression rates on all the tested datasets. The file sizes are reduced by up to 21.91% when compared with LCQS. In terms of compression speed, CMIC is better than all other compressors on most of the tested cases. In terms of random access speed, the CMIC is faster than the LCQS, which provides a random access function for compressed quality scores. Conclusions: CMIC is a compressor that is especially designed for quality score sequences, which has good performance in terms of compression rate, compression speed, decompression speed, and random access speed. The CMIC can be obtained in the following way: https://github.com/Humonex/Cmic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
23. Folate Mediated One Carbon Metabolism in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review.
- Author
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PALASKAR, SANGEETA JAYANT, MUKKANWAR, RUTUJA NARSING, and JOSHI, KALPANA
- Subjects
- *
HEAD & neck cancer , *CARBON metabolism , *SQUAMOUS cell carcinoma , *FOLIC acid , *AMINO acid metabolism , *DNA - Abstract
Introduction: Head and neck cancer (HNC) is one of the most prevalent cancers of upper aerodigestive tract, with squamous cell carcinomas accounting for the majority of cases. Vitamin B such as folate has been associated with carcinogenesis. Folate is essential for one carbon metabolism, which involves the transfer of one carbon units for Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) and Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) production, amino acid metabolism and methylation. Aim: To evaluate the association of folate mediated One carbon metabolism with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC). Materials and Methods: For this systematic review, Electronic bibliographic databases search of PubMed, Google Scholar and Scopus was done. The electronic search was performed between November 15th to November 30th, 2020 by two researchers independently. All original research, observational studies, full text articles, in which blood samples or questionnaires or both, focused on the assessment of folate mediated one carbon metabolism in HNSCC, published upto November 2020 were reviewed. Four studies published from 2005 to 2019 were included in which three studies were case-control and one study was a comparative cross-sectional study. This systematic review was carried out by two reviewers, using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) checklist and the New Castle Ottawa Scale (NOS) for quality assessment. Results: In this systematic review, total of four studies included, had 1504 HNSCC patients and 2970 Controls. One study was reported from Nigeria, one from the European countries, one from Japan, and one from the United States of America (USA). One study had a quality score of 8 whereas 3 studies had 7, considering all the four studies included are of good quality. Conclusion: Significant low levels of serum folate was present in HNSCC when compared to controls. Serum folate levels can differ due to tumor growth and subsequent metabolic changes, or they may precede and accelerate tumor progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
24. Reliability of Gradient-Echo Magnetic Resonance Elastography of Lumbar Muscles: Phantom and Clinical Studies.
- Author
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Hsieh, Tsyh-Jyi, Chou, Ming-Chung, Chen, Yi-Chu, Chou, Yi-Chen, Lin, Chien-Hung, and Chen, Clement Kuen-Huang
- Subjects
- *
PSOAS muscles , *MAGNETIC resonance , *LEG muscles , *ELASTOGRAPHY , *BONFERRONI correction , *ANALYSIS of variance - Abstract
Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) has been used to successfully characterize the mechanical behavior of healthy and diseased muscles, but no study has been performed to investigate the reliability of MRE on lumbar muscles. The objective of this work was to determine the reliability of MRE techniques on lumbar muscles in both ex vivo phantom and in vivo human studies. In this study, fresh porcine leg muscles were used in the phantom study, and 80 healthy adults (38.6 ± 11.2 years, 40 women) were recruited in the human study. Five repeated stiffness maps were obtained from both the phantom and human muscles by using a gradient-echo MRE sequence with a pneumatic vibration on a 1.5 T MR scanner. The technical failure rate, coefficient of variation (CV), and quality score were assessed to evaluate the reliability of MRE, respectively. Analysis of variance was performed to compare the stiffness between different lumbar muscles, and the difference was significant if p < 0.05 after Bonferroni correction. The results showed that the MRE achieved a zero technical failure rate and a low CV of stiffness (6.24 ± 1.41%) in the phantom muscles. However, in the human study, the MRE exhibited high CVs of stiffness (21.57%–25.24%) in the lumbar muscles, and the technical failure rate was higher in psoas muscles (60.0–66.3% in) than in paraspinal muscles (0.0–2.5%). Further, higher quality scores were noticed in paraspinal muscles (7.31–7.71) than those in psoas muscles (1.83–2.06). In conclusion, the MRE was a reliable technique to investigate the mechanical property of lumbar muscles, but it was less reliable to assess stiffness in psoas muscles than paraspinal muscles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
25. Folate Mediated One Carbon Metabolism in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review
- Author
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Sangeeta Jayant Palaskar, Rutuja Narsing Mukkanwar, and Kalpana Joshi
- Subjects
cancer metabolism ,folic acid ,new castle ottawa scale ,quality score ,Medicine - Abstract
Introduction: Head and neck cancer (HNC) is one of the most prevalent cancers of upper aerodigestive tract, with squamous cell carcinomas accounting for the majority of cases. Vitamin B such as folate has been associated with carcinogenesis. Folate is essential for one carbon metabolism, which involves the transfer of one carbon units for Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) and Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) production, amino acid metabolism and methylation. Aim: To evaluate the association of folate mediated One carbon metabolism with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC). Materials and Methods: For this systematic review, electronic bibliographic databases search of PubMed, Google Scholar and Scopus was done. The electronic search was performed between 15-30 November 2020 by two researchers independently. All original research, observational studies, full text articles, in which blood samples or questionnaires or both, focused on the assessment of folate mediated one carbon metabolism in HNSCC, published upto November 2020 were reviewed. Four studies published from 2005-2019 were included in which three studies were case-control and one study was a comparative cross-sectional study. This systematic review was carried out by two reviewers, using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) checklist and the New Castle Ottawa Scale (NOS) for quality assessment. Results: In this systematic review, total of four studies included, had 1504 HNSCC patients and 2970 controls. One study was reported from Nigeria, one from the European countries, one from Japan, and one from the United States of America (USA). One study had a quality score of 8 whereas three studies had quality score of 7, considering all the four studies included are of good quality. Conclusion: Significant low levels of serum folate was present in HNSCC when compared to controls. Serum folate levels can differ due to tumour growth and subsequent metabolic changes, or they may precede and accelerate tumour progression.
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
26. Improved Image Quality Assessment by Utilizing Pre-Trained Architecture Features with Unified Learning Mechanism
- Author
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Jihyoung Ryu
- Subjects
Inception-ResNet-v2 ,spinal network ,image quality assessment (IQA) ,no-reference (NR) ,quality score ,Technology ,Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) ,TA1-2040 ,Biology (General) ,QH301-705.5 ,Physics ,QC1-999 ,Chemistry ,QD1-999 - Abstract
The purpose of the no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to measure perceived image quality based on subjective judgments; however, due to the lack of a clean reference image, this is a complicated and unresolved challenge. Massive new IQA datasets have facilitated the creation of deep learning-based image quality measurements. We present a unique model to handle the NR-IQA challenge in this research by employing a hybrid strategy that leverages from pre-trained CNN model and the unified learning mechanism that extracts both local and non-local characteristics from the input patch. The deep analysis of the proposed framework shows that the model uses features and a mechanism that improves the monotonicity relationship between objective and subjective ratings. The intermediary goal was mapped to a quality score using a regression architecture. To extract various feature maps, a deep architecture with an adaptive receptive field was used. Analyses of this biggest NR-IQA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the suggested technique outperforms current state-of-the-art NR-IQA measures.
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- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
27. FCLQC: fast and concurrent lossless quality scores compressor.
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Cho, Minhyeok and No, Albert
- Subjects
- *
COMPRESSORS , *DNA sequencing , *CLINICAL medicine - Abstract
Background: Advances in sequencing technology have drastically reduced sequencing costs. As a result, the amount of sequencing data increases explosively. Since FASTQ files (standard sequencing data formats) are huge, there is a need for efficient compression of FASTQ files, especially quality scores. Several quality scores compression algorithms are recently proposed, mainly focused on lossy compression to boost the compression rate further. However, for clinical applications and archiving purposes, lossy compression cannot replace lossless compression. One of the main challenges for lossless compression is time complexity, where it takes thousands of seconds to compress a 1 GB file. Also, there are desired features for compression algorithms, such as random access. Therefore, there is a need for a fast lossless compressor with a reasonable compression rate and random access functionality. Results: This paper proposes a Fast and Concurrent Lossless Quality scores Compressor (FCLQC) that supports random access and achieves a lower running time based on concurrent programming. Experimental results reveal that FCLQC is significantly faster than the baseline compressors on compression and decompression at the expense of compression ratio. Compared to LCQS (baseline quality score compression algorithm), FCLQC shows at least 31x compression speed improvement in all settings, where a performance degradation in compression ratio is up to 13.58% (8.26% on average). Compared to general-purpose compressors (such as 7-zip), FCLQC shows 3x faster compression speed while having better compression ratios, at least 2.08% (4.69% on average). Moreover, the speed of random access decompression also outperforms the others. The concurrency of FCLQC is implemented using Rust; the performance gain increases near-linearly with the number of threads. Conclusion: The superiority of compression and decompression speed makes FCLQC a practical lossless quality score compressor candidate for speed-sensitive applications of DNA sequencing data. FCLQC is available at https://github.com/Minhyeok01/FCLQC and is freely available for non-commercial usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
28. Systematic review and quality evaluation of published human ingestion-time trials of blood pressure-lowering medications and their combinations.
- Author
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Hermida, Ramón C., Hermida-Ayala, Ramón G., Mojón, Artemio, Smolensky, Michael H., and Fernández, José R.
- Subjects
- *
BLOOD pressure , *CLINICAL chronobiology , *CARDIOVASCULAR diseases risk factors , *HYPERTENSION , *MEDICAL societies , *DRUGS - Abstract
The pharmacokinetics (PK) – absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination – and pharmacodynamics (PD) of hypertension medications can be significantly affected by circadian rhythms. As a consequence, the time when blood pressure (BP) lowering medications are ingested, with reference to the staging of all involved circadian rhythms modulating PK and PD, can affect their duration of action, magnitude of effect on features of the 24 h BP profile, and safety. We conducted a systematic and comprehensive review of published prospective human trials that investigated individual hypertension medications of all classes and their combinations for ingestion-time differences in BP-lowering, safety, patient adherence, and markers of hypertension-associated target organ pathology of the kidney and heart. The systematic review yielded 155 trials published between 1976 and 2020 – totaling 23,972 hypertensive individuals – that evaluated 37 different single and 14 dual-combination therapies. The vast (83.9%) majority of them reported clinically and statistically significant benefits – including enhanced reduction of asleep BP mean without induced sleep-time hypotension, reduced prevalence of the higher cardiovascular risk non-dipper 24 h BP profile, decreased incidence of adverse effects, improved kidney function, and reduced cardiac pathology – when hypertension medications are ingested at-bedtime/evening rather than upon-waking/morning. Nonetheless, the findings and conclusions of some past conducted trials are inconsistent, often due to disparities and deficiencies of the investigative protocols. Accordingly, we developed a quality assessment method based upon the eight items identified as crucial according to the recently published guidelines of the International Society for Chronobiology and the American Association for Medical Chronobiology and Chronotherapeutics for the design and conduct of human clinical trials on ingestion-time differences of hypertension medications. Among the most frequent deficiencies are: absence or miscalculation of minimum required sample size (83.2%), incorrect choice of primary BP endpoint (53.6%), and inappropriate arbitrary and unrepresentative clock hours chosen for tested treatment times (53.6%). The inability of the very small proportion (16.1%) of trials to verify the advantages of the at-bedtime/evening treatment strategy is likely explained by deficiencies of their study design and conduct. Nonetheless, regardless of the quality score of the 155 trials retrieved by our systematic review, it is most noteworthy that no single published prospective randomized trial reported significantly enhanced BP-lowering, safety, compliance, or other benefits of the unjustified by medical evidence, yet still most recommended, upon-waking/morning hypertension treatment-time scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
29. Toward a No-Reference Quality Metric for Camera-Captured Images
- Author
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Xiongkuo Min, Ke Gu, Guangtao Zhai, Yutao Liu, and Runze Hu
- Subjects
Source code ,Computer science ,business.industry ,Image quality ,media_common.quotation_subject ,ComputingMethodologies_IMAGEPROCESSINGANDCOMPUTERVISION ,Pattern recognition ,Semantics ,Computer Science Applications ,Image (mathematics) ,Human-Computer Interaction ,Support vector machine ,Control and Systems Engineering ,Metric (mathematics) ,Quality Score ,Quality (business) ,Artificial intelligence ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,business ,Software ,Information Systems ,media_common - Abstract
Existing no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) metrics are still not convincing for evaluating the quality of the camera-captured images. Toward tackling this issue, we, in this article, establish a novel NR quality metric for quantifying the quality of the camera-captured images reliably. Since the image quality is hierarchically perceived from the low-level preliminary visual perception to the high-level semantic comprehension in the human brain, in our proposed metric, we characterize the image quality by exploiting both the low-level image properties and the high-level semantics of the image. Specifically, we extract a series of low-level features to characterize the fundamental image properties, including the brightness, saturation, contrast, noiseness, sharpness, and naturalness, which are highly indicative of the camera-captured image quality. Correspondingly, the high-level features are designed to characterize the semantics of the image. The low-level and high-level perceptual features play complementary roles in measuring the image quality. To infer the image quality, we employ the support vector regression (SVR) to map all the informative features to a single quality score. Thorough tests conducted on two standard camera-captured image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quality metric in assessing the image quality and its superiority over the state-of-the-art NR quality metrics. The source code of the proposed metric for camera-captured images is released at https://github.com/YT2015?tab=repositories.
- Published
- 2023
30. CSPP-IQA: a multi-scale spatial pyramid pooling-based approach for blind image quality assessment
- Author
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Chen, Jingjing, Qin, Feng, Lu, Fangfang, Guo, Lingling, Li, Chao, Yan, Ke, and Zhou, Xiaokang
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
31. Reliability of Gradient-Echo Magnetic Resonance Elastography of Lumbar Muscles: Phantom and Clinical Studies
- Author
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Tsyh-Jyi Hsieh, Ming-Chung Chou, Yi-Chu Chen, Yi-Chen Chou, Chien-Hung Lin, and Clement Kuen-Huang Chen
- Subjects
MR elastography ,stiffness ,technical failure rate ,quality score ,muscle ,lumbar spine ,Medicine (General) ,R5-920 - Abstract
Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) has been used to successfully characterize the mechanical behavior of healthy and diseased muscles, but no study has been performed to investigate the reliability of MRE on lumbar muscles. The objective of this work was to determine the reliability of MRE techniques on lumbar muscles in both ex vivo phantom and in vivo human studies. In this study, fresh porcine leg muscles were used in the phantom study, and 80 healthy adults (38.6 ± 11.2 years, 40 women) were recruited in the human study. Five repeated stiffness maps were obtained from both the phantom and human muscles by using a gradient-echo MRE sequence with a pneumatic vibration on a 1.5 T MR scanner. The technical failure rate, coefficient of variation (CV), and quality score were assessed to evaluate the reliability of MRE, respectively. Analysis of variance was performed to compare the stiffness between different lumbar muscles, and the difference was significant if p < 0.05 after Bonferroni correction. The results showed that the MRE achieved a zero technical failure rate and a low CV of stiffness (6.24 ± 1.41%) in the phantom muscles. However, in the human study, the MRE exhibited high CVs of stiffness (21.57%–25.24%) in the lumbar muscles, and the technical failure rate was higher in psoas muscles (60.0–66.3% in) than in paraspinal muscles (0.0–2.5%). Further, higher quality scores were noticed in paraspinal muscles (7.31–7.71) than those in psoas muscles (1.83–2.06). In conclusion, the MRE was a reliable technique to investigate the mechanical property of lumbar muscles, but it was less reliable to assess stiffness in psoas muscles than paraspinal muscles.
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
32. Role of Radiomics in the Prediction of Muscle-invasive Bladder Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
- Author
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Konrad Bilski, Jakub Dobruch, Rodrigo Suarez-Ibarrola, Shahrokh F. Shariat, Christian Gratzke, Mieszko Kozikowski, Rafał Osiecki, and Arkadiusz Miernik
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Bladder cancer ,business.industry ,Muscles ,Urology ,030232 urology & nephrology ,Muscle invasive ,Context (language use) ,medicine.disease ,Sensitivity and Specificity ,Confidence interval ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Systematic review ,ROC Curve ,Urinary Bladder Neoplasms ,Radiomics ,Artificial Intelligence ,030220 oncology & carcinogenesis ,Meta-analysis ,Quality Score ,Humans ,Medicine ,Radiology ,business - Abstract
Context Radiomics is a field of science that aims to develop improved methods of medical image analysis by extracting a large number of quantitative features. New data have emerged on the successful application of radiomics and machine-learning techniques to the prediction of muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). Objective To systematically review the diagnostic performance of radiomic techniques in predicting MIBC. Evidence acquisition The literature search for relevant studies up to July 2020 was performed in the PubMed and EMBASE databases by two independent reviewers. The meta-analysis was inducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines. Inclusion criteria comprised studies that evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of radiomic models in predicting MIBC and used pathological examination as the reference standard. For bias assessment, Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2 and Radiomic Quality Score were used. Weighted summary proportions were used to calculate pooled sensitivity and specificity. A linear mixed model was implemented to calculate the hierarchical summary receiver-operating characteristic (HSROC). Meta-regression analyses were performed to explore heterogeneity. Evidence synthesis Eight studies with a total of 860 patients were included. The summary estimates for sensitivity and specificity in predicting MIBC were 82% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 77–86%) and 81% (95% CI: 76–85%), respectively. The area under HSROC was 0.88. There were no relevant heterogeneity in diagnostic accuracy measures (I2 = 33% and 41% for sensitivity and specificity, respectively), which was confirmed by a subsequent meta-regression analysis. Conclusions Radiomics shows high diagnostic performance in predicting MIBC. Despite differences in approaches, radiomic models were relatively homogeneous in their diagnostic accuracy. With further improvements, radiomics has the potential to become a useful adjunct in clinical management of bladder cancer. Patient summary Rapidly evolving imaging analysis methods using artificial intelligence algorithms, called radiomics, show high diagnostic performance in predicting muscle-invasive bladder cancer.
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- 2022
33. Assessment of treatment resistance criteria in non-invasive brain stimulation studies of schizophrenia
- Author
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Jami Kronick, Amer M. Burhan, Lena Palaniyappan, and Priyadharshini Sabesan
- Subjects
Psychosis ,medicine.medical_specialty ,medicine.medical_treatment ,Treatment resistance ,Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Physical medicine and rehabilitation ,medicine ,Humans ,Non-invasive brain stimulation ,Biological Psychiatry ,business.industry ,Non invasive ,Brain ,medicine.disease ,Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation ,030227 psychiatry ,Clinical trial ,Transcranial magnetic stimulation ,Psychiatry and Mental health ,Schizophrenia ,Brain stimulation ,Quality Score ,business ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Transcranial electrical stimulation - Abstract
Novel treatment modalities, such as non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), typically focus on patient groups that have failed multiple treatment interventions. Despite its promise, the clinical translation of NIBS in schizophrenia has been limited. One important obstacle to implementation is the inconsistent reporting of treatment resistance in the clinical trial literature contributing to heterogeneity in reported effects. In response, we develop a numerical approach to synthesize quality of assessment of Treatment-Resistant Schizophrenia (TRS) and apply this to studies investigating therapeutic response to NIBS in patients with schizophrenia. Literature search conducted through PubMed database identified 119 studies investigating Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Transcranial Electrical Stimulation in treating resistant schizophrenia symptoms. A quality score out of 11 was assigned to each study based on adherence to the international consensus guidelines for TRS developed by the Treatment Response and Resistance in Psychosis (TRRIP) group. Results revealed an overall paucity of studies with thorough assessment and/or reporting of TRS phenomenon, as evidenced by a mean quality score of 3.38/11 (SD: 1.01) for trials and 5.16/11 (SD: 1.57) for case reports, though this improved minimally since the publication of consensus criteria. Most studies considered treatment-resistance as a single dimensional construct by reporting resistance of a single symptom, and failed to establish treatment adherence, resistance time course and functional impairment. We conclude that the current NIBS literature in schizophrenia do not reflect its true effects on treatment-resistance. There is an urgent need to improve assessment and reporting standards of clinical trials that target TRS.
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- 2022
34. StereoARS: Quality Evaluation for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting With Binocular Inconsistency Detection
- Author
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Wenjun Zhang, Yabin Zhang, Weisi Lin, Qiuping Jiang, Ke Gu, Feng Shao, and Zhenyu Peng
- Subjects
Binocular rivalry ,Monocular ,Pixel ,Computer science ,business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,ComputingMethodologies_IMAGEPROCESSINGANDCOMPUTERVISION ,Stereoscopy ,law.invention ,Seam carving ,law ,Quality Score ,Retargeting ,Media Technology ,Computer vision ,Quality (business) ,Artificial intelligence ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,business ,ComputingMethodologies_COMPUTERGRAPHICS ,media_common - Abstract
Many stereoscopic image retargeting (SIR) methods have been developed for automatically and intelligently resizing stereoscopic images and we cannot always rely on time-consuming subjective user studies to validate the performance of different SIR methods. It is therefore required to design reliable objective metrics for SIR quality evaluation. This paper extends our previous 2D aspect ratio similarity (ARS) metric to a stereo 3D version termed as StereoARS where the key idea is to investigate into retargeting inconsistency between the original stereo correspondences. Our proposed StereoARS operates via two stages: monocular quality estimation and binocular inconsistency detection. In the first stage, monocular quality estimation is performed by applying a modified ARS measure on the left and right views separately to quantify the quality degradation within each monocular view. In the second stage, binocular inconsistency detection is performed in both pixel-level and grid-level to characterize the influence of binocular rivalry and stereo visual discomfort on SIR quality. In addition, we also measure to what extent the original pixel visibility relation is preserved after SIR as another binocular quality factor. Finally, these monocular and binocular quality estimates are fused to produce an overall SIR quality score. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that StereoARS achieves better alignment with human subjective ratings than the existing metrics by a large margin.
- Published
- 2022
35. Radiomics for Predicting Lung Cancer Outcomes Following Radiotherapy: A Systematic Review
- Author
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S.O.S. Osman, K.H. Brown, Conor K. McGarry, Karl T. Butterworth, Alan R. Hounsell, Suneil Jain, Philippe Lambin, Aidan J Cole, Gerard Walls, Gerard G Hanna, and R.T.H. Leijenaar
- Subjects
Diagnostic Imaging ,Oncology ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Lung Neoplasms ,Cost-Benefit Analysis ,medicine.medical_treatment ,Population ,MEDLINE ,TEXTURAL FEATURES ,SURVIVAL PREDICTION ,SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being ,RADIATION-THERAPY ,Internal medicine ,SCORE ,Humans ,Medicine ,Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging ,Prospective Studies ,Lung cancer ,Prospective cohort study ,education ,Lung ,radiotherapy ,education.field_of_study ,business.industry ,deep learning ,PATHOLOGICAL RESPONSE ,Biomarker ,medicine.disease ,PROGNOSTIC VALUE ,Clinical trial ,Radiation therapy ,lung cancer ,STAGE-I ,Systematic review ,radiomics ,MEDICAL IMAGES ,Quality Score ,TUMOR RESPONSE ,business ,CT - Abstract
Lung cancer's radiomic phenotype may potentially inform clinical decision-making with respect to radical radiotherapy. At present there are no validated biomarkers available for the individualisation of radical radiotherapy in lung cancer and the mortality rate of this disease remains the highest of all other solid tumours. MEDLINE was searched using the terms 'radiomics' and 'lung cancer' according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Met-Analyses (PRISMA) guidance. Radiomics studies were defined as those manuscripts describing the extraction and analysis of at least 10 quantifiable imaging features. Only those studies assessing disease control, survival or toxicity outcomes for patients with lung cancer following radical radiotherapy ± chemotherapy were included. Study titles and abstracts were reviewed by two independent reviewers. The Radiomics Quality Score was applied to the full text of included papers. Of 244 returned results, 44 studies met the eligibility criteria for inclusion. End points frequently reported were local (17%), regional (17%) and distant control (31%), overall survival (79%) and pulmonary toxicity (4%). Imaging features strongly associated with clinical outcomes include texture features belonging to the subclasses Gray level run length matrix, Gray level co-occurrence matrix and kurtosis. The median cohort size for model development was 100 (15-645); in the 11 studies with external validation in a separate independent population, the median cohort size was 84 (21-295). The median number of imaging features extracted was 184 (10-6538). The median Radiomics Quality Score was 11% (0-47). Patient-reported outcomes were not incorporated within any studies identified. No studies externally validated a radiomics signature in a registered prospective study. Imaging-derived indices attained through radiomic analyses could equip thoracic oncologists with biomarkers for treatment response, patterns of failure, normal tissue toxicity and survival in lung cancer. Based on routine scans, their non-invasive nature and cost-effectiveness are major advantages over conventional pathological assessment. Improved tools are required for the appraisal of radiomics studies, as significant barriers to clinical implementation remain, such as standardisation of input scan data, quality of reporting and external validation of signatures in randomised, interventional clinical trials.
- Published
- 2022
36. Managing quality of cost information in clinical costing: evidence across seven countries
- Author
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Frank Hartmann, Gerardine Doyle, Céu Mateus, Christopher S. Chapman, Nathalie Angelé-Halgand, Paolo Perego, Anja Kern, Allan Hansen, Vera Winter, Wilm Quentin, and Aziza Laguecir
- Subjects
Materiality and quality score (MAQS) ,Quality of cost information ,Public Administration ,Standardization ,business.industry ,Strategy and Management ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Healthcare ,Level of detail (writing) ,Center for Cognition, Culture and Language (CCCL) ,Tariff ,Tariff payment systems ,Health care ,Quality Score ,DRG based payment systems ,Operations management ,Quality (business) ,Relevance (information retrieval) ,Business ,Activity-based costing ,Institute for Management Research ,media_common - Abstract
PurposeThe purpose is to assess the impact of clinical costing approaches on the quality of cost information in seven countries (Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal).Design/methodology/approachCosting practices in seven countries were analysed via questionnaires, interviews and relevant published material.FindingsAlthough clinical costing is intended to support a similar range of purposes, countries display considerable diversity in their approaches to costing in terms of the level of detail contained in regulatory guidance and the percentage of providers subject to such guidance for tariff setting. Guidance in all countries involves a mix of costing methods.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors propose a two-dimensional Materiality and Quality Score (2D MAQS) of costing systems that can support the complex trade-offs in managing the quality of cost information at both policy and provider level, and between financial and clinical concerns.Originality/valueThe authors explore the trade-offs between different dimensions of the quality (accuracy, decision relevance and standardization) and the cost of collecting and analysing cost information for disparate purposes.
- Published
- 2022
37. YouTube as a source of information about COVID-19 for children: Content quality, reliability, and audience participation analysis
- Author
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Nihan Korkmaz, Suzan Yildiz, Kadriye Şahin, and Merve Azak
- Subjects
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) ,Information Dissemination ,SARS-CoV-2 ,YouTube ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Significant difference ,Applied psychology ,Video Recording ,Reproducibility of Results ,COVID-19 ,Pediatrics ,Article ,Checklist ,Information ,Quality Score ,Humans ,Quality (business) ,Christian ministry ,Child ,Psychology ,Audience participation ,Social Media ,Children ,Reliability (statistics) ,media_common - Abstract
Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the content quality, reliability, and audience participation analysis of YouTube videos as a source of information about COVID-19 for children. Design and methods This study was conducted in a descriptive design. The keywords “COVID-19, explain, children” were searched on the YouTube platform on March 17, 2021, and 294 videos were reviewed. The content of the selected videos was analyzed by 2 independent reviewers. Meet the inclusion criteria, 57 videos were evaluated according to the presenter source and the presented audience with the COVID-19 for Children Checklist (CCC), DISCERN score and the Global Quality Score (GQS). Results When the contents of 57 videos included in the study were reviewed, it was determined that 56.1% (n = 32) were informative and 43.9% (n = 25) were misleading. Kappa value among the two independent observers was 0.89. 17.5% (n = 10) of the videos scored 5 points from DISCERN and 31.6% (n = 18) scored 4 points from GQS. The mean scores of GQS, DISCERN and CCC of videos with the grouped as informative were found to be statistically higher. There was a significant difference between the DISCERN mean score of ministry/academic/hospital/physician channel videos was higher than the mean score of entertainment/individual channel videos. Conclusions This study has shown that videos explaining COVID-19 to children have high viewing rates, but also videos that are low in terms of quality and reliability. Practice implications It is thought that this study will reduce the rates of hospitalization by protecting children from COVID-19 by providing them access to healthier and more reliable sources.
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- 2022
38. Concurrent auto-regressive latent variable model for dynamic anomaly detection
- Author
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Qinqin Zhu and Bo Xu
- Subjects
0209 industrial biotechnology ,Computer science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,02 engineering and technology ,Covariance ,computer.software_genre ,Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering ,Computer Science Applications ,Consistency (database systems) ,020901 industrial engineering & automation ,020401 chemical engineering ,Autoregressive model ,Control and Systems Engineering ,Modeling and Simulation ,Quality Score ,Anomaly detection ,Quality (business) ,Data mining ,0204 chemical engineering ,Time series ,Latent variable model ,computer ,media_common - Abstract
With Industry 4.0, temporal relations between process and quality variables become increasingly complex. Some dynamic supervised learning algorithms are designed to extract their dynamic cross-relations, but auto-correlations among quality variables are rarely considered, which, however, can provide additional valuable information. This article proposes a novel dynamic auto-regressive latent variable model (DALVM) to capture both auto and cross correlations from high-dimensional time series data. DALVM is designed to maximize the covariance between current quality score and the weighted sum of past quality and process scores, and an auto-regressive exogenous inner model is developed for consistency purpose. Further, a concurrent anomaly detection system is developed based on DALVM, referred to as ConDALVM, which conducts subsequent decompositions in the extracted latent spaces. ConDALVM realizes a comprehensive monitoring for both static and dynamic anomalies in process and quality spaces. The superiority of the methods is demonstrated through a numerical simulation and two industrial processes.
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- 2021
39. Quality improvement initiative in paediatric echocardiography laboratory in a low- to middle-income country
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Babar Hasan, Salima Ashiq Ali, Shazia Mohsin, Mishaal Ather, Zain Adil Shabbir, Nadeem Aslam, Farah Khalid, Devyani Chowdhury, and Shaan Adil Shabbir
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Heart Defects, Congenital ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Quality management ,business.industry ,Health Policy ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Sedation ,Psychological intervention ,Quality Improvement ,Middle income country ,Echocardiography ,Emergency medicine ,Quality Score ,medicine ,Humans ,Quality (business) ,Metric (unit) ,medicine.symptom ,Child ,Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine ,Adverse effect ,business ,media_common - Abstract
Aims To determine the impact of a quality improvement (QI) initiative in the area of paediatric echocardiography (echo) in a low- to middle-income country (LMIC). Care for patients with congenital heart disease is challenging, especially in LMICs. Collaborative learning through QI projects is imperative to ensure improvement in delivery processes leading to better patient outcomes. Methods and results This QI initiative was taken by a team consisting of physicians and sonographers. Problems were identified, a key driver diagram (KDD) was created, and simple process re-engineering was done using interventions based on the KDD. Metrics (five process and one outcome) were assessed to determine the effectiveness of the QI project. The process metrics assessed were comprehensiveness of exam, timeliness of reporting, diagnostic accuracy and error, and sedation adverse event rates of transthoracic echocardiograms, while a novel comprehensive echo laboratory (lab) quality score was developed as an outcome metric. Data were collected quarterly and analysed in the post-implementation phase. Significant improvement was seen in comprehensive mean score (20.4–29.7), timeliness (40–95%), and diagnostic accuracy rate (91–100%), while a decrease was seen in the diagnostic error rate (7.5–3.5%) and the sedation adverse event rate (6.8–0%), pre- vs. post-implementation. The overall quality outcome score improved from 7 to 19 and the echo lab was able to achieve adequate quality. Conclusion This QI initiative produced improvement in all the processes, and the overall quality of the echo lab without any substantial increase in resources or cost.
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- 2021
40. EvalDNA: a machine learning-based tool for the comprehensive evaluation of mammalian genome assembly quality
- Author
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Kelvin H. Lee and Madolyn L. MacDonald
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Genome assembly quality ,Computer science ,QH301-705.5 ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics ,R858-859.7 ,Sequence assembly ,Bacterial genome size ,Machine learning ,computer.software_genre ,Biochemistry ,Genome ,Chinese hamster ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Chromosome (genetic algorithm) ,Structural Biology ,Animals ,Humans ,Quality (business) ,Biology (General) ,Molecular Biology ,030304 developmental biology ,media_common ,0303 health sciences ,Genome assembly ,business.industry ,Applied Mathematics ,High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing ,CHO cells ,Genomics ,Sequence Analysis, DNA ,Computer Science Applications ,Random forest ,Quality Score ,Artificial intelligence ,business ,computer ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Software ,Genome, Bacterial ,Reference genome - Abstract
Background To select the most complete, continuous, and accurate assembly for an organism of interest, comprehensive quality assessment of assemblies is necessary. We present a novel tool, called Evaluation of De Novo Assemblies (EvalDNA), which uses supervised machine learning for the quality scoring of genome assemblies and does not require an existing reference genome for accuracy assessment. Results EvalDNA calculates a list of quality metrics from an assembled sequence and applies a model created from supervised machine learning methods to integrate various metrics into a comprehensive quality score. A well-tested, accurate model for scoring mammalian genome sequences is provided as part of EvalDNA. This random forest regression model evaluates an assembled sequence based on continuity, completeness, and accuracy, and was able to explain 86% of the variation in reference-based quality scores within the testing data. EvalDNA was applied to human chromosome 14 assemblies from the GAGE study to rank genome assemblers and to compare EvalDNA to two other quality evaluation tools. In addition, EvalDNA was used to evaluate several genome assemblies of the Chinese hamster genome to help establish a better reference genome for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing community. EvalDNA was also used to assess more recent human assemblies from the QUAST-LG study completed in 2018, and its ability to score bacterial genomes was examined through application on bacterial assemblies from the GAGE-B study. Conclusions EvalDNA enables scientists to easily identify the best available genome assembly for their organism of interest without requiring a reference assembly. EvalDNA sets itself apart from other quality assessment tools by producing a quality score that enables direct comparison among assemblies from different species.
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- 2021
41. Blind Quality Evaluator of Tone-Mapped HDR and Multi-Exposure Fused Images for Electronic Display
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Min Hu, Ping An, Liquan Shen, Fuji Ren, and Mingxing Jiang
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Image quality ,Computer science ,Dynamic range ,business.industry ,Photography ,Pattern recognition ,Tone mapping ,Quality Score ,Media Technology ,Segmentation ,Artificial intelligence ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,Entropy (energy dispersal) ,business ,High dynamic range - Abstract
The problem of reproducing high dynamic range (HDR) images on electronic display and photography with restricted dynamic range has gained a lot of interest in the consumer electronics community. There exist various approaches to this issue, e.g., tone mapping operators (TMOs) and multi-exposure fusion algorithms (MEFs). Many existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods have been proposed to compare images of quality degradation generated by TMOs/MEFs. Although promising performances have been achieved, they seldom consider local specific artifacts difference (i.e., abnormal exposure and color cast) related with the TMOs/MEFs. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a Blind Quality Evaluator of Tone-Mapped HDR and Multi-Exposure Fused Images (BQE-TM/MEFI). First, two purpose-designed segment models are utilized to distinguish well-exposedness dense patches (WEDPes) and non-WEDPes, color cast patches (CCPes) and non-CCPes respectively. Second, multiple quality-perception features are extracted to measure local artifacts: 1) structure and sharpness features from WEDPes, 2) saturation features from non-CCPes, and 3) edge structure features. Then, three new low-complexity regional features (over-exposure ratio, entropy and color confidence index) are calculated based on over-exposure segmentation model. Finally, all extracted features are aggregated into a machine-learning regression model to pool a quality score. The simplicity and good performance of the proposed method makes it suitable for electronic displays and other consumer electronics.
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- 2021
42. Evaluation of the Reliability, Utility, and Quality of the Information in Transoral Endoscopic Thyroidectomy Vestibular Approach Videos Shared on Open Access Video Sharing Platform YouTube
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Mehmet Uludag, Bulent Citgez, Nurcihan Aygun, and Banu Yigit
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medicine.medical_specialty ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Video Recording ,computer.software_genre ,Access to Information ,03 medical and health sciences ,Upload ,0302 clinical medicine ,medicine ,Humans ,Quality (business) ,Reliability (statistics) ,media_common ,Multimedia ,Information Dissemination ,business.industry ,Reproducibility of Results ,Transparency (behavior) ,Popularity ,Surgery ,030220 oncology & carcinogenesis ,Quality Score ,Thyroidectomy ,Information source ,030211 gastroenterology & hepatology ,The Internet ,business ,Social Media ,computer - Abstract
Background: The internet is a broadly preferred source of information both by patients and medical professionals. YouTube™ is a significant information source that may be a useful tool to inform the public, medical students, and residents, and may improve the learning experience if used adequately. In this study, we aimed to estimate the quality and accuracy of videos regarding Transoral Endoscopic Thyroidectomy Vestibular Approach (TOETVA) aired on YouTube, which is the most popular video platform of the online world. Materials and Methods: We evaluated the first 50 videos, returned by the YouTube research engine, in reply to the "TOETVA" keyword. The popularity of the videos was assessed using the video power index (VPI). The educational quality, accuracy, and transparency of the content regarding TOETVA were estimated by using the DISCERN questionnaire score (DISCERNqs), Journal of American Medical Association benchmark criteria (JAMABC), and global quality score (GQSc). The technical quality was ranked through TOETVA Scoring System (TOETVA-SS) by a TOETVA practicioning endocrine surgeon. Results: The content of the videos were about surgical technique with a rate of 68%. According to sources, videos uploaded by physicians had significantly higher DISCERNqs, JAMABC, GQSc, and TOETVA-SS scores. Unlike, videos uploaded by physicians had a lower VPI than videos uploaded by nonmedical sources. The videos of surgical technique had significantly higher DISCERNqs, JAMABC, GQSc, and TOETVA-SS scores. Surgical technique videos also had higher VPI scores than "information about disease or surgery" videos. Also, negative correlations were found between the VPI (popularity index) and educational value (GQSc), transparency (JAMABC), and technical quality (TOETVA-SS) scores. Conclusions: The data acquired from YouTube videos regarding TOETVA is of below expected quality and reliability. Nevertheless, the educative potential of the online video platform, YouTube, cannot be underestimated.
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- 2021
43. Do we know enough to quantify the impact of urban green spaces on mortality? An analysis of the current knowledge
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C. Bertrand, S. Médina, and M. Pascal
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business.industry ,Parks, Recreational ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,General Medicine ,Health benefits ,Confidence interval ,Preliminary analysis ,Human health ,Environmental health ,Quality Score ,Humans ,Medicine ,France ,Health Impact Assessment ,Cities ,Vegetation Index ,business ,Health impact assessment ,Cardiovascular mortality - Abstract
Objectives The addition of green spaces (GS) in cities is perceived as an efficient solution to combat climate change and biodiversity loss while also improving human health. Quantitative health impact assessment (QHIA) is a powerful tool to assess the health benefits of GS and support policy-making decisions. In France, a preliminary analysis of the literature led to the decision of developing guidance for QHIA applied to GS and mortality. This paper focuses on the choice of exposure-response functions (ERF) for those QHIA. Study design Literature review and analysis of the key steps of QHIA. Methods Articles providing ERF for all-cause, cardiovascular and respiratory mortality in relation to GS were identified through a literature review and ranked based on a quality score. ERF from the articles with the highest scores was pooled in meta-analyses. Results In total, 13 ERF were selected for all-cause mortality, 10 for cardiovascular mortality and 5 for respiratory mortality. Meta-risk for a 0.1 increase in the normalised differential vegetation index were, 0.96 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.94; 0.97), 0.98 (95% CI 0.96; 0.99) and 0.97 (95% CI 0.92; 1.02) for all-cause, cardiovascular and respiratory mortality, respectively. Conclusions While current knowledge makes it possible to use QHIA on GS and mortality, interdisciplinary research is still needed to clarify the shape of the relationship and its temporality and to assess exposure in a meaningful way for decision-making.
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- 2021
44. Evaluation of a new frequency–volume chart for children with primary monosymptomatic nocturnal enuresis: a prospective, comparative study
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Xiao-Jie Peng, Dong-Jie Wang, Ying Bao, Mei-Lin Ma, Rui Fu, Xiaowen Wang, Fei Zhao, Cuihua Liu, Li Jiang, Yan-Yan Jin, Qian Shen, Lu Cao, Qiuxia Chen, Qing Yang, Huan-Dan Yang, Rui-Feng Zhang, Hong Xu, Fang-Fang Liang, Jiangwei Luan, Yang Dong, Jian-Jiang Zhang, Xiao-Yu Shen, Haidong Fu, Guanghai Cao, Wei Zhou, Ying-Jie Li, Jingjing Wang, De-Xuan Wang, Jianhua Mao, and Hui-Mei Huang
- Subjects
Response rate (survey) ,China ,medicine.medical_specialty ,business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Urination ,FEV1/FVC ratio ,Chart ,Enuresis ,Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health ,Quality Score ,Physical therapy ,Secondary Outcome Measure ,Humans ,Medicine ,Prospective Studies ,medicine.symptom ,Child ,business ,Desmopressin ,Nocturnal Enuresis ,media_common ,medicine.drug - Abstract
INTRODUCTION To improve compliance with voiding diaries in children with primary monosymptomatic nocturnal enuresis (PMNE), a new modified 3-day weekend frequency-volume chart (FVC) was designed, and the compliance and validity of this modified FVC was evaluated by comparing with the International Children's Continence Society (ICCS) recommended voiding diary. METHODS A total of 1200 patients with PMNE were enrolled in the study from 13 centers in China and were randomly assigned to record this modified FVC or the ICCS-recommended voiding diary. The primary outcome measure was the compliance, assessed by comparing the completing index and the quality score of diaries between two groups. The secondary outcome measure was the validity, evaluated by comparing the constituent of subtypes, micturition parameters and response rate to desmopressin. RESULTS Among the 1200 participants enrolled in the study, 447 patients completed the ICCS-recommended voiding diary and 469 completed the modified diary. The diurnal completing index and the quality score of the modified FVC group were better than those of the ICCS group. In addition, there was no significant difference between these two groups in the subtype classification, or in the response rate to desmopressin. CONCLUSIONS The modified FVC could be applied to obtain the voiding characteristics of children with PMNE as the ICCS-recommended voiding diary does and offers a reasonable and better choice for children with PMNE from the unselected population in the future.
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- 2021
45. Mobile health technologies for the monitoring of menstrual cycle: A systematic review of online stores in Brazil
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Cristine Homsi Jorge Ferreira, Kari Bø, Lucas Ogura Dantas, Patricia Driusso, Cristiano Carvalho, Caroline C. Pena, and Carolina Carreira Breda
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business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Mobile apps ,Obstetrics and Gynecology ,Health technology ,medicine.disease ,Mobile Applications ,Telemedicine ,Rating scale ,Menstrual cycle disorder ,mental disorders ,Quality Score ,Humans ,Medicine ,Female ,Medical emergency ,Android (operating system) ,business ,Delivery of Health Care ,mHealth ,Brazil ,Menstrual Cycle ,Menstrual cycle ,media_common - Abstract
Aim To perform a systematic review of available mHealth apps for menstrual cycle monitoring in Brazil. Methods A search for menstrual cycle mHealth apps from the Google Play Store and AppStore in Brazil was performed by two independent reviewers on October 2020, and the quality of eligible mHealth apps was assessed using the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS). Results Our review identified 2400 potentially relevant mHealth apps, of which 56 were eligible for inclusion. The majority of the apps offered tools to track menstruation symptoms (63%) and educational content for users (32%). The mean ( ±SD) MARS app quality score for the 28 evaluated apps in Android was 3.5 ± 0.6 on a 0-5 scale. For the 28 evaluated apps in iOS, the mean app quality score was 3.8 ± 0.4. Most of the included apps, for both systems, scored average for credibility, user interface, and engagement. Conclusion The majority of available tools in Brazil are of moderate quality and limited functionality for menstrual cycle monitoring. This study highlights the top three mHealth apps available on each online store for individuals seeking menstrual cycle monitoring options.
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- 2021
46. The Use of Expert Elicitation among Computational Modeling Studies in Health Research: A Systematic Review
- Author
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Luz María Sánchez-Romero, Ritesh Mistry, Aylin Sertkaya, K. Michael Cummings, David T. Levy, Marie Knoll, Alex Liber, Rafael Meza, Nargiz Travis, David Mendez, Clifford E Douglas, and Christopher J. Cadham
- Subjects
Computational model ,Information retrieval ,Computer science ,Process (engineering) ,Cost-Benefit Analysis ,Health Policy ,Best practice ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Expert elicitation ,Article ,Research Design ,Quality Score ,Humans ,Computer Simulation ,Quality (business) ,Indeterminate ,Citation ,Expert Testimony ,Probability ,media_common - Abstract
Background Expert elicitation (EE) has been used across disciplines to estimate input parameters for computational modeling research when information is sparse or conflictual. Objectives We conducted a systematic review to compare EE methods used to generate model input parameters in health research. Data Sources PubMed and Web of Science. Study Eligibility Modeling studies that reported the use of EE as the source for model input probabilities were included if they were published in English before June 2021 and reported health outcomes. Data Abstraction and Synthesis Studies were classified as “formal” EE methods if they explicitly reported details of their elicitation process. Those that stated use of expert opinion but provided limited information were classified as “indeterminate” methods. In both groups, we abstracted citation details, study design, modeling methodology, a description of elicited parameters, and elicitation methods. Comparisons were made between elicitation methods. Study Appraisal Studies that conducted a formal EE were appraised on the reporting quality of the EE. Quality appraisal was not conducted for studies of indeterminate methods. Results The search identified 1520 articles, of which 152 were included. Of the included studies, 40 were classified as formal EE and 112 as indeterminate methods. Most studies were cost-effectiveness analyses (77.6%). Forty-seven indeterminate method studies provided no information on methods for generating estimates. Among formal EEs, the average reporting quality score was 9 out of 16. Limitations Elicitations on nonhealth topics and those reported in the gray literature were not included. Conclusions We found poor reporting of EE methods used in modeling studies, making it difficult to discern meaningful differences in approaches. Improved quality standards for EEs would improve the validity and replicability of computational models. Highlights We find extensive use of expert elicitation for the development of model input parameters, but most studies do not provide adequate details of their elicitation methods. Lack of reporting hinders greater discussion of the merits and challenges of using expert elicitation for model input parameter development. There is a need to establish expert elicitation best practices and reporting guidelines.
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- 2021
47. Comparison of non-coplanar optimization of static beams and arc trajectories for intensity-modulated treatments of meningioma cases
- Author
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Tiago Ventura, Joana Dias, Brigida Costa Ferreira, Humberto Rocha, and Maria do Carmo Lopes
- Subjects
Mathematical optimization ,Computer science ,Biomedical Engineering ,Biophysics ,VMAT ,Plan (drawing) ,Scientific Paper ,Arc trajectory ,Arc (geometry) ,Meningeal Neoplasms ,Beam angle optimization ,Humans ,Non-coplanar ,Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging ,Instrumentation ,Retrospective Studies ,Radiological and Ultrasound Technology ,Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-Assisted ,Radiotherapy Dosage ,Trajectory optimization ,Intensity (physics) ,Quality Score ,Beam direction ,Radiotherapy, Intensity-Modulated ,Meningioma ,Non coplanar ,Beam (structure) ,Biotechnology - Abstract
Two methods for non-coplanar beam direction optimization, one for static beams and another for arc trajectories, were proposed for intracranial tumours. The results of the beam angle optimizations were compared with the beam directions used in the clinical plans. Ten meningioma cases already treated were selected for this retrospective planning study. Algorithms for non-coplanar beam angle optimization (BAO) and arc trajectory optimization (ATO) were used to generate the corresponding plans. A plan quality score, calculated by a graphical method for plan assessment and comparison, was used to guide the beam angle optimization process. For each patient, the clinical plans (CLIN), created with the static beam orientations used for treatment, and coplanar VMAT approximated plans (VMAT) were also generated. To make fair plan comparisons, all plan optimizations were performed in an automated multicriteria calculation engine and the dosimetric plan quality was assessed. BAO and ATO plans presented, on average, moderate global plan score improvements over VMAT and CLIN plans. Nevertheless, while BAO and CLIN plans assured a more efficient OARs sparing, the ATO and VMAT plans presented a higher coverage and conformity of the PTV. Globally, all plans presented high-quality dose distributions. No statistically significant quality differences were found, on average, between BAO, ATO and CLIN plans. However, automated plan solution optimizations (BAO or ATO) may improve plan generation efficiency and standardization. In some individual patients, plan quality improvements were achieved with ATO plans, demonstrating the possible benefits of this automated optimized delivery technique. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13246-021-01061-8.
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- 2021
48. Association of Smoking Cessation and Intentions to Quit: Role of Occupational Status, Health Professional’s Support, and Perceived Risk
- Author
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Alice Mannocci, Leda Semyonov, Rosella Saulle, Nevena Skroza, Concetta Potenza, Ersilia Tolino, Antonio Boccia, and Giuseppe La Torre
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Pathology ,education.field_of_study ,business.industry ,Population ,Alternative medicine ,Case-control study ,medicine.disease ,Dermatology ,Meta-analysis ,Quality Score ,medicine ,Observational study ,business ,Association (psychology) ,education ,Acne - Abstract
Objectives: Cigarette smoking continues to be the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the United States. Tobacco related mortality has promoted a massive effort to understand and enhance smoking cessation efforts. In this study, we examine the role of different factors on intentions to quit smoking. Methods: Data is taken from Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2012. A total of 1745 national representative samples of U.S adults, meeting our research conditions, were included in this study. Results: Multivariate statistical analysis methods were used which showed that employed participants were 6 times more likely to have intentions to quit than participants with other occupational statuses were. Participants who received support sometimes from health professionals were 9 times more likely to have intention to quit smoking as compared to those who never received support from health professionals. In addition, race (Hispanic), and age group (35-39 years) are significantly associated with intentions to quit smoking. Perceived personal risk of cancer, perceived compared risk of cancer, and family history of cancer were not significantly associated with intentions to quit smoking. Conclusion: Our study suggests that age, race, occupational status, and help from health professionals are viable intervention targets for smoking cessation interventions. As a key role can be played by health professionals in smoking cessation interventions, future work should evaluate the extent to which health professionals can play a role in smoking cessation intervention. Smokers should be encouraged to maintain smoke free environments in their homes and offices, by health care providers leading to the protection of non-smokers, lesser convenience for smoking, decreased cigarette consumption, and smoking cues over time.
- Published
- 2022
49. Is social media reliable as a source of information on Peyronie’s disease treatment?
- Author
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Ismail Selvi and Numan Baydilli
- Subjects
030219 obstetrics & reproductive medicine ,business.industry ,Urology ,Information sharing ,media_common.quotation_subject ,030232 urology & nephrology ,MEDLINE ,medicine.disease ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Quality Score ,medicine ,Professional association ,Social media ,Quality (business) ,Medical emergency ,Board certification ,Peyronie's disease ,business ,media_common - Abstract
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.Although YouTube video is one of the most widely used and easily accessible information sharing sources, its widespread use can carry the risk of spreading misleading and unreliable information. We aimed to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, quality, and content of the most viewed YouTube videos related to Peyronie’s disease treatment. The keywords of “penile curvature”, “penile deformity”, “bent penis” “curved penis”, and “Peyronie’s disease” were searched on YouTube. Among 700 YouTube videos, 267 videos were included in the study. They were categorized by two independent urologists with board certification as accurate information (n = 138, 51.7%) or inaccurate information (n = 129, 48.3%). Accurate videos contained information about the treatment of Peyronie’s disease with proven scientific accuracy according to the current guidelines, whereas inaccurate videos contained scientifically unproven or incorrect information and recommendations not in the guidelines. A 5-point modified DISCERN scale and Global Quality Score were used for reliability and quality assessment. Although the accurate information group had a significantly higher DISCERN Score (3, IQR = 3–4 vs. 1, IQR = 1–2, p
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- 2022
50. Reference ranges for fetal brain structures using magnetic resonance imaging: systematic review
- Author
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Massimo Caulo, Anthony Odibo, Daniele Di Mascio, Gregor Kasprian, Lucia Manganaro, Giuseppe Rizzo, D Buca, Ilan E. Timor-Tritsch, Maria Elena Flacco, Asma Khalil, F. D'Antonio, M Liberati, and Antonella Giancotti
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy ,MEDLINE ,CINAHL ,Fetal brain ,Pregnancy ,Reference Values ,Medicine ,Humans ,Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging ,Medical physics ,Ultrasonography ,Radiological and Ultrasound Technology ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,business.industry ,Obstetrics and Gynecology ,Brain ,Magnetic resonance imaging ,General Medicine ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Regression ,central nervous system ,charts ,fetal brain ,growth ,magnetic resonance imaging ,Reproductive Medicine ,Individual study ,Sample size determination ,Quality Score ,Female ,business - Abstract
Objective\ud To evaluate the methodology of studies reporting reference ranges for fetal brain structures on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).\ud \ud Methods\ud MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL and the Web of Science databases were searched electronically up to 31 December 2020 to identify studies investigating biometry and growth of the fetal brain and reporting reference ranges for brain structures using MRI. The primary aim was to evaluate the methodology of these studies. A list of 26 quality criteria divided into three domains, including ‘study design’, ‘statistical and reporting methods’ and ‘specific aspects relevant to MRI’, was developed and applied to evaluate the methodological appropriateness of each of the included studies. The overall quality score of a study, ranging between 0 and 26, was defined as the sum of scores awarded for each quality criterion and expressed as a percentage (the lower the percentage, the higher the risk of bias).\ud \ud Results\ud Fifteen studies were included in this systematic review. The overall mean quality score of the studies evaluated was 48.7%. When focusing on each domain, the mean quality score was 42.0% for ‘study design’, 59.4% for ‘statistical and reporting methods’ and 33.3% for ‘specific aspects relevant to MRI’. For the ‘study design’ domain, sample size calculation and consecutive enrolment of women were the items found to be at the highest risk of bias. For the ‘statistical and reporting methods’ domain, the presence of regression equations for mean and SD for each measurement, the number of measurements taken for each variable and the presence of postnatal assessment information were the items found to be at the highest risk of bias. For the ‘specific aspects relevant to MRI’ domain, whole fetal brain assessment was not performed in any of the included studies and was therefore considered to be the item at the highest risk of bias.\ud \ud Conclusions\ud Most of the previously published studies reporting fetal brain reference ranges on MRI are highly heterogeneous and have low-to-moderate quality in terms of methodology, which is similar to the findings reported for ultrasound studies.
- Published
- 2022
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