Semi-Automatic Calibration Method for a Bed-Monitoring System Using Infrared Image Depth Sensors.

With the aging of society, the number of fall accidents has increased in hospitals and care facilities, and some accidents have happened around beds. To help prevent accidents, mats and clip sensors have been used in these facilities but they can be invasive, and their purpose may be misinterpreted. In recent years, research has been conducted using an infrared-image depth sensor as a bed-monitoring system for detecting a patient getting up, exiting the bed, and/or falling; however, some manual calibration was required initially to set up the sensor in each instance.

Detection of pancreatic tumor cell nuclei via a hyperspectral analysis of pathological slides based on stain spectra.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides more detailed information than red-green-blue (RGB) imaging, and therefore has potential applications in computer-aided pathological diagnosis. This study aimed to develop a pattern recognition method based on HSI, called hyperspectral analysis of pathological slides based on stain spectrum (HAPSS), to detect cancers in hematoxylin and eosin-stained pathological slides of pancreatic tumors. The samples, comprising hyperspectral cubes of 420-750 nm, were harvested for HSI and tissue microarray (TMA) analysis.

Feature analysis of cell nuclear chromatin distribution in support of cervical cytology.

Cytology, a method of estimating cancer or cellular atypia from microscopic images of scraped specimens, is used according to the pathologist's experience to diagnose cases based on the degree of structural changes and atypia. Several methods of cell feature quantification, including nuclear size, nuclear shape, cytoplasm size, and chromatin texture, have been studied. We focus on chromatin distribution in the cell nucleus and propose new feature values that indicate the chromatin complexity, spreading, and bias, including convex hull ratio on multiple binary images, intensity distribution from the gravity center, and tangential component intensity and texture biases.

Proteinase inhibitor from ginkgo seeds is a member of the plant nonspecific lipid transfer protein gene family.

A 9-kD proteinase inhibitor was isolated from the seeds of ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) and purified to homogeneity. This protein was revealed to partial-noncompetitively inhibit the aspartic acid proteinase pepsin and the cysteine proteinase papain (inhibition constant = 10(-5)-10(-4) m). The cDNA of the inhibitor was revealed to contain a 357-bp open reading frame encoding a 119-amino acid protein with a potential signal peptide (27 residues), indicating that this protein is synthesized as a preprotein and secreted outside the cells.