The value of SPECT/CT imaging of lacrimal glands as a means of assessing the activity of Graves' orbitopathy.

Background: Graves' orbitopathy (GO) is an autoimmune disease with mechanical impairment of orbital muscles and lacrimal gland dysfunction. The frequently used methods of assessing GO activity include Clinical Activity Score (CAS), CT, and MRI. These approaches are mainly associated with orbital muscles; however, there are not many studies that focus on the lacrimal gland inflammation of GO patients.

Preliminary evidence of the association between DNAm and orbital volumetry in GO.

Background: The pathogenesis underlying the alterations of orbital architecture in Graves' orbitopathy (GO) is not yet fully understood. The present study aimed to investigate the association of DNA methylation in peripheral blood and orbital volumetry in Chinese patients with GO.

Methods: A total of 35 GO subjects (70 orbits) were subjected to computed tomography (CT) scan.

DesnowNet: Context-Aware Deep Network for Snow Removal.

Existing learning-based atmospheric particle-removal approaches such as those used for rainy and hazy images are designed with strong assumptions regarding spatial frequency, trajectory, and translucency. However, the removal of snow particles is more complicated because they possess additional attributes of particle size and shape, and these attributes may vary within a single image. Currently, hand-crafted features are still the mainstream for snow removal, making significant generalization difficult to achieve.

Clustered-Dot Screen Design for Digital Multitoning.

Digital multitoning is an extension of halftoning for rendering more than two tones at each pixel for higher image quality. Although a lot of effort has been put in generating dispersed dots previously, the blue-noise feature can hardly be achieved for those printers utilizing the electrophotography (EP) process to avoid the physically unstable isolated dots. To overcome this issue, Chandu et al.

Dot-Diffused Halftoning With Improved Homogeneity.

Compared with the error diffusion, dot diffusion provides an additional pixel-level parallelism for digital halftoning. However, even though its periodic and blocking artifacts had been eased by the previous works, it was still far from satisfactory in terms of the blue noise spectrum perspective. In this paper, we strengthen the relation among the pixel locations of the same processing order by an iterative halftoning method, and the results demonstrate a significant improvement.

Tone-Replacement Error Diffusion for Multitoning.

Error diffusion is an efficient halftone method for mainly being applied on printers. The promising high image quality and processing efficiency endorse it as a popular and competitive candidate in halftoning and multitoning applications. The multitoning is an extension of halftoning, adopting more than two-tone levels for the improvement of the similarity between an original image and the converted image.

Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms of NLRP12 Gene and Association with Non-specific Digestive Disorder in Rabbit.

The NLRP12 (NLR family, pyrin domain containing 12) serves as a suppressor factor in the inflammatory response and protects the host against inflammation-induced damage. In the present study, we aimed to study the polymorphisms of NLRP12 gene and its association with susceptibility to non-specific digestive disorder (NSDD) in rabbits. We re-sequenced the entire coding region of the rabbit NLRP12 gene and detected a total of 19 SNPs containing 14 synonymous and five non-synonymous variations.

Inverse halftoning with context driven prediction.

A prior work proposed by Chung-Wu considered an edge-based lookup table to obtain good inversed image quality, yet it suffers from some drawbacks in terms of image quality, memory consumption, and complexity. In this correspondence, an improved scheme is proposed to deal with these issues.

Efficient halftoning based on multiple look-up tables.

Look-up table (LUT) halftoning is an efficient way to construct halftone images and approximately simulate the dot distribution of the learned halftone image set. In this paper, a general mechanism named multiple look-up table (MLUT) halftoning is proposed to generate the halftones of direct binary search (DBS), whereas the high efficient characteristic of the LUT is still preserved. In the MLUT, the standard deviation is adopted as an important feature to classify various tables.

Improved block truncation coding using optimized dot diffusion.

Block truncation coding (BTC) has been considered a highly efficient compression technique for decades. However, its inherent artifacts, blocking effect and false contour, caused by low bit rate configuration are the key problems. To deal with these, an improved BTC, namely dot-diffused BTC (DDBTC), is proposed in this paper.

Rapid Genotyping of MSTN Gene Polymorphism Using High-resolution Melting for Association Study in Rabbits.

The myostatin (MSTN) gene, as a negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth, has been proposed to be associated with production traits in farm animals. In the present study, a T/C variant at -125 bp (relative to ATG start codon) of 5'regulatory region of rabbit MSTN was identified by direct sequencing. Two hundred and twenty two rabbits, which were randomly sampled from 3 breeds (Ira rabbits, Champagne rabbits and Tianfu black rabbits), were genotyped by high-resolution melting (HRM).

New class tiling design for dot-diffused halftoning.

In this paper, a new class tiling designed dot diffusion along with the optimized class matrix and diffused matrix are proposed. The result of this method presents a nearly periodic-free halftone when compared to the former schemes. Formerly, the class matrix of the dot diffusion is duplicated and orthogonally tiled to fulfill the entire image for further thresholding and quantized-error diffusion, which accompanies subsequent periodic artifacts.

High capacity data hiding for error-diffused block truncation coding.

Block truncation coding (BTC) is an efficient compression technique with extremely low computational complexity. However, the blocking and false contour effects are two major deficiencies in BTC which cause severe perceptual artifacts. The former scheme, error-diffused BTC (EDBTC), can significantly improve the above issues through the visual low-pass compensation on the bitmap, which thus widens its possible application market, yet the corresponding security issue may limit its value.

Oriented modulation for watermarking in direct binary search halftone images.

In this paper, a halftoning-based watermarking method is presented. This method enables high pixel-depth watermark embedding, while maintaining high image quality. This technique is capable of embedding watermarks with pixel depths up to 3 bits without causing prominent degradation to the image quality.

Impact of the lips for biometrics.

In this paper, the impact of the lips for identity recognition is investigated. In fact, it is a challenging issue for identity recognition solely by the lips. In the first stage of the proposed system, a fast box filtering is proposed to generate a noise-free source with high processing efficiency.

MicroRNA-449a acts as a tumor suppressor in human bladder cancer through the regulation of pocket proteins.

Frequent downregulation of microRNA-449a (miR-449a) was detected in 14 human bladder cancer tissues. The restoration of miR-449a inhibited cell growth and induced G1-phase arrest in T24 and 5637 human bladder cancer cells. CDK6 and CDC25a were downregulated after miR-449a treatment, resulting in the functional accumulation of the pocket proteins Rb and p130.

Halftone image classification using LMS algorithm and naive Bayes.

Former research on inverse halftoning most focus on developing a general-purpose method for all types of halftone patterns, such as error diffusion, ordered dithering, etc., while fail to consider the natural discrepancies among various halftoning methods. To achieve optimal image quality for each halftoning method, the classification of halftone images is highly demanded.

Halftone-image security improving using overall minimal-error searching.

For image-based data hiding, it is difficult to achieve good image quality when high embedding capacity and 100% data extraction are also demanded. In this study, the proposed method, namely, overall minimal-error searching (OMES) is developed to meet the aforementioned requirements. Moreover, the concept of secret sharing is also adopted to distribute watermarks into multiple halftone images, and the embedded information can only be extracted when all of the marked images are gathered.

Inverse halftoning based on the bayesian theorem.

This study proposes a method which can generate high quality inverse halftone images from halftone images. This method can be employed prior to any signal processing over a halftone image or the inverse halftoning used in JBIG2. The proposed method utilizes the least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm to establish a relationship between the current processing position and its corresponding neighboring positions in each type of halftone image, including direct binary search, error diffusion, dot diffusion, and ordered dithering.

Joint compression/watermarking scheme using majority-parity guidance and halftoning-based block truncation coding.

In this paper, a watermarking scheme, called majority-parity-guided error-diffused block truncation coding (MPG-EDBTC), is proposed to achieve high image quality and embedding capacity. EDBTC exploits the error diffusion to effectively reduce blocking effect and false contour which inherently exhibit in traditional BTC. In addition, the coding efficiency is significantly improved by replacing high and low means evaluation with extreme values substitution.

Improved dot diffusion by diffused matrix and class matrix co-optimization.

Dot diffusion is an efficient approach which utilizes concepts of block-wise and parallel-oriented processing to generate halftones. However, the block-wise nature of processing reduces image quality much more significantly as compared to error diffusion. In this work, four types of filters with various sizes are employed in co-optimization procedures with class matrices of size 8 n 8 and 16 x 16 to improve the image quality.

[Analysis of personality traits on felons].

Objective: To study the personality traits of felons and their relevant factors, and to recommend for criminal psychological correction and crime prevention.

Methods: Using Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to test felons in initial and middle stage of sentence serving.

Results: The differences of MMPI factors between felon group and normal group were statistically significant (P < 0.