Phytoliths can be an important source of information related to environmental and climatic change, as well as to ancient plant use by humans, particularly within the disciplines of paleoecology and archaeology. Currently, phytolith identification and categorization is performed manually by researchers, a time-consuming task liable to misclassifications. The automated classification of phytoliths would allow the standardization of identification processes, avoiding possible biases related to the classification capability of researchers. This paper presents a comparative analysis of six classification methods, using digitized microscopic images to examine the efficacy of different quantitative approaches for characterizing phytoliths. A comprehensive experiment performed on images of 429 phytoliths demonstrated that the automatic phytolith classification is a promising area of research that will help researchers to invest time more efficiently and improve their recognition accuracy rate.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1431927620024629 | DOI Listing |
Mycoses
January 2025
Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán, Mexico City, Mexico.
Background: Accurate identification of Fusarium species requires molecular identification. Treating fusariosis is challenging due to widespread antifungal resistance, high rates of treatment failure, and insufficient information relating antifungal susceptibility to the clinical outcome. Despite recent outbreaks in Mexico, there is limited information on epidemiology and antifungal susceptibility testing (AST).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFood Environ Virol
January 2025
Institute of Human Virology, Department of Pathogen Biology and Biosecurity, and Key Laboratory of Tropical Disease Control of Ministry of Education, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, 510080, China.
Invasive alien species such as freshwater snails have significantly affected the food, environment, and the health of humans and animals, which have unfortunately received insufficient attention. To facilitate the study of viromes in snail species, we compared the enrichment effect of cesium chloride (CsCl) and sucrose density gradient ultracentrifugations in the recovery of diverse viruses in Pomacea canaliculata and Achatina fulica. First, we showed that CsCl-based ultracentrifugation enriched more virus contigs and reduced the nucleic acid background of the Pomacea canaliculata and was thus beneficial for virus recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizophr Bull
January 2025
Orygen, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia.
Background: Although attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is known to be common in psychotic disorders, reported prevalence rates vary widely, with limited understanding of how different factors (eg, assessment methods, geographical region) may be associated with this variation. The aim was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine the prevalence of ADHD in psychotic disorders and factors associated with the variability in reported rates.
Study Design: Searches were conducted in MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Scopus in May 2023.
NPJ Biofilms Microbiomes
January 2025
A*STAR Skin Research Labs (A*SRL), Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) & Skin Research Institute of Singapore (SRIS), Singapore, Republic of Singapore.
Sebaceous free fatty acids are metabolized by multiple skin microbes into bioactive lipid mediators termed oxylipins. This study investigated correlations between skin oxylipins and microbes on the superficial skin of pre-pubescent children (N = 36) and adults (N = 100), including pre- (N = 25) and post-menopausal females (N = 25). Lipidomics and metagenomics revealed that Malassezia restricta positively correlated with the oxylipin 9,10-DiHOME on adult skin and negatively correlated with its precursor, 9,10-EpOME, on pre-pubescent skin.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
College of Ocean and Meteorology & South China Sea Institute of Marine Meteorology, Guangdong Ocean University, 524088, Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China.
Accurate classification of tropical cyclone (TC) tracks is essential for evaluating and mitigating the potential disaster risks associated with TCs. In this study, three commonly used methods (K-means, Fuzzy C-Means, and Self-Organizing Maps) are assessed for clustering historical TC tracks that originated in the South China Sea from 1949 to 2023. The results show that the K-means method performs the best, while the Fuzzy C-Means and Self-Organizing Maps methods are also viable alternatives.
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