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Background:  With the widespread use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), there is an urgent need for a rapid assay to exclude clinically relevant plasma levels. Accurate and rapid determination of DOAC levels would guide medical decision-making to (1) determine the potential contribution of the DOAC to spontaneous or trauma-induced hemorrhage; (2) identify appropriate candidates for reversal, or (3) optimize the timing of urgent surgery or intervention., Methods and Results:  The DOAC Dipstick test uses a disposable strip to identify factor Xa- or thrombin inhibitors in a urine sample. Based on the results of a systematic literature search followed by an analysis of a simple pooling of five retrieved clinical studies, the test strip has a high sensitivity and an acceptably high negative predictive value when compared with levels measured with liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry or calibrated chromogenic assays to reliably exclude plasma DOAC concentrations ≥30 ng/mL., Conclusion:  Based on these data, a simple algorithm is proposed to enhance medical decision-making in acute care indications useful primarily in hospitals not having readily available quantitative tests and 24/7. This algorithm not only determines DOAC exposure but also differentiates between factor Xa and thrombin inhibitors to better guide clinical management., Competing Interests: J.H. is general manager and founder of DOASENSE GmbH, J.D. is CEO of Qualiblood SA. All other authors declare no conflicts of interest., (Thieme. All rights reserved.)

Introduction: Pen-on-paper pain drawing are an easily administered self-reported measure that enables patients to report the spatial distribution of their pain. The digitalization of pain drawings has facilitated the extraction of quantitative metrics, such as pain extent and location. This study aimed to assess the reliability of pen-on-paper pain drawing analysis conducted by an automated pain-spot recognition algorithm using various scanning procedures., Methods: One hundred pain drawings, completed by patients experiencing somatic pain, were repeatedly scanned using diverse technologies and devices. Seven datasets were created, enabling reliability assessments including inter-device, inter-scanner, inter-mobile, inter-software, intra- and inter-operator. Subsequently, the automated pain-spot recognition algorithm estimated pain extent and location values for each digitized pain drawing. The relative reliability of pain extent analysis was determined using the intraclass correlation coefficient, while absolute reliability was evaluated through the standard error of measurement and minimum detectable change. The reliability of pain location analysis was computed using the Jaccard similarity index., Results: The reliability analysis of pain extent consistently yielded intraclass correlation coefficient values above 0.90 for all scanning procedures, with standard error of measurement ranging from 0.03% to 0.13% and minimum detectable change from 0.08% to 0.38%. The mean Jaccard index scores across all dataset comparisons exceeded 0.90., Conclusions: The analysis of pen-on-paper pain drawings demonstrated excellent reliability, suggesting that the automated pain-spot recognition algorithm is unaffected by scanning procedures. These findings support the algorithm's applicability in both research and clinical practice., Competing Interests: Disclosures and Acknowledgments No conflict of interest exists in the submission of this manuscript, and the manuscript is approved by all authors for publication., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: In the healthcare domain today, despite the substantial adoption of electronic health information systems, a significant proportion of medical reports still exist in paper-based formats. As a result, there is a significant demand for the digitization of information from these paper-based reports. However, the digitization of paper-based laboratory reports into a structured data format can be challenging due to their non-standard layouts, which includes various data types such as text, numeric values, reference ranges, and units. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a highly scalable and lightweight technique that can effectively identify and extract information from laboratory test reports and convert them into a structured data format for downstream tasks., Methods: We developed an end-to-end Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based pipeline for extracting information from paper-based laboratory test reports. Our pipeline consists of two main modules: an optical character recognition (OCR) module and an information extraction (IE) module. The OCR module is applied to locate and identify text from scanned laboratory test reports using state-of-the-art OCR algorithms. The IE module is then used to extract meaningful information from the OCR results to form digitalized tables of the test reports. The IE module consists of five sub-modules, which are time detection, headline position, line normalization, Named Entity Recognition (NER) with a Conditional Random Fields (CRF)-based method, and step detection for multi-column. Finally, we evaluated the performance of the proposed pipeline on 153 laboratory test reports collected from Peking University First Hospital (PKU1)., Results: In the OCR module, we evaluate the accuracy of text detection and recognition results at three different levels and achieved an averaged accuracy of 0.93. In the IE module, we extracted four laboratory test entities, including test item name, test result, test unit, and reference value range. The overall F1 score is 0.86 on the 153 laboratory test reports collected from PKU1. With a single CPU, the average inference time of each report is only 0.78 s., Conclusion: In this study, we developed a practical lightweight pipeline to digitalize and extract information from paper-based laboratory test reports in diverse types and with different layouts that can be adopted in real clinical environments with the lowest possible computing resources requirements. The high evaluation performance on the real-world hospital dataset validated the feasibility of the proposed pipeline., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Systematic reviews rely on identification of studies, initially through electronic searches yielding potentially thousands of studies, and then reviewer-led screening studies for inclusion. This standard method is time- and resource-intensive. We designed and applied an algorithm written in Python involving computer-aided identification of keywords within each paper for an exemplar systematic review of arm impairment after stroke. The standard method involved reading each abstract searching for these keywords. We compared the methods in terms of accuracy in identification of keywords, abstracts' eligibility, and time taken to make a decision about eligibility. For external validation, we adapted the algorithm for a different systematic review, and compared eligible studies using the algorithm with those included in that review. For the exemplar systematic review, the algorithm failed on 72 out of 2,789 documents retrieved (2.6%). Both methods identified the same 610 studies for inclusion. Based on a sample of 21 randomly selected abstracts, the standard screening took 1.58 ± 0.26 min per abstract. Computer output screening took 0.43 ± 0.14 min per abstract. The mean difference between the two methods was 1.15 min ( P  < 0.0001), saving 73% per abstract. For the other systematic review, use of the algorithm resulted in the same studies being identified. One study was excluded based on the interpretation of the comparison intervention. Our purpose-built software was an accurate and significantly time-saving method for identifying eligible abstracts for inclusion in systematic reviews. This novel method could be adapted for other systematic reviews in future for the benefit of authors, reviewers and editors., (Copyright © 2023 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

The amount of available scientific literature is increasing, and studies have proposed various methods for evaluating document-document similarity in order to cluster or classify documents for science mapping and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we propose hybrid methods for bibliographic coupling (BC) and linear evaluation of text or content similarity: We combined BC with BM25, Cosine, and PMRA to compare their performances with single methods in paper recommendation tasks using TREC Genomics Track 2005datasets. For paper recommendation, BC and text-based methods complement each other, and hybrid methods were better than single methods. The combinations of BC with BM25 and BC with Cosine performed better than BC with PMRA. The performances were best when the weights of BM25, Cosine, and PMRA were 0.025, 0.2, and 0.2, respectively, in hybrid methods. For paper recommendation, the combinations of BC with text-based methods were better than BC or text-based methods used alone. The choice of method should depend on the actual data and research needs. In the future, the underlying reasons for the differences in performance and the specific part or type of information they complement in text clustering or recommendation need to be examined.

In recent years, the wide application of deep neural network models has brought serious risks of intellectual property rights infringement. Embedding a watermark in a network model is an effective solution to protect intellectual property rights. Although researchers have proposed schemes to add watermarks to models, they cannot prevent attackers from adding and overwriting original information, and embedding rates cannot be quantified. Therefore, aiming at these problems, this paper designs a high embedding rate and tamper-proof watermarking scheme. We employ wet paper coding (WPC), in which important parameters are regarded as wet blocks and the remaining unimportant parameters are regarded as dry blocks in the model. To obtain the important parameters more easily, we propose an optimized probabilistic selection strategy (OPSS). OPSS defines the unimportant-level function and sets the importance threshold to select the important parameter positions and to ensure that the original function is not affected after the model parameters are changed. We regard important parameters as an unmodifiable part, and only modify the part that includes the unimportant parameters. We selected the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet datasets to test the performance of the model after adding a watermark and to analyze the fidelity, robustness, embedding rate, and comparison schemes of the model. Our experiment shows that the proposed scheme has high fidelity and strong robustness along with a high embedding rate and the ability to prevent malicious tampering.

Today, computer graphics and graphic image processing techniques have been widely used in daily life and industrial production. Due to the development of computers, computer graphics has brought more convenience to our daily life. In order to give full play to the value of computers, this paper takes the Hakka paper-cut art with local characteristics as the starting point, first of all its development history, artistic characteristics, compositional forms, expression techniques, cultural connotations, Hakka paper-cut patterns, and the symbolic meaning of folk customs, and then we design a visualization system for the paper-cut works of Gannan Hakka based on computer graphics. In addition, the system provides a solution for the integration of Gannan Hakka paper-cut art and Jiangxi native product packaging design and provides a reference for the theory and practice of modern native product packaging design., Competing Interests: The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Xingping Li.)

Introduction: Participation from racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials has been burdened by issues surrounding mistrust and access to healthcare. There is emerging use of machine learning (ML) in clinical trial recruitment and evaluation. However, for individuals from groups who are recipients of societal biases, utilisation of ML can lead to the creation and use of biased algorithms. To minimise bias, the design of equitable ML tools that advance health equity could be guided by community engagement processes. The Howard University Partnership with the National Institutes of Health for Equitable Clinical Trial Participation for Racial/Ethnic Communities Underrepresented in Research (HoPeNET) seeks to create an ML-based infrastructure from community advisory board (CAB) experiences to enhance participation of African-Americans/Blacks in clinical trials., Methods and Analysis: This triphased cross-sectional study (24 months, n=56) will create a CAB of community members and research investigators. The three phases of the study include: (1) identification of perceived barriers/facilitators to clinical trial engagement through qualitative/quantitative methods and systems-based model building participation; (2) operation of CAB meetings and (3) development of a predictive ML tool and outcome evaluation. Identified predictors from the participant-derived systems-based map will be used for the ML tool development., Ethics and Dissemination: We anticipate minimum risk for participants. Institutional review board approval and informed consent has been obtained and patient confidentiality ensured., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

In the last 15 years, the segmentation of vessels in retinal images has become an intensively researched problem in medical imaging, with hundreds of algorithms published. One of the de facto benchmarking data sets of vessel segmentation techniques is the DRIVE data set. Since DRIVE contains a predefined split of training and test images, the published performance results of the various segmentation techniques should provide a reliable ranking of the algorithms. Including more than 100 papers in the study, we performed a detailed numerical analysis of the coherence of the published performance scores. We found inconsistencies in the reported scores related to the use of the field of view (FoV), which has a significant impact on the performance scores. We attempted to eliminate the biases using numerical techniques to provide a more realistic picture of the state of the art. Based on the results, we have formulated several findings, most notably: despite the well-defined test set of DRIVE, most rankings in published papers are based on non-comparable figures; in contrast to the near-perfect accuracy scores reported in the literature, the highest accuracy score achieved to date is 0.9582 in the FoV region, which is 1% higher than that of human annotators. The methods we have developed for identifying and eliminating the evaluation biases can be easily applied to other domains where similar problems may arise., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Conservative activism around the purported influence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) on K-12 education has swept the country in recent years. While others have documented the sources of these messages, how school districts have responded to these critiques has not yet been investigated. Drawing on research on how social media algorithms elevate polarizing information and activate emotions, we analyze public social media posts on school/district Facebook pages mentioning the phrase "critical race" to examine how educators address the claim of teaching CRT and how the local community responds. We use sentiment analysis to examine the emotions of these posts and how they are distributed across states. We also explore the sentiment of subsequent community reactions reflected in the comments of each post, including negative emotions such as anger and fear, and positive emotions such as trust. This study has implications for how school districts can help to stop cycles of fearful rhetoric and engage with stakeholders in ways that unite a school community around shared priorities.

With the development of computer technology, automatic test paper generation systems have gradually become an effective tool for detecting and maintaining national machine security and protecting the rights and interests of workers. This article achieved multi-level oral scores for different types of questions through online scoring using artificial neural networks in recent years. Based on its specific situation and evaluation index requirements, an analysis module that is reasonable, efficient, and in line with the hierarchical structure and module requirements of national conditions has been designed to complete the research on automatic test paper generation technology, in order to help better manage and allocate human resources and improve production efficiency. Afterwards, this article conducted functional testing on the technical module. The test results showed that the scalability of the system was over 82%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this work is to develop a method to solve the ill-posed inverse problem of accelerated image reconstruction while correcting forward model imperfections in the context of subject motion during MRI examinations., Methods: The proposed solution uses a Bayesian framework based on deep generative diffusion models to jointly estimate a motion-free image and rigid motion estimates from subsampled and motion-corrupt two-dimensional (2D) k-space data., Results: We demonstrate the ability to reconstruct motion-free images from accelerated two-dimensional (2D) Cartesian and non-Cartesian scans without any external reference signal. We show that our method improves over existing correction techniques on both simulated and prospectively accelerated data., Conclusion: We propose a flexible framework for retrospective motion correction of accelerated MRI based on deep generative diffusion models, with potential application to other forward model corruptions., (© 2024 The Authors. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.)

Purpose: In MRI, motion artifacts can significantly degrade image quality. Motion artifact correction methods using deep neural networks usually required extensive training on large datasets, making them time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this paper, an unsupervised deep learning-based motion artifact correction method for turbo-spin echo MRI is proposed using the deep image prior framework., Theory and Methods: The proposed approach takes advantage of the high impedance to motion artifacts offered by the neural network parameterization to remove motion artifacts in MR images. The framework consists of parameterization of MR image, automatic spatial transformation, and motion simulation model. The proposed method synthesizes motion-corrupted images from the motion-corrected images generated by the convolutional neural network, where an optimization process minimizes the objective function between the synthesized images and the acquired images., Results: In the simulation study of 280 slices from 14 subjects, the proposed method showed a significant increase in the averaged structural similarity index measure by 0.2737 in individual coil images and by 0.4550 in the root-sum-of-square images. In addition, the ablation study demonstrated the effectiveness of each proposed component in correcting motion artifacts compared to the corrected images produced by the baseline method. The experiments on real motion dataset has shown its clinical potential., Conclusion: The proposed method exhibited significant quantitative and qualitative improvements in correcting rigid and in-plane motion artifacts in MR images acquired using turbo spin-echo sequence., (© 2024 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.)

Subject motion is a long-standing problem of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can seriously deteriorate the image quality. Various prospective and retrospective methods have been proposed for MRI motion correction, among which deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art motion correction performance. This survey paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of deep learning-based MRI motion correction methods. Neural networks used for motion artifacts reduction and motion estimation in the image domain or frequency domain are detailed. Furthermore, besides motion-corrected MRI reconstruction, how estimated motion is applied in other downstream tasks is briefly introduced, aiming to strengthen the interaction between different research areas. Finally, we identify current limitations and point out future directions of deep learning-based MRI motion correction., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology (ESMRMB).)

Hidden Markov models (HMMs), which can characterize dynamic heterogeneity, are valuable tools for analyzing longitudinal data. The order of HMMs (ie, the number of hidden states) is typically assumed to be known or predetermined by some model selection criterion in conventional analysis. As prior information about the order frequently lacks, pairwise comparisons under criterion-based methods become computationally expensive with the model space growing. A few studies have conducted order selection and parameter estimation simultaneously, but they only considered homogeneous parametric instances. This study proposes a Bayesian double penalization (BDP) procedure for simultaneous order selection and parameter estimation of heterogeneous semiparametric HMMs. To overcome the difficulties in updating the order, we create a brand-new Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm coupled with an effective adjust-bound reversible jump strategy. Simulation results reveal that the proposed BDP procedure performs well in estimation and works noticeably better than the conventional criterion-based approaches. Application of the suggested method to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative research further supports its usefulness., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The gig economy and gig work have grown quickly in recent years and have drawn much attention from researchers in different fields. Because the platform mediated gig economy is a relatively new phenomenon, studies have produced a range of interesting findings; of interest here are the socio‐technical issues that this work has surfaced. This systematic literature review (SLR) provides a snapshot of a range of socio‐technical issues raised in the last 12 years of literature focused on the platform mediated gig economy. Based on a sample of 515 papers gathered from nine databases in multiple disciplines, 132 were coded that specifically studied the gig economy, gig work, and gig workers. Three main socio‐technical themes were identified: (1) the digital workplace, which includes information infrastructure and digital labor that are related to the nature of gig work and the user agency; (2) algorithmic management, which includes platform governance, performance management, information asymmetry, power asymmetry, and system manipulation, relying on a diverse set of technological tools including algorithms and big data analytics; (3) ethical design, as a relevant value set that gig workers expect from the platform, which includes trust, fairness, equality, privacy, and transparency. A social informatics perspective is used to rethink the relationship between gig workers and platforms, extract the socio‐technical issues noted in prior research, and discuss the underexplored aspects of the platform mediated gig economy. The results draw attention to understudied yet critically important socio‐technical issues in the gig economy that suggest short‐ and long‐term opportunities for future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of technology has resulted in a surge in the volume of digital data available. This situation creates a problem for users who need assistance in locating specific information within this massive collection of data, resulting in a time-consuming process. Automatic Text Summarization systems have been developed as a more effective solution than traditional summarization techniques to address this problem and improve user access to relevant information. It is well known that researchers in the health sciences find it difficult to keep up with the latest literature due to their busy schedules. This study aims to produce comprehensive abstracts of Turkish-language scientific papers in the field of health sciences. Although abstracts of scientific papers are already available, more thorough summaries are still needed. To the best of our knowledge, no previous attempt has been made to automatically summarize Turkish language health science papers. For this purpose, a dataset of 105 Turkish papers was collected from DergiPark. Term Frequency, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, Latent Semantic Analysis, TextRank, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithms were chosen as extractive text summarization methods due to their frequent use in this field. The performance of the text summarization models was evaluated using recall, precision, and F-score metrics, and the algorithms gave satisfactory results for Turkish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature screening is the process of identifying all relevant records from a pool of candidate paper records in systematic review, meta-analysis, and other research synthesis tasks. This process is time consuming, expensive, and prone to human error. Screening prioritization methods attempt to help reviewers identify most relevant records while only screening a proportion of candidate records with high priority. In previous studies, screening prioritization is often referred to as automatic literature screening or automatic literature identification. Numerous screening prioritization methods have been proposed in recent years. However, there is a lack of screening prioritization methods with reliable performance. Our objective is to develop a screening prioritization algorithm with reliable performance for practical use, for example, an algorithm that guarantees an 80% chance of identifying at least 80 % of the relevant records. Based on a target-based method proposed in Cormack and Grossman, we propose a screening prioritization algorithm using sampling with replacement. The algorithm is a wrapper algorithm that can work with any current screening prioritization algorithm to guarantee the performance. We prove, with mathematics and probability theory, that the algorithm guarantees the performance. We also run numeric experiments to test the performance of our algorithm when applied in practice. The numeric experiment results show this algorithm achieve reliable performance under different circumstances. The proposed screening prioritization algorithm can be reliably used in real world research synthesis tasks., (© 2024 The Authors. Research Synthesis Methods published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Analysing data from educational tests allows governments to make decisions for improving the quality of life of individuals in a society. One of the key responsibilities of statisticians is to develop models that provide decision-makers with pertinent information about the latent process that educational tests seek to represent. Mixtures of t $$ t $$ factor analysers (MtFA) have emerged as a powerful device for model-based clustering and classification of high-dimensional data containing one or several groups of observations with fatter tails or anomalous outliers. This paper considers an extension of MtFA for robust clustering of censored data, referred to as the MtFAC model, by incorporating external covariates. The enhanced flexibility of including covariates in MtFAC enables cluster-specific multivariate regression analysis of dependent variables with censored responses arising from upper and/or lower detection limits of experimental equipment. An alternating expectation conditional maximization (AECM) algorithm is developed for maximum likelihood estimation of the proposed model. Two simulation experiments are conducted to examine the effectiveness of the techniques presented. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is applied to Peruvian data from the 2007 Early Grade Reading Assessment, and the results obtained from the analysis provide new insights regarding the reading skills of Peruvian students., (© 2023 British Psychological Society.)

Interaction between proteins and nucleic acids is crucial to many cellular activities. Accurately detecting nucleic acid-binding residues (NABRs) in proteins can help researchers better understand the interaction mechanism between proteins and nucleic acids. Structure-based methods can generally make more accurate predictions than sequence-based methods. However, the existing structure-based methods are sensitive to protein conformational changes, causing limited generalizability. More effective and robust approaches should be further explored. In this study, we propose iNucRes-ASSH to identify nucleic acid-binding residues with a self-attention-based structure-sequence hybrid neural network. It improves the generalizability and robustness of NABR prediction from two levels: residue representation and prediction model. Experimental results show that iNucRes-ASSH can predict the nucleic acid-binding residues even when the experimentally validated structures are unavailable and outperforms five competing methods on a recent benchmark dataset and a widely used test dataset., (© 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Traditional federated learning faces challenges such as high communication costs, structural heterogeneity,and insufficient privacy protection. To address these issues, this paper proposes a federated learning evolutionary algorithm that applies sparse evolutionary training algorithm to reduce communication costs and integrates local differential privacy protection for participants’ privacy. Additionally, it utilizes the NSGA-Ⅲ algorithm to optimize the network structure and sparsity of the global federated learning model, adjusting the relationship between data availability and privacy protection. This achieves a balance between the effectiveness, communication costs, and privacy of the global federated learning model. Experimental results under unstable communication environments demonstrate that, on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, compared to the solution with the lowest error rate using the FNSGA-Ⅲ algorithm, the proposed algorithm improves communication efficiency by 57. 19% and 52. 17%, respectively. The participants also achieved（3. 46, 10-4） and（6. 52, 10-4）-local differential privacy. This algorithm can effectively reduce communication costs and protect participant privacy without significantly compromising the accuracy of the global model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing focus on applying deep learning methods to electrocardiograms (ECGs), with recent studies showing that neural networks (NNs) can predict future heart failure or atrial fibrillation from the ECG alone. However, large numbers of ECGs are needed to train NNs, and many ECGs are currently only in paper format, which are not suitable for NN training. We developed a fully-automated online ECG digitisation tool to convert scanned paper ECGs into digital signals. Using automated horizontal and vertical anchor point detection, the algorithm automatically segments the ECG image into separate images for the 12 leads and a dynamical morphological algorithm is then applied to extract the signal of interest. We then validated the performance of the algorithm on 515 digital ECGs, of which 45 were printed, scanned and redigitised. The automated digitisation tool achieved 99.0% correlation between the digitised signals and the ground truth ECG (n = 515 standard 3-by-4 ECGs) after excluding ECGs with overlap of lead signals. Without exclusion, the performance of average correlation was from 90 to 97% across the leads on all 3-by-4 ECGs. There was a 97% correlation for 12-by-1 and 3-by-1 ECG formats after excluding ECGs with overlap of lead signals. Without exclusion, the average correlation of some leads in 12-by-1 ECGs was 60–70% and the average correlation of 3-by-1 ECGs achieved 80–90%. ECGs that were printed, scanned, and redigitised, our tool achieved 96% correlation with the original signals. We have developed and validated a fully-automated, user-friendly, online ECG digitisation tool. Unlike other available tools, this does not require any manual segmentation of ECG signals. Our tool can facilitate the rapid and automated digitisation of large repositories of paper ECGs to allow them to be used for deep learning projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a special issue of the journal Algorithms, featuring selected papers from the journal's editorial board members from 2022 and 2023. The issue includes 16 research papers covering a range of topics such as game theory, fault detection in cellular networks, optimization algorithms, machine learning, cryptocurrency trading, and more. Each paper presents its own unique research findings and methodologies. The issue aims to showcase the diverse research interests and expertise of the journal's editorial board members. [Extracted from the article]

Background: Radiation dose reduction has been the focus of many research activities in x-ray CT. Various approaches were taken to minimize the dose to patients, ranging from the optimization of clinical protocols, refinement of the scanner hardware design, and development of advanced reconstruction algorithms. Although significant progress has been made, more advancements in this area are needed to minimize the radiation risks to patients., Purpose: Reconstruction algorithm-based dose reduction approaches focus mainly on the suppression of noise in the reconstructed images while preserving detailed anatomical structures. Such an approach effectively produces synthesized high-dose images (SHD) from the data acquired with low-dose scans. A representative example is the model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR). Despite its widespread deployment, its full adoption in a clinical environment is often limited by an undesirable image texture. Recent studies have shown that deep learning image reconstruction (DLIR) can overcome this shortcoming. However, the limited availability of high-quality clinical images for training and validation is often the bottleneck for its development. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate SHD with existing low-dose clinical datasets that overcomes both the noise texture issue and the data availability issue., Methods: Our approach is based on the observation that noise in the image can be effectively reduced by performing image processing orthogonal to the imaging plane. This process essentially creates an equivalent thick-slice image (TSI), and the characteristics of TSI depend on the nature of the image processing. An advantage of this approach is its potential to reduce impact on the noise texture. The resulting image, however, is likely corrupted by the anatomical structural degradation due to partial volume effects. Careful examination has shown that the differential signal between the original and the processed image contains sufficient information to identify regions where anatomical structures are modified. The differential signal, unfortunately, contains significant noise and has to be removed. The noise removal can be accomplished by performing iterative noise reduction to preserve structural information. The processed differential signal is subsequently subtracted from TSI to arrive at SHD., Results: The algorithm was evaluated extensively with phantom and clinical datasets. For better visual inspection, difference images between the original and SHD were generated and carefully examined. Negligible residual structure could be observed. In addition to the qualitative inspection, quantitative analyses were performed on clinical images in terms of the CT number consistency and the noise reduction characteristics. Results indicate that no CT number bias is introduced by the proposed algorithm. In addition, noise reduction capability is consistent across different patient anatomical regions. Further, simulated water phantom scans were utilized in the generation of the noise power spectrum (NPS) to demonstrate the preservation of the noise-texture., Conclusions: We present a method to generate SHD datasets from regularly acquired low-dose CT scans. Images produced with the proposed approach exhibit excellent noise-reduction with the desired noise-texture. Extensive clinical and phantom studies have demonstrated the efficacy and robustness of our approach. Potential limitations of the current implementation are discussed and further research topics are outlined., (© 2023 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.)

The development and maintenance of the item bank is a critical element to a CD-CAT (cognitive diagnostic computerized adaptive testing; Cheng, 2009) system. For continuous testing, it is important to replenish the item bank with new items that have been calibrated. This requires pretesting to estimate the parameters of the new items. For CD-CAT, the structural parameters that need to be estimated include both item parameters and attribute vectors. In this paper, we propose three residual-statistic-based methods: RMA, ROEM, and RMEM, to estimate the attribute vectors and item parameters all together for new items. An iterative two-step online calibration procedure is developed to estimate the attribute vectors for the new items in the first step, and estimate the item parameters in the second step, then proceed iteratively until convergence is reached. An extensive simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the three proposed methods and compare them with two existing methods, namely the Joint Estimation Algorithm (JEA; Chen & Xin, 2011) and Single Item Estimation (SIE; Chen et al., 2015) methods. In terms of the estimation of the attribute vector, the RMEM method performs the best in most of the cases. In terms of item parameter estimation, RMEM still has some advantages, and RMA outperforms JEA and SIE. Taken together, results suggest that the RMEM is superior to the other methods, especially when sample size is relatively small. A real-data example is provided to illustrate the application of RMEM in practice., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Image processing (IP) in digital radiography has been steadily refined to improve image quality. Adaptable settings enable users to adjust systems to their specific requirements. This prospective, analytical study aimed to investigate the influence of different IP settings and dose reductions on image quality. Included were 20 cadaveric equine limb specimens distal to the metacarpophalangeal and metatarsophalangeal joints. Images were processed with the Dynamic Visualization II system (Fujifilm) using five different IP settings including multiobjective frequency processing, flexible noise control (FNC), and virtual grid processing (VGP). Seven criteria were assessed by three veterinary radiology Diplomates and one veterinary radiology resident in a blinded study using a scoring system. Algorithm comparison was performed using an absolute visual grading analysis. The rating of bone structures was improved by VGP at full dose (P < .05; AUC VGC  = 0.45). Überschwinger artifact perception was enhanced by VGP (P < .001; AUC VGC  = 0.66), whereas image noise perception was suppressed by FNC (P < .001; AUC VGC  = 0.29). The ratings of bone structures were improved by FNC at 50% dose (P < .05; AUC VGC  = 0.44), and 25% dose (P < .001; AUC VGC  = 0.32), and clinically acceptable image quality was maintained at 50% dose (mean rating 2.16; 95.8% ratings sufficient or better). The favored IP setting varied among observers, with higher agreement at lower dose levels. These findings supported using individualized IP settings based on the radiologist's preferences and situational image requirements, rather than using default settings., (© 2023 The Authors. Veterinary Radiology & Ultrasound published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American College of Veterinary Radiology.)