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Saliva has emerged as an efficient screening sample for early stage detection of oral cancer (OC) owing to non-invasiveness coupled with high sensitivity and specificity. Although spectroscopic characterization of saliva in oral potentially malignant disorders OPMDs) and OC is extensively studied, its potential as imaging biomarker is sparsely explored. Further, the literature on crystalline pattern of saliva for other diseases or different physiological conditions is mostly qualitative. This paper proposed multifractal based methodology to quantitatively study alteration of the salivary fern pattern in different OPMDs and OC in relation to normal counterpart. The fern pattern of dried saliva is captured by stereo-zoom microscope in reflective mode and an image dataset is developed. We resort to two dimensional multi-fractal detrended fluctuation analysis (2d MFDFA) to elucidate the complexity and heterogeneity of these micro-structured patterns. Existence of multifractal nature embedded in salivary fern has been validated for the first time. Long range spatial correlation is found to be the origin of multifractality. Variation in multi-scale self-similarity of irregular pattern in different study groups is demonstrated by four features extracted from MFDFA. Statistical analysis shows discriminating nature of these features for combinations of pairwise interclass classification. This study sheds light on acceptability of microscopic images of arborized saliva in fast and cost effective screening of different oral lesions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bright-field microscopy (BFM) encrypts the optical transillumination profile of the transmitted light attenuated by the complex micro-structural tissue convolutions, manifested by the dense and compact regions of the specimen under examination. The connotations of idiosyncratic tissue interaction dynamics with the onset of pre-cancerous activity are encoded in the BFM acquired oral mucosa histopathological images (OMHI). In the present study, our analysis is focused on the sub-epithelium region of the oral mucosa, which has high clinical significance but sparsely explored in the literature from the textural domain. Histopathology being the gold-standard technique till date, we have used the light microscopic histopathology images for tissue characterization. The tissue-index transmission patches (TITP) from the sub-epithelium region are cropped under the guidance of oral onco-pathologists. After that, the TITPs are characterized for its multi-scale spatial-deformation dynamics, while keeping the intrinsic anisotropic geometry, and local contour connectivity within tolerable limits. With recent studies exhibiting multifractal's potency in diverse biological system analysis, here, we exploit the 2D multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (2D-MFDFA) on TITPs for exploring a discriminative set of multifractal signatures for healthy, oral potentially malignant disorders and oral cancer tissue sample. The predictive model's competency is validated on an experimentally collected corpus of TITP samples and substantiated via confirmatory data statistics and analysis, showing its inter-class segregation efficacy. Moreover, the 2D-MFDFA analysis evinces the complex multifractal patterns in TITPs, which is due to the presence of composite long-range correlations in the oral mucosa tissue fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of four different seed layers—Ru, Hf/Ru, Ru/Hf, and Hf on the magnetic properties of [Co 5/Pt 3 Å] multilayer (ML) stack with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy was investigated. The structural quality of the ML stacks was studied and correlated with the magnetic properties. Among the abovementioned seed layers, Ru promotes stronger fcc (111) texture in the ML due to less lattice mismatch (8% between Ru and Co) in Co/Pt MLs. As a result, higher anisotropy field ( \(H_{K}~\sim ~17\) kOe) and larger effective perpendicular anisotropy ( \(K_{\rm eff}~\sim ~1.2\times 10^{7}\) erg/cm \(^{3}\) ) were achieved for the MLs on Ru seed layer compared with other seed layers after annealing at 300 °C for 30 min. The perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of the MLs is improved at higher annealing temperature up to 400 °C for Ru and Hf/Ru seed layer. For the Co/Pt MLs on Ru, \(1.3\times 10^{7}\) erg/cm \(^{3}\) perpendicular magnetic anisotropy was obtained even after annealing at 400 °C. Detail investigations of postannealing stability of the ML films on different seed layers were also discussed. The magnetic properties and structural properties of the films on four different seed layers were characterized after rapid thermal annealing process at 300 °C, 350 °C, and 400 °C for 30 min annealing duration. The high temperature endurance limit up to 400 °C for 30 min of the Co/Pt MLs on Ru and Hf/Ru seed layers makes them compatible with the back-end-of-line process temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invention is inspired by the desire to understand the opportunities and expectations of developing economies in terms of healthcare. The designed system is a point-of-care (POC) device that can deliver heart-care services to the rural population and bridge the rural–urban divide in healthcare delivery. The product design incorporates several innovations including the effective use of adaptive and multiresolution signal-processing techniques for acquisition, denoising, segmentation, and characterization of the heart sounds (HS) and murmurs using an ultralow-power embedded Mixed Signal Processor. The device is able to provide indicative diagnosis of cardiac conditions and classify a subject into either normal, abnormal, ischemic, or valvular abnormalities category. Preliminary results demonstrated by the prototype confirm the applicability of the device as a prescreening tool that can be used by paramedics in rural outreach programs. Feedback from medical professionals also shows that such a device is helpful in early detection of common congenital heart diseases. This letter aims to determine a framework for utilization of automated HS analysis system for community healthcare and healthcare inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a novel modification of the brightness preserving dynamic histogram equalization technique to improve its brightness preserving and contrast enhancement abilities while reducing its computational complexity. The modified technique, called Brightness Preserving Dynamic Fuzzy Histogram Equalization (BPDFHE1), uses fuzzy statistics of digital images for their representation and processing. Representation and processing of images in the fuzzy domain enables the technique to handle the inexactness of gray level values in a better way, resulting in improved performance. Execution time is dependent on image size and nature of the histogram, however experimental results show it to be faster as compared to the techniques compared here. The performance analysis of the BPDFHE along with that for BPDHE has been given for comparative evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]