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Aims: The use of extended criteria donors is a routine practice that sometimes involves extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) in donations after cardiac death or brain death. Methods: We performed a retrospective study in a single center from January 2006 to December 2019. The study included 90 deceased donor liver transplants. The patients were divided into three groups: the donation after brain death (DBD) group (n = 58, 64.4%), the DBD with ECMO group (n = 11, 12.2%) and the donation after cardiac death (DCD) with ECMO group (n = 21, 23.3%). Results: There were no significant differences between the DBD with ECMO group and the DBD group. When comparing the DCD with ECMO group and the DBD group, there were statistically significant differences for total warm ischemia time (p < 0.001), total cold ischemia time (p = 0.023), and split liver transplantation (p < 0.001), and there was significantly poor recovery in regard to total bilirubin level (p = 0.027) for the DCD with ECMO group by repeated measures ANOVA. The 5‐year survival rates of the DBD, DBD with ECMO, and DCD with ECMO groups were 78.1%, 90.9%, and 75.6%, respectively. The survival rate was not significantly different when comparing the DBD group to either the DBD with ECMO group (p = 0.435) or the DCD with ECMO group (p = 0.310). Conclusions: Using ECMO in donations after cardiac death or brain death is a good technology, and it contributed to 35.6% of the liver graft pool. The findings of this study suggest that using ECMO in donations after cardiac death or brain death is a good technology and increase the pool of organs. Using ECMO of technology is convenient, but the material cost of machine perfusion is too expensive, especially in small organ donation centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sudden cardiac arrest can lead to death if emergency treatment is unavailable. However, the proper use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) can save lives. This study is based on an image processing technology for automatically indicating the electrode patch locations of an AED. We use three strategies to achieve this goal: (1) Create a body proportional positing method (BPPM) to solve the problem of differing body shapes. (2) Apply three features: the center of the neck, the ends of the shoulder, and a calculation of the slope to accurately determine the correct electrode patch locations of the AED. Finally, (3) apply a standard deviation to compensate the calculated center points of the trained AED electrode patches. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme is an effective and accurate method for indicating the locations of AED electrode patches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hand gesture recognition is a simpler and more natural way of human computer interaction. The goal of this paper is to detect the continuous gestures and use them to convey information for the robot movement control. So the hand gesture recognition requires fast and extremely robust. In this paper, three strategies were used to realize the hand gesture recognition: (1) the valley circle (VC) was created for the first stage of 6 fingertip numbers classification; (2) the hybrid feature vector of Hu’s moments, convexity and compactness (HCC) were constructed for the second stage of gesture recognition of the remainder unknown gesture classes; (3) a new template matching recognition (NTMR) algorithm was proposed to realize 10 gesture classes recognition. To test the hand gesture recognition method, the robot movement control system was built. It is experimental proved that the NTMR algorithm is effective and corrective for the hand gesture recognition. It increased the recognition accuracy by 4% and decreased the recognition duration by 112 ms compared with Hu’s moment method. It had good performances of the real-time hand gesture acquisition and information conveyance, and it had the invariant properties when the gesture was rotated and shifted and scaled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The objective of this study was to determine if a functional heterodimer of prolactin receptor (PRLR) and growth hormone receptor (GHR) can be formed in humans. A novel ligand was designed that is composed of a GHR antagonist (B2036) and a PRLR antagonist (G129R) fused in tandem (B2036-G129R). Because both B2036 and G129R are binding site 2 inactive antagonists, the B2036-G129R fusion protein, in theory contains only two functional binding site 1s: one for GHR and one for PRLR. We examined the behavior of this chimeric ligand in cell lines known to express GHR, PRLR, or both receptors. The data presented show that B2036-G129R is inactive in IM-9 cells that express only GHR or Nb2 cells that express PRLR. In T-47D cells that coexpress PRLR and GHR, B2036-G129R activates JAK2/STAT5 signaling. These findings provide evidence that B2036-G129R is able to activate signal transduction through a heterodimer of PRLR and GHR in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Watermarking is a potential method for copyright protection and authentication of multimedia data in the internet. The watermarking process can be viewed as a communication task, where the watermark acting like information is embedded into a host image acting like noise in a communication channel which is susceptible to all kinds of attacks acting like jamming. In a previous paper, we proposed a robust watermarking scheme using frequency shift keying (FSK). In the scheme, high-variance block selection (HVBS) is employed to enhance robustness. In this paper, a novel watermarking scheme using phase shift keying (PSK) modulation with amplitude boost (AB) and low amplitude block selection (LABS) is proposed. AB is hired to increase the robustness while LABS is employed to improve the imperceptibility. With proper combination of AB and LABS, the proposed scheme achieves superior performance in terms of robustness and imperceptibility. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, simulations under various conditions were conducted. The empirical results showed that QPSK is the best choice among other PSKs and the proposed scheme can sustain most common attacks including JPEG compression, rotating, resizing, cropping, painting, noising and blurring etc. The empirical results also showed that the scheme with AB and LABS properly combined outperforms the scheme without. The gain of the former over the latter is more significant for host images with smooth characteristics than those with high-frequency characteristics. Simulation comparison with two other schemes (the Hsu''s scheme and the Chen''s scheme) showed that the proposed scheme is the most robust among the three. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The micromachined gyroscope with an electromagnetic levitated rotor (MGELR) was modeled and analyzed using finite element, and the influence of loop number, depth and inner diameter of levitation coil on levitating force was obtained. With the increase of the loop number of levitation coil, the levitating force increases more quickly. The levitating force decreases with the increase of the depth of coil. The levitating force increases linearly with the increase of the inner diameter of levitation coil. The micromachining process like photolithograph, electroplate and sputtering etc is adopted to fabricate the stator of MGELR. The result of preliminary experiment shows that the design scheme of MGELR is feasible. The multi-loop levitation coil structure was adopted and the influencing factor of levitating force was analyzed systematically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singular value decomposition is used to obtain the mean value of the first and second singular value ratios of normal and defect LCD images. Then the third and fourth singular values matched with the standard deviation of the first two singular value ratios are used to divide the defect images into two categories: coarse and fine. Finally, 2D discrete wavelet coefficient filtering combined with region growing is adopted to extract defect regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problem of traffic accidents, an Adaboost and Contour Circle (ACC) algorithm is developed based on a traditional Adaboost method and the proposed contour circle (CC) for recognizing whether eyes are in open state or closed state. First, Adaboost method is used to detect human faces and eye regions. Second, the pixels of the pupil region are removed by the given grid method. Third, the least squares method is utilized to fit the CC of the upper eyelid. Fourth, the center and radius of the CC are extracted as the feature vector. Finally, the eyes state is recognized according to the defined threshold. It is experimentally proved that the vertical coordinate of the CC is the best feature which can classified whether the eyes are in open state or closed state by the linear decision surface. Besides, the feature vector can classify the eyes states by nonlinear decision surfaces. The correct ratio of the blink detection is 96.6%, and the fatigue blink recognition accuracy is 91.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dice recognition, there are several situations that may cause dice image identification problems, including the color of background being the same as the dice, the shape of the dice being round, or the dice touching each other. Especially when the camera zooms in or out, the pip sizes become irregular. We analyze the dice structure features to develop an intelligent memorized least-distance search method (IMLDSM) that can achieve accurate dice detection. Compared to other schemes, our method has two major advantages: (i) Unlike other schemes using complicated classification methods to segment the dice, we adopt a novel, simple, and effective method to analyze dice structure features to achieve more accurate recognition results and (ii) the IMLDSM solves the problems of image zooming in and out, which other methods cannot. After over 250 test images that include different shapes, styles, sizes, and colors used in simulations, this scheme is proven to achieve 100% dice image identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]