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This pilot study aimed at fostering resilience among people living with HIV and improving the HIV-negative participants' acceptance of people living with HIV. A group of 75 people living with HIV who were former blood/plasma donors and 36 HIV-negative fellow villagers in rural China participated in the intervention. The 8 sessions lasted for 4 months and were facilitated by trained local family-planning officers. Efficacy of the intervention was assessed using a pre- and postprogram study design; measurements were made at baseline, at completion, and 3 months afterward completion. The authors found that the HIV-positive participants increased their levels of resilience, social support, and quality of life and that they reported fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress at the completion of the intervention; most of these changes were sustained at the 3-month follow-up. Such participants also reported subjective improvements on problem-solving skills, self-confidence, and a feeling of being cared for by others. In addition, the HIV-negative participants' discriminatory attitudes toward people living with HIV were reduced after completing the intervention. The majority of the participants was satisfied with the intervention and would recommend it to others. The train-the-trainer approach was used effectively. Positive effects of the intervention have been revealed and future randomized controlled studies are warranted.

To identify individual and clinical risk factors associated with cesarean section (CS) delivery in a Chinese rural population.A cross-sectional study was conducted with data from hospital medical records in Henan Province and Anhui Province, China, using univariate and multiple logistic regression analyses.Between January 1 and December 31, 2008, 46.3% (4,823/10,425) of deliveries were via CS in the study population. After adjustment for other variables, pregnant women in the 25-29-year-old (odds ratio [OR] 1.41, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.24-1.61) andor = 30-year-old (OR 1.73, 95% CI 1.46-2.04) age groups were more likely to give birth by CS as compared to the 20-24-year-old age group. Other independent factors related to a higher risk of CS included nonagricultural occupation (OR 1.44, 95% CI 1.27-1.62), gestational hypertension (OR 5.22, 95% CI 3.93-6.93), breech presentation (OR 10.47, 95% CI 6.37-17.20), dystocia (OR 28.62, 95% CI 24.62-33.28), and preterm delivery (OR 1.28, 95% CI 1.06-1.54).Age, occupation, gestational hypertension, breech presentation, and dystocia may play an important role in the high level of CS among women in a Chinese rural population. Further comprehensive studies on both medical and nonmedical reasons for CS delivery are needed.

Objective To investigate providers' knowledge and attitudes about medical abortion (MA) and their views regarding the main challenges to expanding the use of MA in urban and rural areas in China. Methods A total of 658 abortion providers were surveyed from November 7, 2009, to May 29, 2010. Results The providers' knowledge about MA was relatively poor, and most thought the risks of severe complications of MA were much higher than they are. Urban nonphysician providers were the least informed about MA. Most providers thought that the main challenges to an expanded use of MA were its lesser effectiveness in comparison to surgical abortion and women's lack of knowledge about it. In rural areas many providers thought that deficiencies of clinics, such as limited bed space and inadequate toilets and washing facilities, also posed serious obstacles to expanding MA use. Conclusion Abortion providers, especially urban nonphysician providers, need refresher training to strengthen their knowledge of the approved protocol for providing MA in China, and also of the indications, contraindications, and safety and efficacy of the method. Deficiencies at abortion facilities should be addressed as well, and they are more numerous in rural areas.

A random sample consisting of 88 sexually active people living with HIV (PLWH) and their HIV negative spouses in rural China were interviewed. Data of 68 couples (77.2 %) who gave identical responses to whether they had been using condoms consistently in the last 12 months (n = 136) were analyzed. The results showed that 27.9 % of the discordant couples used condom inconsistently in the last year. Condom non-availability was the most commonly given main reason for not using condoms. Free condoms should be made available to these low-income couples. Suicidal ideation of the PLWH and the spouse's perception on 'whether someone could contract HIV via unprotected sexual intercourse with a HIV positive person' were significantly associated with inconsistent condom use in the last year. Education program should change the cognition about the risk for HIV transmission via unprotected sex. Integrated psychological services to reduce suicidal ideation are greatly warranted.

The purpose of this study was to broadly assess the level of knowledge, attitude and behaviors related to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) among unmarried female migrants in China.This cross-sectional study was conducted and a self-administered questionnaire was designed for collecting information on SRH including 15 items for knowledge, 8 items for attitude and some items for contraception and abortion related behaviors.A total of 1690 unmarried female migrants were interviewed. Most of the respondents had less knowledge of SRH. Only one-third of respondents was aware of emergency contraceptives and could freely talk about SRH with their friends. Over one-third of respondents were not willing to come into contact with someone with AIDS or STDs. In this study, 10.4% participants had an unwanted pregnancy and 95% of them had an abortion. Multivariate analysis showed that having a boyfriend, duration of employment in city, knowledge on SRH and freely discussing SRH with peer were associated with having premarital sex among these unmarried female migrants.This study revealed that the unmarried female migrant was one of the most vulnerable groups concerning SRH. In some policy reforms, appropriate and cost-effective SRH services should be provided for these migrants.

Objective To examine the prevalence of contraceptive use in rural China and to determine factors that influence choice of contraceptive method. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted using multistage cluster sampling to identify married women aged 20–49 years residing in Shaanxi Province, China. Data on demographics and contraceptive use were collected via detailed questionnaire. Results The prevalence of contraceptive use in the study population was 93.9% (19 599/20 878 eligible women). Among the women using contraceptives, 10 408 (53.1%) used sterilization (female and male) and 6947 (35.4%) chose an intrauterine device. In total, 2244 (11.4%) women used short-acting contraceptive (SAC) methods: condoms and pills accounted for 8.7% (n = 1712) and 1.0% (n = 216), respectively. Young age; high level of education; low parity; increased number of abortions; low frequency of sexual intercourse; long duration between marriage and delivery; and marriage after 1994 were all associated with SAC usage. Conclusion Although contraceptive use was high in rural China, the participants’ awareness of free selection of contraceptive method and the rate of SAC use were both low. Appropriate and diverse family-planning services should be provided to meet the needs of women living in rural areas.

Poor sexual and reproductive health status has been reported among rural-to-urban migrants in China. Therefore, some effective and feasible interventions are urgently needed. The authors developed a workplace-based intervention to compare 2 young labor migrant service packages (A and B) on the knowledge, attitude related to contraception, and contraceptive use among unmarried male migrants in Chengdu. Fourteen construction sites were randomly assigned to either of the 2 intervention packages. Interventions were completed in 3 months, and data were collected in 2 rounds independently (before and after interventions). After the intervention, the median scores for knowledge and attitude in migrants in package B were significantly higher than in migrants in package A. Although migrants in both packages increased use of condom, the increase was pronounced in migrants in package B, with odds ratio (OR) = 9.65 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.41-66.28). The rate of unwanted pregnancies was reduced more significantly in migrants in package B than in migrants in package A (OR = 0.16; 95%CI = 0.03-0.45). Unmarried male migrants who received the comprehensive intervention (package B) were more willing to use condoms and avoid unwanted pregnancies effectively.

To evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program on promoting the use of contraceptives in migrant population working in factories, and to compare the difference of results between the basic intervention mode and the comprehensive intervention mode.This was an epidemiologic intervention study carried out in each 2 factories in Shenzhen and Dongguan among migrant workers by comparing the effectiveness of a baseline survey and a end-line survey. The basic intervention mode was composed of spreading contraceptives and reproductive health information, conducting education and communication and providing references to access free services from family planning clinics (IEC). The comprehensive intervention mode provided more services on face to face counseling and distributing free contraceptives.The demographic characteristics of subjects before and after surveys were comparable. Whether in the basic group or comprehensive mode group, the awareness of contraceptive/reproductive health knowledge was increased significantly after intervention (P = 0.000), and the pass rate was higher in the comprehensive intervention group (P = 0.000). The self-reported most frequently used contraceptives was condoms. The proportion of using condoms and purchasing condoms was increased after intervention (P = 0.000) from 69.7% and 67.7% before intervention to 84.9% and 90.2% after basic intervention and 87.1% and 95.1% after comprehensive intervention. The proportion of using contraceptives every time was increased from 35.7% before intervention to 38.1% after basic intervention (P = 0.018) and to 42.9% after comprehensive intervention (P = 0.000).Intervention measures based on implementing in factories were effective in promoting contraception among migrant workers, and the integration of counseling and free contraceptive services with IEC was better. Carrying on and extending this kind of intervention measures to other migrant population in similar conditions is suggested.

An audio steganalysis technique to detect the existence of secret messages introduced by Echo Hiding (EH) is presented in this paper. After in-depth exploring the changing rule of the Sliding Window Cepstrum (SWC), we extract the sensitive statistical feature named Peak Location Aggregation Index (PLAI) in cepstrum domain to realize the echo detecting system. A rigorous mathematical derivation to verify the reasonableness of the design is also included. The proposed algorithm has been tested by a great deal of audio clips generated by state-of-the-art echo kernels such as Typical Kernel (T-kernel), Positive-and-Negative kernels (PN-kernels), Backward-and-Forward kernels (BF-kernels), and Mirrored kernels (M-kernels). The experiments have been carried out with various payloads, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Objective To evaluate Chinese healthcare providers’ knowledge regarding medical abortion, to understand provider preferences for abortion methods, and to investigate the role of remuneration on providers’ decision making. Methods Between November 2009 and May 2010, 658 abortion service providers from family-planning service centers and hospitals in Shenzhen and Henan, China, were surveyed via self-administered questionnaires. Results The knowledge score (out of a maximum of 32) regarding medical abortion was 16–20 for 60.9% of the providers; 20.4% of the providers preferred medical abortion to surgical abortion, whereas 35.0% preferred surgical abortion. Overall, 72.2% of providers stated that they did not receive any commission for providing medical abortion or surgical abortion. Conclusion Most healthcare providers believed that surgical abortion was preferable to medical abortion. Efforts should be made to overcome the perceived disadvantages of medical abortion.

A novel audio steganalysis approach for Direct-Sequence Spread-Spectrum (DSSS) hiding method is presented in this paper. The proposed scheme can potently detect DSSS hiding message without any priori knowledge. Meanwhile, it can give an optimum estimation of the Spread Spectrum (SS) sequence adopted by transmitter. With a given length of PseudoNoise (PN) sequence, the maximal cumulative cross correlation between PN sequence and test audio can be obtained employing Genetic Algorithm (GA), and then the kurtosis of cross correlation curve via PN sequence length is adopted as the sensitive feature to design the detector. The optimum estimation of SS sequence is considered as the PN sequence which makes the curve achieve its maximal value. Experiments have been carried out under various embedding rates, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Objective: To assess the need for integrating postabortion care with family planning services in China. Method: We collected data from a clinic-based study of 24 abortion clinics in 3 large cities in China. Results: There was a total of 287 (10.3%) high-risk abortions among the 2780 respondents, 974 (35%) of whom had had repeated abortions and 48.4% had had 2 abortions within 1 year; 63.7% of the current pregnancies resulted from not using contraceptives; 28.8% and 19.8% of these new pregnancies, respectively, were due to the failure of the rhythm or the withdrawal method; only 9.7% of the respondents consistently used condoms; and only 9.1% could identify the correct time of their first ovulation following an abortion. Conclusion: Contraceptive neglect and the high rates of repeated and high-risk abortions call for the integration of postabortion care with family planning services in China.

To develop effective learning algorithms for continuous prediction of cursor movement using EEG signals is a challenging research issue in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). To train a classifier for continuous prediction, trials in training dataset are first divided into segments. The difficulty is that the actual intention (label) at each time interval (segment) is unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical approach under Bayesian learning framework to learn the parameters of a classifier. To make use of all the training dataset, we iteratively estimate probability of the unknown label, and use this probability to assist the training process. Experimental results have shown that the performance of the proposed method is equal to or better than the best results so far.

In 3D object detection and recognition, the object of interest in an image is subject to changes in view-point as well as illumination. It is benefit for the detection and recognition if a representation can be derived to account for view and illumination changes in an effective and meaningful way. In this paper, we propose a method for learning such a representation from a set of un-labeled images containing the appearances of the object viewed from various poses and in various illuminations. Topographic Independent Component Analysis (TICA) is applied for the unsupervised learning to produce an emergent result, that is a topographic map of basis components. The map is topographic in the following sense: the basis components as the units of the map are ordered in the 2D map such that components of similar viewing angle are group in one axis and changes in illumination are accounted for in the other axis. This provides a meaningful set of basis vectors that may be used to construct view subspaces for appearance based multi-view object detection and recognition.

Face images are subject to changes in view and illumination. Such changes cause data distribution to be highly nonlinear and complex in the image space. It is desirable to learn a nonlinear mapping from the image space to a low dimensional space such that the distribution becomes simpler tighter and therefore more predictable for better modeling effaces. In this paper we present a kernel machine based approach for learning such nonlinear mappings. The aim is to provide an effective view-based representation for multi-view face detection and pose estimation. Assuming that the view is partitioned into a number of distinct ranges, one nonlinear view-subspace is learned for each (range of) view from a set of example face images of that view (range), by using kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). Projections of the data onto the view-subspaces are then computed as view-based nonlinear features. Multi-view face detection and pose estimation are performed by classifying a face into one of the facial views or into the nonface class, by using a multi-class kernel support vector classifier (KSVC). Experimental results show that fusion of evidences from multi-views can produce better results than using the result from a single view; and that our approach yields high detection and low false alarm rates in face detection and good accuracy in pose estimation, in comparison with the linear counterpart composed of linear principal component analysis (PCA) feature extraction and Fisher linear discriminant based classification (FLDC).