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BackgroundHuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention intervention programs and related research for men who have sex with men (MSM) in the southern African region remain limited, despite the emergence of a severe epidemic among this group. With a lack of understanding of their social and sexual lives and HIV risks, and with MSM being a hidden and stigmatized group in the region, optimized HIV prevention packages for southern African MSM are an urgent public health and research priority. ObjectiveThe objective of the Sibanye Health Project is to develop and evaluate a combination package of biomedical, behavioral, and community-level HIV prevention interventions and services for MSM in South Africa. MethodsThe project consists of three phases: (1) a comprehensive literature review and summary of current HIV prevention interventions (Phase I), (2) agent-based mathematical modeling of HIV transmission in southern African MSM (Phase II), and (3) formative and stigma-related qualitative research, community engagement, training on providing health care to MSM, and the pilot study (Phase III). The pilot study is a prospective one-year study of 200 men in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The study will assess a package of HIV prevention services, including condom and condom-compatible lubricant choices, risk-reduction counseling, couples HIV testing and counseling, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for eligible men, and non-occupational post-exposure prophylaxis for men with a high risk exposure. The pilot study will begin in October 2014. ResultsPreliminary results from all components but the pilot study are available. We developed a literature review database with meta-data extracted from 3800 documents from 67 countries. Modeling results indicate that regular HIV testing and promotion of condom use can significantly impact new HIV infections among South African MSM, even in the context of high coverage of early treatment of HIV-positive men and high coverage of PrEP for at-risk HIV-negative men. Formative qualitative research consisted of 79 in-depth interviews, and six focus group discussions in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Analysis of these data has informed pilot study protocol development and has been documented in peer-reviewed manuscripts. Qualitative work regarding stigma faced by South African MSM resulted in finalized scales for use in the pilot study questionnaire. A total of 37 health care providers completed training designed to facilitate clinically and culturally competent care for MSM in the Eastern Cape. ConclusionsThe design of a future, larger study of the HIV prevention package will be conducted at the end of the pilot study, powered to detect efficacy of the prevention package. Data from the updated mathematical model, results of the pilot study, acceptability data, and advancements in HIV prevention sciences will be considered in developing the final proposed package and study design. Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT02043015; http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT02043015 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6THvp7rAj).

The diffractive processes within an optical system can be simulated by computer to compute the diffraction-altered electric-field distribution at the output of the system from the electric-field distribution at the input. In the paraxial approximation the system can be described by an ABCD ray matrix whose elements in turn can be used to simplify the computation such that only a single computational step is required. We describe two rearrangements of such computations that allow the simulation to be expressed in a linear systems formulation, in particular using the fast-Fourier-transform algorithm. We investigate the sampling requirements for the kernel-modifying function or chirp that arises. We also use the special properties of the chirp to determine the spreading imposed by the diffraction. This knowledge can be used to reduce the computation if only a limited region of either the input or the output is of interest.

Multi-modal medical image fusion provides an informative and qualitative image, which enhances the accuracy of clinical diagnosis and surgical planning. The most commonand effective approaches for medical image fusion involve principal component analysis (PCA), the discrete wavelet transform and the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT). These existing algorithms perform fusion in either the spatial or transform domains. In this paper, an advanced fusion algorithm, which combines the DTCWT with PCA, is proposed to perform fusion on several medical imaging modalities. The input images are decomposed by the DTCWT and different fusion rules are applied to combine the coefficients. While PCA is used to fuse the low frequency coefficients, the high frequency coefficients are fused using the maximum fusion rule. The main advantages of the proposed method are the use of both DTCWT and PCA methods together. The DTCWT extracts the salient information about the input images, and then the PCA method is applied to calculate the principal component based on the information on the input images instead of taking only the average value of the low frequency components. The performance of the proposed method was compared with several existingmethods. The experimental results obtained reveal that our proposed fusion algorithm performs better than existing schemes both quantitatively and in terms of visual perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image registration is a fundamental image processing technique. It is used to spatially align two or more images that have been captured at different times, from different sensors, or from different viewpoints. There have been many algorithms proposed for this task. The most common of these being the well-known Lucas-Kanade (LK) and Horn-Schunck approaches. However, the main limitation of these approaches is the computational complexity required to implement the large number of iterations necessary for successful alignment of the images. Previously, a multi-pass image interpolation algorithm (MP-I2A) was developed to considerably reduce the number of iterations required for successful registration compared with the LK algorithm. This paper develops a kernel-warping algorithm (KWA), a modified version of the MP-I2A, which requires fewer iterations to successfully register two images and less memory space for the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation than the MP-I2A. These reductions increase feasibility of the implementation of the proposed algorithm on FPGAs with very limited memory space and other hardware resources. A two-FPGA system rather than single FPGA system is successfully developed to implement the KWA in order to compensate insufficiency of hardware resources supported by one FPGA, and increase parallel processing ability and scalability of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]