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Abstract Training a generic objectness measure to produce object proposals has recently become of significant interest. We observe that generic objects with well-defined closed boundaries can be detected by looking at the norm of gradients, with a suitable resizing of their corresponding image windows to a small fixed size. Based on this observation and computational reasons, we propose to resize the window to 8 × 8 and use the norm of the gradients as a simple 64D feature to describe it, for explicitly training a generic objectness measure. We further show how the binarized version of this feature, namely binarized normed gradients (BING), can be used for efficient objectness estimation, which requires only a few atomic operations (e.g., add, bitwise shift, etc.). To improve localization quality of the proposals while maintaining efficiency, we propose a novel fast segmentation method and demonstrate its effectiveness for improving BING’s localization performance, when used in multi-thresholding straddling expansion (MTSE) post-processing. On the challenging PASCAL VOC2007 dataset, using 1000 proposals per image and intersection-over-union threshold of 0.5, our proposal method achieves a 95.6% object detection rate and 78.6% mean average best overlap in less than 0.005 second per image.

In this study, chitosan (CS) grafted by glycidyltrimethylammonium chloride (GTMAC) to form GTMAC-CS was synthesized, chemically identified, and rheologically characterized. The Maxwell Model can be applied to closely simulate the dynamic rheological performance of the chitosan and the GTMAC-CS solutions, revealing a single relaxation time pertains to both systems. The crossover point of G′ and Gʺ shifted toward lower frequencies as the CS concentration increased but remained almost constant frequencies as the GTMAC-CS concentration increased, indicating the solubility of GTMAC-CS in water is good enough to diminish influence from the interaction among polymer chains so as to ensure the relaxation time is independent of the concentration. A frequency–concentration superposition master curve of the CS and GTMAC-CS solutions was subsequently proposed and well fitted with the experimental results. Finally, the sol-gel transition of CS is 8.5 weight % (wt %), while that of GTMAC-CS is 20 wt %, reconfirming the excellent water solubility of the latter.

This population-based study investigated the subsequent cardiovascular risk of patients with knee osteoarthritis underwent total knee arthroplasty in Taiwan.This was a population-based follow-up study of 22931 patients diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis between 2008 and 2011. Each patient was followed for 3 years or until death. Treatment was dichotomized into conservative treatment and TKA. The association between TKA and cardiovascular disease (CVD) events was analyzed using propensity score analysis and instrumental variable analysis and two-stage least-squares regression model.Patients with knee osteoarthritis who underwent TKA had a lower 3-year cumulative risk of stroke and acute myocardial infarction (AMI). After adjusting for measured risk and confounding factors, propensity score showed a 0.56 fold (adjusted OR = 0.56; 95% CI, 0.51-0.61; p

Objective To study the change of serum bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)-2 and BMP-4 during the development of sepsis and its mechanisms. Methods Blood was collected for quantifying serum BMP-2 and BMP-4 from patients with sepsis (sepsis group), patients without sepsis (non-sepsis group) in 24 hours of ICU admission and from healthy volunteers (control group). Concentration of serum BMP-2 and BMP-4 was determined by ELISA. The expression of BMP-2, pSmad1/5, and BMPRⅡ of lip polysaccharide (LPS)-treated rat pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells (RPMECs) was detected by Western blot. Results Serum BMP-2 and BMP-4 were significantly increased in sepsis group (P＜0.05) and the level of BMP-2 was significantly higher in sepsis group than that in non-sepsis group (P＜0.05). BMP-2 was found to be a marker for differential diagnosis of separating sepsis LPS may significantly increase the expression of BMP-2 of RPMECs but decrease the expression of phosphorylated Smad1/5 (pSmad1/5) and BMP receptor Ⅱ (BMPRⅡ) (P＜0.05). Conclusions BMP-2 is a potential diagnostic marker and act as apro-inflammatory factor in early phase of sepsis.