Search results for "Enhancement."

2014

Somatic gene therapy is a promising tool for the treatment of severe diseases. Because of its abuse potential for performance enhancement in sports, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) included the term 'gene doping' in the official list of banned substances and methods in 2004. Several nested PCR or qPCR-based strategies have been proposed that aim at detecting long-term presence of transgene in blood, but these strategies are hampered by technical limitations. We developed a digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) protocol for Insulin-Like Growth Factor 1 (IGF1) detection and demonstrated its applicability monitoring 6 mice injected into skeletal muscle with AAV9-IGF1 elements and 2 controls over a 3…

Microaneurysm detection with radon transform-based classification on retina images.

2012

The creation of an automatic diabetic retinopathy screening system using retina cameras is currently receiving considerable interest in the medical imaging community. The detection of microaneurysms is a key element in this effort. In this work, we propose a new microaneurysms segmentation technique based on a novel application of the radon transform, which is able to identify these lesions without any previous knowledge of the retina morphological features and with minimal image preprocessing. The algorithm has been evaluated on the Retinopathy Online Challenge public dataset, and its performance compares with the best current techniques. The performance is particularly good at low false p…

Efficient gene delivery to photoreceptors using AAV2/rh10 and rescue of the Rho–/– mouse

2015

As gene therapies for various forms of retinal degeneration progress toward human clinical trial, it will be essential to have a repertoire of safe and efficient vectors for gene delivery to the target cells. Recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) serotype 2/2 has been shown to be well tolerated in the human retina and has provided efficacy in human patients for some inherited retinal degenerations. In this study, the AAV2/8 and AAV2/rh10 serotypes have been compared as a means of gene delivery to mammalian photoreceptor cells using a photoreceptor specific promoter for transgene expression. Both AAV2/8 and AAV2/rh10 provided rescue of the retinal degeneration present in the rhodopsin kno…

Rotation-Invariant Texture Retrieval via Signature Alignment Based on Steerable Sub-Gaussian Modeling

2008

This paper addresses the construction of a novel efficient rotation-invariant texture retrieval method that is based on the alignment in angle of signatures obtained via a steerable sub-Gaussian model. In our proposed scheme, we first construct a steerable multivariate sub-Gaussian model, where the fractional lower-order moments of a given image are associated with those of its rotated versions. The feature extraction step consists of estimating the so-called covariations between the orientation subbands of the corresponding steerable pyramid at the same or at adjacent decomposition levels and building an appropriate signature that can be rotated directly without the need of rotating the im…

Spherical nonlinear correlations for global invariant three-dimensional object recognition

2007

We define a nonlinear filtering based on correlations on unit spheres to obtain both rotation- and scale-invariant three-dimensional (3D) object detection. Tridimensionality is expressed in terms of range images. The phase Fourier transform (PhFT) of a range image provides information about the orientations of the 3D object surfaces. When the object is sequentially rotated, the amplitudes of the different PhFTs form a unit radius sphere. On the other hand, a scale change is equivalent to a multiplication of the amplitude of the PhFT by a constant factor. The effect of both rotation and scale changes for 3D objects means a change in the intensity of the unit radius sphere. We define a 3D fil…

In vitro perception of low-contrast features in digital, film, and digitized dental radiographs: A receiver operating characteristic analysis

2005

Objective To compare experimentally the image quality of charged-coupled device (CCD)-based digital, flatbed scanner digitized, and dental film radiographs. Study design High-contrast standardized radiographs of an aluminum step wedge containing boreholes were obtained on dental radiographic film (F) and a CCD receptor (D). Digitization (S) was done with a flatbed scanner. Each radiograph was separated into 23 single images, 18 of which showed a dark spot. Thirty observers indicated their confidence on the visibility of the spots for a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Results Mean Az values (area beneath the ROC curves) differed significantly (P < .05), being highest for D …

Extraction of Airways from CT (EXACT'09)

2012

Contains fulltext : 107854.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) This paper describes a framework for establishing a reference airway tree segmentation, which was used to quantitatively evaluate fifteen different airway tree extraction algorithms in a standardized manner. Because of the sheer difficulty involved in manually constructing a complete reference standard from scratch, we propose to construct the reference using results from all algorithms that are to be evaluated. We start by subdividing each segmented airway tree into its individual branch segments. Each branch segment is then visually scored by trained observers to determine whether or not it is a correctly segmented part o…

Double β Decay and the Axial Strength

2019

Quenching of the weak axial strength gA is discussed and relations of this quenching to the nuclear matrix elements of double beta decays are highlighted. An analysis of Gamow-Teller transitions in the mass range A = 62 − 142 is presented and its results are compared with those of many previous works. The enhancement of the axial charge is discussed for first-forbidden pseudoscalar β transitions. Higher-forbidden β transitions are introduced and their role in determining the effective value of gA is examined, in particular from the point of view of the β-decay half-lives and the shapes of electron spectra of forbidden non-unique β transitions. peerReviewed

Cool barnacles: Do common biogenic structures enhance or retard rates of deterioration of intertidal rocks and concrete?

2017

Sedentary and mobile organisms grow profusely on hard substrates within the coastal zone and contribute to the deterioration of coastal engineering structures and the geomorphic evolution of rocky shores by both enhancing and retarding weathering and erosion. There is a lack of quantitative evidence for the direction and magnitude of these effects. This study assesses the influence of globally-abundant intertidal organisms, barnacles, by measuring the response of limestone, granite and marine-grade concrete colonised with varying percentage covers of Chthamalus spp. under simulated, temperate intertidal conditions. Temperature regimes at 5 and 10 mm below the surface of each material demons…

“TECHNOLOGICAL PROJECT” AND HERITAGE ENHANCEMENT (in CICOP)

2010

Recovering our building heritage has a fundamental role regarding renewal process, since it constitutes one of the strategies for urban and territorial balance. Building recovery, in the broadest sense of the word, means the renewal of precious constructions which have decayed or outdated but could be renewed and/or requalified. In other words, recovery is a subject which solves the probable damages of a building, trying to bring it back to its original living conditions; otherwise referring to the intervention which confronts the damages provoked by the weather and, more often than not, by the absence of maintenance. In any case, technological innovation can intervene systematically basing…