Implementation of Static Telecytology Applications for Accreditation Purposes According to ISO 15189

Telecytology can be defined as the process of diagnostic cytology performed on digital images. The process of diagnostic cytology performed on digital images can be used for teaching, professional examinations, obtaining expert opinions on severe cases, and routine diagnosis of the entire laboratory workload. Ηowever, little information exists about its possible use for proficiency testing purposes. The existing studies have found a high (90%–95%) concordance between telecytological and glass slide diagnoses, but they refer to a small number of cases. Thus, the purpose of the chapter is to examine the feasibility of developing a proficiency testing scheme for cytology labs wishing to be accredited according to ISO 15189:2012 by using low-cost telemedical applications.

Experimental Setup for Swellable Elastomers in Cased and Open Holes

A full scale experimental setup was designed and commissioned for testing of swelling elastomer seals against a casing (cased hole) and formation (open hole). Actual replicate of wellbore was designed with varying inside diameters and roughness to reproduce the effect of actual formation. The Dynaset packer mounted on a 7-inch tubular was allowed to swell against a 9–5/8-inch casing, while the fast swell packer mounted on a 9–5/8-inch tubular was allowed to swell against the 12–1/4-inch replicated well bore. This one-of-its-kind test setup can demonstrate the way the elastomers swell out and fill the asperities against smooth outer casing (cased hole) or against rough wellbore surface (open hole). Dismantling of the test setup midway through the testing scheme revealed a severely dimpled surface of the swelled elastomer.

Is large-scale rapid CoV-2 testing a substitute for lockdowns? The case of Tuebingen

Various forms of contact restriction have been adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only recently, rapid testing appeared as a new policy instrument. If sufficiently effective, it may serve as a substitute for contact restrictions. Against this background we evaluate the effects of a unique policy experiment: on March 16, the city of Tuebingen set up a rapid testing scheme while relaxing lockdown measures-in sharp contrast to its German peers. Comparing case rates in Tuebingen county to an appropriately defined control unit over a four-week period, we find an increase in the reported case rate, robustly across alternative specifications. However, the increase is temporary and about one half of it reflects cases that would have gone undetected in the absence of extra testing.

Sample-Guided Adaptive Class Prototype for Visual Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation aims to handle the distribution mismatch of training and testing data, which achieves dramatic progress in multi-sensor systems. Previous methods align the cross-domain distributions by some statistics, such as the means and variances. Despite their appeal, such methods often fail to model the discriminative structures existing within testing samples. In this paper, we present a sample-guided adaptive class prototype method, which consists of the no distribution matching strategy. Specifically, two adaptive measures are proposed. Firstly, the modified nearest class prototype is raised, which allows more diversity within same class, while keeping most of the class wise discrimination information. Secondly, we put forward an easy-to-hard testing scheme by taking into account the different difficulties in recognizing target samples. Easy samples are classified and selected to assist the prediction of hard samples. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.