A Cross-Machine Comparison of Shear-Wave Speed Measurements Using 2D Shear-Wave Elastography in the Normal Female Breast

Quantitative measures of radiation-induced breast stiffness are required to support clinical studies of novel breast radiotherapy regimens and exploration of personalised therapy, however, variation between shear-wave elastography (SWE) machines may limit the usefulness of shear-wave speed (cs) for this purpose. Mean cs measured in four healthy volunteers’ breasts and a phantom using 2D-SWE machines Acuson S2000 (Siemens Medical Solutions) and Aixplorer (Supersonic Imagine) were compared. Shear-wave speed was measured in the skin region, subcutaneous adipose tissue and parenchyma. cs estimates were on average 2.3% greater when using the Aixplorer compared to S2000 in vitro. In vivo, cs estimates were on average 43.7%, 36.3% and 49.9% significantly greater (p << 0.01) when using the Aixplorer compared to S2000, for skin region, subcutaneous adipose tissue and parenchyma, respectively. In conclusion, despite relatively small differences between machines observed in vitro, large differences in absolute measures of shear wave speed measured were observed in vivo, which may prevent pooling of cross-machine data in clinical studies of the breast.

Widespread nociceptive maps in the human neonatal somatosensory cortex

Topographic cortical maps are essential for spatial localisation of sensory stimulation and generation of appropriate task-related motor responses. Somatosensation and nociception are finely mapped and aligned in the adult somatosensory (S1) cortex, but in infancy, when pain behaviour is disorganised and poorly directed, nociceptive maps may be less refined. We compared the topographic pattern of S1 activation following noxious (clinically required heel lance) and innocuous (touch) mechanical stimulation of the same skin region in newborn infants (n=32) using multi-optode functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Signal to noise ratio and overall activation area did not differ with stimulus modality. Within S1 cortex, touch and lance of the heel elicit localised, partially overlapping increases in oxygenated haemoglobin (HbO), but while touch activation was restricted to the heel area, lance activation extended into cortical hand regions. The data reveals a widespread cortical nociceptive map in infant S1, consistent with their poorly directed pain behaviour.

Monitoring System for Persons With Alzheimer's Disease via Video-Object Tracking

This article presents a framework for a food intake monitoring system intended for use with persons with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Alzheimer's disease has a significant impact on the individual's ability to perform their daily activities including eating. Providing assistance with feeding is a major challenge for caregivers, including a significant time commitment. We present a vision-based system that tracks moving objects, such as the hand, using a combined optical flow and skin region detection algorithms. Skin detection is implemented using two different methods. Hue, saturation, and value (HSV) color space, which is on separation of the illuminance component from chrominance one as the first method and skin color information is extracted from subject's face detected using Viola-Johns algorithm for the second method. Once face and other moving skin regions are detected, bounding boxes are created and used to track all moving regions over the video frames, recognizing eating behavior or the lack of it. Based on experimental results the proposed method using optical flow and skin regions segmentation using HSV color detects the hand to mouth eating motion with 92.12% accuracy. The optical flow and skin region segmentation based on face color information achieves a higher accuracy of 94.29%.

Novel Nanocarriers for Targeted Topical Skin Delivery of the Antioxidant Resveratrol

Resveratrol (RSV) is a potent lipophilic antioxidant with a low aqueous solubility. Novel nanoformulations have been successfully developed and evaluated to increase the potential of resveratrol as a skin targeting antioxidant. Nanoformulations were prepared using a spontaneous emulsification method, and characterized and evaluated for their capabilities to penetrate/permeate the skin. In nanoformulations, the thermodynamic activity of the RSV penetration into/permeation through the skin was correlated with the thermodynamic activity of the RSV in the formulations. When terpenes were incorporated into the nanoformulations, the permeation of RSV through the skin increased and correlated with an increasing lipophilicity of the terpene. The nanoemulsion containing eugenol showed the highest RSV penetration into the stratum corneum (SC) and the epidermis-dermis-follicle region, whereas the limonene containing nanoemulsion had the highest RSV permeation through the skin (the enhancement ratios, compared to a saturated solution of RSV, were (i) 9.55 and (ii) 12.61, respectively, based on the average RSV amount (i) in each skin region and (ii) permeation through skin).

Beyond Color Correction : Skin Color Estimation In The Wild Through Deep Learning

Estimating skin color from an uncontrolled facial image is a challenging task. Many factors such as illumination, camera and shading variations directly affect the appearance of skin color in the image. Furthermore, using a color calibration target in order to correct the image pixels leads to a complex user experience. We propose a skin color estimation method from images in the wild, taken with unknown camera, under an unknown lighting, and without a calibration target. While prior methods relied on explicit intermediate steps of color correction of image pixels and skin region segmentation, we propose an end-to-end color regression model named LabNet, in which color correction and skin region segmentation are implicitly learnt by the model. Our method is based on a convolutional neural network trained on a dataset of smartphone images, labeled with L*a*b* measures of skin colors. We compare our method with standard skin color estimation approaches and found that our method over-perform these models while removing the need of color calibration target.

Fast pornographic image recognition using compact holistic features and multi-layer neural network

The paper presents an alternative fast pornographic image recognition using compact holistic features and multi-layer neural network (MNN). The compact holistic features of pornographic images, which are invariant features against pose and scale, is extracted by shape and frequency analysis on pornographic images under skin region of interests (ROIs). The main objective of this work is to design pornographic recognition scheme which not only can improve performances of existing methods (i.e., methods based on skin probability, scale invariant feature transform, eigenporn, and Multilayer-Perceptron and Neuro-Fuzzy (MP-NF)) but also can works fast for recognition. The experimental outcome display that our proposed system can improve 0.3% of accuracy and reduce 6.60% the false negative rate (FNR) of the best existing method (skin probability and eigenporn on YCbCr, SEP), respectively. Additionally, our proposed method also provides almost similar robust performances to the MP-NF on large size dataset. However, our proposed method needs short recognition time by about 0.021 seconds per image for both tested datasets.

Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol) Level in the Dorsal Skin of Sunda Porcupine (Hystrix javanica)

Alpha tocopherol, as the most active component of Vitamine E, is identified as antioxidant present in some parts of the skin and the concentration is vary in several regions of the body due to the skin characteristic of the region. Sunda porcupine (Hystrix javanica) is one of the rodents in Indonesia with quill as its spesific skin characteristic. The porcupine quill are distributed in various shapes and sizes in body parts, while dorsal regions and the tail is the body part that has the most developed quill form. This study aimed to measure alpha tocopherol content in the dorsal region skin of male and female Sunda porcupine. The study used skin samples of thoracodorsal and lumbosacral regions of 6 adult Sunda porcupine (3 males and 3 females) and 2 frozen specimens (1 male and 1 female). Samples were prepared and processed for analysis through high performance liquid chromatography. The results showed that the level of tocopherol in the dorsal thoracic region of males and females was much higher than that of the lumbosacral region. The results of this study indicate the characteristics of the skin region affect the levels of alpha tocopherol in the region.