Enhance Portable Radiograph for Fast and High Accurate COVID-19 Monitoring

This work aimed to assist physicians by improving their speed and diagnostic accuracy when interpreting portable CXRs as well as monitoring the treatment process to see whether a patient is improving or deteriorating with treatment. These objectives are in especially high demand in the setting of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With the recent progress in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), we introduce new deep learning frameworks to align and enhance the quality of portable CXRs to be more consistent, and to more closely match higher quality conventional CXRs. These enhanced portable CXRs can then help the doctors provide faster and more accurate diagnosis and treatment planning. The contributions of this work are four-fold. Firstly, a new database collection of subject-pair radiographs is introduced. For each subject, we collected a pair of samples from both portable and conventional machines. Secondly, a new deep learning approach is presented to align the subject-pairs dataset to obtain a pixel-pairs dataset. Thirdly, a new PairFlow approach is presented, an end-to-end invertible transfer deep learning method, to enhance the degraded quality of portable CXRs. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is evaluated by UAMS doctors in terms of both image quality and topological properties. This work was undertaken in collaboration with the Department of Radiology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) to enhance portable/mobile COVID-19 CXRs, to improve the speed and accuracy of portable CXR images and aid in urgent COVID-19 diagnosis, monitoring and treatment.

Young of the common buzzard (Buteo buteo) reared by lesser spotted eagles (Aquila pomarina) in natural conditions in Slovakia

Since 2005 a breeding pair of A. pomarina has been observed near the village of Drienovec, Košice-Environs district, eastern Slovakia. Since 2009 occupied nests have been found each year with the subject pair. In the years 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 this pair successfully reared one young A. pomarina, but in 2012 they reared two B. buteo young during the nesting period in natural conditions and without the intervention of human beings. This is the first such documented case in the entire breeding grounds ofA. pomarina.

Frequency Selectivity and Consonant Intelligibility in Sensorineural Hearing Loss

The relations between frequency selectivity and consonant intelligibility were investigated in subjects with sensorineura] hearing loss in an attempt to derive predictive indices. Three matched pairs of subjects with similar audiometric configurations (high-frequency, fiat or low-frequency hearing loss) but significantly different word-intelligibility scores were tested. Characteristics of psychophysical tuning curves (PTCs) for high- and low-frequency probes were compared with speech-intelligibility performance for high- and low-frequency consonant-vowel syllables. Frequency-specific relations between PTC characteristics and consonant-intelligibility performance were observed in the subject pairs with high-frequency and fiat sensorineural hearing loss. Corresponding results for the subject pair with low-frequency sensorineural hearing loss were equivocal.