Communicable diseases are illnesses caused by pathogenic biological agents, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, and protozoa. Such diseases spread among people through contact with contaminated surfaces, bodily fluids, or blood products, or through the air, insect bites, or consuming contaminated food and beverages. Although some communicable diseases can be treated or prevented by taking medication and vaccines, there has been an increase in awareness of adopting a healthy diet to aid in the prevention and reversal of these diseases. One popular diet is a plant-based diet. Plant-based diets generally consist of vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, and fruits, without any animal-source foods or artificial ingredients. Over the years, this diet has continuously increased in popularity. Reasons for following a plant-based diet are varied but include health benefits, such as improving immunity, and reducing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers. Scientific evidence even shows that just an increased vegetable intake can decrease the occurrence of chronic diseases caused by viruses, such as hepatitis viruses, and reduce the risk of severe coronavirus disease 2019. Therefore, this mini review discusses the effectiveness of adopting a plant-based diet in ameliorating diseases caused by selected viruses and its limitations.
Fryderyk Chopin's Polonaise in Ab Major, op. 53, is widely known as the “Heroic.” It's tempting to dismiss this seemingly generic title, which was not Chopin's. But what can notions of a “heroic polonaise,” taken from nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century contexts, do for our current understanding of the piece? The appellation evokes a constellation of distinct cultural contexts, such as nostalgia, nationalism, Polish messianism, the medieval revival in the arts, and ideas of the artist as a prophetic hero. Not only do these contexts come together and interact in the then pervasive cultural narrative of Poland's fall and eventual rebirth, but they also color the mythicized reception accorded to Chopin and his music. Taken collectively, these contexts help to shape the amorphous concept of heroicness. So, I deploy topic theory and narratology in a close reading of the piece in order to reconcile these contexts with this polonaise's putative heroic qualities. As a topic, the polonaise takes the form of several types throughout the piece, each with its own affective connotations and temporal associations, and this fluidity of topical references muddles a straightforward apprehension of the piece's heroicness. Combining the topical dimension with an examination of the tonal and formal logic of the piece, I demonstrate how the piece might be re-interpreted in light of the previously mentioned narrative of Poland's fall and resurrection. Moreover, the piece's specificities interact with certain theoretical issues related to musical meaning, such as music's capacity to denote temporalities distinct from its unfolding. That said, my turn to the historical contexts for the piece's heroicness is meant to open up rather than to pin down musical meaning. A comparison between my interpretation and a nineteenth-century one by a Polish musician illustrates how the same interpretative framework yields diverse readings, while a survey of a few works of art that draw on op. 53, each with their own framing contexts, shows how op. 53's heroicness has been understood anew across time and cultures.
This paper presents a segmentation technique which utilizes atlas based centroid forces coupled with GradientVector Flow (GVF) parametric active contour for the segmentation of femoral cancellous bone. The atlas used in our study provides prior information to constraint contours at regions where edge based forces are missing and to initialize the active contours. GVF external force field is padded with the centroid force derived from the atlas. In our implementation, once the atlas is registered with the target image to be segmented, the segmentation process is fully automatic. Analysis of segmentation accuracy of twenty one slices at the intercondylar location of sagittal slices provides sensitivity of 97.4±1.9%; specificity of 99.6±0.1%; Dice similarity coefficient of 96.7±1.1%. From the inspection of external force fields and the accuracy results, the study suggests that the centroid force formulation is effective in approximating missing boundaries in GVF and in facilitating automatic initialization.
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