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Purpose: To evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of one-field, non-mydriatic, 45° digital photography for screening for diabetic retinopathy compared to indirect ophthalmoscopy using a slit-lamp, the reference standard. Methods: A total of 100 consecutive diabetic patients (200 eyes) who underwent digital fundus photography and ocular examinations from June 2002 to November 2002 were included in this retrospective study. The patients, recruited from a hospital-based, retina referral practice, underwent 45°, non-mydriatic, digital fundus photography using a non-mydriatic fundus camera. One image was obtained focusing the mid fundus between the optic disc and the macula. The fundus images were printed and graded by endocrinologists and a retinal specialist separately. The patients also underwent complete standard ocular examinations as the reference method for determining diabetic retinopathy, including dilation of their pupils and slit-lamp biomicroscopy done by ophthalmologists. The sensitivity and specificity of the digital photographic method were calculated by comparison to the reference method. Results: The sensitivity and specificity of the retinal specialist’s diabetic retinopathy grades were 53.8 and 89.0%, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of the endocrinologists’ grades were 45 and 75.3%, respectively. The false negative rates were 22 and 21.5% for endocrinologists and the retinal specialist, respectively. Conclusions: Screening for diabetic retinopathy using one-field, non-mydriatic, 45° digital photography is inadequate.

It is most informative when both the trend and the levels of Tg during sequential follow-up are considered. The diagnostic WBS may be performed for selected patients with indication based on Tg levels to localize the disease.

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the major cause of death for infants aged one week to twelve months. The SIDS rate has declined owing to the awareness of caregivers and parents, but the rate is still high even in developed countries because of the difficulty in rescuing the infant immediately. Respiration, which can reflect various physiological conditions, is a basic but vital function for infants. Therefore, this study presents a respiration monitoring system with a video camera positioned in front of an infant to non-invasively detect the infant's respiratory frequency. The proposed system can continuously monitor the infant to detect unusual occurrences in the infant's respiration, to alert caregivers to attend to the infant immediately and reduce potential injuries from SIDS and other respiratory-related disease.The proposed system contains four major stages, including motion detection, candidate point extraction, respiration point selection, and respiratory frequency calculation. During motion detection the system captures images from video and decides whether to conduct the following stages. If no obvious motion is detected in the input frames, then SIDS may have occurred in the infant, and the system extracts candidate points by some spatial characteristics. Based on these points, the system then selects respiration points using a fuzzy integral technique with four temporal characteristics, including entropy, period, skewness, and kurtosis. Finally, the infant's respiratory frequency is calculated. Experimental data are obtained from ten infants, in 48 sequences with a total length of 150 minutes. The experimental results show that the proposed system is robust and efficient.Keywords-Home healthcare, vision-based infant monitoring system, vision-based infant respiratory frequency detection system, fuzzy integral.

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A network simulator always is an important tool to observe and evaluate the study concept for wireless networks. Considering the restriction of the limited budget, the non-commercial open-source simulation software often becomes the top choice of academia. Since the natures of academic study are innovation and excellence, a simulator frequently encounters that the existing modular functions are inadequate and need to be appended or modified. If a selected simulator inherently has poor architecture, the maintenance, recondition, and expansion of functions will become more difficult and more time-consuming in the future, while it is difficult to understand and reuse by the successors. Therefore, how to select a most suitable simulator is an important issue. In order to make a simulator have flexible architecture and believable results, design patterns are proposed as the norms to design system architecture. To realize this idea, we surveyed six most used simulators, i.e., J-Sim, NS-2, NS-3, OMNet++, OPNET, and QualNet, to ponder their system architectures and design concepts from the source codes and the related literatures of the modular function expansion. We propose a network simulator architecture, named as CCGns, which is a discrete-event virtual network simulator and follows the IEEE 802.16-2009 standard. CCGns obeys the object-oriented design principles and is coded by the Java language. CCGns comprises eight packages for physical layer, medium access control layer, network layer, devices, topologies, events, scheduler, and reports, respectively. The main contribution includes three aspects which propose a scalable MAC messages management and the corresponding architecture, an applicable for multi-hop relay network topology architecture, and a two-stage minimum variance bandwidth allocation algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this article is not the first one to apply the design patterns for the simulator architectures of wireless network, but we use more design patterns and types than the others and also provide the unified modeling language figures to explain the system architectures. We particularly focus on how the management procedure of control messages influences the time-related performance evaluation metrics, e.g., how the amount and processing time of different control messages affect throughput, packet delay, and packet drop ratio. By using mathematic calculation to verify the simulation results, the proposed system architecture has been proven to possess excellent fidelity.

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