Light scattering and color change are two major sources of distortion for underwater photography. Light scattering is caused by light incident on objects reflected and deflected multiple times by particles present in the water before reaching the camera. This in turn lowers the visibility and contrast of the image captured. Color change corresponds to the varying degrees of attenuation encountered by light traveling in the water with different wavelengths, rendering ambient underwater environments dominated by a bluish tone. No existing underwater processing techniques can handle light scattering and color change distortions suffered by underwater images, and the possible presence of artificial lighting simultaneously. This paper proposes a novel systematic approach to enhance underwater images by a dehazing algorithm, to compensate the attenuation discrepancy along the propagation path, and to take the influence of the possible presence of an artifical light source into consideration. Once the depth map, i.e., distances between the objects and the camera, is estimated, the foreground and background within a scene are segmented. The light intensities of foreground and background are compared to determine whether an artificial light source is employed during the image capturing process. After compensating the effect of artifical light, the haze phenomenon and discrepancy in wavelength attenuation along the underwater propagation path to camera are corrected. Next, the water depth in the image scene is estimated according to the residual energy ratios of different color channels existing in the background light. Based on the amount of attenuation corresponding to each light wavelength, color change compensation is conducted to restore color balance. The performance of the proposed algorithm for wavelength compensation and image dehazing (WCID) is evaluated both objectively and subjectively by utilizing ground-truth color patches and video downloaded from the Youtube website. Both results demonstrate that images with significantly enhanced visibility and superior color fidelity are obtained by the WCID proposed.

This nationwide prospective cohort study demonstrates that DVT and PE risks significantly increased in patients with RA compared with those of the general population.

Physical therapy (physiotherapy), a complementary and alternative medicine therapy, has been widely applied in diagnosing and treating various diseases and defects. Increasing evidence suggests that convenient and non-invasive far-infrared (FIR) rays, a vital type of physiotherapy, improve the health of patients with cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, and chronic kidney disease. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanisms by which FIR functions remain elusive. Hence, the purpose of this study was to review and summarize the results of previous investigations and to elaborate on the molecular mechanisms of FIR therapy in various types of disease. In conclusion, FIR therapy may be closely related to the increased expression of endothelial nitric oxide synthase as well as nitric oxide production and may modulate the profiles of some circulating miRNAs; thus, it may be a beneficial complement to treatments for some chronic diseases that yields no adverse effects.

CD34+ cell therapy for end-stage diffuse coronary artery disease patients might contribute to persistently long-term effects on improvement of left ventricular function, angina/heart failure, and amelioration of left ventricular remodeling.

Cytologic screening has been widely used for detecting the cervical cancers. In this study, a semiautomatic PC-based cellular image analysis system was developed for segmenting nuclear and cytoplasmic contours and for computing morphometric and textual features to train support vector machine (SVM) classifiers to classify four different types of cells and to discriminate dysplastic from normal cells. A software program incorporating function, including image reviewing and standardized denomination of file names, was also designed to facilitate and standardize the workflow of cell analyses. Two experiments were conducted to verify the classification performance. The cross-validation results of the first experiment showed that average accuracies of 97.16% and 98.83%, respectively, for differentiating four different types of cells and in discriminating dysplastic from normal cells have been achieved using salient features (8 for four-cluster and 7 for two-cluster classifiers) selected with SVM recursive feature addition. In the second experiment, 70% (837) of the cell images were used for training and 30% (361) for testing, achieving an accuracy of 96.12% and 98.61% for four-cluster and two-cluster classifiers, respectively. The proposed system provides a feasible and effective tool in evaluating cytologic specimens.

Tongue diagnosis is an important practice in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for diagnosing diseases before determining proper means of treatments. Traditionally, it depends solely on personal knowledge and experience of the practitioner, thereby being criticized as lacking of objectivity. Currently, no research regarding intra- and inter-agreements of automatic tongue diagnosis system (ATDS) and TCM doctors has been conducted. In this study, the ATDS is developed to extract a variety of tongue features and provide practitioners with objective information to assist diagnoses. To evaluate the ATDS clinical stability, 2 sets of tongue images taken 1 hour apart from 20 patients with possible variations in lighting and extruding tongue, are employed to investigate intra-agreement of the ATDS, intra-agreement of the TCM doctors, and the inter-agreement between the ATDS and TCM doctors. The ATDS is shown to be more consistent with significantly higher intra-agreement than the TCM doctors (kappa value: 0.93 ± 0.06 versus 0.64 ± 0.13) with P < 0.001 (Student's t-test). Inter-agreements between the ATDS and TCM doctors, as well as among the TCM doctors are both moderate. The high agreement of the ATDS can provide objective and reliable tongue features to facilitate doctor in making effective observation and diagnosis of specific diseases.

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