This paper presents a method to detect table regions in document images by identifying the column and row line-separators and their properties. The method employs a run-length approach to identify the horizontal and vertical lines present in the input image. From each group of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, a set of 26 low-level features are extracted and an SVM classifier is used to test if it belongs to a table or not. The performance of the method is evaluated on a heterogeneous corpus of French, English and Arabic documents that contain various types of table structures and compared with that of the Tesseract OCR system.

This paper presents a Document Image Analysis (DIA) system able to extract homogeneous typed and handwritten text regions from complex layout documents of various types. The method is based on two connected component classification stages that successively discriminate text/non text and typed/handwritten shapes, followed by an original block segmentation method based on white rectangles detection. We present the results obtained by the system during the first competition round of the MAURDOR campaign.

Recent years saw a growing interest in predicting antibiotic resistance from whole-genome sequencing data, with promising results obtained for Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In this work, we gathered 6,574 sequencing read datasets of M. tuberculosis public genomes with associated antibiotic resistance profiles for both first and second-line antibiotics. We performed a systematic evaluation of TBProfiler and Mykrobe, two widely recognized softwares allowing to predict resistance in M. tuberculosis. The size of the dataset allowed us to obtain confident estimations of their overall predictive performance, to assess precisely the individual predictive power of the markers they rely on, and to study in addition how these softwares behave across the major M. tuberculosis lineages. While this study confirmed the overall good performance of these tools, it revealed that an important fraction of the catalog of mutations they embed is of limited predictive power. It also revealed that these tools offer different sensitivity/specificity trade-offs, which is mainly due to the different sets of mutation they embed but also to their underlying genotyping pipelines. More importantly, it showed that their level of predictive performance varies greatly across lineages for some antibiotics, therefore suggesting that the predictions made by these softwares should be deemed more or less confident depending on the lineage inferred and the predictive performance of the marker(s) actually detected. Finally, we evaluated the relevance of machine learning approaches operating from the set of markers detected by these softwares and show that they present an attractive alternative strategy, allowing to reach better performance for several drugs while significantly reducing the number of candidate mutations to consider.

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A questionnaire-based survey of rheumatology nurses was undertaken to investigate the use, and perceptions, of the effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) in the management of patients with rheumatic diseases (RD). A total of 192 rheumatology nurses (response rate 76.2%) completed the questionnaire, which included sections on qualifications and clinical experience, perceptions of, training in, and use of CAM in the management of RD patients. CAM was provided by 8.3% of respondents, principally aromatherapy, massage and reflexology. Furthermore, over half of respondents (51.6%) provided advice to patients about CAM, primarily to patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Perceptions of the benefits of CAM are overwhelmingly positive: 89.8% of respondents considered it to have a role in the NHS. Current barriers to wider use of CAM include budgetary constraints in the health service, limited availability of published evidence, and the current lack of a clear and adequate regulatory framework for its practice.