This paper presents a compact and efficient shape signature that can be applied to shape retrieval from handdrawn sketches. The two proposed invariant features that constitute our affine invariant signature are: (a) angle between spoke vectors, and (b) cumulated normalized area between consecutive spoke vectors. The signature can be computed efficiently from an input shape and supports fast sim...

BACKGROUND It remains uncertain whether exposure to lower doses of alcohol is damaging to the developing fetus. The present study aimed to investigate associations for boys and girls between prenatal exposure to binge drinking and lower doses of alcohol in pregnancy, and parent-reported behavioural and emotional development at age seven. METHODS This study used data from the Danish National B...

Objective: To investigate in a prospective randomised study both long term clinical effects and cost effectiveness of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) with or without intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) guidance. Methods: 108 male patients with stable angina referred for PCI of a significant coronary lesion were randomly assigned to IVUS guided PCI or conventional PCI. Individual accumulat...

OBJECTIVE Mapping of transrectal ultrasonographic (TRUS) prostate biopsies is of fundamental importance for either diagnostic purposes or the management and treatment of prostate cancer, but the localization of the cores seems inaccurate. Our objective was to evaluate the capacities of an operator to plan transrectal prostate biopsies under 2-dimensional TRUS guidance using a registration algor...

Neural network analysis was applied for early diagnosis/exclusion of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), prediction of infarct size, and estimation of "time from onset of infarction." Eighty-eight patients admitted within 8 h after onset of chest pain were included. Blood samples for measurement of myoglobin, creatine kinase isoform MB, and troponin T were obtained every 30 min during the first ...

Various studies have suggested the existence of different pathways of tumor progression in colorectal cancer that associate with specific molecular, chromosomal, and clinicopathological features. We hypothesize that a comprehensive analysis of cumulated genomic damage in colorectal cancers would aid the characterization of different tumor progression pathways and identify the factors determinin...

BACKGROUND Some Chinese herbal products (CHPs) may contain aristolochic acid (AA) or may be adulterated by the herbs suspected of containing AA which is nephrotoxic and carcinogenic. This study aims to identify the risk and the prescription profile of AA-containing CHPs (AA-CHPs) in Taiwan. METHODS A longitudinal analysis was conducted on a randomly sampled cohort of 200,000 patients using th...

Abstract Subalpine conifers are highly sensitive to climatic changes. In these trees, the intra-annual dynamics of cambial activity and phenological process in xylem development closely associated with conditions. However, scientific findings have not been verified for subalpine Republic Korea. Therefore, we initiated such a study four conifers, viz. Abies koreana , Pinus koraiensis Taxus cuspi...