automatic

Evaluating the performance of water indices and water-related ecosystems is crucial for Ethiopia. This is due to limited information on the availability and distribution of water resources at the country scale, despite its critical role in sustainable water management, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem resilience. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of seven water indices and select the best-performing indices for detecting surface water at country scale. Sentinel-2 data from December 1, 2021, to November 30, 2022, were used for the evaluation and processed using the Google Earth Engine...

Canopy photosynthesis (Ac ), rather than leaf photosynthesis, is critical to gaining higher biomass production in the field because the daily or seasonal integrals of Ac correlate with the daily or seasonal integrals of biomass production. The canopy photosynthesis and transpiration measurement system (CAPTS) was developed to enable measurement of canopy photosynthetic CO2 uptake, transpiration, and respiration rates. CAPTS continuously records the CO2 concentration, water vapor concentration, air temperature, air pressure, air relative humidity, and photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) inside the chamber, which can be used to derive CO2 and H2 O fluxes of a canopy covered by the chamber...

Geometry scaling of microwave circuits is an essential but challenging task. In particular, the employment of a given passive structure in a different application area often requires re-adjustment of the operating frequencies/bands while maintaining top performance. Achieving this necessitates the utilization of numerical optimization methods. Nonetheless, if the intended frequencies are distant from the ones at the starting point, local search procedures tend to fail, whereas global search algorithms are computationally expensive...

A crucial step in the clinical adaptation of an AI-based tool is an external, independent validation. The aim of this study was to investigate brain atrophy in patients with confirmed, progressed Huntington's disease using a certified software for automated volumetry and to compare the results with the manual measurement methods used in clinical practice as well as volume calculations of the caudate nuclei based on manual segmentations. Twenty-two patients were included retrospectively, consisting of eleven patients with Huntington's disease and caudate nucleus atrophy and an age- and sex-matched control group...

AIMS: Delineation variations and organ motion produce difficult-to-quantify uncertainties in planned radiation doses to targets and organs at risk. Similar to manual contouring, most automatic segmentation tools generate single delineations per structure; however, this does not indicate the range of clinically acceptable delineations. This study develops a method to generate a range of automatic cardiac structure segmentations, incorporating motion and delineation uncertainty, and evaluates the dosimetric impact in lung cancer...

OBJECTIVES: To analyze the effects of electroacupuncture (EA) at "Fenglong" (ST40) and "Zusanli" (ST36) of different intensities and durations on rats with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) based on the protein kinase R-like endoplasmic reticulum kinase (PERK)-activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4)-C/EBP homologous protein (CHOP) signaling pathway, so as to explore its mechanism underlying improvement of NAFLD. METHODS: SD rats were randomly divided into normal diet group, high-fat model group, sham EA group, strong stimulation EA (SEA) group, and weak stimulation EA (WEA) group, with 15 rats in each group...

BACKGROUND: Measuring spinal alignment with radiological parameters is essential in patients with spinal conditions likely to be treated surgically. These evaluations are not usually included in the radiological report. As a result, spinal surgeons commonly perform the measurement, which is time-consuming and subject to errors. We aim to develop a fully automated artificial intelligence tool to assist in measuring alignment parameters in whole-spine lateral radiograph (WSL X-rays). MATERIAL AND METHODS: We developed a tool called Vertebrai that automatically calculates the global spinal parameters (GSP): Pelvic incidence (PI), sacral slope (SS), pelvic tilt (PT), L1-L4 angle, L4-S1 lumbo-pelvic angle, T1 pelvic angle (TPA), sagittal vertical axis (SVA), cervical lordosis (CL), C1-C2 lordosis, lumbar lordosis (LL), mid-thoracic kyphosis (MTK), proximal thoracic kyphosis (PTK), global thoracic kyphosis (GTK), T1 slope (T1S), C2-C7 plummet (cSVA), spino-sacral angle (SSA), C7 tilt (C7T), global tilt (GT), spinopelvic tilt (T1SPi) and hip odontoid axis (OD-HA)...

Barking and other dog vocalizations have acoustic properties related to emotions, physiological reactions, attitudes, or some particular internal states. In the field of intelligent audio analysis, researchers use methods based on signal processing and machine learning to analyze the digitized acoustic signals' properties and obtain relevant information. The present work describes a method to classify the identity, breed, age, sex, and context associated with each bark. This information can support the decisions of people who regularly interact with animals, such as dog trainers, veterinarians, rescuers, police, people with visual impairment...

Photon-counting detector (PCD) CT enables routine virtual-monoenergetic image (VMI) reconstruction. We evaluated the performance of an automatic VMI energy level (keV) selection tool on a clinical PCD-CT system in comparison to an automatic tube potential (kV) selection tool from an energy-integrating-detector (EID) CT system from the same manufacturer. 
Approach: Four torso-shaped phantoms (20-50 cm width) containing iodine (2, 5, and 10-mg/cc) and calcium (100 mg/cc) were scanned on PCD-CT and EID-CT...

BACKGROUND: Liver lesions mainly occur inside the liver parenchyma, which are difficult to locate and have complicated relationships with essential vessels. Thus, preoperative planning is crucial for the resection of liver lesions. Accurate segmentation of the hepatic and portal veins (PVs) on computed tomography (CT) images is of great importance for preoperative planning. However, manually labeling the mask of vessels is laborious and time-consuming, and the labeling results of different clinicians are prone to inconsistencies...

PURPOSE: To evaluate the reliability and validity of a newly developed computerized Automated Battery of Cognitive Tests in healthy individuals without cognitive impairments or psychiatric disorders. METHODS: From April 20 to July 1, 2023, 142 healthy individuals in Beijing and Tangshan, China were assessed using the Automated Battery of Cognitive Tests. After a 3-week interval, 36 participants were randomly selected for retesting. The assessment also included administration of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status and the Automated Battery of Cognitive Tests to 59 participants...

When representing high-level stimuli, such as faces and animals, we tend to emphasize salient features-such as a face's prominent cheekbones or a bird's pointed beak. Such mental caricaturing leaves traces in memory, which exaggerates these distinctive qualities. How broadly does this phenomenon extend? Here, in six experiments ( N = 700 adults), we explored how memory automatically caricatures basic units of visual processing-simple geometric shapes-even without task-related demands to do so. Participants saw a novel shape and then immediately adjusted a copy of that shape to match what they had seen...

Accurate and robust medical image segmentation is crucial for assisting disease diagnosis, making treatment plan, and monitoring disease progression. Adaptive to different scale variations and regions of interest is essential for high accuracy in automatic segmentation methods. Existing methods based on the U-shaped architecture respectively tackling intra- and inter-scale problem with a hierarchical encoder, however, are restricted by the scope of multi-scale modeling. In addition, global attention and scaling attention in regions of interest have not been appropriately adopted, especially for the salient features...

As a building block of knowledge acquisition, knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims at inferring missing facts in knowledge graphs (KGs) automatically. Previous studies mainly focus on graph convolutional network (GCN)-based KG embedding (KGE) to determine the representations of entities and relations, accordingly predicting missing triplets. However, most existing KGE methods suffer from limitations in predicting tail entities that are far away or even unreachable in KGs. This limitation can be attributed to the related high-order information being largely ignored...

STUDY OBJECTIVES: This study investigated the impact of APAP therapy on vascular behavior and its potential to lower cardiovascular risk in patients with OSA, as well as differentiating APAP therapy heterogeneity. METHODS: All participants were diagnosed with OSA by portable monitoring, and pulse wave parameters and cardiac risk composite parameter index (CRI) were obtained by photoplethysmography before and after APAP. Clustering analysis of pulse wave parameters before APAP in the high-risk population was performed using k-means clustering...

This study aims to assess the accuracy of automatic atlas-based contours for various key anatomical structures in prostate radiotherapy treatment planning. The evaluated structures include the bladder, rectum, prostate, seminal vesicles, femoral heads and penile bulb. CT images from 20 patients who underwent intensity-modulated radiotherapy were randomly chosen to create an atlas library. Atlas contours of the seven anatomical structures were generated using four software packages: ABAS, Eclipse, MIM, and RayStation...

A subcortical pathway is thought to have evolved to facilitate fear information transmission, but direct evidence for its existence in humans is lacking. In recent years, rapid, preattentive, and preconscious fear processing has been demonstrated, providing indirect support for the existence of the subcortical pathway by challenging the necessity of canonical cortical pathways in fear processing. However, direct support also requires evidence for the involvement of subcortical regions in fear processing. To address this issue, here we investigate whether fear processing reflects the characteristics of the subcortical structures in the hypothesized subcortical pathway...

This study examined parental romantic attachment security as a mediator of prospective associations between hostile interparental conflict and parental discipline (i.e., power-assertive, permissive, and inductive discipline) for mothers and fathers of young children. Furthermore, this study utilized a novel, automatic assessment of romantic attachment security in examining whether romantic attachment assessed at controlled (i.e., self-reported) and automatic (i.e., a rapid word-sorting task) levels of representation differentially serve as spillover mechanisms...

Advances in machine learning have enabled sufficiently accurate predictions of protein structure to be used in macromolecular structure determination with crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy data. The Phenix software suite has AlphaFold predictions integrated into an automated pipeline that can start with an amino acid sequence and data, and automatically perform model-building and refinement to return a protein model fitted into the data. Due to the steep technical requirements of running AlphaFold efficiently, we have implemented a Phenix-AlphaFold webservice that enables all Phenix users to run AlphaFold predictions remotely from the Phenix GUI starting with the official 1...

An exciton-phonon (ex-ph) model based on our recently developed block interaction product basis framework is introduced to simulate the distal charge separation (CS) process in aggregated perylenediimide (PDI) trimer incorporating the quantum dynamic method, i.e., the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group. The electronic Hamiltonian in the ex-ph model is represented by nine constructed diabatic states, which include three local excited (LE) states and six charge transfer (CT) states from both the neighboring and distal chromophores...