Complete Box Fusion based on Ensemble Networks for rib fracture detection and localization / 解剖学报

Objective To propose a new rib fracture detection network Rib-Net to automatically and accurately detect and locate rib fracture and address the issue of missed diagnosis of rib fractures. Methods The public data set RibFrac Dataset was used to evaluate the performance of the Rib-Net, and the data set was divided into training set (420 cases), validation set (80 cases), and test set (160 cases). The Rib-Net was composed of the object detection integrated network Ensemble Detection Net (ED-Ne), Complete Box Fusion (CBF) module and the segmentation network 3D Unet. Firstly, Retina Unet, UFRCNN+ and Mask RCNN were integrated to form ED-Net to predict rib fracture candidate boxes. Secondly, a new CBF module was designed to fuse overlapping fracture candidate boxes to generate candidate boxes with accurate positioning and accurate confidence. Finally, Unet was used for rib fracture segmentation to achieve further precise localization of rib fractures. Results On the “MICCAI 2020 RibFrac Challenge: Rib Fracture Detection and Classification challenge”, our proposed Rib-Net’s detection results reached the best performance, and its recall rate, free-response receiver operating characteristic curve(FROC) value and Dice were 92.3%, 0.859 and 0.61, respectively. Conclusion The Rib-Net network can efficiently and accurately detect and locate rib fractures on chest CT images, effectively assisting doctors in making accurate diagnosis.

Awareness of Age-related Macular Degeneration and Its Risk Factors among Beijing Residents in China / 中华医学杂志(英文版)

<p><b>BACKGROUND</b>Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a major cause of irreversible blindness, and awareness of this disease is important in the prevention of blindness. However, lack of public awareness of AMD was shown in previous studies, and there was no report of AMD awareness in the Mainland of China. Therefore, the aim of our study was to assess the awareness of AMD and its risk factors among Beijing residents in China.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>A cross-sectional, computer-assisted, telephone investigation was conducted to measure the awareness of AMD among Beijing residents. All the contacts of potential respondents were randomly generated by computer. Only those above 18 years of age and willing to participate in the study were included. The questionnaire for the study was modified from the AMD Alliance International Global Report. Pearson's Chi-square test and binary logistic regression analysis were used to identify the factors that affected the knowledge of AMD.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>Among 385 Beijing residents who agreed to participate, the awareness of AMD was 6.8%, far below than that of cataract and glaucoma. Participants who were above 30 years of age (odds ratio [OR] 6.17, confidence interval [CI] 1.44-26.57), with experience of health-related work (OR 8.11, CI 3.25-20.27), and whose relatives/friends or themselves suffering from AMD (OR 32.18, CI 11.29-91.68) had better AMD awareness. Among those familiar with AMD, only 35% of them identified smoking as a risk factor, and only 23.1% of the residents believed that smoking could lead to blindness.</p><p><b>CONCLUSIONS</b>The sample of Chinese population had limited knowledge of AMD. Educational programs need to be carried out to raise public awareness of AMD.</p>

Analysis on chemical constituents from Forsythiae Fructus by HPLC-Q-TOF-MS / 中草药

Objective: To analysis the main chemical ingredients of Forsythiae Fructus by LC-MS technology in the positive and negative ions mode. Methods: The chromatographic fingerprint was obtained with Diamonsil II C18 column (250 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm) and gradient elution with 0.05% H2O-formic acid (A)-acetonitrile (B), and the flow rate was 1.0 mL/min. The column temperature was maintained at 35℃. The detection wavelength was 200-600 nm. Positive and negative ions MS information of Bruker Daltonics 1200 HPLC-Q-TOF was coupled with elemental analysis and compared with literature data to analyze the compounds information. Results: Combined with the accurately relative molecular mass of compounds provided by HPLC-Q-TOF-MS, 24 compounds were identified from the ethanolic extraction of Forsythia Fructus, which include 12 phenylethanoid glycosides, seven lignan ingredients, and five flavonoids. And 3,4-dihydroxyphenylethanoid glycoside (1), 2-methoxy-3,4,5-trihydroxyphenylethanoid glycoside (2), β-hydroxyforsythoside H (7), dihydroquercetagetin (24), and dihydromyricetin (25) were first identified in Forsythiae fructus. Conclusion: The method provides the technical support for the quality control of Forsythiae Fructus and contributes the reference data to elucidating the potential basis of Forsythiae Fructus.

SVM for density estimation and application to medical image segmentation / 浙江大学学报（英文版）（B辑：生物医学和生物技术）

A method of medical image segmentation based on support vector machine (SVM) for density estimation is presented. We used this estimator to construct a prior model of the image intensity and curvature profile of the structure from training images. When segmenting a novel image similar to the training images, the technique of narrow level set method is used. The higher dimensional surface evolution metric is defined by the prior model instead of by energy minimization function. This method offers several advantages. First, SVM for density estimation is consistent and its solution is sparse. Second, compared to the traditional level set methods, this method incorporates shape information on the object to be segmented into the segmentation process. Segmentation results are demonstrated on synthetic images, MR images and ultrasonic images.