ABSTRACT
Cracks are one of the main distresses that occur on concrete surfaces. Traditional methods for detecting cracks based on two-dimensional (2D) images can be hampered by stains, shadows, and other artifacts, while various three-dimensional (3D) crack-detection techniques, using point clouds, are less affected in this regard but are limited by the measurement accuracy of the 3D laser scanner. In this study, we propose an automatic crack-detection method that fuses 3D point clouds and 2D images based on an improved Otsu algorithm, which consists of the following four major procedures. First, a high-precision registration of a depth image projected from 3D point clouds and 2D images is performed. Second, pixel-level image fusion is performed, which fuses the depth and gray information. Third, a rough crack image is obtained from the fusion image using the improved Otsu method. Finally, the connected domain labeling and morphological methods are used to finely extract the cracks. Experimentally, the proposed method was tested at multiple scales and with various types of concrete crack. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve an average precision of 89.0%, recall of 84.8%, and F1 score of 86.7%, performing significantly better than the single image (average F1 score of 67.6%) and single point cloud (average F1 score of 76.0%) methods. Accordingly, the proposed method has high detection accuracy and universality, indicating its wide potential application as an automatic method for concrete-crack detection.
ABSTRACT
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver cancer with a dismal prognosis, especially when diagnosed at advanced stages. Annexin A2 (ANXA2), is found to promote cancer progression and therapeutic resistance. However, the underlining mechanisms of ANXA2 in immune escape of HCC remain poorly understood up to now. Herein, we summarized the molecular function of ANXA2 in HCC and its relationship with prognosis. Furthermore, we tentatively elucidated the underlying mechanism of ANXA2 immune escape of HCC by upregulating the proportion of regulatory T cells and the expression of several inhibitory molecules, and by downregulating the proportion of natural killer cells and dendritic cells and the expression of several inhibitory molecules or effector molecules. We expect a lot of in-depth studies to further reveal the underlying mechanism of ANXA2 in immune escape of HCC in the future.
