Adult necrotising enterocolitis: a rare entity.

A case of Adult Necrotising Enterocolitis in an adult female whom diagnosed with intestinal obstruction was reported. On exploratory laparotomy, the mechanical caused was not found although major part of small bowel, caecum and proximal ascending colon were gangrenous along with intervening normal parts. Resection of affected bowel was performed followed by jejunostomy and transverse colostomy. Unfortunately, the patient not survive in the postoperative periods. Adult Necrotising Enterocolitis may mimic intestinal obstruction clinically or radiologically and prompt medical and surgical intervention is indicated in doubtful cases although it carries a poor prognosis.

An unusual presentation of giant extrathoracic tumor in a child--managed successfully.

Lipoma is one of the most common mesenchymal tumors, usually seen over the trunk and proximal portions of the extremities. However, giant lipomas are very rarely seen over the chest wall and axilla in children. In rural areas, patients usually do not bother to be treated, which leads to complications, as seen in our case. Here, we report a rare case of a three-year-old child who presented with a large swelling on the right side of the anterior chest wall and in the axillary region. On histopathology, the diagnosis was lipoma. At the six-month follow-up, the child was normal without any complications. The clinical features, radiological and pathological findings and management of the lesion are discussed. If such a large tumor is not treated in a timely manner, it can cause respiratory discomfort or lead to malignancy.

A semi-automated approach to balancing of bottom-up salience for predicting change detection performance.

Previous change blindness studies have failed to address the importance of balancing low-level visual salience when producing experimental stimuli for a change detection task. Therefore, prior results suggesting that top-down processes influence change detection may be contaminated by low-level saliency differences in the stimuli used. Here we present a novel technique for generating semi-automated balanced modifications to a scene, handled by a genetic algorithm coupled with a computational model for bottom-up saliency. The saliency model obtains global saliency values for input images by analysing peaks in feature contrast maps. This quantification approach facilitates the generation of experimental stimuli using natural images and is an extension to a recently investigated approach using only low-level stimuli (Verma & McOwan, 2009). In this exemplar study, subjects were asked to detect changes in a flicker task containing the original scene image (A) and a synthesised modified version (A'). We find under the conditions where global saliency is balanced between A and A' as well as between all modifications (all instantiations of A') that low-level saliency is indeed a reasonable estimator of change detection performance in comparison with high-level measures such as mouse-click densities. When the saliency of the changes are similar, addition/removal changes are detected more readily than colour changes to the scene.

Generating customised experimental stimuli for visual search using Genetic Algorithms shows evidence for a continuum of search efficiency.

Here we present a new empirically validated computational paradigm that generates on demand stimuli with user-defined levels of salience for use in visual search tasks. Combining a Genetic Algorithm with a biologically motivated model for image saliency we are able to breed a range of customised texture elements for use in psychophysical experiments. We review these psychophysical studies, showing for the first time that an explicit and predictable continuum of search efficiency exists in human visual search.