Identifying Informal Settlements Using Contourlet Assisted Deep Learning.

As the global urban population grows due to the influx of migrants from rural areas, many cities in developing countries face the emergence and proliferation of unplanned and informal settlements. However, even though the rise of unplanned development influences planning and management of residential land-use, reliable and detailed information about these areas is often scarce. While formal settlements in urban areas are easily mapped due to their distinct features, this does not hold true for informal settlements because of their microstructure, instability, and variability of shape and texture. Therefore, detecting and mapping these areas remains a challenging task. This research will contribute to the development of tools to identify such informal built-up areas by using an integrated approach of multiscale deep learning. The authors propose a composite architecture for semantic segmentation using the U-net architecture aided by information obtained from a multiscale contourlet transform. This work also analyzes the effects of wavelet and contourlet decompositions in the U-net architecture. The performance was evaluated in terms of precision, recall, F-score, mean intersection over union, and overall accuracy. It was found that the proposed method has better class-discriminating power as compared to existing methods and has an overall classification accuracy of 94.9-95.7%.

Nordihydroguaiaretic Acid from Creosote Bush (Larrea tridentata) Mitigates 12-O-Tetradecanoylphorbol-13-Acetate-Induced Inflammatory and Oxidative Stress Responses of Tumor Promotion Cascade in Mouse Skin.

Nordihydroguaiaretic acid (NDGA) is a phenolic antioxidant found in the leaves and twigs of the evergreen desert shrub, Larrea tridentata (Sesse and Moc. ex DC) Coville (creosote bush). It has a long history of traditional medicinal use by the Native Americans and Mexicans. The modulatory effects of topically applied NDGA was studied on acute inflammatory and oxidative stress responses in mouse skin induced by stage I tumor promoting agent, 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA). Double TPA treatment adversely altered many of the marker responses of stage I skin tumor promotion cascade. Pretreatment of NDGA in TPA-treated mice mitigated cutaneous lipid peroxidation and inhibited production of hydrogen peroxide. NDGA treatment also restored reduced glutathione level and activities of antioxidant enzymes. Elevated activities of myeloperoxidase, xanthine oxidase and skin edema formation in TPA-treated mice were also lowered by NDGA indicating a restrained inflammatory response. Furthermore, results of histological study demonstrated inhibitory effect of NDGA on cellular inflammatory responses. This study provides a direct evidence of antioxidative and anti-inflammatory properties of NDGA against TPA-induced cutaneous inflammation and oxidative stress corroborating its chemopreventive potential against skin cancer.