An Exploration of Recent Intelligent Image Analysis Techniques for Visual Pavement Surface Condition Assessment.

Road pavement condition assessment is essential for maintenance, asset management, and budgeting for pavement infrastructure. Countries allocate a substantial annual budget to maintain and improve local, regional, and national highways. Pavement condition is assessed by measuring several pavement characteristics such as roughness, surface skid resistance, pavement strength, deflection, and visual surface distresses. Visual inspection identifies and quantifies surface distresses, and the condition is assessed using standard rating scales. This paper critically analyzes the research trends in the academic literature, professional practices and current commercial solutions for surface condition ratings by civil authorities. We observe that various surface condition rating systems exist, and each uses its own defined subset of pavement characteristics to evaluate pavement conditions. It is noted that automated visual sensing systems using intelligent algorithms can help reduce the cost and time required for assessing the condition of pavement infrastructure, especially for local and regional road networks. However, environmental factors, pavement types, and image collection devices are significant in this domain and lead to challenging variations. Commercial solutions for automatic pavement assessment with certain limitations exist. The topic is also a focus of academic research. More recently, academic research has pivoted toward deep learning, given that image data is now available in some form. However, research to automate pavement distress assessment often focuses on the regional pavement condition assessment standard that a country or state follows. We observe that the criteria a region adopts to make the evaluation depends on factors such as pavement construction type, type of road network in the area, flow and traffic, environmental conditions, and region's economic situation. We summarized a list of publicly available datasets for distress detection and pavement condition assessment. We listed approaches focusing on crack segmentation and methods concentrating on distress detection and identification using object detection and classification. We segregated the recent academic literature in terms of the camera's view and the dataset used, the year and country in which the work was published, the F1 score, and the architecture type. It is observed that the literature tends to focus more on distress identification ("presence/absence" detection) but less on distress quantification, which is essential for developing approaches for automated pavement rating.

Comparison of efficacy and pharmacoeconomics of two Helicobacter pylori eradication regimens in peptic ulcer disease.

BACKGROUND: Helicobacter pylori, the cause of most peptic ulcer diseases, infects approximately 50% of the population worldwide. Indian data on cost and effectiveness of the standard first-line therapies for H. pylori eradication are scarce. Thus, the present study was aimed at comparing the cost and efficacy of two standard first-line therapies: Regimen I comprising pantoprazole (40 mg) plus amoxicillin (750 mg) plus clarithromycin (500 mg) (PAC) and Regimen II comprising rabeprazole (20 mg) plus amoxicillin (625 mg) plus metronidazole (200 mg) (RAM). METHODOLOGY: This prospective, observational, bottom-up study collected demographic, economic, diagnostic, and therapeutic data from 60 H. pylori-positive patients. The study was carried out for 6 months in the Gastroenterology Department of a Tertiary Care Hospital in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. RESULTS: Health-care system perspective was used to account for direct costs. Average cost per patient for complete H. pylori eradication was Rs. 10,221 and Rs. 8568 for Regimen I and Regimen II, respectively. Inpatient cost was considerably higher than the outpatient cost. Diagnostic costs ranked first in direct costs, followed by hospitalization costs, medication costs, and finally, physician's office visit cost. Individual patient's costs difference between two regimens was found to be statistically significant. Overall, Regimen I proved to be more efficacious than Regimen II, but Regimen II proved to be more cost-effective than Regimen I. Furthermore, incremental cost-effectiveness analysis revealed additional cost of Rs. 127 per patient if the patient was treated with Regimen I instead of Regimen II. CONCLUSION: Our study showed that Regimen II (RAM) was more cost-effective than Regimen I (PAC), but PAC achieved faster H. pylori eradication than RAM. We assume that this study provides local clinical data as to which regimen may be useful in a particular patient. National Level Clinical Trials are required to further ascertain this conclusion.

Esophageal stricture following electrical injury.

Esophageal injury resulting from electrical shock is rare. Stricture of esophagus following external electrical injury has not been reported yet. We report a 24-year-old electric lineman who developed esophageal stricture following external electrical shock. He responded to dilatation with Savary-Gilliard dilators.