Chronic wounds multimodal image database.

A multimodal wound image database was created to allow fast development of computer-aided approaches for wound healing monitoring. The developed system with parallel camera optical axes enables multimodal images: photo, thermal, stereo, and depth map of the wound area to be acquired. As a result of using this system a multimodal database of chronic wound images is introduced. It contains 188 image sets of photographs, thermal images, and 3D meshes of the surfaces of chronic wounds acquired during 79 patient visits. Manual wound outlines delineated by an expert are also included in the dataset. All images of each case are additionally coregistered, and both numerical registration parameters and the transformed images are covered in the database. The presented database is publicly available for the research community at https://chronicwounddatabase.eu. That is the first publicly available database for evaluation and comparison of new image-based algorithms in the wound healing monitoring process with coregistered photographs, thermal maps, and 3D models of the wound area. Easily available database of coregistered multimodal data with the raw data set allows faster development of algorithms devoted to wound healing analysis and monitoring.

Effect of physical activity on the sequelae of osteoporosis in female residents of residential care facilities.

BACKGROUND: Osteoporosis is one of the most common diseases that develop with age and cause high morbidity and mortality among elderly people. OBJECTIVES: This study was set out to evaluate the influence of a program of modified Sinaki exercises, Nordic walking (NW) and a combination of these physical activities on people with osteoporosis. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A sample consisting of 91 women aged 65-98 years living in residential care facilities was randomized into 4 groups. The control group (group 1) received only pharmacological treatment. In the other 3 groups, the same drug therapy was enhanced by a program of modified Sinaki exercises (group 2), Nordic walking (group 3), and Sinaki exercises and Nordic walking applied together (group 4). At baseline and after 12 months of intervention, the participants were assessed for bone density, rib cage mobility, motor abilities, risk of falling (Timed Up and Go Test - TUG, Functional Reach Test - FRT), and locomotor activity (based on pedometer readings). The intervention was completed by 83 participants. RESULTS: Bone density (T-score) was higher in all intervention groups and in the control group (p < 0.003). The improvement in rib cage mobility was statistically significant in groups 2 (p < 0.001) and 4 (p < 0.002). Locomotor activity significantly improved in groups 3 (p < 0.000) and 4 (p < 0.000). The post-intervention results of the TUG and FRT tests showed a significantly lower risk of falling in group 4. In groups 1 and 2, the risk was higher, but not statistically significantly, and in group 3, it did not change. CONCLUSIONS: Modified Sinaki exercises and Nordic walking significantly improved the mobility of the rib cage, locomotor activity and motor abilities in the women comprising groups 2 and 3, but the best results of the intervention were noted in the group treated with both forms of physical activity.

Dynamic time warping in phoneme modeling for fast pronunciation error detection.

The presented paper describes a novel approach to the detection of pronunciation errors. It makes use of the modeling of well-pronounced and mispronounced phonemes by means of the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm. Four approaches that make use of the DTW phoneme modeling were developed to detect pronunciation errors: Variations of the Word Structure (VoWS), Normalized Phoneme Distances Thresholding (NPDT), Furthest Segment Search (FSS) and Normalized Furthest Segment Search (NFSS). The performance evaluation of each module was carried out using a speech database of correctly and incorrectly pronounced words in the Polish language, with up to 10 patterns of every trained word from a set of 12 words having different phonetic structures. The performance of DTW modeling was compared to Hidden Markov Models (HMM) that were used for the same four approaches (VoWS, NPDT, FSS, NFSS). The average error rate (AER) was the lowest for DTW with NPDT (AER=0.287) and scored better than HMM with FSS (AER=0.473), which was the best result for HMM. The DTW modeling was faster than HMM for all four approaches. This technique can be used for computer-assisted pronunciation training systems that can work with a relatively small training speech corpus (less than 20 patterns per word) to support speech therapy at home.