Towards automated and in-situ, near-real time 3-D reconstruction of coral reef environments

Coral reefs are biologically complex ecosystems that support a wide variety of marine organisms. These are fragile communities under enormous threat from natural and human-based influences. Properly assessing and measuring the growth and health of reefs is essential to understanding impacts of ocean acidification, coastal urbanisation and global warming. In this paper, we present an innovative 3-D reconstruction technique based on visual imagery as a non-intrusive, repeatable, in situ method for estimating physical parameters, such as surface area and volume for efficient assessment of long-term variability. The reconstruction algorithms are presented, and benchmarked using an existing data set. We validate the technique underwater, utilising a commercial-off-the-shelf camera and a piece of staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis. The resulting reconstruction is compared with a laser scan of the coral piece for assessment and validation. The comparison shows that 77% of the pixels in the reconstruction are within 0.3 mm of the ground truth laser scan. Reconstruction results from an unknown video camera are also presented as a segue to future applications of this research.

Post-disaster housing reconstruction : challenges for effective community participation

The extant literature suggests that community participation is an important ingredient for the successful delivery of post-disaster housing reconstruction projects. Even though policy-makers, international funding bodies and non-governmental organisations broadly appreciate the value of community participation, post-disaster reconstruction practices systematically fail to follow, or align with, existing policy statements. Research into past experiences has led many authors to argue that post-disaster reconstruction is the least successful physically visible arena of international cooperation. Why is the principle of community participation not evident in the veracity of reconstructions already carried out on the ground? This paper discusses and develops the concepts of, and challenges to, community participation and the subsequent negative and positive effects on post-disaster reconstruction projects outcomes.

The influence of maternal ethnic group and diet on breast milk fatty acid composition

INTRODUCTION: Breast milk fatty acids play a major role in infant development. However, no data have compared the breast milk composition of different ethnic groups living in the same environment. We aimed to (i) investigate breast milk fatty acid composition of three ethnic groups in Singapore and (ii) determine dietary fatty acid patterns in these groups and any association with breast milk fatty acid composition. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This was a prospective study conducted at a tertiary hospital in Singapore. Healthy pregnant women with the intention to breastfeed were recruited. Diet profile was studied using a standard validated 3-day food diary. Breast milk was collected from mothers at 1 to 2 weeks and 6 to 8 weeks postnatally. Agilent gas chromatograph (6870N) equipped with a mass spectrometer (5975) and an automatic liquid sampler (ALS) system with a split mode was used for analysis. RESULTS: Seventy-two breast milk samples were obtained from 52 subjects. Analysis showed that breast milk ETA (Eicosatetraenoic acid) and ETA:EA (Eicosatrienoic acid) ratio were significantly different among the races (P = 0.031 and P = 0.020), with ETA being the highest among Indians and the lowest among Malays. Docosahexaenoic acid was significantly higher among Chinese compared to Indians and Malays. No difference was demonstrated in n3 and n6 levels in the food diet analysis among the 3 ethnic groups. CONCLUSIONS: Differences exist in breast milk fatty acid composition in different ethnic groups in the same region, although no difference was demonstrated in the diet analysis. Factors other than maternal diet may play a role in breast milk fatty acid composition.

Supportive-expressive group therapy for women with metastatic breast cancer: Improving access for Australian women through use of teleconference

While supportive-expressive group therapy (SEGT) has been found to be effective in significantly reducing distress associated with life-threatening illness, the challenge in Australia is to develop a means of providing supportive interventions to rural women who may be isolated both by the experience of illness and by geographical location. In this study an adaptation of SEGT was provided to women with metastatic breast cancer (n =21), who attended face-to-face or by telephone conference call. Participants showed significant gains on standardised measures of well-being, including a reduction in negative affect and an increase in positive affect, over a 12-month period. A reduction in intrusive and avoidant stress symptoms was also observed over 12 months; however, this difference was not significant. These outcomes suggest that SEGT, delivered in an innovative way within a community setting, may be an effective means of moderating the adverse effects of a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer while improving access to supportive care for rural women. These results are considered exploratory, as the study did not include a matched control group.

Dietary modification for women after breast cancer treatment : a narrative review

Diet is thought to account for about 25% of cancers in developed countries. It is well documented that the risks associated with both the breast cancer itself and its treatments are important for women previously treated for breast cancer. Women are at risk of recurrence of the primary disease and prone to develop treatment-induced co-morbidities, some of which are thought to be modified by diet. With a view to making dietary recommendations for the breast cancer patients we encounter in our clinical nursing research, we mined the literature to scope the most current robust evidence concerning the role of the diet in protecting women against the recurrence of breast cancer and its potential to ameliorate some of the longer-term morbidities associated with the disease. We found that the evidence about the role of the diet in breast cancer recurrence is largely inconclusive. However, drawing on international guidelines enabled us to make three definitive recommendations. Women at risk of breast cancer recurrence, or who experience co-morbidities as a result of treatment, should limit their exposure to alcohol, moderate their nutritional intake so it does not contribute to postmenopausal weight gain, and should adhere to a balanced diet. Nursing education planned for breast cancer patients about dietary issues should ideally be individually tailored, based on a good understanding of the international recommendations and the evidence underpinning them

Dynamic texture reconstruction from sparse codes for unusual event detection in crowded scenes

Unusual event detection in crowded scenes remains challenging because of the diversity of events and noise. In this paper, we present a novel approach for unusual event detection via sparse reconstruction of dynamic textures over an overcomplete basis set, with the dynamic texture described by local binary patterns from three orthogonal planes (LBPTOP). The overcomplete basis set is learnt from the training data where only the normal items observed. In the detection process, given a new observation, we compute the sparse coefficients using the Dantzig Selector algorithm which was proposed in the literature of compressed sensing. Then the reconstruction errors are computed, based on which we detect the abnormal items. Our application can be used to detect both local and global abnormal events. We evaluate our algorithm on UCSD Abnormality Datasets for local anomaly detection, which is shown to outperform current state-of-the-art approaches, and we also get promising results for rapid escape detection using the PETS2009 dataset.