An empirical study of machine learning techniques applied to image watermarking

A study of how the machine learning technique, known as gentleboost, could improve different digital watermarking methods such as LSB, DWT, DCT2 and Histogram shifting.

Desenvolupament d'algorismes biològicament inspirats basats en Support Vector Machines

L'objectiu d'aquest projecte ha estat el desenvolupament d'algorismes biològicament inspirats per a l'olfacció artificial. Per a assolir-lo ens hem basat en el paradigma de les màquines amb suport vectorial. Hem construit algoritmes que imitaven els processos computacionals dels diferents sistemes que formen el sistema olfactiu dels insectes, especialment de la llagosta Schistocerca gregaria. Ens hem centrat en el lòbuls de les antenes, i en el cos fungiforme. El primer està considerat un dispositiu de codificació de les olors, que a partir de la resposta temporal dels receptors olfactius a les antenes genera un patró d'activació espaial i temporal. Quant al cos fungiforme es considera que la seva funció és la d'una memòria per als olors, així com un centre per a la integració multi-sensorial. El primer pas ha estat la construcció de models detallats dels dos sistemes. A continuació, hem utilitzat aquests models per a processar diferents tipus de senyals amb l'objectiu de abstraure els principis computacionals subjacents. Finalment, hem avaluat les capacitats d'aquests models abstractes, i els hem utilitzat per al processat de dades provinents de sensors de gasos. Els resultats mostren que el models abstractes tenen millor comportament front el soroll i més capacitat d'emmagatzematge de records que altres models més clàssics, com ara les memòries associatives de Hopfield o fins i tot en determinades circumstàncies que les mateixes Support Vector Machines.

The EPAGE internet guideline as a decision support tool for determining the appropriateness of colonoscopy

RÉSUMÉ Contexte : Peu d'études ont examiné la façon dont les médecins appréhendent les guidelines, et encore moins celle dont ils perçoivent de tels guidelines disponibles sur Internet. Cette étude évalue l'acceptation par les médecins d'un guideline électronique portant sur l'adéquation de la colonoscopie. Méthode : Des gastroentérologues participant à une étude observationnelle internationale ont consulté un guideline électronique pour une série consécutive de patients adressés pour une colonoscopie. Le guideline a été élaboré par le Panel Européen sur l'Adéquation de l'Endoscopie Gastro-intestinale (EPAGE en version anglaise), utilisant une méthode validée (RAND). Les opinions des médecins sur le guideline, sur le site Internet et sur les perspectives d'utilisation ont été recueillies au moyen de questionnaires. Résultats : 289 patients ont été inclus dans l'étude. Le temps moyen pour consulter le site Internet a été de 1.8 min et 86% des médecins l'ont considéré comme simple à utiliser. Les recommandations ont été facilement localisées pour 82% des patients et les médecins étaient d'accord avec l'adéquation de la colonoscopie dans 86% des cas. Selon les critères EPAGE, la colonoscopie était appropriée, incertaine et inappropriée, respectivement chez 59, 28 et 13% des patients. Conclusions : Le guideline EPAGE a été considéré comme acceptable et simple à utiliser. L'utilisation, l'utilité et la pertinence du site Internet a été jugée comme acceptable. Son utilisation effective dépendra cependant de la levée de certains obstacles au niveau organisationnel et culturel.

Infornut® Process; improves accessibility to diagnosis and nutritional support for the malnourished hospitalized patient; impact on management indicators; two-year assessment.

Introduction: The high prevalence of disease-related hospital malnutrition justifies the need for screening tools and early detection in patients at risk for malnutrition, followed by an assessment targeted towards diagnosis and treatment. At the same time there is clear undercoding of malnutrition diagnoses and the procedures to correct it Objectives: To describe the INFORNUT program/ process and its development as an information system. To quantify performance in its different phases. To cite other tools used as a coding source. To calculate the coding rates for malnutrition diagnoses and related procedures. To show the relationship to Mean Stay, Mortality Rate and Urgent Readmission; as well as to quantify its impact on the hospital Complexity Index and its effect on the justification of Hospitalization Costs. Material and methods: The INFORNUT® process is based on an automated screening program of systematic detection and early identification of malnourished patients on hospital admission, as well as their assessment, diagnoses, documentation and reporting. Of total readmissions with stays longer than three days incurred in 2008 and 2010, we recorded patients who underwent analytical screening with an alert for a medium or high risk of malnutrition, as well as the subgroup of patients in whom we were able to administer the complete INFORNUT® process, generating a report for each.

Soins palliatifs et soins de support: à la frontière de la toute-puissance médicale [Palliative and supportive care: at the frontiers of medical omnipotence].

Cancer patients have physical, social, spiritual and emotional needs. They may suffer from severe physical symptoms, from social isolation, spiritual abandonment, and emotions such as sadness and anxiety, or feelings of deception, helplessness, anger and guilt. In some of them, the disease is rapidly progressing and ultimately they die. Their demanding care evokes intense feelings in health care providers, the more since these incurable patients represent a challenge, which could be condensed under the heading "the challenge of medical omnipotence". We suppose that the way health care providers cope with these circumstances has a profound influence on the way these patients are cared for. The attitudes towards the emerging heterogeneous movement of palliative and supportive care and towards its different models of implementation can be viewed from this point of view. We try to demonstrate these interrelations and to discuss the danger that may arise if they remain obscure and unreflected.

A Clinical Decision Support using a Terminology Server to improve Patient Safety.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) are software applications that support clinicians in making healthcare decisions providing relevant information for individual patients about their specific conditions. The lack of integration between CDSS and Electronic Health Record (EHR) has been identified as a significant barrier to CDSS development and adoption. Andalusia Healthcare Public System (AHPS) provides an interoperable health information infrastructure based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that eases CDSS implementation. This paper details the deployment of a CDSS jointly with the deployment of a Terminology Server (TS) within the AHPS infrastructure. It also explains a case study about the application of decision support to thromboembolism patients and its potential impact on improving patient safety. We will apply the inSPECt tool proposal to evaluate the appropriateness of alerts in this scenario.

Embedding Emotional Context in Recommender Systems

Emotions are crucial for user's decision making in recommendation processes. We first introduce ambient recommender systems, which arise from the analysis of new trends on the exploitation of the emotional context in the next generation of recommender systems. We then explain some results of these new trends in real-world applications through the smart prediction assistant (SPA) platform in an intelligent learning guide with more than three million users. While most approaches to recommending have focused on algorithm performance. SPA makes recommendations to users on the basis of emotional information acquired in an incremental way. This article provides a cross-disciplinary perspective to achieve this goal in such recommender systems through a SPA platform. The methodology applied in SPA is the result of a bunch of technology transfer projects for large real-world rccommender systems

Decision Support Methods for Global Optomization

Immobile location-allocation (LA) problems is a type of LA problem that consists in determining the service each facility should offer in order to optimize some criterion (like the global demand), given the positions of the facilities and the customers. Due to the complexity of the problem, i.e. it is a combinatorial problem (where is the number of possible services and the number of facilities) with a non-convex search space with several sub-optimums, traditional methods cannot be applied directly to optimize this problem. Thus we proposed the use of clustering analysis to convert the initial problem into several smaller sub-problems. By this way, we presented and analyzed the suitability of some clustering methods to partition the commented LA problem. Then we explored the use of some metaheuristic techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or cuckoo search in order to solve the sub-problems after the clustering analysis

Tax incentives and direct support for R&D: What do firms use and why?

This paper studies whether firms' use of R&D subsidies and R&D tax incentives is correlated to two sources of underinvestment in R&D, financing constraints and appropriability. We find that financially constrained SMEs are less likely to use R&D tax credits and more likely to obtain subsidies. SMEs using legal methods to protect their intellectual property are more likely to use tax incentives. Results are ambiguous for large firms. For both having previous experience in R&D increases the likelihood of using tax incentives, while it reduces the likelihood of using exclusively subsidies, suggesting that the latter induce entry into R&D. Results imply that direct funding and tax credits do not have the same ability to address each source of R&D underinvestment, and that on average subsidies may be better suited than tax credits at least for SMEs. From a policy perspective these tools may be complements rather than substitutes.

Prise en charge nutritionnelle préopératoire. [Preoperative nutritional support.]

Undernutrition is an independent factor of postoperative morbidity and mortality The aim of a preoperative nutritional support is to enhance immune muscular and cognitive functions, and to support wound healing This nutritional support (e g dietary management enteral or parenteral nutrition) should be limited to high risk situations with a beneficial effect of nutrition for the patient undernutrition major surgery and elderly Preoperative nutritional support should be scheduled for atleast 7 to 10 days before the surgery During the preoperative period the type and route of an eventual postoperative nutritional assistance should be anticipated In the case of emergency surgery nutritional assessment of the patient should be done as soon as possible before surgery or in the 48 h postoperative period Finally, in elective surgery, preoperative fasting should be limited to 2-3 hours for clear liquids and 6 hours for solids (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS