Study of the Effectiveness of OCR for Decentralized Data Capture and Conversion. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liston, David M.; And Others

The ERIC network conversion to an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) mode of data entry was studied to analyze the potential effectiveness of OCR data entry for future EPC/s (Editorial Processing Centers). Study results are also applicable to any other system involving decentralized bibliographic data capture and conversion functions. The report…

A New Experiment on Bengali Character Recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barman, Sumana; Bhattacharyya, Debnath; Jeon, Seung-Whan; Kim, Tai-Hoon; Kim, Haeng-Kon

This paper presents a method to use View based approach in Bangla Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system providing reduced data set to the ANN classification engine rather than the traditional OCR methods. It describes how Bangla characters are processed, trained and then recognized with the use of a Backpropagation Artificial neural network. This is the first published account of using a segmentation-free optical character recognition system for Bangla using a view based approach. The methodology presented here assumes that the OCR pre-processor has presented the input images to the classification engine described here. The size and the font face used to render the characters are also significant in both training and classification. The images are first converted into greyscale and then to binary images; these images are then scaled to a fit a pre-determined area with a fixed but significant number of pixels. The feature vectors are then formed extracting the characteristics points, which in this case is simply a series of 0s and 1s of fixed length. Finally, an artificial neural network is chosen for the training and classification process.

Design and development of an ancient Chinese document recognition system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Liangrui; Xiu, Pingping; Ding, Xiaoqing

2003-12-01

The digitization of ancient Chinese documents presents new challenges to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) research field due to the large character set of ancient Chinese characters, variant font types, and versatile document layout styles, as these documents are historical reflections to the thousands of years of Chinese civilization. After analyzing the general characteristics of ancient Chinese documents, we present a solution for recognition of ancient Chinese documents with regular font-types and layout-styles. Based on the previous work on multilingual OCR in TH-OCR system, we focus on the design and development of two key technologies which include character recognition and page segmentation. Experimental results show that the developed character recognition kernel of 19,635 Chinese characters outperforms our original traditional Chinese recognition kernel; Benchmarked test on printed ancient Chinese books proves that the proposed system is effective for regular ancient Chinese documents.

The impact of OCR accuracy on automated cancer classification of pathology reports.

PubMed

Zuccon, Guido; Nguyen, Anthony N; Bergheim, Anton; Wickman, Sandra; Grayson, Narelle

2012-01-01

To evaluate the effects of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the automatic cancer classification of pathology reports. Scanned images of pathology reports were converted to electronic free-text using a commercial OCR system. A state-of-the-art cancer classification system, the Medical Text Extraction (MEDTEX) system, was used to automatically classify the OCR reports. Classifications produced by MEDTEX on the OCR versions of the reports were compared with the classification from a human amended version of the OCR reports. The employed OCR system was found to recognise scanned pathology reports with up to 99.12% character accuracy and up to 98.95% word accuracy. Errors in the OCR processing were found to minimally impact on the automatic classification of scanned pathology reports into notifiable groups. However, the impact of OCR errors is not negligible when considering the extraction of cancer notification items, such as primary site, histological type, etc. The automatic cancer classification system used in this work, MEDTEX, has proven to be robust to errors produced by the acquisition of freetext pathology reports from scanned images through OCR software. However, issues emerge when considering the extraction of cancer notification items.

Post processing of optically recognized text via second order hidden Markov model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Poudel, Srijana

In this thesis, we describe a postprocessing system on Optical Character Recognition(OCR) generated text. Second Order Hidden Markov Model (HMM) approach is used to detect and correct the OCR related errors. The reason for choosing the 2nd order HMM is to keep track of the bigrams so that the model can represent the system more accurately. Based on experiments with training data of 159,733 characters and testing of 5,688 characters, the model was able to correct 43.38 % of the errors with a precision of 75.34 %. However, the precision value indicates that the model introduced some new errors, decreasing the correction percentage to 26.4%.

Guideline for Optical Character Recognition Forms.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

National Bureau of Standards (DOC), Washington, DC.

This publication provides materials relating to the design, preparation, acquisition, inspection, and application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms in data entry systems. Since the materials are advisory and tutorial in nature, this publication has been issued as a guideline rather than as a standard in the Federal Information…

The Effects of Noisy Data on Text Retrieval.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taghva, Kazem; And Others

1994-01-01

Discusses the use of optical character recognition (OCR) for inputting documents in an information retrieval system and describes a study that used an OCR-generated database and its corresponding corrected version to examine query evaluation in the presence of noisy data. Scanning technology, recognition technology, and retrieval technology are…

Kansas State University Libraries' OCR Labeling Project.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thierer, Joyce; Bower, Merry

This publication describes the planning and implementation of an optical character recognition (OCR) labeling project, the first stage of Kansas State University (KSU) Libraries' program of conversion from a manual to an automated circulation system. It is noted that a telephone survey of libraries with automated circulation systems and…

An evaluation of information retrieval accuracy with simulated OCR output

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Croft, W.B.; Harding, S.M.; Taghva, K.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a critical part of many text-based applications. Although some commercial systems use the output from OCR devices to index documents without editing, there is very little quantitative data on the impact of OCR errors on the accuracy of a text retrieval system. Because of the difficulty of constructing test collections to obtain this data, we have carried out evaluation using simulated OCR output on a variety of databases. The results show that high quality OCR devices have little effect on the accuracy of retrieval, but low quality devices used with databases of short documents canmore » result in significant degradation.« less

Automatic Cataloguing and Searching for Retrospective Data by Use of OCR Text.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tseng, Yuen-Hsien

2001-01-01

Describes efforts in supporting information retrieval from OCR (optical character recognition) degraded text. Reports on approaches used in an automatic cataloging and searching contest for books in multiple languages, including a vector space retrieval model, an n-gram indexing method, and a weighting scheme; and discusses problems of Asian…

Effects of OCR Errors on Ranking and Feedback Using the Vector Space Model.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taghva, Kazem; And Others

1996-01-01

Reports on the performance of the vector space model in the presence of OCR (optical character recognition) errors in information retrieval. Highlights include precision and recall, a full-text test collection, smart vector representation, impact of weighting parameters, ranking variability, and the effect of relevance feedback. (Author/LRW)

Optical character recognition of handwritten Arabic using hidden Markov models

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Aulama, Mohannad M.; Natsheh, Asem M.; Abandah, Gheith A.; Olama, Mohammed M.

2011-04-01

The problem of optical character recognition (OCR) of handwritten Arabic has not received a satisfactory solution yet. In this paper, an Arabic OCR algorithm is developed based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) combined with the Viterbi algorithm, which results in an improved and more robust recognition of characters at the sub-word level. Integrating the HMMs represents another step of the overall OCR trends being currently researched in the literature. The proposed approach exploits the structure of characters in the Arabic language in addition to their extracted features to achieve improved recognition rates. Useful statistical information of the Arabic language is initially extracted and then used to estimate the probabilistic parameters of the mathematical HMM. A new custom implementation of the HMM is developed in this study, where the transition matrix is built based on the collected large corpus, and the emission matrix is built based on the results obtained via the extracted character features. The recognition process is triggered using the Viterbi algorithm which employs the most probable sequence of sub-words. The model was implemented to recognize the sub-word unit of Arabic text raising the recognition rate from being linked to the worst recognition rate for any character to the overall structure of the Arabic language. Numerical results show that there is a potentially large recognition improvement by using the proposed algorithms.

Optical character recognition of handwritten Arabic using hidden Markov models

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Aulama, Mohannad M.; Natsheh, Asem M.; Abandah, Gheith A.

2011-01-01

The problem of optical character recognition (OCR) of handwritten Arabic has not received a satisfactory solution yet. In this paper, an Arabic OCR algorithm is developed based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) combined with the Viterbi algorithm, which results in an improved and more robust recognition of characters at the sub-word level. Integrating the HMMs represents another step of the overall OCR trends being currently researched in the literature. The proposed approach exploits the structure of characters in the Arabic language in addition to their extracted features to achieve improved recognition rates. Useful statistical information of the Arabic language ismore » initially extracted and then used to estimate the probabilistic parameters of the mathematical HMM. A new custom implementation of the HMM is developed in this study, where the transition matrix is built based on the collected large corpus, and the emission matrix is built based on the results obtained via the extracted character features. The recognition process is triggered using the Viterbi algorithm which employs the most probable sequence of sub-words. The model was implemented to recognize the sub-word unit of Arabic text raising the recognition rate from being linked to the worst recognition rate for any character to the overall structure of the Arabic language. Numerical results show that there is a potentially large recognition improvement by using the proposed algorithms.« less

Applications of Optical Scanners in an Academic Center.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Molinari, Carol; Tannenbaum, Robert S.

1995-01-01

Describes optical scanners, including how the technology works; applications in data management and research; development of instructional materials; and providing community services. Discussion includes the three basic types of optical scanners: optical character recognition (OCR), optical mark readers (OMR), and graphic scanners. A sidebar…

Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Evaluation in Order to Develop a Post-OCR Module

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-09-01

handwritten, and many more have some handwriting in the margins. Some images are blurred or faded to the point of illegibility. Others are mostly or...it is to English, because Arabic has more features such as agreement. We say that Arabic is more “morphologically rich” than English. We intend to

Digitization of Full-Text Documents Before Publishing on the Internet: A Case Study Reviewing the Latest Optical Character Recognition Technologies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McClean, Clare M.

1998-01-01

Reviews strengths and weaknesses of five optical character recognition (OCR) software packages used to digitize paper documents before publishing on the Internet. Outlines options available and stages of the conversion process. Describes the learning experience of Eurotext, a United Kingdom-based electronic libraries project (eLib). (PEN)

Improved document image segmentation algorithm using multiresolution morphology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bukhari, Syed Saqib; Shafait, Faisal; Breuel, Thomas M.

2011-01-01

Page segmentation into text and non-text elements is an essential preprocessing step before optical character recognition (OCR) operation. In case of poor segmentation, an OCR classification engine produces garbage characters due to the presence of non-text elements. This paper describes modifications to the text/non-text segmentation algorithm presented by Bloomberg,1 which is also available in his open-source Leptonica library.2The modifications result in significant improvements and achieved better segmentation accuracy than the original algorithm for UW-III, UNLV, ICDAR 2009 page segmentation competition test images and circuit diagram datasets.

A super resolution framework for low resolution document image OCR

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ma, Di; Agam, Gady

2013-01-01

Optical character recognition is widely used for converting document images into digital media. Existing OCR algorithms and tools produce good results from high resolution, good quality, document images. In this paper, we propose a machine learning based super resolution framework for low resolution document image OCR. Two main techniques are used in our proposed approach: a document page segmentation algorithm and a modified K-means clustering algorithm. Using this approach, by exploiting coherence in the document, we reconstruct from a low resolution document image a better resolution image and improve OCR results. Experimental results show substantial gain in low resolution documents such as the ones captured from video.

Trigram-based algorithms for OCR result correction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bulatov, Konstantin; Manzhikov, Temudzhin; Slavin, Oleg; Faradjev, Igor; Janiszewski, Igor

2017-03-01

In this paper we consider a task of improving optical character recognition (OCR) results of document fields on low-quality and average-quality images using N-gram models. Cyrillic fields of Russian Federation internal passport are analyzed as an example. Two approaches are presented: the first one is based on hypothesis of dependence of a symbol from two adjacent symbols and the second is based on calculation of marginal distributions and Bayesian networks computation. A comparison of the algorithms and experimental results within a real document OCR system are presented, it's showed that the document field OCR accuracy can be improved by more than 6% for low-quality images.

The use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the digitisation of herbarium specimen labels.

PubMed

Drinkwater, Robyn E; Cubey, Robert W N; Haston, Elspeth M

2014-01-01

At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to aid the digitisation process has been investigated. This was tested using a herbarium specimen digitisation process with two stages of data entry. Records were initially batch-processed to add data extracted from the OCR text prior to being sorted based on Collector and/or Country. Using images of the specimens, a team of six digitisers then added data to the specimen records. To investigate whether the data from OCR aid the digitisation process, they completed a series of trials which compared the efficiency of data entry between sorted and unsorted batches of specimens. A survey was carried out to explore the opinion of the digitisation staff to the different sorting options. In total 7,200 specimens were processed. When compared to an unsorted, random set of specimens, those which were sorted based on data added from the OCR were quicker to digitise. Of the methods tested here, the most successful in terms of efficiency used a protocol which required entering data into a limited set of fields and where the records were filtered by Collector and Country. The survey and subsequent discussions with the digitisation staff highlighted their preference for working with sorted specimens, in which label layout, locations and handwriting are likely to be similar, and so a familiarity with the Collector or Country is rapidly established.

Neural Network--OCR/ICR Recognology: Theory and Applications.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schantz, Herbert F.

1993-01-01

Explains the value of neurocomputing as a unique and effective new technological concept for information processing and optical character recognition. Comparisons are made to digital computing and examples of applications such as recognizing handprinted characters are addressed. Products available from various companies are described. (Contains…

Towards Mobile OCR: How To Take a Good Picture of a Document Without Sight.

PubMed

Cutter, Michael; Manduchi, Roberto

The advent of mobile OCR (optical character recognition) applications on regular smartphones holds great promise for enabling blind people to access printed information. Unfortunately, these systems suffer from a problem: in order for OCR output to be meaningful, a well-framed image of the document needs to be taken, something that is difficult to do without sight. This contribution presents an experimental investigation of how blind people position and orient a camera phone while acquiring document images. We developed experimental software to investigate if verbal guidance aids in the acquisition of OCR-readable images without sight. We report on our participant's feedback and performance before and after assistance from our software.

Towards Mobile OCR: How To Take a Good Picture of a Document Without Sight

PubMed Central

Cutter, Michael; Manduchi, Roberto

2015-01-01

The advent of mobile OCR (optical character recognition) applications on regular smartphones holds great promise for enabling blind people to access printed information. Unfortunately, these systems suffer from a problem: in order for OCR output to be meaningful, a well-framed image of the document needs to be taken, something that is difficult to do without sight. This contribution presents an experimental investigation of how blind people position and orient a camera phone while acquiring document images. We developed experimental software to investigate if verbal guidance aids in the acquisition of OCR-readable images without sight. We report on our participant's feedback and performance before and after assistance from our software. PMID:26677461

A modern optical character recognition system in a real world clinical setting: some accuracy and feasibility observations.

PubMed

Biondich, Paul G; Overhage, J Marc; Dexter, Paul R; Downs, Stephen M; Lemmon, Larry; McDonald, Clement J

2002-01-01

Advances in optical character recognition (OCR) software and computer hardware have stimulated a reevaluation of the technology and its ability to capture structured clinical data from preexisting paper forms. In our pilot evaluation, we measured the accuracy and feasibility of capturing vitals data from a pediatric encounter form that has been in use for over twenty years. We found that the software had a digit recognition rate of 92.4% (95% confidence interval: 91.6 to 93.2) overall. More importantly, this system was approximately three times as fast as our existing method of data entry. These preliminary results suggest that with further refinements in the approach and additional development, we may be able to incorporate OCR as another method for capturing structured clinical data.

Automatic feature design for optical character recognition using an evolutionary search procedure.

PubMed

Stentiford, F W

1985-03-01

An automatic evolutionary search is applied to the problem of feature extraction in an OCR application. A performance measure based on feature independence is used to generate features which do not appear to suffer from peaking effects [17]. Features are extracted from a training set of 30 600 machine printed 34 class alphanumeric characters derived from British mail. Classification results on the training set and a test set of 10 200 characters are reported for an increasing number of features. A 1.01 percent forced decision error rate is obtained on the test data using 316 features. The hardware implementation should be cheap and fast to operate. The performance compares favorably with current low cost OCR page readers.

The use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the digitisation of herbarium specimen labels

PubMed Central

Drinkwater, Robyn E.; Cubey, Robert W. N.; Haston, Elspeth M.

2014-01-01

Abstract At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to aid the digitisation process has been investigated. This was tested using a herbarium specimen digitisation process with two stages of data entry. Records were initially batch-processed to add data extracted from the OCR text prior to being sorted based on Collector and/or Country. Using images of the specimens, a team of six digitisers then added data to the specimen records. To investigate whether the data from OCR aid the digitisation process, they completed a series of trials which compared the efficiency of data entry between sorted and unsorted batches of specimens. A survey was carried out to explore the opinion of the digitisation staff to the different sorting options. In total 7,200 specimens were processed. When compared to an unsorted, random set of specimens, those which were sorted based on data added from the OCR were quicker to digitise. Of the methods tested here, the most successful in terms of efficiency used a protocol which required entering data into a limited set of fields and where the records were filtered by Collector and Country. The survey and subsequent discussions with the digitisation staff highlighted their preference for working with sorted specimens, in which label layout, locations and handwriting are likely to be similar, and so a familiarity with the Collector or Country is rapidly established. PMID:25009435

A usability evaluation of an interactive application for halal products using optical character recognition and augmented reality technologies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lam, Meng Chun; Nizam, Siti Soleha Muhammad; Arshad, Haslina; A'isyah Ahmad Shukri, Saidatul; Hashim, Nurhazarifah Che; Putra, Haekal Mozzia; Abidin, Rimaniza Zainal

2017-10-01

This article discusses the usability of an interactive application for halal products using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies. Among the problems that have been identified in this study is that consumers have little knowledge about the E-Code. Therefore, users often have doubts about the halal status of the product. Nowadays, the integrity of halal status can be doubtful due to the actions of some irresponsible people spreading false information about a product. Therefore, an application that uses OCR and AR technology developed in this study will help the users to identify the information content of a product by scanning the E-Code label and by scanning the product's brand to know the halal status of the product. In this application, E-Code on the label of a product is scanned using OCR technology to display information about the E-Code. The product's brand is scan using augmented reality technology to display halal status of the product. The findings reveal that users are satisfied with this application and it is useful and easy to use.

A modern optical character recognition system in a real world clinical setting: some accuracy and feasibility observations.

PubMed Central

Biondich, Paul G.; Overhage, J. Marc; Dexter, Paul R.; Downs, Stephen M.; Lemmon, Larry; McDonald, Clement J.

2002-01-01

Advances in optical character recognition (OCR) software and computer hardware have stimulated a reevaluation of the technology and its ability to capture structured clinical data from preexisting paper forms. In our pilot evaluation, we measured the accuracy and feasibility of capturing vitals data from a pediatric encounter form that has been in use for over twenty years. We found that the software had a digit recognition rate of 92.4% (95% confidence interval: 91.6 to 93.2) overall. More importantly, this system was approximately three times as fast as our existing method of data entry. These preliminary results suggest that with further refinements in the approach and additional development, we may be able to incorporate OCR as another method for capturing structured clinical data. PMID:12463786

Computers for the Disabled.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lazzaro, Joseph J.

1993-01-01

Describes adaptive technology for personal computers that accommodate disabled users and may require special equipment including hardware, memory, expansion slots, and ports. Highlights include vision aids, including speech synthesizers, magnification, braille, and optical character recognition (OCR); hearing adaptations; motor-impaired…

Practical vision based degraded text recognition system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mohammad, Khader; Agaian, Sos; Saleh, Hani

2011-02-01

Rapid growth and progress in the medical, industrial, security and technology fields means more and more consideration for the use of camera based optical character recognition (OCR) Applying OCR to scanned documents is quite mature, and there are many commercial and research products available on this topic. These products achieve acceptable recognition accuracy and reasonable processing times especially with trained software, and constrained text characteristics. Even though the application space for OCR is huge, it is quite challenging to design a single system that is capable of performing automatic OCR for text embedded in an image irrespective of the application. Challenges for OCR systems include; images are taken under natural real world conditions, Surface curvature, text orientation, font, size, lighting conditions, and noise. These and many other conditions make it extremely difficult to achieve reasonable character recognition. Performance for conventional OCR systems drops dramatically as the degradation level of the text image quality increases. In this paper, a new recognition method is proposed to recognize solid or dotted line degraded characters. The degraded text string is localized and segmented using a new algorithm. The new method was implemented and tested using a development framework system that is capable of performing OCR on camera captured images. The framework allows parameter tuning of the image-processing algorithm based on a training set of camera-captured text images. Novel methods were used for enhancement, text localization and the segmentation algorithm which enables building a custom system that is capable of performing automatic OCR which can be used for different applications. The developed framework system includes: new image enhancement, filtering, and segmentation techniques which enabled higher recognition accuracies, faster processing time, and lower energy consumption, compared with the best state of the art published techniques. The system successfully produced impressive OCR accuracies (90% -to- 93%) using customized systems generated by our development framework in two industrial OCR applications: water bottle label text recognition and concrete slab plate text recognition. The system was also trained for the Arabic language alphabet, and demonstrated extremely high recognition accuracy (99%) for Arabic license name plate text recognition with processing times of 10 seconds. The accuracy and run times of the system were compared to conventional and many states of art methods, the proposed system shows excellent results.

Improving the Accessibility of Mobile OCR Apps Via Interactive Modalities.

PubMed

Cutter, Michael; Manduchi, Roberto

2017-10-01

Mobile optical character recognition (OCR) apps have come of age. Many blind individuals use them on a daily basis. The usability of such tools, however, is limited by the requirement that a good picture of the text to be read must be taken, something that is difficult to do without sight. Some mobile OCR apps already implement auto-shot and guidance mechanisms to facilitate this task. In this paper, we describe two experiments with blind participants, who tested these two interactive mechanisms on a customized iPhone implementation. These experiments bring to light a number of interesting aspects of accessing a printed document without sight, and enable a comparative analysis of the available interaction modalities.

Improving the Accessibility of Mobile OCR Apps Via Interactive Modalities

PubMed Central

Cutter, Michael; Manduchi, Roberto

2017-01-01

Mobile optical character recognition (OCR) apps have come of age. Many blind individuals use them on a daily basis. The usability of such tools, however, is limited by the requirement that a good picture of the text to be read must be taken, something that is difficult to do without sight. Some mobile OCR apps already implement auto-shot and guidance mechanisms to facilitate this task. In this paper, we describe two experiments with blind participants, who tested these two interactive mechanisms on a customized iPhone implementation. These experiments bring to light a number of interesting aspects of accessing a printed document without sight, and enable a comparative analysis of the available interaction modalities. PMID:29270243

Neural network-based systems for handprint OCR applications.

PubMed

Ganis, M D; Wilson, C L; Blue, J L

1998-01-01

Over the last five years or so, neural network (NN)-based approaches have been steadily gaining performance and popularity for a wide range of optical character recognition (OCR) problems, from isolated digit recognition to handprint recognition. We present an NN classification scheme based on an enhanced multilayer perceptron (MLP) and describe an end-to-end system for form-based handprint OCR applications designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Visual Image Processing Group. The enhancements to the MLP are based on (i) neuron activations functions that reduce the occurrences of singular Jacobians; (ii) successive regularization to constrain the volume of the weight space; and (iii) Boltzmann pruning to constrain the dimension of the weight space. Performance characterization studies of NN systems evaluated at the first OCR systems conference and the NIST form-based handprint recognition system are also summarized.

Benchmark for license plate character segmentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gonçalves, Gabriel Resende; da Silva, Sirlene Pio Gomes; Menotti, David; Shwartz, William Robson

2016-09-01

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) has been the focus of many researches in the past years. In general, ALPR is divided into the following problems: detection of on-track vehicles, license plate detection, segmentation of license plate characters, and optical character recognition (OCR). Even though commercial solutions are available for controlled acquisition conditions, e.g., the entrance of a parking lot, ALPR is still an open problem when dealing with data acquired from uncontrolled environments, such as roads and highways when relying only on imaging sensors. Due to the multiple orientations and scales of the license plates captured by the camera, a very challenging task of the ALPR is the license plate character segmentation (LPCS) step, because its effectiveness is required to be (near) optimal to achieve a high recognition rate by the OCR. To tackle the LPCS problem, this work proposes a benchmark composed of a dataset designed to focus specifically on the character segmentation step of the ALPR within an evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we propose the Jaccard-centroid coefficient, an evaluation measure more suitable than the Jaccard coefficient regarding the location of the bounding box within the ground-truth annotation. The dataset is composed of 2000 Brazilian license plates consisting of 14000 alphanumeric symbols and their corresponding bounding box annotations. We also present a straightforward approach to perform LPCS efficiently. Finally, we provide an experimental evaluation for the dataset based on five LPCS approaches and demonstrate the importance of character segmentation for achieving an accurate OCR.

Boost OCR accuracy using iVector based system combination approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Xujun; Cao, Huaigu; Natarajan, Prem

2015-01-01

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a challenging task because most existing preprocessing approaches are sensitive to writing style, writing material, noises and image resolution. Thus, a single recognition system cannot address all factors of real document images. In this paper, we describe an approach to combine diverse recognition systems by using iVector based features, which is a newly developed method in the field of speaker verification. Prior to system combination, document images are preprocessed and text line images are extracted with different approaches for each system, where iVector is transformed from a high-dimensional supervector of each text line and is used to predict the accuracy of OCR. We merge hypotheses from multiple recognition systems according to the overlap ratio and the predicted OCR score of text line images. We present evaluation results on an Arabic document database where the proposed method is compared against the single best OCR system using word error rate (WER) metric.

Adaptive detection of missed text areas in OCR outputs: application to the automatic assessment of OCR quality in mass digitization projects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ben Salah, Ahmed; Ragot, Nicolas; Paquet, Thierry

2013-01-01

The French National Library (BnF*) has launched many mass digitization projects in order to give access to its collection. The indexation of digital documents on Gallica (digital library of the BnF) is done through their textual content obtained thanks to service providers that use Optical Character Recognition softwares (OCR). OCR softwares have become increasingly complex systems composed of several subsystems dedicated to the analysis and the recognition of the elements in a page. However, the reliability of these systems is always an issue at stake. Indeed, in some cases, we can find errors in OCR outputs that occur because of an accumulation of several errors at different levels in the OCR process. One of the frequent errors in OCR outputs is the missed text components. The presence of such errors may lead to severe defects in digital libraries. In this paper, we investigate the detection of missed text components to control the OCR results from the collections of the French National Library. Our verification approach uses local information inside the pages based on Radon transform descriptors and Local Binary Patterns descriptors (LBP) coupled with OCR results to control their consistency. The experimental results show that our method detects 84.15% of the missed textual components, by comparing the OCR ALTO files outputs (produced by the service providers) to the images of the document.

Expert system for automatically correcting OCR output

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Taghva, Kazem; Borsack, Julie; Condit, Allen

1994-03-01

This paper describes a new expert system for automatically correcting errors made by optical character recognition (OCR) devices. The system, which we call the post-processing system, is designed to improve the quality of text produced by an OCR device in preparation for subsequent retrieval from an information system. The system is composed of numerous parts: an information retrieval system, an English dictionary, a domain-specific dictionary, and a collection of algorithms and heuristics designed to correct as many OCR errors as possible. For the remaining errors that cannot be corrected, the system passes them on to a user-level editing program. This post-processing system can be viewed as part of a larger system that would streamline the steps of taking a document from its hard copy form to its usable electronic form, or it can be considered a stand alone system for OCR error correction. An earlier version of this system has been used to process approximately 10,000 pages of OCR generated text. Among the OCR errors discovered by this version, about 87% were corrected. We implement numerous new parts of the system, test this new version, and present the results.

Text vectorization based on character recognition and character stroke modeling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fan, Zhigang; Zhou, Bingfeng; Tse, Francis; Mu, Yadong; He, Tao

2014-03-01

In this paper, a text vectorization method is proposed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and character stroke modeling. This is based on the observation that for a particular character, its font glyphs may have different shapes, but often share same stroke structures. Like many other methods, the proposed algorithm contains two procedures, dominant point determination and data fitting. The first one partitions the outlines into segments and second one fits a curve to each segment. In the proposed method, the dominant points are classified as "major" (specifying stroke structures) and "minor" (specifying serif shapes). A set of rules (parameters) are determined offline specifying for each character the number of major and minor dominant points and for each dominant point the detection and fitting parameters (projection directions, boundary conditions and smoothness). For minor points, multiple sets of parameters could be used for different fonts. During operation, OCR is performed and the parameters associated with the recognized character are selected. Both major and minor dominant points are detected as a maximization process as specified by the parameter set. For minor points, an additional step could be performed to test the competing hypothesis and detect degenerated cases.

Data Input for Libraries: State-of-the-Art Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buckland, Lawrence F.

This brief overview of new manuscript preparation methods which allow authors and editors to set their own type discusses the advantages and disadvantages of optical character recognition (OCR), microcomputers and personal computers, minicomputers, and word processors for editing and database entry. Potential library applications are also…

Intelligent Classification in Huge Heterogeneous Data Sets

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-06-01

Competencies DoD Department of Defense GMTI Ground Moving Target Indicator ISR Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance NCD Noncoherent Change...Detection OCR Optical Character Recognition PCA Principal Component Analysis SAR Synthetic Aperture Radar SVD Singular Value Decomponsition USPS United States Postal Service 8 Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited.

Printed Arabic optical character segmentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mohammad, Khader; Ayyesh, Muna; Qaroush, Aziz; Tumar, Iyad

2015-03-01

A considerable progress in recognition techniques for many non-Arabic characters has been achieved. In contrary, few efforts have been put on the research of Arabic characters. In any Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system the segmentation step is usually the essential stage in which an extensive portion of processing is devoted and a considerable share of recognition errors is attributed. In this research, a novel segmentation approach for machine Arabic printed text with diacritics is proposed. The proposed method reduces computation, errors, gives a clear description for the sub-word and has advantages over using the skeleton approach in which the data and information of the character can be lost. Both of initial evaluation and testing of the proposed method have been developed using MATLAB and shows 98.7% promising results.

Combining multiple thresholding binarization values to improve OCR output

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lund, William B.; Kennard, Douglas J.; Ringger, Eric K.

2013-01-01

For noisy, historical documents, a high optical character recognition (OCR) word error rate (WER) can render the OCR text unusable. Since image binarization is often the method used to identify foreground pixels, a body of research seeks to improve image-wide binarization directly. Instead of relying on any one imperfect binarization technique, our method incorporates information from multiple simple thresholding binarizations of the same image to improve text output. Using a new corpus of 19th century newspaper grayscale images for which the text transcription is known, we observe WERs of 13.8% and higher using current binarization techniques and a state-of-the-art OCR engine. Our novel approach combines the OCR outputs from multiple thresholded images by aligning the text output and producing a lattice of word alternatives from which a lattice word error rate (LWER) is calculated. Our results show a LWER of 7.6% when aligning two threshold images and a LWER of 6.8% when aligning five. From the word lattice we commit to one hypothesis by applying the methods of Lund et al. (2011) achieving an improvement over the original OCR output and a 8.41% WER result on this data set.

TELLTALE: Experiments in a Dynamic Hypertext Environment for Degraded and Multilingual Data.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pearce, Claudia; Nicholas, Charles

1996-01-01

Presents experimentation results for the TELLTALE system, a dynamic hypertext environment that provides full-text search from a hypertext-style user interface for text corpora that may be garbled by OCR (optical character recognition) or transmission errors, and that may contain languages other than English. (Author/LRW)

Techniques of Document Management: A Review of Text Retrieval and Related Technologies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Veal, D. C.

2001-01-01

Reviews present and possible future developments in the techniques of electronic document management, the major ones being text retrieval and scanning and OCR (optical character recognition). Also addresses document acquisition, indexing and thesauri, publishing and dissemination standards, impact of the Internet, and the document management…

Study of style effects on OCR errors in the MEDLINE database

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Garrison, Penny; Davis, Diane L.; Andersen, Tim L.; Barney Smith, Elisa H.

2005-01-01

The National Library of Medicine has developed a system for the automatic extraction of data from scanned journal articles to populate the MEDLINE database. Although the 5-engine OCR system used in this process exhibits good performance overall, it does make errors in character recognition that must be corrected in order for the process to achieve the requisite accuracy. The correction process works by feeding words that have characters with less than 100% confidence (as determined automatically by the OCR engine) to a human operator who then must manually verify the word or correct the error. The majority of these errors are contained in the affiliation information zone where the characters are in italics or small fonts. Therefore only affiliation information data is used in this research. This paper examines the correlation between OCR errors and various character attributes in the MEDLINE database, such as font size, italics, bold, etc. and OCR confidence levels. The motivation for this research is that if a correlation between the character style and types of errors exists it should be possible to use this information to improve operator productivity by increasing the probability that the correct word option is presented to the human editor. We have determined that this correlation exists, in particular for the case of characters with diacritics.

Simple and efficient method for region of interest value extraction from picture archiving and communication system viewer with optical character recognition software and macro program.

PubMed

Lee, Young Han; Park, Eun Hae; Suh, Jin-Suck

2015-01-01

The objectives are: 1) to introduce a simple and efficient method for extracting region of interest (ROI) values from a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) viewer using optical character recognition (OCR) software and a macro program, and 2) to evaluate the accuracy of this method with a PACS workstation. This module was designed to extract the ROI values on the images of the PACS, and created as a development tool by using open-source OCR software and an open-source macro program. The principal processes are as follows: (1) capture a region of the ROI values as a graphic file for OCR, (2) recognize the text from the captured image by OCR software, (3) perform error-correction, (4) extract the values including area, average, standard deviation, max, and min values from the text, (5) reformat the values into temporary strings with tabs, and (6) paste the temporary strings into the spreadsheet. This principal process was repeated for the number of ROIs. The accuracy of this module was evaluated on 1040 recognitions from 280 randomly selected ROIs of the magnetic resonance images. The input times of ROIs were compared between conventional manual method and this extraction module-assisted input method. The module for extracting ROI values operated successfully using the OCR and macro programs. The values of the area, average, standard deviation, maximum, and minimum could be recognized and error-corrected with AutoHotkey-coded module. The average input times using the conventional method and the proposed module-assisted method were 34.97 seconds and 7.87 seconds, respectively. A simple and efficient method for ROI value extraction was developed with open-source OCR and a macro program. Accurate inputs of various numbers from ROIs can be extracted with this module. The proposed module could be applied to the next generation of PACS or existing PACS that have not yet been upgraded. Copyright © 2015 AUR. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Warped document image correction method based on heterogeneous registration strategies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tong, Lijing; Zhan, Guoliang; Peng, Quanyao; Li, Yang; Li, Yifan

2013-03-01

With the popularity of digital camera and the application requirement of digitalized document images, using digital cameras to digitalize document images has become an irresistible trend. However, the warping of the document surface impacts on the quality of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system seriously. To improve the warped document image's vision quality and the OCR rate, this paper proposed a warped document image correction method based on heterogeneous registration strategies. This method mosaics two warped images of the same document from different viewpoints. Firstly, two feature points are selected from one image. Then the two feature points are registered in the other image base on heterogeneous registration strategies. At last, image mosaics are done for the two images, and the best mosaiced image is selected by OCR recognition results. As a result, for the best mosaiced image, the distortions are mostly removed and the OCR results are improved markedly. Experimental results show that the proposed method can resolve the issue of warped document image correction more effectively.

Invention and validation of an automated camera system that uses optical character recognition to identify patient name mislabeled samples.

PubMed

Hawker, Charles D; McCarthy, William; Cleveland, David; Messinger, Bonnie L

2014-03-01

Mislabeled samples are a serious problem in most clinical laboratories. Published error rates range from 0.39/1000 to as high as 1.12%. Standardization of bar codes and label formats has not yet achieved the needed improvement. The mislabel rate in our laboratory, although low compared with published rates, prompted us to seek a solution to achieve zero errors. To reduce or eliminate our mislabeled samples, we invented an automated device using 4 cameras to photograph the outside of a sample tube. The system uses optical character recognition (OCR) to look for discrepancies between the patient name in our laboratory information system (LIS) vs the patient name on the customer label. All discrepancies detected by the system's software then require human inspection. The system was installed on our automated track and validated with production samples. We obtained 1 009 830 images during the validation period, and every image was reviewed. OCR passed approximately 75% of the samples, and no mislabeled samples were passed. The 25% failed by the system included 121 samples actually mislabeled by patient name and 148 samples with spelling discrepancies between the patient name on the customer label and the patient name in our LIS. Only 71 of the 121 mislabeled samples detected by OCR were found through our normal quality assurance process. We have invented an automated camera system that uses OCR technology to identify potential mislabeled samples. We have validated this system using samples transported on our automated track. Full implementation of this technology offers the possibility of zero mislabeled samples in the preanalytic stage.

intelligentCAPTURE 1.0 Adds Tables of Content to Library Catalogues and Improves Retrieval.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hauer, Manfred; Simedy, Walton

2002-01-01

Describes an online library catalog that was developed for an Austrian scientific library that includes table of contents in addition to the standard bibliographic information in order to increase relevance for searchers. Discusses the technology involved, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and automatic indexing techniques; weighted…

EDP Applications to Musical Bibliography: Input Considerations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robbins, Donald C.

1972-01-01

The application of Electronic Data Processing (EDP) has been a boon in the analysis and bibliographic control of music. However, an extra step of encoding must be undertaken for input of music. The best hope to facilitate musical input is the development of an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) music-reading machine. (29 references) (Author/NH)

Development of OCR system for portable passport and visa reader

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Visilter, Yury V.; Zheltov, Sergey Y.; Lukin, Anton A.

1999-01-01

The modern passport and visa documents include special machine-readable zones satisfied the ICAO standards. This allows to develop the special passport and visa automatic readers. However, there are some special problems in such OCR systems: low resolution of character images captured by CCD-camera (down to 150 dpi), essential shifts and slopes (up to 10 degrees), rich paper texture under the character symbols, non-homogeneous illumination. This paper presents the structure and some special aspects of OCR system for portable passport and visa reader. In our approach the binarization procedure is performed after the segmentation step, and it is applied to the each character site separately. Character recognition procedure uses the structural information of machine-readable zone. Special algorithms are developed for machine-readable zone extraction and character segmentation.

Development of a Digitalized Child's Checkups Information System.

PubMed

Ito, Yoshiya; Takimoto, Hidemi

2017-01-01

In Japan, health checkups for children take place from infancy through high school and play an important role in the maintenance and control of childhood/adolescent health. The anthropometric data obtained during these checkups are kept in health centers and schools and are also recorded in a mother's maternal and child health handbook, as well as on school health cards. These data are meaningful if they are utilized well and in an appropriate manner. They are particularly useful for the prevention of obesity-related conditions in adulthood, such as metabolic syndrome and diabetes mellitus. For this purpose, we have tried to establish a scanning system with an optical character recognition (OCR) function, which links data obtained during health checkups in infancy with that obtained in schools. In this system, handwritten characters on the records are scanned and processed using OCR. However, because many of the scanned characters are not read properly, we must wait for the improvement in the performance of the OCR function. In addition, we have developed Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, on which obesity-related indices, such as body mass index and relative body weight, are calculated. These sheets also provide functions that tabulate the frequencies of obesity in specific groups. Actively using these data and digitalized systems will not only contribute towards resolving physical health problems in children, but also decrease the risk of developing lifestyle-related diseases in adulthood.

Optical character recognition: an illustrated guide to the frontier

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nagy, George; Nartker, Thomas A.; Rice, Stephen V.

1999-12-01

We offer a perspective on the performance of current OCR systems by illustrating and explaining actual OCR errors made by three commercial devices. After discussing briefly the character recognition abilities of humans and computers, we present illustrated examples of recognition errors. The top level of our taxonomy of the causes of errors consists of Imaging Defects, Similar Symbols, Punctuation, and Typography. The analysis of a series of 'snippets' from this perspective provides insight into the strengths and weaknesses of current systems, and perhaps a road map to future progress. The examples were drawn from the large-scale tests conducted by the authors at the Information Science Research Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. By way of conclusion, we point to possible approaches for improving the accuracy of today's systems. The talk is based on our eponymous monograph, recently published in The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.

Document image retrieval through word shape coding.

PubMed

Lu, Shijian; Li, Linlin; Tan, Chew Lim

2008-11-01

This paper presents a document retrieval technique that is capable of searching document images without OCR (optical character recognition). The proposed technique retrieves document images by a new word shape coding scheme, which captures the document content through annotating each word image by a word shape code. In particular, we annotate word images by using a set of topological shape features including character ascenders/descenders, character holes, and character water reservoirs. With the annotated word shape codes, document images can be retrieved by either query keywords or a query document image. Experimental results show that the proposed document image retrieval technique is fast, efficient, and tolerant to various types of document degradation.

Beta Testing a Novel Smartphone Application to Improve Medication Adherence.

PubMed

Sarzynski, Erin; Decker, Brian; Thul, Aaron; Weismantel, David; Melaragni, Ronald; Cholakis, Elizabeth; Tewari, Megha; Beckholt, Kristy; Zaroukian, Michael; Kennedy, Angie C; Given, Charles

2017-04-01

We developed and beta-tested a patient-centered medication management application, PresRx optical character recognition (OCR), a mobile health (m-health) tool that auto-populates drug name and dosing instructions directly from patients' medication labels by OCR. We employed a single-subject design study to evaluate PresRx OCR for three outcomes: (1) accuracy of auto-populated medication dosing instructions, (2) acceptability of the user interface, and (3) patients' adherence to chronic medications. Eight patients beta-tested PresRx OCR. Five patients used the software for ≥6 months, and four completed exit interviews (n = 4 completers). At baseline, patients used 3.4 chronic prescription medications and exhibited moderate-to-high adherence rates. Accuracy of auto-populated information by OCR was 95% for drug name, 98% for dose, and 96% for frequency. Study completers rated PresRx OCR 74 on the System Usability Scale, where scores ≥70 indicate an acceptable user interface (scale 0-100). Adherence rates measured by PresRx OCR were high during the first month of app use (93%), but waned midway through the 6-month testing period (78%). Compared with pharmacy fill rates, PresRx OCR underestimated adherence among completers by 3%, while it overestimated adherence among noncompleters by 8%. Results suggest smartphone applications supporting medication management are feasible and accurately assess adherence compared with objective measures. Future efforts to improve medication-taking behavior using m-health tools should target specific patient populations and leverage common application programming interfaces to promote generalizability. Our medication management application PresRx OCR is innovative, acceptable for patient use, and accurately tracks medication adherence.

The Heinz Electronic Library Interactive Online System (HELIOS): Building a Digital Archive Using Imaging, OCR, and Natural Language Processing Technologies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Galloway, Edward A.; Michalek, Gabrielle V.

1995-01-01

Discusses the conversion project of the congressional papers of Senator John Heinz into digital format and the provision of electronic access to these papers by Carnegie Mellon University. Topics include collection background, project team structure, document processing, scanning, use of optical character recognition software, verification…

Document image cleanup and binarization

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wu, Victor; Manmatha, Raghaven

1998-04-01

Image binarization is a difficult task for documents with text over textured or shaded backgrounds, poor contrast, and/or considerable noise. Current optical character recognition (OCR) and document analysis technology do not handle such documents well. We have developed a simple yet effective algorithm for document image clean-up and binarization. The algorithm consists of two basic steps. In the first step, the input image is smoothed using a low-pass filter. The smoothing operation enhances the text relative to any background texture. This is because background texture normally has higher frequency than text does. The smoothing operation also removes speckle noise. In the second step, the intensity histogram of the smoothed image is computed and a threshold automatically selected as follows. For black text, the first peak of the histogram corresponds to text. Thresholding the image at the value of the valley between the first and second peaks of the histogram binarizes the image well. In order to reliably identify the valley, the histogram is smoothed by a low-pass filter before the threshold is computed. The algorithm has been applied to some 50 images from a wide variety of source: digitized video frames, photos, newspapers, advertisements in magazines or sales flyers, personal checks, etc. There are 21820 characters and 4406 words in these images. 91 percent of the characters and 86 percent of the words are successfully cleaned up and binarized. A commercial OCR was applied to the binarized text when it consisted of fonts which were OCR recognizable. The recognition rate was 84 percent for the characters and 77 percent for the words.

A comparison study between MLP and convolutional neural network models for character recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ben Driss, S.; Soua, M.; Kachouri, R.; Akil, M.

2017-05-01

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been designed to operate on text contained in scanned documents and images. They include text detection and character recognition in which characters are described then classified. In the classification step, characters are identified according to their features or template descriptions. Then, a given classifier is employed to identify characters. In this context, we have proposed the unified character descriptor (UCD) to represent characters based on their features. Then, matching was employed to ensure the classification. This recognition scheme performs a good OCR Accuracy on homogeneous scanned documents, however it cannot discriminate characters with high font variation and distortion.3 To improve recognition, classifiers based on neural networks can be used. The multilayer perceptron (MLP) ensures high recognition accuracy when performing a robust training. Moreover, the convolutional neural network (CNN), is gaining nowadays a lot of popularity for its high performance. Furthermore, both CNN and MLP may suffer from the large amount of computation in the training phase. In this paper, we establish a comparison between MLP and CNN. We provide MLP with the UCD descriptor and the appropriate network configuration. For CNN, we employ the convolutional network designed for handwritten and machine-printed character recognition (Lenet-5) and we adapt it to support 62 classes, including both digits and characters. In addition, GPU parallelization is studied to speed up both of MLP and CNN classifiers. Based on our experimentations, we demonstrate that the used real-time CNN is 2x more relevant than MLP when classifying characters.

OCR enhancement through neighbor embedding and fast approximate nearest neighbors

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Smith, D. C.

2012-10-01

Generic optical character recognition (OCR) engines often perform very poorly in transcribing scanned low resolution (LR) text documents. To improve OCR performance, we apply the Neighbor Embedding (NE) single-image super-resolution (SISR) technique to LR scanned text documents to obtain high resolution (HR) versions, which we subsequently process with OCR. For comparison, we repeat this procedure using bicubic interpolation (BI). We demonstrate that mean-square errors (MSE) in NE HR estimates do not increase substantially when NE is trained in one Latin font style and tested in another, provided both styles belong to the same font category (serif or sans serif). This is very important in practice, since for each font size, the number of training sets required for each category may be reduced from dozens to just one. We also incorporate randomized k-d trees into our NE implementation to perform approximate nearest neighbor search, and obtain a 1000x speed up of our original NE implementation, with negligible MSE degradation. This acceleration also made it practical to combine all of our size-specific NE Latin models into a single Universal Latin Model (ULM). The ULM eliminates the need to determine the unknown font category and size of an input LR text document and match it to an appropriate model, a very challenging task, since the dpi (pixels per inch) of the input LR image is generally unknown. Our experiments show that OCR character error rates (CER) were over 90% when we applied the Tesseract OCR engine to LR text documents (scanned at 75 dpi and 100 dpi) in the 6-10 pt range. By contrast, using k-d trees and the ULM, CER after NE preprocessing averaged less than 7% at 3x (100 dpi LR scanning) and 4x (75 dpi LR scanning) magnification, over an order of magnitude improvement. Moreover, CER after NE preprocessing was more that 6 times lower on average than after BI preprocessing.

Intelligent bar chart plagiarism detection in documents.

PubMed

Al-Dabbagh, Mohammed Mumtaz; Salim, Naomie; Rehman, Amjad; Alkawaz, Mohammed Hazim; Saba, Tanzila; Al-Rodhaan, Mznah; Al-Dhelaan, Abdullah

2014-01-01

This paper presents a novel features mining approach from documents that could not be mined via optical character recognition (OCR). By identifying the intimate relationship between the text and graphical components, the proposed technique pulls out the Start, End, and Exact values for each bar. Furthermore, the word 2-gram and Euclidean distance methods are used to accurately detect and determine plagiarism in bar charts.

Intelligent Bar Chart Plagiarism Detection in Documents

PubMed Central

Al-Dabbagh, Mohammed Mumtaz; Salim, Naomie; Alkawaz, Mohammed Hazim; Saba, Tanzila; Al-Rodhaan, Mznah; Al-Dhelaan, Abdullah

2014-01-01

This paper presents a novel features mining approach from documents that could not be mined via optical character recognition (OCR). By identifying the intimate relationship between the text and graphical components, the proposed technique pulls out the Start, End, and Exact values for each bar. Furthermore, the word 2-gram and Euclidean distance methods are used to accurately detect and determine plagiarism in bar charts. PMID:25309952

Public domain optical character recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Garris, Michael D.; Blue, James L.; Candela, Gerald T.; Dimmick, Darrin L.; Geist, Jon C.; Grother, Patrick J.; Janet, Stanley A.; Wilson, Charles L.

1995-03-01

A public domain document processing system has been developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The system is a standard reference form-based handprint recognition system for evaluating optical character recognition (OCR), and it is intended to provide a baseline of performance on an open application. The system's source code, training data, performance assessment tools, and type of forms processed are all publicly available. The system recognizes the handprint entered on handwriting sample forms like the ones distributed with NIST Special Database 1. From these forms, the system reads hand-printed numeric fields, upper and lowercase alphabetic fields, and unconstrained text paragraphs comprised of words from a limited-size dictionary. The modular design of the system makes it useful for component evaluation and comparison, training and testing set validation, and multiple system voting schemes. The system contains a number of significant contributions to OCR technology, including an optimized probabilistic neural network (PNN) classifier that operates a factor of 20 times faster than traditional software implementations of the algorithm. The source code for the recognition system is written in C and is organized into 11 libraries. In all, there are approximately 19,000 lines of code supporting more than 550 subroutines. Source code is provided for form registration, form removal, field isolation, field segmentation, character normalization, feature extraction, character classification, and dictionary-based postprocessing. The recognition system has been successfully compiled and tested on a host of UNIX workstations. This paper gives an overview of the recognition system's software architecture, including descriptions of the various system components along with timing and accuracy statistics.

Goal-oriented evaluation of binarization algorithms for historical document images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Obafemi-Ajayi, Tayo; Agam, Gady

2013-01-01

Binarization is of significant importance in document analysis systems. It is an essential first step, prior to further stages such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), document segmentation, or enhancement of readability of the document after some restoration stages. Hence, proper evaluation of binarization methods to verify their effectiveness is of great value to the document analysis community. In this work, we perform a detailed goal-oriented evaluation of image quality assessment of the 18 binarization methods that participated in the DIBCO 2011 competition using the 16 historical document test images used in the contest. We are interested in the image quality assessment of the outputs generated by the different binarization algorithms as well as the OCR performance, where possible. We compare our evaluation of the algorithms based on human perception of quality to the DIBCO evaluation metrics. The results obtained provide an insight into the effectiveness of these methods with respect to human perception of image quality as well as OCR performance.

Degraded Chinese rubbing images thresholding based on local first-order statistics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Fang; Hou, Ling-Ying; Huang, Han

2017-06-01

It is a necessary step for Chinese character segmentation from degraded document images in Optical Character Recognizer (OCR); however, it is challenging due to various kinds of noising in such an image. In this paper, we present three local first-order statistics method that had been adaptive thresholding for segmenting text and non-text of Chinese rubbing image. Both visual inspection and numerically investigate for the segmentation results of rubbing image had been obtained. In experiments, it obtained better results than classical techniques in the binarization of real Chinese rubbing image and PHIBD 2012 datasets.

An Image Processing Approach to Linguistic Translation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kubatur, Shruthi; Sreehari, Suhas; Hegde, Rajeshwari

2011-12-01

The art of translation is as old as written literature. Developments since the Industrial Revolution have influenced the practice of translation, nurturing schools, professional associations, and standard. In this paper, we propose a method of translation of typed Kannada text (taken as an image) into its equivalent English text. The National Instruments (NI) Vision Assistant (version 8.5) has been used for Optical character Recognition (OCR). We developed a new way of transliteration (which we call NIV transliteration) to simplify the training of characters. Also, we build a special type of dictionary for the purpose of translation.

Figure mining for biomedical research.

PubMed

Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul; Iossifov, Ivan

2009-08-15

Figures from biomedical articles contain valuable information difficult to reach without specialized tools. Currently, there is no search engine that can retrieve specific figure types. This study describes a retrieval method that takes advantage of principles in image understanding, text mining and optical character recognition (OCR) to retrieve figure types defined conceptually. A search engine was developed to retrieve tables and figure types to aid computational and experimental research. http://iossifovlab.cshl.edu/figurome/.

Image simulation for automatic license plate recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bala, Raja; Zhao, Yonghui; Burry, Aaron; Kozitsky, Vladimir; Fillion, Claude; Saunders, Craig; Rodríguez-Serrano, José

2012-01-01

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) is an important capability for traffic surveillance applications, including toll monitoring and detection of different types of traffic violations. ALPR is a multi-stage process comprising plate localization, character segmentation, optical character recognition (OCR), and identification of originating jurisdiction (i.e. state or province). Training of an ALPR system for a new jurisdiction typically involves gathering vast amounts of license plate images and associated ground truth data, followed by iterative tuning and optimization of the ALPR algorithms. The substantial time and effort required to train and optimize the ALPR system can result in excessive operational cost and overhead. In this paper we propose a framework to create an artificial set of license plate images for accelerated training and optimization of ALPR algorithms. The framework comprises two steps: the synthesis of license plate images according to the design and layout for a jurisdiction of interest; and the modeling of imaging transformations and distortions typically encountered in the image capture process. Distortion parameters are estimated by measurements of real plate images. The simulation methodology is successfully demonstrated for training of OCR.

Pattern matching techniques for correcting low-confidence OCR words in a known context

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ford, Glenn; Hauser, Susan E.; Le, Daniel X.; Thoma, George R.

2000-12-01

A commercial OCR system is a key component of a system developed at the National Library of Medicine for the automated extraction of bibliographic fields from biomedical journals. This 5-engine OCR system, while exhibiting high performance overall, does not reliably convert very small characters, especially those that are in italics. As a result, the 'affiliations' field that typically contains such characters in most journals, is not captured accurately, and requires a disproportionately high manual input. To correct this problem, dictionaries have been created from words occurring in this field (e.g., university, department, street addresses, names of cities, etc.) from 230,000 articles already processed. The OCR output corresponding to the affiliation field is then matched against these dictionary entries by approximate string-matching techniques, and the ranked matches are presented to operators for verification. This paper outlines the techniques employed and the results of a comparative evaluation.

Image Segmentation of Historical Handwriting from Palm Leaf Manuscripts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Surinta, Olarik; Chamchong, Rapeeporn

Palm leaf manuscripts were one of the earliest forms of written media and were used in Southeast Asia to store early written knowledge about subjects such as medicine, Buddhist doctrine and astrology. Therefore, historical handwritten palm leaf manuscripts are important for people who like to learn about historical documents, because we can learn more experience from them. This paper presents an image segmentation of historical handwriting from palm leaf manuscripts. The process is composed of three steps: 1) background elimination to separate text and background by Otsu's algorithm 2) line segmentation and 3) character segmentation by histogram of image. The end result is the character's image. The results from this research may be applied to optical character recognition (OCR) in the future.

Recognizing characters of ancient manuscripts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Diem, Markus; Sablatnig, Robert

2010-02-01

Considering printed Latin text, the main issues of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems are solved. However, for degraded handwritten document images, basic preprocessing steps such as binarization, gain poor results with state-of-the-art methods. In this paper ancient Slavonic manuscripts from the 11th century are investigated. In order to minimize the consequences of false character segmentation, a binarization-free approach based on local descriptors is proposed. Additionally local information allows the recognition of partially visible or washed out characters. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps: character classification and character localization. Initially Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) features are extracted which are subsequently classified using Support Vector Machines (SVM). Afterwards, the interest points are clustered according to their spatial information. Thereby, characters are localized and finally recognized based on a weighted voting scheme of pre-classified local descriptors. Preliminary results show that the proposed system can handle highly degraded manuscript images with background clutter (e.g. stains, tears) and faded out characters.

Figure Text Extraction in Biomedical Literature

PubMed Central

Kim, Daehyun; Yu, Hong

2011-01-01

Background Figures are ubiquitous in biomedical full-text articles, and they represent important biomedical knowledge. However, the sheer volume of biomedical publications has made it necessary to develop computational approaches for accessing figures. Therefore, we are developing the Biomedical Figure Search engine (http://figuresearch.askHERMES.org) to allow bioscientists to access figures efficiently. Since text frequently appears in figures, automatically extracting such text may assist the task of mining information from figures. Little research, however, has been conducted exploring text extraction from biomedical figures. Methodology We first evaluated an off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool on its ability to extract text from figures appearing in biomedical full-text articles. We then developed a Figure Text Extraction Tool (FigTExT) to improve the performance of the OCR tool for figure text extraction through the use of three innovative components: image preprocessing, character recognition, and text correction. We first developed image preprocessing to enhance image quality and to improve text localization. Then we adapted the off-the-shelf OCR tool on the improved text localization for character recognition. Finally, we developed and evaluated a novel text correction framework by taking advantage of figure-specific lexicons. Results/Conclusions The evaluation on 382 figures (9,643 figure texts in total) randomly selected from PubMed Central full-text articles shows that FigTExT performed with 84% precision, 98% recall, and 90% F1-score for text localization and with 62.5% precision, 51.0% recall and 56.2% F1-score for figure text extraction. When limiting figure texts to those judged by domain experts to be important content, FigTExT performed with 87.3% precision, 68.8% recall, and 77% F1-score. FigTExT significantly improved the performance of the off-the-shelf OCR tool we used, which on its own performed with 36.6% precision, 19.3% recall, and 25.3% F1-score for text extraction. In addition, our results show that FigTExT can extract texts that do not appear in figure captions or other associated text, further suggesting the potential utility of FigTExT for improving figure search. PMID:21249186

Figure text extraction in biomedical literature.

PubMed

Kim, Daehyun; Yu, Hong

2011-01-13

Figures are ubiquitous in biomedical full-text articles, and they represent important biomedical knowledge. However, the sheer volume of biomedical publications has made it necessary to develop computational approaches for accessing figures. Therefore, we are developing the Biomedical Figure Search engine (http://figuresearch.askHERMES.org) to allow bioscientists to access figures efficiently. Since text frequently appears in figures, automatically extracting such text may assist the task of mining information from figures. Little research, however, has been conducted exploring text extraction from biomedical figures. We first evaluated an off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool on its ability to extract text from figures appearing in biomedical full-text articles. We then developed a Figure Text Extraction Tool (FigTExT) to improve the performance of the OCR tool for figure text extraction through the use of three innovative components: image preprocessing, character recognition, and text correction. We first developed image preprocessing to enhance image quality and to improve text localization. Then we adapted the off-the-shelf OCR tool on the improved text localization for character recognition. Finally, we developed and evaluated a novel text correction framework by taking advantage of figure-specific lexicons. The evaluation on 382 figures (9,643 figure texts in total) randomly selected from PubMed Central full-text articles shows that FigTExT performed with 84% precision, 98% recall, and 90% F1-score for text localization and with 62.5% precision, 51.0% recall and 56.2% F1-score for figure text extraction. When limiting figure texts to those judged by domain experts to be important content, FigTExT performed with 87.3% precision, 68.8% recall, and 77% F1-score. FigTExT significantly improved the performance of the off-the-shelf OCR tool we used, which on its own performed with 36.6% precision, 19.3% recall, and 25.3% F1-score for text extraction. In addition, our results show that FigTExT can extract texts that do not appear in figure captions or other associated text, further suggesting the potential utility of FigTExT for improving figure search.

Arabic OCR: toward a complete system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

El-Bialy, Ahmed M.; Kandil, Ahmed H.; Hashish, Mohamed; Yamany, Sameh M.

1999-12-01

Latin and Chinese OCR systems have been studied extensively in the literature. Yet little work was performed for Arabic character recognition. This is due to the technical challenges found in the Arabic text. Due to its cursive nature, a powerful and stable text segmentation is needed. Also; features capturing the characteristics of the rich Arabic character representation are needed to build the Arabic OCR. In this paper a novel segmentation technique which is font and size independent is introduced. This technique can segment the cursive written text line even if the line suffers from small skewness. The technique is not sensitive to the location of the centerline of the text line and can segment different font sizes and type (for different character sets) occurring on the same line. Features extraction is considered one of the most important phases of the text reading system. Ideally, the features extracted from a character image should capture the essential characteristics of this character that are independent of the font type and size. In such ideal case, the classifier stores a single prototype per character. However, it is practically challenging to find such ideal set of features. In this paper, a set of features that reflect the topological aspects of Arabia characters is proposed. These proposed features integrated with a topological matching technique introduce an Arabic text reading system that is semi Omni.

Comparison of the three optical platforms for measurement of cellular respiration.

PubMed

Kondrashina, Alina V; Ogurtsov, Vladimir I; Papkovsky, Dmitri B

2015-01-01

We compared three optical platforms for measurement of cellular respiration: absolute oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) in hermetically sealed microcuvettes, relative OCRs measured in a 96-well plate with oil seal, and steady-state oxygenation of cells in an open 96-well plate. Using mouse embryonic fibroblasts cell line, the phosphorescent intracellular O2 probe MitoXpress-Intra, and time-resolved fluorescence reader, we determined algorithms for conversion of relative OCRs and cell oxygenation into absolute OCRs, thereby allowing simple high-throughput measurement of absolute OCR values. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automatic de-identification of French clinical records: comparison of rule-based and machine-learning approaches.

PubMed

Grouin, Cyril; Zweigenbaum, Pierre

2013-01-01

In this paper, we present a comparison of two approaches to automatically de-identify medical records written in French: a rule-based system and a machine-learning based system using a conditional random fields (CRF) formalism. Both systems have been designed to process nine identifiers in a corpus of medical records in cardiology. We performed two evaluations: first, on 62 documents in cardiology, and on 10 documents in foetopathology - produced by optical character recognition (OCR) - to evaluate the robustness of our systems. We achieved a 0.843 (rule-based) and 0.883 (machine-learning) exact match overall F-measure in cardiology. While the rule-based system allowed us to achieve good results on nominative (first and last names) and numerical data (dates, phone numbers, and zip codes), the machine-learning approach performed best on more complex categories (postal addresses, hospital names, medical devices, and towns). On the foetopathology corpus, although our systems have not been designed for this corpus and despite OCR character recognition errors, we obtained promising results: a 0.681 (rule-based) and 0.638 (machine-learning) exact-match overall F-measure. This demonstrates that existing tools can be applied to process new documents of lower quality.

Building Structured Personal Health Records from Photographs of Printed Medical Records.

PubMed

Li, Xiang; Hu, Gang; Teng, Xiaofei; Xie, Guotong

2015-01-01

Personal health records (PHRs) provide patient-centric healthcare by making health records accessible to patients. In China, it is very difficult for individuals to access electronic health records. Instead, individuals can easily obtain the printed copies of their own medical records, such as prescriptions and lab test reports, from hospitals. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to extract structured data from printed medical records photographed by mobile phones. An optical character recognition (OCR) pipeline is performed to recognize text in a document photo, which addresses the problems of low image quality and content complexity by image pre-processing and multiple OCR engine synthesis. A series of annotation algorithms that support flexible layouts are then used to identify the document type, entities of interest, and entity correlations, from which a structured PHR document is built. The proposed approach was applied to real world medical records to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability.

Review of chart recognition in document images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Yan; Lu, Xiaoqing; Qin, Yeyang; Tang, Zhi; Xu, Jianbo

2013-01-01

As an effective information transmitting way, chart is widely used to represent scientific statistics datum in books, research papers, newspapers etc. Though textual information is still the major source of data, there has been an increasing trend of introducing graphs, pictures, and figures into the information pool. Text recognition techniques for documents have been accomplished using optical character recognition (OCR) software. Chart recognition techniques as a necessary supplement of OCR for document images are still an unsolved problem due to the great subjectiveness and variety of charts styles. This paper reviews the development process of chart recognition techniques in the past decades and presents the focuses of current researches. The whole process of chart recognition is presented systematically, which mainly includes three parts: chart segmentation, chart classification, and chart Interpretation. In each part, the latest research work is introduced. In the last, the paper concludes with a summary and promising future research direction.

Building Structured Personal Health Records from Photographs of Printed Medical Records

PubMed Central

Li, Xiang; Hu, Gang; Teng, Xiaofei; Xie, Guotong

2015-01-01

Personal health records (PHRs) provide patient-centric healthcare by making health records accessible to patients. In China, it is very difficult for individuals to access electronic health records. Instead, individuals can easily obtain the printed copies of their own medical records, such as prescriptions and lab test reports, from hospitals. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to extract structured data from printed medical records photographed by mobile phones. An optical character recognition (OCR) pipeline is performed to recognize text in a document photo, which addresses the problems of low image quality and content complexity by image pre-processing and multiple OCR engine synthesis. A series of annotation algorithms that support flexible layouts are then used to identify the document type, entities of interest, and entity correlations, from which a structured PHR document is built. The proposed approach was applied to real world medical records to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability. PMID:26958219

Counting OCR errors in typeset text

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sandberg, Jonathan S.

1995-03-01

Frequently object recognition accuracy is a key component in the performance analysis of pattern matching systems. In the past three years, the results of numerous excellent and rigorous studies of OCR system typeset-character accuracy (henceforth OCR accuracy) have been published, encouraging performance comparisons between a variety of OCR products and technologies. These published figures are important; OCR vendor advertisements in the popular trade magazines lead readers to believe that published OCR accuracy figures effect market share in the lucrative OCR market. Curiously, a detailed review of many of these OCR error occurrence counting results reveals that they are not reproducible as published and they are not strictly comparable due to larger variances in the counts than would be expected by the sampling variance. Naturally, since OCR accuracy is based on a ratio of the number of OCR errors over the size of the text searched for errors, imprecise OCR error accounting leads to similar imprecision in OCR accuracy. Some published papers use informal, non-automatic, or intuitively correct OCR error accounting. Still other published results present OCR error accounting methods based on string matching algorithms such as dynamic programming using Levenshtein (edit) distance but omit critical implementation details (such as the existence of suspect markers in the OCR generated output or the weights used in the dynamic programming minimization procedure). The problem with not specifically revealing the accounting method is that the number of errors found by different methods are significantly different. This paper identifies the basic accounting methods used to measure OCR errors in typeset text and offers an evaluation and comparison of the various accounting methods.

Partitioning of the degradation space for OCR training

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barney Smith, Elisa H.; Andersen, Tim

2006-01-01

Generally speaking optical character recognition algorithms tend to perform better when presented with homogeneous data. This paper studies a method that is designed to increase the homogeneity of training data, based on an understanding of the types of degradations that occur during the printing and scanning process, and how these degradations affect the homogeneity of the data. While it has been shown that dividing the degradation space by edge spread improves recognition accuracy over dividing the degradation space by threshold or point spread function width alone, the challenge is in deciding how many partitions and at what value of edge spread the divisions should be made. Clustering of different types of character features, fonts, sizes, resolutions and noise levels shows that edge spread is indeed shown to be a strong indicator of the homogeneity of character data clusters.

Optical Data Processing.

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-04-01

much less for characters than for other objects, and 200 0.98 thus OCR appears to represent a worst-case guideline. 400 (10 To quantify the effect of...mm, yma = 5 mm, , = 0.6328 mn, and J = 400 mm. the effect of the positional weighting factor given b From Eq. (6), we then find a > 23 line pairs/mm...is the square radius r2 = (x2 + yN2) of each input point i required. We used n = 400 fringes in Eq. (4) for a = 40 Po. The effect of the r2 = (X2 + y2

Document image database indexing with pictorial dictionary

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Akbari, Mohammad; Azimi, Reza

2010-02-01

In this paper we introduce a new approach for information retrieval from Persian document image database without using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).At first an attribute called subword upper contour label is defined then, a pictorial dictionary is constructed based on this attribute for the subwords. By this approach we address two issues in document image retrieval: keyword spotting and retrieval according to the document similarities. The proposed methods have been evaluated on a Persian document image database. The results have proved the ability of this approach in document image information retrieval.

Digital Archiving: Where the Past Lives Again

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Paxson, K. B.

2012-06-01

The process of digital archiving for variable star data by manual entry with an Excel spreadsheet is described. Excel-based tools including a Step Magnitude Calculator and a Julian Date Calculator for variable star observations where magnitudes and Julian dates have not been reduced are presented. Variable star data in the literature and the AAVSO International Database prior to 1911 are presented and reviewed, with recent archiving work being highlighted. Digitization using optical character recognition software conversion is also demonstrated, with editing and formatting suggestions for the OCR-converted text.

A robust omnifont open-vocabulary Arabic OCR system using pseudo-2D-HMM

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rashwan, Abdullah M.; Rashwan, Mohsen A.; Abdel-Hameed, Ahmed; Abdou, Sherif; Khalil, A. H.

2012-01-01

Recognizing old documents is highly desirable since the demand for quickly searching millions of archived documents has recently increased. Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) has been proven to be a good solution to tackle the main problems of recognizing typewritten Arabic characters. These attempts however achieved a remarkable success for omnifont OCR under very favorable conditions, they didn't achieve the same performance in practical conditions, i.e. noisy documents. In this paper we present an omnifont, large-vocabulary Arabic OCR system using Pseudo Two Dimensional Hidden Markov Model (P2DHMM), which is a generalization of the HMM. P2DHMM offers a more efficient way to model the Arabic characters, such model offer both minimal dependency on the font size/style (omnifont), and high level of robustness against noise. The evaluation results of this system are very promising compared to a baseline HMM system and best OCRs available in the market (Sakhr and NovoDynamics). The recognition accuracy of the P2DHMM classifier is measured against the classic HMM classifier, the average word accuracy rates for P2DHMM and HMM classifiers are 79% and 66% respectively. The overall system accuracy is measured against Sakhr and NovoDynamics OCR systems, the average word accuracy rates for P2DHMM, NovoDynamics, and Sakhr are 74%, 71%, and 61% respectively.

Comparison of approaches for mobile document image analysis using server supported smartphones

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ozarslan, Suleyman; Eren, P. Erhan

2014-03-01

With the recent advances in mobile technologies, new capabilities are emerging, such as mobile document image analysis. However, mobile phones are still less powerful than servers, and they have some resource limitations. One approach to overcome these limitations is performing resource-intensive processes of the application on remote servers. In mobile document image analysis, the most resource consuming process is the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process, which is used to extract text in mobile phone captured images. In this study, our goal is to compare the in-phone and the remote server processing approaches for mobile document image analysis in order to explore their trade-offs. For the inphone approach, all processes required for mobile document image analysis run on the mobile phone. On the other hand, in the remote-server approach, core OCR process runs on the remote server and other processes run on the mobile phone. Results of the experiments show that the remote server approach is considerably faster than the in-phone approach in terms of OCR time, but adds extra delays such as network delay. Since compression and downscaling of images significantly reduce file sizes and extra delays, the remote server approach overall outperforms the in-phone approach in terms of selected speed and correct recognition metrics, if the gain in OCR time compensates for the extra delays. According to the results of the experiments, using the most preferable settings, the remote server approach performs better than the in-phone approach in terms of speed and acceptable correct recognition metrics.

Approximate string matching algorithms for limited-vocabulary OCR output correction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lasko, Thomas A.; Hauser, Susan E.

2000-12-01

Five methods for matching words mistranslated by optical character recognition to their most likely match in a reference dictionary were tested on data from the archives of the National Library of Medicine. The methods, including an adaptation of the cross correlation algorithm, the generic edit distance algorithm, the edit distance algorithm with a probabilistic substitution matrix, Bayesian analysis, and Bayesian analysis on an actively thinned reference dictionary were implemented and their accuracy rates compared. Of the five, the Bayesian algorithm produced the most correct matches (87%), and had the advantage of producing scores that have a useful and practical interpretation.

Intelligent form removal with character stroke preservation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Garris, Michael D.

1996-03-01

A new technique for intelligent form removal has been developed along with a new method for evaluating its impact on optical character recognition (OCR). All the dominant lines in the image are automatically detected using the Hough line transform and intelligently erased while simultaneously preserving overlapping character strokes by computing line width statistics and keying off of certain visual cues. This new method of form removal operates on loosely defined zones with no image deskewing. Any field in which the writer is provided a horizontal line to enter a response can be processed by this method. Several examples of processed fields are provided, including a comparison of results between the new method and a commercially available forms removal package. Even if this new form removal method did not improve character recognition accuracy, it is still a significant improvement to the technology because the requirement of a priori knowledge of the form's geometric details has been greatly reduced. This relaxes the recognition system's dependence on rigid form design, printing, and reproduction by automatically detecting and removing some of the physical structures (lines) on the form. Using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) public domain form-based handprint recognition system, the technique was tested on a large number of fields containing randomly ordered handprinted lowercase alphabets, as these letters (especially those with descenders) frequently touch and extend through the line along which they are written. Preserving character strokes improves overall lowercase recognition performance by 3%, which is a net improvement, but a single performance number like this doesn't communicate how the recognition process was really influenced. There is expected to be trade- offs with the introduction of any new technique into a complex recognition system. To understand both the improvements and the trade-offs, a new analysis was designed to compare the statistical distributions of individual confusion pairs between two systems. As OCR technology continues to improve, sophisticated analyses like this are necessary to reduce the errors remaining in complex recognition problems.

A paper form processing system with an error correcting function for reading handwritten Kanji strings

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Katsumi Marukawa; Kazuki Nakashima; Masashi Koga

1994-12-31

This paper presents a paper form processing system with an error correcting function for reading handwritten kanji strings. In the paper form processing system, names and addresses are important key data, and especially this paper takes up an error correcting method for name and address recognition. The method automatically corrects errors of the kanji OCR (Optical Character Reader) with the help of word dictionaries and other knowledge. Moreover, it allows names and addresses to be written in any style. The method consists of word matching {open_quotes}furigana{close_quotes} verification for name strings, and address approval for address strings. For word matching, kanjimore » name candidates are extracted by automaton-type word matching. In {open_quotes}furigana{close_quotes} verification, kana candidate characters recognized by the kana OCR are compared with kana`s searched from the name dictionary based on kanji name candidates, given by the word matching. The correct name is selected from the results of word matching and furigana verification. Also, the address approval efficiently searches for the right address based on a bottom-up procedure which follows hierarchical relations from a lower placename to a upper one by using the positional condition among the placenames. We ascertained that the error correcting method substantially improves the recognition rate and processing speed in experiments on 5,032 forms.« less

Basic test framework for the evaluation of text line segmentation and text parameter extraction.

PubMed

Brodić, Darko; Milivojević, Dragan R; Milivojević, Zoran

2010-01-01

Text line segmentation is an essential stage in off-line optical character recognition (OCR) systems. It is a key because inaccurately segmented text lines will lead to OCR failure. Text line segmentation of handwritten documents is a complex and diverse problem, complicated by the nature of handwriting. Hence, text line segmentation is a leading challenge in handwritten document image processing. Due to inconsistencies in measurement and evaluation of text segmentation algorithm quality, some basic set of measurement methods is required. Currently, there is no commonly accepted one and all algorithm evaluation is custom oriented. In this paper, a basic test framework for the evaluation of text feature extraction algorithms is proposed. This test framework consists of a few experiments primarily linked to text line segmentation, skew rate and reference text line evaluation. Although they are mutually independent, the results obtained are strongly cross linked. In the end, its suitability for different types of letters and languages as well as its adaptability are its main advantages. Thus, the paper presents an efficient evaluation method for text analysis algorithms.

A segmentation-free approach to Arabic and Urdu OCR

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sabbour, Nazly; Shafait, Faisal

2013-01-01

In this paper, we present a generic Optical Character Recognition system for Arabic script languages called Nabocr. Nabocr uses OCR approaches specific for Arabic script recognition. Performing recognition on Arabic script text is relatively more difficult than Latin text due to the nature of Arabic script, which is cursive and context sensitive. Moreover, Arabic script has different writing styles that vary in complexity. Nabocr is initially trained to recognize both Urdu Nastaleeq and Arabic Naskh fonts. However, it can be trained by users to be used for other Arabic script languages. We have evaluated our system's performance for both Urdu and Arabic. In order to evaluate Urdu recognition, we have generated a dataset of Urdu text called UPTI (Urdu Printed Text Image Database), which measures different aspects of a recognition system. The performance of our system for Urdu clean text is 91%. For Arabic clean text, the performance is 86%. Moreover, we have compared the performance of our system against Tesseract's newly released Arabic recognition, and the performance of both systems on clean images is almost the same.

Automatic detection and recognition of signs from natural scenes.

PubMed

Chen, Xilin; Yang, Jie; Zhang, Jing; Waibel, Alex

2004-01-01

In this paper, we present an approach to automatic detection and recognition of signs from natural scenes, and its application to a sign translation task. The proposed approach embeds multiresolution and multiscale edge detection, adaptive searching, color analysis, and affine rectification in a hierarchical framework for sign detection, with different emphases at each phase to handle the text in different sizes, orientations, color distributions and backgrounds. We use affine rectification to recover deformation of the text regions caused by an inappropriate camera view angle. The procedure can significantly improve text detection rate and optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy. Instead of using binary information for OCR, we extract features from an intensity image directly. We propose a local intensity normalization method to effectively handle lighting variations, followed by a Gabor transform to obtain local features, and finally a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method for feature selection. We have applied the approach in developing a Chinese sign translation system, which can automatically detect and recognize Chinese signs as input from a camera, and translate the recognized text into English.

Basic Test Framework for the Evaluation of Text Line Segmentation and Text Parameter Extraction

PubMed Central

Brodić, Darko; Milivojević, Dragan R.; Milivojević, Zoran

2010-01-01

Text line segmentation is an essential stage in off-line optical character recognition (OCR) systems. It is a key because inaccurately segmented text lines will lead to OCR failure. Text line segmentation of handwritten documents is a complex and diverse problem, complicated by the nature of handwriting. Hence, text line segmentation is a leading challenge in handwritten document image processing. Due to inconsistencies in measurement and evaluation of text segmentation algorithm quality, some basic set of measurement methods is required. Currently, there is no commonly accepted one and all algorithm evaluation is custom oriented. In this paper, a basic test framework for the evaluation of text feature extraction algorithms is proposed. This test framework consists of a few experiments primarily linked to text line segmentation, skew rate and reference text line evaluation. Although they are mutually independent, the results obtained are strongly cross linked. In the end, its suitability for different types of letters and languages as well as its adaptability are its main advantages. Thus, the paper presents an efficient evaluation method for text analysis algorithms. PMID:22399932

Development of Portable Automatic Number Plate Recognition System on Android Mobile Phone

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mutholib, Abdul; Gunawan, Teddy S.; Chebil, Jalel; Kartiwi, Mira

2013-12-01

The Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) System has performed as the main role in various access control and security, such as: tracking of stolen vehicles, traffic violations (speed trap) and parking management system. In this paper, the portable ANPR implemented on android mobile phone is presented. The main challenges in mobile application are including higher coding efficiency, reduced computational complexity, and improved flexibility. Significance efforts are being explored to find suitable and adaptive algorithm for implementation of ANPR on mobile phone. ANPR system for mobile phone need to be optimize due to its limited CPU and memory resources, its ability for geo-tagging image captured using GPS coordinates and its ability to access online database to store the vehicle's information. In this paper, the design of portable ANPR on android mobile phone will be described as follows. First, the graphical user interface (GUI) for capturing image using built-in camera was developed to acquire vehicle plate number in Malaysia. Second, the preprocessing of raw image was done using contrast enhancement. Next, character segmentation using fixed pitch and an optical character recognition (OCR) using neural network were utilized to extract texts and numbers. Both character segmentation and OCR were using Tesseract library from Google Inc. The proposed portable ANPR algorithm was implemented and simulated using Android SDK on a computer. Based on the experimental results, the proposed system can effectively recognize the license plate number at 90.86%. The required processing time to recognize a license plate is only 2 seconds on average. The result is consider good in comparison with the results obtained from previous system that was processed in a desktop PC with the range of result from 91.59% to 98% recognition rate and 0.284 second to 1.5 seconds recognition time.

Automated sea floor extraction from underwater video

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kelly, Lauren; Rahmes, Mark; Stiver, James; McCluskey, Mike

2016-05-01

Ocean floor mapping using video is a method to simply and cost-effectively record large areas of the seafloor. Obtaining visual and elevation models has noteworthy applications in search and recovery missions. Hazards to navigation are abundant and pose a significant threat to the safety, effectiveness, and speed of naval operations and commercial vessels. This project's objective was to develop a workflow to automatically extract metadata from marine video and create image optical and elevation surface mosaics. Three developments made this possible. First, optical character recognition (OCR) by means of two-dimensional correlation, using a known character set, allowed for the capture of metadata from image files. Second, exploiting the image metadata (i.e., latitude, longitude, heading, camera angle, and depth readings) allowed for the determination of location and orientation of the image frame in mosaic. Image registration improved the accuracy of mosaicking. Finally, overlapping data allowed us to determine height information. A disparity map was created using the parallax from overlapping viewpoints of a given area and the relative height data was utilized to create a three-dimensional, textured elevation map.

Font adaptive word indexing of modern printed documents.

PubMed

Marinai, Simone; Marino, Emanuele; Soda, Giovanni

2006-08-01

We propose an approach for the word-level indexing of modern printed documents which are difficult to recognize using current OCR engines. By means of word-level indexing, it is possible to retrieve the position of words in a document, enabling queries involving proximity of terms. Web search engines implement this kind of indexing, allowing users to retrieve Web pages on the basis of their textual content. Nowadays, digital libraries hold collections of digitized documents that can be retrieved either by browsing the document images or relying on appropriate metadata assembled by domain experts. Word indexing tools would therefore increase the access to these collections. The proposed system is designed to index homogeneous document collections by automatically adapting to different languages and font styles without relying on OCR engines for character recognition. The approach is based on three main ideas: the use of Self Organizing Maps (SOM) to perform unsupervised character clustering, the definition of one suitable vector-based word representation whose size depends on the word aspect-ratio, and the run-time alignment of the query word with indexed words to deal with broken and touching characters. The most appropriate applications are for processing modern printed documents (17th to 19th centuries) where current OCR engines are less accurate. Our experimental analysis addresses six data sets containing documents ranging from books of the 17th century to contemporary journals.

Noninvasive in vivo optical characterization of blood flow and oxygen consumption in the superficial plexus of skin

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liasi, Faezeh Talebi; Samatham, Ravikant; Jacques, Steven L.

2017-11-01

Assessing the metabolic activity of a tissue, whether normal, damaged, aged, or pathologic, is useful for diagnosis and evaluating the effects of drugs. This report describes a handheld optical fiber probe that contacts the skin, applies pressure to blanch the superficial vascular plexus of the skin, then releases the pressure to allow refill of the plexus. The optical probe uses white light spectroscopy to record the time dynamics of blanching and refilling. The magnitude and dynamics of changes in blood content and hemoglobin oxygen saturation yield an estimate of the oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in units of attomoles per cell per second. The average value of OCR on nine forearm sites on five subjects was 10±5 (amol/cell/s). This low-cost, portable, rapid, noninvasive optical probe can characterize the OCR of a skin site to assess the metabolic activity of the epidermis or a superficial lesion.

Approximate strip exchanging.

PubMed

Roy, Swapnoneel; Thakur, Ashok Kumar

2008-01-01

Genome rearrangements have been modelled by a variety of primitives such as reversals, transpositions, block moves and block interchanges. We consider such a genome rearrangement primitive Strip Exchanges. Given a permutation, the challenge is to sort it by using minimum number of strip exchanges. A strip exchanging move interchanges the positions of two chosen strips so that they merge with other strips. The strip exchange problem is to sort a permutation using minimum number of strip exchanges. We present here the first non-trivial 2-approximation algorithm to this problem. We also observe that sorting by strip-exchanges is fixed-parameter-tractable. Lastly we discuss the application of strip exchanges in a different area Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with an example.

Cost analysis of a project to digitize classic articles in neurosurgery*

PubMed Central

Bauer, Kathleen

2002-01-01

In summer 2000, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University began a demonstration project to digitize classic articles in neurosurgery from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The objective of the first phase of the project was to measure the time and costs involved in digitization, and those results are reported here. In the second phase, metadata will be added to the digitized articles, and the project will be publicized. Thirteen articles were scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) software, and the resulting text files were carefully proofread. Time for photocopying, scanning, and proofreading were recorded. This project achieved an average cost per item (total pages plus images) of $4.12, a figure at the high end of average costs found in other studies. This project experienced high costs for two reasons. First, the articles contained many images, which required extra processing. Second, the older fonts and the poor condition of many of these articles complicated the OCR process. The average article cost $84.46 to digitize. Although costs were high, the selection of historically important articles maximized the benefit gained from the investment in digitization. PMID:11999182

Text recognition and correction for automated data collection by mobile devices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ozarslan, Suleyman; Eren, P. Erhan

2014-03-01

Participatory sensing is an approach which allows mobile devices such as mobile phones to be used for data collection, analysis and sharing processes by individuals. Data collection is the first and most important part of a participatory sensing system, but it is time consuming for the participants. In this paper, we discuss automatic data collection approaches for reducing the time required for collection, and increasing the amount of collected data. In this context, we explore automated text recognition on images of store receipts which are captured by mobile phone cameras, and the correction of the recognized text. Accordingly, our first goal is to evaluate the performance of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) method with respect to data collection from store receipt images. Images captured by mobile phones exhibit some typical problems, and common image processing methods cannot handle some of them. Consequently, the second goal is to address these types of problems through our proposed Knowledge Based Correction (KBC) method used in support of the OCR, and also to evaluate the KBC method with respect to the improvement on the accurate recognition rate. Results of the experiments show that the KBC method improves the accurate data recognition rate noticeably.

How well does multiple OCR error correction generalize?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lund, William B.; Ringger, Eric K.; Walker, Daniel D.

2013-12-01

As the digitization of historical documents, such as newspapers, becomes more common, the need of the archive patron for accurate digital text from those documents increases. Building on our earlier work, the contributions of this paper are: 1. in demonstrating the applicability of novel methods for correcting optical character recognition (OCR) on disparate data sets, including a new synthetic training set, 2. enhancing the correction algorithm with novel features, and 3. assessing the data requirements of the correction learning method. First, we correct errors using conditional random fields (CRF) trained on synthetic training data sets in order to demonstrate the applicability of the methodology to unrelated test sets. Second, we show the strength of lexical features from the training sets on two unrelated test sets, yielding a relative reduction in word error rate on the test sets of 6.52%. New features capture the recurrence of hypothesis tokens and yield an additional relative reduction in WER of 2.30%. Further, we show that only 2.0% of the full training corpus of over 500,000 feature cases is needed to achieve correction results comparable to those using the entire training corpus, effectively reducing both the complexity of the training process and the learned correction model.

Cost analysis of a project to digitize classic articles in neurosurgery.

PubMed

Bauer, Kathleen

2002-04-01

In summer 2000, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University began a demonstration project to digitize classic articles in neurosurgery from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The objective of the first phase of the project was to measure the time and costs involved in digitization, and those results are reported here. In the second phase, metadata will be added to the digitized articles, and the project will be publicized. Thirteen articles were scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) software, and the resulting text files were carefully proofread. Time for photocopying, scanning, and proofreading were recorded. This project achieved an average cost per item (total pages plus images) of $4.12, a figure at the high end of average costs found in other studies. This project experienced high costs for two reasons. First, the articles contained many images, which required extra processing. Second, the older fonts and the poor condition of many of these articles complicated the OCR process. The average article cost $84.46 to digitize. Although costs were high, the selection of historically important articles maximized the benefit gained from the investment in digitization.

Automated document analysis system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Black, Jeffrey D.; Dietzel, Robert; Hartnett, David

2002-08-01

A software application has been developed to aid law enforcement and government intelligence gathering organizations in the translation and analysis of foreign language documents with potential intelligence content. The Automated Document Analysis System (ADAS) provides the capability to search (data or text mine) documents in English and the most commonly encountered foreign languages, including Arabic. Hardcopy documents are scanned by a high-speed scanner and are optical character recognized (OCR). Documents obtained in an electronic format bypass the OCR and are copied directly to a working directory. For translation and analysis, the script and the language of the documents are first determined. If the document is not in English, the document is machine translated to English. The documents are searched for keywords and key features in either the native language or translated English. The user can quickly review the document to determine if it has any intelligence content and whether detailed, verbatim human translation is required. The documents and document content are cataloged for potential future analysis. The system allows non-linguists to evaluate foreign language documents and allows for the quick analysis of a large quantity of documents. All document processing can be performed manually or automatically on a single document or a batch of documents.

An integrated information retrieval and document management system

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Coles, L. Stephen; Alvarez, J. Fernando; Chen, James; Chen, William; Cheung, Lai-Mei; Clancy, Susan; Wong, Alexis

1993-01-01

This paper describes the requirements and prototype development for an intelligent document management and information retrieval system that will be capable of handling millions of pages of text or other data. Technologies for scanning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), magneto-optical storage, and multiplatform retrieval using a Standard Query Language (SQL) will be discussed. The semantic ambiguity inherent in the English language is somewhat compensated-for through the use of coefficients or weighting factors for partial synonyms. Such coefficients are used both for defining structured query trees for routine queries and for establishing long-term interest profiles that can be used on a regular basis to alert individual users to the presence of relevant documents that may have just arrived from an external source, such as a news wire service. Although this attempt at evidential reasoning is limited in comparison with the latest developments in AI Expert Systems technology, it has the advantage of being commercially available.

Recognition of handwritten similar Chinese characters by self-growing probabilistic decision-based neural network.

PubMed

Fu, H C; Xu, Y Y; Chang, H Y

1999-12-01

Recognition of similar (confusion) characters is a difficult problem in optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we introduce a neural network solution that is capable of modeling minor differences among similar characters, and is robust to various personal handwriting styles. The Self-growing Probabilistic Decision-based Neural Network (SPDNN) is a probabilistic type neural network, which adopts a hierarchical network structure with nonlinear basis functions and a competitive credit-assignment scheme. Based on the SPDNN model, we have constructed a three-stage recognition system. First, a coarse classifier determines a character to be input to one of the pre-defined subclasses partitioned from a large character set, such as Chinese mixed with alphanumerics. Then a character recognizer determines the input image which best matches the reference character in the subclass. Lastly, the third module is a similar character recognizer, which can further enhance the recognition accuracy among similar or confusing characters. The prototype system has demonstrated a successful application of SPDNN to similar handwritten Chinese recognition for the public database CCL/HCCR1 (5401 characters x200 samples). Regarding performance, experiments on the CCL/HCCR1 database produced 90.12% recognition accuracy with no rejection, and 94.11% accuracy with 6.7% rejection, respectively. This recognition accuracy represents about 4% improvement on the previously announced performance. As to processing speed, processing before recognition (including image preprocessing, segmentation, and feature extraction) requires about one second for an A4 size character image, and recognition consumes approximately 0.27 second per character on a Pentium-100 based personal computer, without use of any hardware accelerator or co-processor.

A contour-based shape descriptor for biomedical image classification and retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

You, Daekeun; Antani, Sameer; Demner-Fushman, Dina; Thoma, George R.

2013-12-01

Contours, object blobs, and specific feature points are utilized to represent object shapes and extract shape descriptors that can then be used for object detection or image classification. In this research we develop a shape descriptor for biomedical image type (or, modality) classification. We adapt a feature extraction method used in optical character recognition (OCR) for character shape representation, and apply various image preprocessing methods to successfully adapt the method to our application. The proposed shape descriptor is applied to radiology images (e.g., MRI, CT, ultrasound, X-ray, etc.) to assess its usefulness for modality classification. In our experiment we compare our method with other visual descriptors such as CEDD, CLD, Tamura, and PHOG that extract color, texture, or shape information from images. The proposed method achieved the highest classification accuracy of 74.1% among all other individual descriptors in the test, and when combined with CSD (color structure descriptor) showed better performance (78.9%) than using the shape descriptor alone.

Evaluation of image deblurring methods via a classification metric

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Perrone, Daniele; Humphreys, David; Lamb, Robert A.; Favaro, Paolo

2012-09-01

The performance of single image deblurring algorithms is typically evaluated via a certain discrepancy measure between the reconstructed image and the ideal sharp image. The choice of metric, however, has been a source of debate and has also led to alternative metrics based on human visual perception. While fixed metrics may fail to capture some small but visible artifacts, perception-based metrics may favor reconstructions with artifacts that are visually pleasant. To overcome these limitations, we propose to assess the quality of reconstructed images via a task-driven metric. In this paper we consider object classification as the task and therefore use the rate of classification as the metric to measure deblurring performance. In our evaluation we use data with different types of blur in two cases: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), where the goal is to recognise characters in a black and white image, and object classification with no restrictions on pose, illumination and orientation. Finally, we show how off-the-shelf classification algorithms benefit from working with deblurred images.

Texture for script identification.

PubMed

Busch, Andrew; Boles, Wageeh W; Sridharan, Sridha

2005-11-01

The problem of determining the script and language of a document image has a number of important applications in the field of document analysis, such as indexing and sorting of large collections of such images, or as a precursor to optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we investigate the use of texture as a tool for determining the script of a document image, based on the observation that text has a distinct visual texture. An experimental evaluation of a number of commonly used texture features is conducted on a newly created script database, providing a qualitative measure of which features are most appropriate for this task. Strategies for improving classification results in situations with limited training data and multiple font types are also proposed.

Slant rectification in Russian passport OCR system using fast Hough transform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Limonova, Elena; Bezmaternykh, Pavel; Nikolaev, Dmitry; Arlazarov, Vladimir

2017-03-01

In this paper, we introduce slant detection method based on Fast Hough Transform calculation and demonstrate its application in industrial system for Russian passports recognition. About 1.5% of this kind of documents appear to be slant or italic. This fact reduces recognition rate, because Optical Recognition Systems are normally designed to process normal fonts. Our method uses Fast Hough Transform to analyse vertical strokes of characters extracted with the help of x-derivative of a text line image. To improve the quality of detector we also introduce field grouping rules. The resulting algorithm allowed to reach high detection quality. Almost all errors of considered approach happen on passports of nonstandard fonts, while slant detector works in appropriate way.

System for measuring oxygen consumption rates of mammalian cells in static culture under hypoxic conditions.

PubMed

Kagawa, Yuki; Miyahara, Hirotaka; Ota, Yuri; Tsuneda, Satoshi

2016-01-01

Estimating the oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) of mammalian cells in hypoxic environments is essential for designing and developing a three-dimensional (3-D) cell culture system. However, OCR measurements under hypoxic conditions are infrequently reported in the literature. Here, we developed a system for measuring OCRs at low oxygen levels. The system injects nitrogen gas into the environment and measures the oxygen concentration by an optical oxygen microsensor that consumes no oxygen. The developed system was applied to HepG2 cells in static culture. Specifically, we measured the spatial profiles of the local dissolved oxygen concentration in the medium, then estimated the OCRs of the cells. The OCRs, and also the pericellular oxygen concentrations, decreased nonlinearly as the oxygen partial pressure in the environment decreased from 19% to 1%. The OCRs also depended on the culture period and the matrix used for coating the dish surface. Using this system, we can precisely estimate the OCRs of various cell types under environments that mimic 3-D culture conditions, contributing crucial data for an efficient 3-D culture system design. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

A guide for digitising manuscript climate data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Brönnimann, S.; Annis, J.; Dann, W.; Ewen, T.; Grant, A. N.; Griesser, T.; Krähenmann, S.; Mohr, C.; Scherer, M.; Vogler, C.

2006-05-01

Hand-written or printed manuscript data are an important source for paleo-climatological studies, but bringing them into a suitable format can be a time consuming adventure with uncertain success. Before starting the digitising work, it is worthwhile spending a few thoughts on the characteristics of the data, the scientific requirements with respect to quality and coverage, and on the different digitising techniques. Here we briefly discuss the most important considerations and report our own experience. We describe different methods for digitising numeric or text data, i.e., optical character recognition (OCR), speech recognition, and key entry. Each technique has its advantages and disadvantages that may become important for certain applications. It is therefore crucial to thoroughly investigate beforehand the characteristics of the manuscript data, define the quality targets and develop validation strategies.

TreeRipper web application: towards a fully automated optical tree recognition software.

PubMed

Hughes, Joseph

2011-05-20

Relationships between species, genes and genomes have been printed as trees for over a century. Whilst this may have been the best format for exchanging and sharing phylogenetic hypotheses during the 20th century, the worldwide web now provides faster and automated ways of transferring and sharing phylogenetic knowledge. However, novel software is needed to defrost these published phylogenies for the 21st century. TreeRipper is a simple website for the fully-automated recognition of multifurcating phylogenetic trees (http://linnaeus.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~jhughes/treeripper/). The program accepts a range of input image formats (PNG, JPG/JPEG or GIF). The underlying command line c++ program follows a number of cleaning steps to detect lines, remove node labels, patch-up broken lines and corners and detect line edges. The edge contour is then determined to detect the branch length, tip label positions and the topology of the tree. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to convert the tip labels into text with the freely available tesseract-ocr software. 32% of images meeting the prerequisites for TreeRipper were successfully recognised, the largest tree had 115 leaves. Despite the diversity of ways phylogenies have been illustrated making the design of a fully automated tree recognition software difficult, TreeRipper is a step towards automating the digitization of past phylogenies. We also provide a dataset of 100 tree images and associated tree files for training and/or benchmarking future software. TreeRipper is an open source project licensed under the GNU General Public Licence v3.

Page Recognition: Quantum Leap In Recognition Technology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Miller, Larry

1989-07-01

No milestone has proven as elusive as the always-approaching "year of the LAN," but the "year of the scanner" might claim the silver medal. Desktop scanners have been around almost as long as personal computers. And everyone thinks they are used for obvious desktop-publishing and business tasks like scanning business documents, magazine articles and other pages, and translating those words into files your computer understands. But, until now, the reality fell far short of the promise. Because it's true that scanners deliver an accurate image of the page to your computer, but the software to recognize this text has been woefully disappointing. Old optical-character recognition (OCR) software recognized such a limited range of pages as to be virtually useless to real users. (For example, one OCR vendor specified 12-point Courier font from an IBM Selectric typewriter: the same font in 10-point, or from a Diablo printer, was unrecognizable!) Computer dealers have told me the chasm between OCR expectations and reality is so broad and deep that nine out of ten prospects leave their stores in disgust when they learn the limitations. And this is a very important, very unfortunate gap. Because the promise of recognition -- what people want it to do -- carries with it tremendous improvements in our productivity and ability to get tons of written documents into our computers where we can do real work with it. The good news is that a revolutionary new development effort has led to the new technology of "page recognition," which actually does deliver the promise we've always wanted from OCR. I'm sure every reader appreciates the breakthrough represented by the laser printer and page-makeup software, a combination so powerful it created new reasons for buying a computer. A similar breakthrough is happening right now in page recognition: the Macintosh (and, I must admit, other personal computers) equipped with a moderately priced scanner and OmniPage software (from Caere Corporation) can recognize not only different fonts (omnifont recogniton) but different page (omnipage) formats, as well.

A new pre-classification method based on associative matching method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Katsuyama, Yutaka; Minagawa, Akihiro; Hotta, Yoshinobu; Omachi, Shinichiro; Kato, Nei

2010-01-01

Reducing the time complexity of character matching is critical to the development of efficient Japanese Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. To shorten processing time, recognition is usually split into separate preclassification and recognition stages. For high overall recognition performance, the pre-classification stage must both have very high classification accuracy and return only a small number of putative character categories for further processing. Furthermore, for any practical system, the speed of the pre-classification stage is also critical. The associative matching (AM) method has often been used for fast pre-classification, because its use of a hash table and reliance solely on logical bit operations to select categories makes it highly efficient. However, redundant certain level of redundancy exists in the hash table because it is constructed using only the minimum and maximum values of the data on each axis and therefore does not take account of the distribution of the data. We propose a modified associative matching method that satisfies the performance criteria described above but in a fraction of the time by modifying the hash table to reflect the underlying distribution of training characters. Furthermore, we show that our approach outperforms pre-classification by clustering, ANN and conventional AM in terms of classification accuracy, discriminative power and speed. Compared to conventional associative matching, the proposed approach results in a 47% reduction in total processing time across an evaluation test set comprising 116,528 Japanese character images.

Rectification of curved document images based on single view three-dimensional reconstruction.

PubMed

Kang, Lai; Wei, Yingmei; Jiang, Jie; Bai, Liang; Lao, Songyang

2016-10-01

Since distortions in camera-captured document images significantly affect the accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR), distortion removal plays a critical role for document digitalization systems using a camera for image capturing. This paper proposes a novel framework that performs three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction and rectification of camera-captured document images. While most existing methods rely on additional calibrated hardware or multiple images to recover the 3D shape of a document page, or make a simple but not always valid assumption on the corresponding 3D shape, our framework is more flexible and practical since it only requires a single input image and is able to handle a general locally smooth document surface. The main contributions of this paper include a new iterative refinement scheme for baseline fitting from connected components of text line, an efficient discrete vertical text direction estimation algorithm based on convex hull projection profile analysis, and a 2D distortion grid construction method based on text direction function estimation using 3D regularization. In order to examine the performance of our proposed method, both qualitative and quantitative evaluation and comparison with several recent methods are conducted in our experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms relevant approaches for camera-captured document image rectification, in terms of improvements on both visual distortion removal and OCR accuracy.

A unified approach for development of Urdu Corpus for OCR and demographic purpose

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Choudhary, Prakash; Nain, Neeta; Ahmed, Mushtaq

2015-02-01

This paper presents a methodology for the development of an Urdu handwritten text image Corpus and application of Corpus linguistics in the field of OCR and information retrieval from handwritten document. Compared to other language scripts, Urdu script is little bit complicated for data entry. To enter a single character it requires a combination of multiple keys entry. Here, a mixed approach is proposed and demonstrated for building Urdu Corpus for OCR and Demographic data collection. Demographic part of database could be used to train a system to fetch the data automatically, which will be helpful to simplify existing manual data-processing task involved in the field of data collection such as input forms like Passport, Ration Card, Voting Card, AADHAR, Driving licence, Indian Railway Reservation, Census data etc. This would increase the participation of Urdu language community in understanding and taking benefit of the Government schemes. To make availability and applicability of database in a vast area of corpus linguistics, we propose a methodology for data collection, mark-up, digital transcription, and XML metadata information for benchmarking.

Image-based mobile service: automatic text extraction and translation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Berclaz, Jérôme; Bhatti, Nina; Simske, Steven J.; Schettino, John C.

2010-01-01

We present a new mobile service for the translation of text from images taken by consumer-grade cell-phone cameras. Such capability represents a new paradigm for users where a simple image provides the basis for a service. The ubiquity and ease of use of cell-phone cameras enables acquisition and transmission of images anywhere and at any time a user wishes, delivering rapid and accurate translation over the phone's MMS and SMS facilities. Target text is extracted completely automatically, requiring no bounding box delineation or related user intervention. The service uses localization, binarization, text deskewing, and optical character recognition (OCR) in its analysis. Once the text is translated, an SMS message is sent to the user with the result. Further novelties include that no software installation is required on the handset, any service provider or camera phone can be used, and the entire service is implemented on the server side.

ESARR: enhanced situational awareness via road sign recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Perlin, V. E.; Johnson, D. B.; Rohde, M. M.; Lupa, R. M.; Fiorani, G.; Mohammad, S.

2010-04-01

The enhanced situational awareness via road sign recognition (ESARR) system provides vehicle position estimates in the absence of GPS signal via automated processing of roadway fiducials (primarily directional road signs). Sign images are detected and extracted from vehicle-mounted camera system, and preprocessed and read via a custom optical character recognition (OCR) system specifically designed to cope with low quality input imagery. Vehicle motion and 3D scene geometry estimation enables efficient and robust sign detection with low false alarm rates. Multi-level text processing coupled with GIS database validation enables effective interpretation even of extremely low resolution low contrast sign images. In this paper, ESARR development progress will be reported on, including the design and architecture, image processing framework, localization methodologies, and results to date. Highlights of the real-time vehicle-based directional road-sign detection and interpretation system will be described along with the challenges and progress in overcoming them.

An Interactive Procedure to Preserve the Desired Edges during the Image Processing of Noise Reduction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hsu, Chih-Yu; Huang, Hsuan-Yu; Lee, Lin-Tsang

2010-12-01

The paper propose a new procedure including four stages in order to preserve the desired edges during the image processing of noise reduction. A denoised image can be obtained from a noisy image at the first stage of the procedure. At the second stage, an edge map can be obtained by the Canny edge detector to find the edges of the object contours. Manual modification of an edge map at the third stage is optional to capture all the desired edges of the object contours. At the final stage, a new method called Edge Preserved Inhomogeneous Diffusion Equation (EPIDE) is used to smooth the noisy images or the previously denoised image at the first stage for achieving the edge preservation. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) results in the experiments show that the proposed procedure has the best recognition result because of the capability of edge preservation.

Page segmentation using script identification vectors: A first look

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Hochberg, J.; Cannon, M.; Kelly, P.

1997-07-01

Document images in which different scripts, such as Chinese and Roman, appear on a single page pose a problem for optical character recognition (OCR) systems. This paper explores the use of script identification vectors in the analysis of multilingual document images. A script identification vector is calculated for each connected component in a document. The vector expresses the closest distance between the component and templates developed for each of thirteen scripts, including Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Roman. The authors calculate the first three principal components within the resulting thirteen-dimensional space for each image. By mapping these components to red, green,more » and blue, they can visualize the information contained in the script identification vectors. The visualization of several multilingual images suggests that the script identification vectors can be used to segment images into script-specific regions as large as several paragraphs or as small as a few characters. The visualized vectors also reveal distinctions within scripts, such as font in Roman documents, and kanji vs. kana in Japanese. Results are best for documents containing highly dissimilar scripts such as Roman and Japanese. Documents containing similar scripts, such as Roman and Cyrillic will require further investigation.« less

Multioriented and curved text lines extraction from Indian documents.

PubMed

Pal, U; Roy, Partha Pratim

2004-08-01

There are printed artistic documents where text lines of a single page may not be parallel to each other. These text lines may have different orientations or the text lines may be curved shapes. For the optical character recognition (OCR) of these documents, we need to extract such lines properly. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, mainly based on the concept of water reservoir analogy, to extract individual text lines from printed Indian documents containing multioriented and/or curve text lines. A reservoir is a metaphor to illustrate the cavity region of a character where water can be stored. In the proposed scheme, at first, connected components are labeled and identified either as isolated or touching. Next, each touching component is classified either straight type (S-type) or curve type (C-type), depending on the reservoir base-area and envelope points of the component. Based on the type (S-type or C-type) of a component two candidate points are computed from each touching component. Finally, candidate regions (neighborhoods of the candidate points) of the candidate points of each component are detected and after analyzing these candidate regions, components are grouped to get individual text lines.

Recognizable or Not: Towards Image Semantic Quality Assessment for Compression

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Dong; Wang, Dandan; Li, Houqiang

2017-12-01

Traditionally, image compression was optimized for the pixel-wise fidelity or the perceptual quality of the compressed images given a bit-rate budget. But recently, compressed images are more and more utilized for automatic semantic analysis tasks such as recognition and retrieval. For these tasks, we argue that the optimization target of compression is no longer perceptual quality, but the utility of the compressed images in the given automatic semantic analysis task. Accordingly, we propose to evaluate the quality of the compressed images neither at pixel level nor at perceptual level, but at semantic level. In this paper, we make preliminary efforts towards image semantic quality assessment (ISQA), focusing on the task of optical character recognition (OCR) from compressed images. We propose a full-reference ISQA measure by comparing the features extracted from text regions of original and compressed images. We then propose to integrate the ISQA measure into an image compression scheme. Experimental results show that our proposed ISQA measure is much better than PSNR and SSIM in evaluating the semantic quality of compressed images; accordingly, adopting our ISQA measure to optimize compression for OCR leads to significant bit-rate saving compared to using PSNR or SSIM. Moreover, we perform subjective test about text recognition from compressed images, and observe that our ISQA measure has high consistency with subjective recognizability. Our work explores new dimensions in image quality assessment, and demonstrates promising direction to achieve higher compression ratio for specific semantic analysis tasks.

Composition of a dewarped and enhanced document image from two view images.

PubMed

Koo, Hyung Il; Kim, Jinho; Cho, Nam Ik

2009-07-01

In this paper, we propose an algorithm to compose a geometrically dewarped and visually enhanced image from two document images taken by a digital camera at different angles. Unlike the conventional works that require special equipment or assumptions on the contents of books or complicated image acquisition steps, we estimate the unfolded book or document surface from the corresponding points between two images. For this purpose, the surface and camera matrices are estimated using structure reconstruction, 3-D projection analysis, and random sample consensus-based curve fitting with the cylindrical surface model. Because we do not need any assumption on the contents of books, the proposed method can be applied not only to optical character recognition (OCR), but also to the high-quality digitization of pictures in documents. In addition to the dewarping for a structurally better image, image mosaic is also performed for further improving the visual quality. By finding better parts of images (with less out of focus blur and/or without specular reflections) from either of views, we compose a better image by stitching and blending them. These processes are formulated as energy minimization problems that can be solved using a graph cut method. Experiments on many kinds of book or document images show that the proposed algorithm robustly works and yields visually pleasing results. Also, the OCR rate of the resulting image is comparable to that of document images from a flatbed scanner.

Launch Control System Software Development System Automation Testing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hwang, Andrew

2017-01-01

The Spaceport Command and Control System (SCCS) is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) launch control system for the Orion capsule and Space Launch System, the next generation manned rocket currently in development. This system requires high quality testing that will measure and test the capabilities of the system. For the past two years, the Exploration and Operations Division at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) has assigned a group including interns and full-time engineers to develop automated tests to save the project time and money. The team worked on automating the testing process for the SCCS GUI that would use streamed simulated data from the testing servers to produce data, plots, statuses, etc. to the GUI. The software used to develop automated tests included an automated testing framework and an automation library. The automated testing framework has a tabular-style syntax, which means the functionality of a line of code must have the appropriate number of tabs for the line to function as intended. The header section contains either paths to custom resources or the names of libraries being used. The automation library contains functionality to automate anything that appears on a desired screen with the use of image recognition software to detect and control GUI components. The data section contains any data values strictly created for the current testing file. The body section holds the tests that are being run. The function section can include any number of functions that may be used by the current testing file or any other file that resources it. The resources and body section are required for all test files; the data and function sections can be left empty if the data values and functions being used are from a resourced library or another file. To help equip the automation team with better tools, the Project Lead of the Automated Testing Team, Jason Kapusta, assigned the task to install and train an optical character recognition (OCR) tool to Brandon Echols, a fellow intern, and I. The purpose of the OCR tool is to analyze an image and find the coordinates of any group of text. Some issues that arose while installing the OCR tool included the absence of certain libraries needed to train the tool and an outdated software version. We eventually resolved the issues and successfully installed the OCR tool. Training the tool required many images and different fonts and sizes, but in the end the tool learned to accurately decipher the text in the images and their coordinates. The OCR tool produced a file that contained significant metadata for each section of text, but only the text and coordinates of the text was required for our purpose. The team made a script to parse the information we wanted from the OCR file to a different file that would be used by automation functions within the automated framework. Since a majority of development and testing for the automated test cases for the GUI in question has been done using live simulated data on the workstations at the Launch Control Center (LCC), a large amount of progress has been made. As of this writing, about 60% of all of automated testing has been implemented. Additionally, the OCR tool will help make our automated tests more robust due to the tool's text recognition being highly scalable to different text fonts and text sizes. Soon we will have the whole test system automated, allowing for more full-time engineers working on development projects.

A neural network based artificial vision system for licence plate recognition.

PubMed

Draghici, S

1997-02-01

This paper presents a neural network based artificial vision system able to analyze the image of a car given by a camera, locate the registration plate and recognize the registration number of the car. The paper describes in detail various practical problems encountered in implementing this particular application and the solutions used to solve them. The main features of the system presented are: controlled stability-plasticity behavior, controlled reliability threshold, both off-line and on-line learning, self assessment of the output reliability and high reliability based on high level multiple feedback. The system has been designed using a modular approach. Sub-modules can be upgraded and/or substituted independently, thus making the system potentially suitable in a large variety of vision applications. The OCR engine was designed as an interchangeable plug-in module. This allows the user to choose an OCR engine which is suited to the particular application and to upgrade it easily in the future. At present, there are several versions of this OCR engine. One of them is based on a fully connected feedforward artificial neural network with sigmoidal activation functions. This network can be trained with various training algorithms such as error backpropagation. An alternative OCR engine is based on the constraint based decomposition (CBD) training architecture. The system has showed the following performances (on average) on real-world data: successful plate location and segmentation about 99%, successful character recognition about 98% and successful recognition of complete registration plates about 80%.

A Stirred Microchamber for Oxygen Consumption Rate Measurements With Pancreatic Islets

PubMed Central

Papas, Klearchos K.; Pisania, Anna; Wu, Haiyan; Weir, Gordon C.; Colton, Clark K.

2010-01-01

Improvements in pancreatic islet transplantation for treatment of diabetes are hindered by the absence of meaningful islet quality assessment methods. Oxygen consumption rate (OCR) has previously been used to assess the quality of organs and primary tissue for transplantation. In this study, we describe and characterize a stirred microchamber for measuring OCR with small quantities of islets. The device has a titanium body with a chamber volume of about 200 µL and is magnetically stirred and water jacketed for temperature control. Oxygen partial pressure (pO2) is measured by fluorescence quenching with a fiber optic probe, and OCR is determined from the linear decrease of pO2 with time. We demonstrate that measurements can be made rapidly and with high precision. Measurements with βTC3 cells and islets show that OCR is directly proportional to the number of viable cells in mixtures of live and dead cells and correlate linearly with membrane integrity measurements made with cells that have been cultured for 24 h under various stressful conditions. PMID:17497731

Does the cost function matter in Bayes decision rule?

PubMed

Schlü ter, Ralf; Nussbaum-Thom, Markus; Ney, Hermann

2012-02-01

In many tasks in pattern recognition, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), optical character recognition (OCR), part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and other string recognition tasks, we are faced with a well-known inconsistency: The Bayes decision rule is usually used to minimize string (symbol sequence) error, whereas, in practice, we want to minimize symbol (word, character, tag, etc.) error. When comparing different recognition systems, we do indeed use symbol error rate as an evaluation measure. The topic of this work is to analyze the relation between string (i.e., 0-1) and symbol error (i.e., metric, integer valued) cost functions in the Bayes decision rule, for which fundamental analytic results are derived. Simple conditions are derived for which the Bayes decision rule with integer-valued metric cost function and with 0-1 cost gives the same decisions or leads to classes with limited cost. The corresponding conditions can be tested with complexity linear in the number of classes. The results obtained do not make any assumption w.r.t. the structure of the underlying distributions or the classification problem. Nevertheless, the general analytic results are analyzed via simulations of string recognition problems with Levenshtein (edit) distance cost function. The results support earlier findings that considerable improvements are to be expected when initial error rates are high.

Image based book cover recognition and retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sukhadan, Kalyani; Vijayarajan, V.; Krishnamoorthi, A.; Bessie Amali, D. Geraldine

2017-11-01

In this we are developing a graphical user interface using MATLAB for the users to check the information related to books in real time. We are taking the photos of the book cover using GUI, then by using MSER algorithm it will automatically detect all the features from the input image, after this it will filter bifurcate non-text features which will be based on morphological difference between text and non-text regions. We implemented a text character alignment algorithm which will improve the accuracy of the original text detection. We will also have a look upon the built in MATLAB OCR recognition algorithm and an open source OCR which is commonly used to perform better detection results, post detection algorithm is implemented and natural language processing to perform word correction and false detection inhibition. Finally, the detection result will be linked to internet to perform online matching. More than 86% accuracy can be obtained by this algorithm.

Historical files from Federal government mineral exploration-assistance programs, 1950 to 1974

USGS Publications Warehouse

Frank, David G.

2010-01-01

Congress enacted the Defense Production Act in 1950 to provide funding and support for the exploration and development of critical mineral resources. From 1950 to 1974, three Department of the Interior agencies carried out this mission. Contracts with mine owners provided financial assistance for mineral exploration on a joint-participation basis. These contracts are documented in more than 5,000 'dockets' now archived online by the U.S. Geological Survey. This archive provides access to unique and difficult to recreate information, such as drill logs, assay results, and underground geologic maps, that is invaluable to land and resource management organizations and the minerals industry. An effort to preserve the data began in 2009, and the entire collection of dockets was electronically scanned. The scanning process used optical character recognition (OCR) when possible, and files were converted into Portable Document Format (.pdf) files, which require Adobe Reader or similar software for viewing. In 2010, the scans were placed online (http://minerals.usgs.gov/dockets/) and are available to download free of charge.

Correcting geometric and photometric distortion of document images on a smartphone

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Simon, Christian; Williem; Park, In Kyu

2015-01-01

A set of document image processing algorithms for improving the optical character recognition (OCR) capability of smartphone applications is presented. The scope of the problem covers the geometric and photometric distortion correction of document images. The proposed framework was developed to satisfy industrial requirements. It is implemented on an off-the-shelf smartphone with limited resources in terms of speed and memory. Geometric distortions, i.e., skew and perspective distortion, are corrected by sending horizontal and vertical vanishing points toward infinity in a downsampled image. Photometric distortion includes image degradation from moiré pattern noise and specular highlights. Moiré pattern noise is removed using low-pass filters with different sizes independently applied to the background and text region. The contrast of the text in a specular highlighted area is enhanced by locally enlarging the intensity difference between the background and text while the noise is suppressed. Intensive experiments indicate that the proposed methods show a consistent and robust performance on a smartphone with a runtime of less than 1 s.

Electronic patient registration and tracking at mass vaccination clinics: a clinical study.

PubMed

Billittier, Anthony J; Lupiani, Patrick; Masterson, Gary; Masterson, Tim; Zak, Christopher

2003-01-01

To protect the citizens of the United States from the use of dangerous biological agents, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been actively preparing to deal with the consequences of such an attack. Their plans include the deployment of mass immunization clinics to handle postevent vaccinations. As part of the planning efforts by the Western New York Public Health Alliance, a Web-based electronic patient registration and tracking system was developed and tested at a recent trial smallpox vaccination clinic. Initial goals were to determine what the pitfalls and benefits of using such a system might be in comparison to other methods of data collection. This exercise proved that use of an electronic system capable of scanning two-dimensional bar codes was superior to both paper-based and optical character recognition (OCR) methods of data collection and management. Major improvements in speed and/or accuracy were evident in all areas of the clinic, especially in patient registration, vaccine tracking and postclinic data analysis.

The Precise and Efficient Identification of Medical Order Forms Using Shape Trees

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Henker, Uwe; Petersohn, Uwe; Ultsch, Alfred

A powerful and flexible technique to identify, classify and process documents using images from a scanning process is presented. The types of documents can be described to the system as a set of differentiating features in a case base using shape trees. The features are filtered and abstracted from an extremely reduced scanner image of the document. Classification rules are stored with the cases to enable precise recognition and further mark reading and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. The method is implemented in a system which actually processes the majority of requests for medical lab procedures in Germany. A large practical experiment with data from practitioners was performed. An average of 97% of the forms were correctly identified; none were identified incorrectly. This meets the quality requirements for most medical applications. The modular description of the recognition process allows for a flexible adaptation of future changes to the form and content of the document’s structures.

A New Pivoting and Iterative Text Detection Algorithm for Biomedical Images

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Xu, Songhua; Krauthammer, Prof. Michael

2010-01-01

There is interest to expand the reach of literature mining to include the analysis of biomedical images, which often contain a paper's key findings. Examples include recent studies that use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract image text, which is used to boost biomedical image retrieval and classification. Such studies rely on the robust identification of text elements in biomedical images, which is a non-trivial task. In this work, we introduce a new text detection algorithm for biomedical images based on iterative projection histograms. We study the effectiveness of our algorithm by evaluating the performance on a set of manuallymore » labeled random biomedical images, and compare the performance against other state-of-the-art text detection algorithms. We demonstrate that our projection histogram-based text detection approach is well suited for text detection in biomedical images, and that the iterative application of the algorithm boosts performance to an F score of .60. We provide a C++ implementation of our algorithm freely available for academic use.« less

Precision Information Environment (PIE) for International Safeguards: Pre-Demonstration Development Use Cases

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Gastelum, Zoe N.; Henry, Michael J.

2013-11-13

In FY2013, the PIE International Safeguards team demonstrated our development progress to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) staff from the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security (NA-24, our client) and the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development (NA-22). Following the demonstration, the team was asked by our client to complete additional development prior to a planned demonstration at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), scheduled tentatively for January or spring of 2014. The team discussed four potential areas for development (in priority order), and will develop them as time and funding permit prior to an IAEA demonstration. Themore » four capability areas are: 1. Addition of equipment manuals to PIE-accessible files 2. Optical character recognition (OCR) of photographed text 3. Barcode reader with information look-up from a database 4. Add Facilities to Data Model 5. Geospatial capabilities with information integration Each area will be described below in a use case.« less

Ocean surface partitioning strategies using ocean colour remote Sensing: A review

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Krug, Lilian Anne; Platt, Trevor; Sathyendranath, Shubha; Barbosa, Ana B.

2017-06-01

The ocean surface is organized into regions with distinct properties reflecting the complexity of interactions between environmental forcing and biological responses. The delineation of these functional units, each with unique, homogeneous properties and underlying ecosystem structure and dynamics, can be defined as ocean surface partitioning. The main purposes and applications of ocean partitioning include the evaluation of particular marine environments; generation of more accurate satellite ocean colour products; assimilation of data into biogeochemical and climate models; and establishment of ecosystem-based management practices. This paper reviews the diverse approaches implemented for ocean surface partition into functional units, using ocean colour remote sensing (OCRS) data, including their purposes, criteria, methods and scales. OCRS offers a synoptic, high spatial-temporal resolution, multi-decadal coverage of bio-optical properties, relevant to the applications and value of ocean surface partitioning. In combination with other biotic and/or abiotic data, OCRS-derived data (e.g., chlorophyll-a, optical properties) provide a broad and varied source of information that can be analysed using different delineation methods derived from subjective, expert-based to unsupervised learning approaches (e.g., cluster, fuzzy and empirical orthogonal function analyses). Partition schemes are applied at global to mesoscale spatial coverage, with static (time-invariant) or dynamic (time-varying) representations. A case study, the highly heterogeneous area off SW Iberian Peninsula (NE Atlantic), illustrates how the selection of spatial coverage and temporal representation affects the discrimination of distinct environmental drivers of phytoplankton variability. Advances in operational oceanography and in the subject area of satellite ocean colour, including development of new sensors, algorithms and products, are among the potential benefits from extended use, scope and applications of ocean surface partitioning using OCRS.

Multi-font printed Mongolian document recognition system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Liangrui; Liu, Changsong; Ding, Xiaoqing; Wang, Hua; Jin, Jianming

2009-01-01

Mongolian is one of the major ethnic languages in China. Large amount of Mongolian printed documents need to be digitized in digital library and various applications. Traditional Mongolian script has unique writing style and multi-font-type variations, which bring challenges to Mongolian OCR research. As traditional Mongolian script has some characteristics, for example, one character may be part of another character, we define the character set for recognition according to the segmented components, and the components are combined into characters by rule-based post-processing module. For character recognition, a method based on visual directional feature and multi-level classifiers is presented. For character segmentation, a scheme is used to find the segmentation point by analyzing the properties of projection and connected components. As Mongolian has different font-types which are categorized into two major groups, the parameter of segmentation is adjusted for each group. A font-type classification method for the two font-type group is introduced. For recognition of Mongolian text mixed with Chinese and English, language identification and relevant character recognition kernels are integrated. Experiments show that the presented methods are effective. The text recognition rate is 96.9% on the test samples from practical documents with multi-font-types and mixed scripts.

Fast approach for toner saving

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Safonov, Ilia V.; Kurilin, Ilya V.; Rychagov, Michael N.; Lee, Hokeun; Kim, Sangho; Choi, Donchul

2011-01-01

Reducing toner consumption is an important task in modern printing devices and has a significant positive ecological impact. Existing toner saving approaches have two main drawbacks: appearance of hardcopy in toner saving mode is worse in comparison with normal mode; processing of whole rendered page bitmap requires significant computational costs. We propose to add small holes of various shapes and sizes to random places inside a character bitmap stored in font cache. Such random perforation scheme is based on processing pipeline in RIP of standard printer languages Postscript and PCL. Processing of text characters only, and moreover, processing of each character for given font and size alone, is an extremely fast procedure. The approach does not deteriorate halftoned bitmap and business graphics and provide toner saving for typical office documents up to 15-20%. Rate of toner saving is adjustable. Alteration of resulted characters' appearance is almost indistinguishable in comparison with solid black text due to random placement of small holes inside the character regions. The suggested method automatically skips small fonts to preserve its quality. Readability of text processed by proposed method is fine. OCR programs process that scanned hardcopy successfully too.

Toward a Computer Vision-based Wayfinding Aid for Blind Persons to Access Unfamiliar Indoor Environments.

PubMed

Tian, Yingli; Yang, Xiaodong; Yi, Chucai; Arditi, Aries

2013-04-01

Independent travel is a well known challenge for blind and visually impaired persons. In this paper, we propose a proof-of-concept computer vision-based wayfinding aid for blind people to independently access unfamiliar indoor environments. In order to find different rooms (e.g. an office, a lab, or a bathroom) and other building amenities (e.g. an exit or an elevator), we incorporate object detection with text recognition. First we develop a robust and efficient algorithm to detect doors, elevators, and cabinets based on their general geometric shape, by combining edges and corners. The algorithm is general enough to handle large intra-class variations of objects with different appearances among different indoor environments, as well as small inter-class differences between different objects such as doors and door-like cabinets. Next, in order to distinguish intra-class objects (e.g. an office door from a bathroom door), we extract and recognize text information associated with the detected objects. For text recognition, we first extract text regions from signs with multiple colors and possibly complex backgrounds, and then apply character localization and topological analysis to filter out background interference. The extracted text is recognized using off-the-shelf optical character recognition (OCR) software products. The object type, orientation, location, and text information are presented to the blind traveler as speech.

Arabic handwritten: pre-processing and segmentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maliki, Makki; Jassim, Sabah; Al-Jawad, Naseer; Sellahewa, Harin

2012-06-01

This paper is concerned with pre-processing and segmentation tasks that influence the performance of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems and handwritten/printed text recognition. In Arabic, these tasks are adversely effected by the fact that many words are made up of sub-words, with many sub-words there associated one or more diacritics that are not connected to the sub-word's body; there could be multiple instances of sub-words overlap. To overcome these problems we investigate and develop segmentation techniques that first segment a document into sub-words, link the diacritics with their sub-words, and removes possible overlapping between words and sub-words. We shall also investigate two approaches for pre-processing tasks to estimate sub-words baseline, and to determine parameters that yield appropriate slope correction, slant removal. We shall investigate the use of linear regression on sub-words pixels to determine their central x and y coordinates, as well as their high density part. We also develop a new incremental rotation procedure to be performed on sub-words that determines the best rotation angle needed to realign baselines. We shall demonstrate the benefits of these proposals by conducting extensive experiments on publicly available databases and in-house created databases. These algorithms help improve character segmentation accuracy by transforming handwritten Arabic text into a form that could benefit from analysis of printed text.

Toward a Computer Vision-based Wayfinding Aid for Blind Persons to Access Unfamiliar Indoor Environments

PubMed Central

Tian, YingLi; Yang, Xiaodong; Yi, Chucai; Arditi, Aries

2012-01-01

Independent travel is a well known challenge for blind and visually impaired persons. In this paper, we propose a proof-of-concept computer vision-based wayfinding aid for blind people to independently access unfamiliar indoor environments. In order to find different rooms (e.g. an office, a lab, or a bathroom) and other building amenities (e.g. an exit or an elevator), we incorporate object detection with text recognition. First we develop a robust and efficient algorithm to detect doors, elevators, and cabinets based on their general geometric shape, by combining edges and corners. The algorithm is general enough to handle large intra-class variations of objects with different appearances among different indoor environments, as well as small inter-class differences between different objects such as doors and door-like cabinets. Next, in order to distinguish intra-class objects (e.g. an office door from a bathroom door), we extract and recognize text information associated with the detected objects. For text recognition, we first extract text regions from signs with multiple colors and possibly complex backgrounds, and then apply character localization and topological analysis to filter out background interference. The extracted text is recognized using off-the-shelf optical character recognition (OCR) software products. The object type, orientation, location, and text information are presented to the blind traveler as speech. PMID:23630409

Machine-printed Arabic OCR

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hassibi, Khosrow M.

1994-02-01

This paper presents a brief overview of our research in the development of an OCR system for recognition of machine-printed texts in languages that use the Arabic alphabet. The cursive nature of machine-printed Arabic makes the segmentation of words into letters a challenging problem. In our approach, through a novel preliminary segmentation technique, a word is broken into pieces where each piece may not represent a valid letter in general. Neural networks trained on a training sample set of about 500 Arabic text images are used for recognition of these pieces. The rules governing the alphabet and character-level contextual information are used for recombining these pieces into valid letters. Higher-level contextual analysis schemes including the use of an Arabic lexicon and n-grams is also under development and are expected to improve the word recognition accuracy. The segmentation, recognition, and contextual analysis processes are closely integrated using a feedback scheme. The details of preparation of the training set and some recent results on training of the networks will be presented.

DRR is a teenager

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nagy, George

2008-01-01

The fifteenth anniversary of the first SPIE symposium (titled Character Recognition Technologies) on Document Recognition and Retrieval provides an opportunity to examine DRR's contributions to the development of document technologies. Many of the tools taken for granted today, including workable general purpose OCR, large-scale, semi-automatic forms processing, inter-format table conversion, and text mining, followed research presented at this venue. This occasion also affords an opportunity to offer tribute to the conference organizers and proceedings editors and to the coterie of professionals who regularly participate in DRR.

Prediction of Marginal Mass Required for Successful Islet Transplantation

PubMed Central

Papas, Klearchos K.; Colton, Clark K.; Qipo, Andi; Wu, Haiyan; Nelson, Rebecca A.; Hering, Bernhard J.; Weir, Gordon C.; Koulmanda, Maria

2013-01-01

Islet quality assessment methods for predicting diabetes reversal (DR) following transplantation are needed. We investigated two islet parameters, oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and OCR per DNA content, to predict transplantation outcome and explored the impact of islet quality on marginal islet mass for DR. Outcomes in immunosuppressed diabetic mice were evaluated by transplanting mixtures of healthy and purposely damaged rat islets for systematic variation of OCR/DNA over a wide range. The probability of DR increased with increasing transplanted OCR and OCR/DNA. On coordinates of OCR versus OCR/DNA, data fell into regions in which DR occurred in all, some, or none of the animals with a sharp threshold of around 150-nmol/min mg DNA. A model incorporating both parameters predicted transplantation outcome with sensitivity and specificity of 93% and 94%, respectively. Marginal mass was not constant, depended on OCR/DNA, and increased from 2,800 to over 100,000 islet equivalents/kg body weight as OCR/DNA decreased. We conclude that measurements of OCR and OCR/DNA are useful for predicting transplantation outcome in this model system, and OCR/DNA can be used to estimate the marginal mass required for reversing diabetes. Because human clinical islet preparations in a previous study had OCR/DNA values in the range of 100–150-nmol/min mg DNA, our findings suggest that substantial improvement in transplantation outcome may accompany increasedOCR/DNAin clinical islet preparations. PMID:20233002

A new pivoting and iterative text detection algorithm for biomedical images.

PubMed

Xu, Songhua; Krauthammer, Michael

2010-12-01

There is interest to expand the reach of literature mining to include the analysis of biomedical images, which often contain a paper's key findings. Examples include recent studies that use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract image text, which is used to boost biomedical image retrieval and classification. Such studies rely on the robust identification of text elements in biomedical images, which is a non-trivial task. In this work, we introduce a new text detection algorithm for biomedical images based on iterative projection histograms. We study the effectiveness of our algorithm by evaluating the performance on a set of manually labeled random biomedical images, and compare the performance against other state-of-the-art text detection algorithms. We demonstrate that our projection histogram-based text detection approach is well suited for text detection in biomedical images, and that the iterative application of the algorithm boosts performance to an F score of .60. We provide a C++ implementation of our algorithm freely available for academic use. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Solar Rotation in the 1930s from the Sunspot and Flocculi Catalogs of the Ebro Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

de Paula, V.; Curto, J. J.; Casas, R.

2016-10-01

The tables of sunspot and flocculi heliographic positions included in the catalogs published by the Ebro Observatory in the 1930s have recently been recovered and converted into digital format by using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. We here analyzed these data by computing the angular velocity of several sunspot and flocculi groups. A difference was found in the rotational velocity for sunspots and flocculi groups at high latitudes, and we also detected an asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, which is especially marked for the flocculi groups. The results were then fitted with a differential-rotation law [ω=a+b sin2 B] to compare the data obtained with the results published by other authors. A dependence on the latitude that is consistent with former studies was found. Finally, we studied the possible relationship between the sunspot/flocculi group areas and their corresponding angular velocity. There are strong indications that the rotational velocity of a sunspot/flocculi group is reduced (in relation to the differential rotation law) when its maximum area is larger.

The Profiles in Science Digital Library: Behind the Scenes.

PubMed

Gallagher, Marie E; Moffatt, Christie

2012-01-01

This demonstration shows the Profiles in Science ® digital library. Profiles in Science contains digitized selections from the personal manuscript collections of prominent biomedical researchers, medical practitioners, and those fostering science and health. The Profiles in Science Web site is the delivery mechanism for content derived from the digital library system. The system is designed according to our basic principles for digital library development [1]. The digital library includes the rules and software used for digitizing items, creating and editing database records and performing quality control as well as serving the digital content to the public. Among the types of data managed by the digital library are detailed item-level, collection-level and cross-collection metadata, digitized photographs, papers, audio clips, movies, born-digital electronic files, optical character recognized (OCR) text, and annotations (see Figure 1). The digital library also tracks the status of each item, including digitization quality, sensitivity of content, and copyright. Only items satisfying all required criteria are released to the public through the World Wide Web. External factors have influenced all aspects of the digital library's infrastructure.

Restoring 2D content from distorted documents.

PubMed

Brown, Michael S; Sun, Mingxuan; Yang, Ruigang; Yun, Lin; Seales, W Brent

2007-11-01

This paper presents a framework to restore the 2D content printed on documents in the presence of geometric distortion and non-uniform illumination. Compared with textbased document imaging approaches that correct distortion to a level necessary to obtain sufficiently readable text or to facilitate optical character recognition (OCR), our work targets nontextual documents where the original printed content is desired. To achieve this goal, our framework acquires a 3D scan of the document's surface together with a high-resolution image. Conformal mapping is used to rectify geometric distortion by mapping the 3D surface back to a plane while minimizing angular distortion. This conformal "deskewing" assumes no parametric model of the document's surface and is suitable for arbitrary distortions. Illumination correction is performed by using the 3D shape to distinguish content gradient edges from illumination gradient edges in the high-resolution image. Integration is performed using only the content edges to obtain a reflectance image with significantly less illumination artifacts. This approach makes no assumptions about light sources and their positions. The results from the geometric and photometric correction are combined to produce the final output.

Recognition and defect detection of dot-matrix text via variation-model based learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ohyama, Wataru; Suzuki, Koushi; Wakabayashi, Tetsushi

2017-03-01

An algorithm for recognition and defect detection of dot-matrix text printed on products is proposed. Extraction and recognition of dot-matrix text contains several difficulties, which are not involved in standard camera-based OCR, that the appearance of dot-matrix characters is corrupted and broken by illumination, complex texture in the background and other standard characters printed on product packages. We propose a dot-matrix text extraction and recognition method which does not require any user interaction. The method employs detected location of corner points and classification score. The result of evaluation experiment using 250 images shows that recall and precision of extraction are 78.60% and 76.03%, respectively. Recognition accuracy of correctly extracted characters is 94.43%. Detecting printing defect of dot-matrix text is also important in the production scene to avoid illegal productions. We also propose a detection method for printing defect of dot-matrix characters. The method constructs a feature vector of which elements are classification scores of each character class and employs support vector machine to classify four types of printing defect. The detection accuracy of the proposed method is 96.68 %.

Font group identification using reconstructed fonts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cutter, Michael P.; van Beusekom, Joost; Shafait, Faisal; Breuel, Thomas M.

2011-01-01

Ideally, digital versions of scanned documents should be represented in a format that is searchable, compressed, highly readable, and faithful to the original. These goals can theoretically be achieved through OCR and font recognition, re-typesetting the document text with original fonts. However, OCR and font recognition remain hard problems, and many historical documents use fonts that are not available in digital forms. It is desirable to be able to reconstruct fonts with vector glyphs that approximate the shapes of the letters that form a font. In this work, we address the grouping of tokens in a token-compressed document into candidate fonts. This permits us to incorporate font information into token-compressed images even when the original fonts are unknown or unavailable in digital format. This paper extends previous work in font reconstruction by proposing and evaluating an algorithm to assign a font to every character within a document. This is a necessary step to represent a scanned document image with a reconstructed font. Through our evaluation method, we have measured a 98.4% accuracy for the assignment of letters to candidate fonts in multi-font documents.

Mobile-based text recognition from water quality devices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dhakal, Shanti; Rahnemoonfar, Maryam

2015-03-01

Measuring water quality of bays, estuaries, and gulfs is a complicated and time-consuming process. YSI Sonde is an instrument used to measure water quality parameters such as pH, temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. This instrument is taken to water bodies in a boat trip and researchers note down different parameters displayed by the instrument's display monitor. In this project, a mobile application is developed for Android platform that allows a user to take a picture of the YSI Sonde monitor, extract text from the image and store it in a file on the phone. The image captured by the application is first processed to remove perspective distortion. Probabilistic Hough line transform is used to identify lines in the image and the corner of the image is then obtained by determining the intersection of the detected horizontal and vertical lines. The image is warped using the perspective transformation matrix, obtained from the corner points of the source image and the destination image, hence, removing the perspective distortion. Mathematical morphology operation, black-hat is used to correct the shading of the image. The image is binarized using Otsu's binarization technique and is then passed to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for character recognition. The extracted information is stored in a file on the phone and can be retrieved later for analysis. The algorithm was tested on 60 different images of YSI Sonde with different perspective features and shading. Experimental results, in comparison to ground-truth results, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Optimal frame-by-frame result combination strategy for OCR in video stream

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bulatov, Konstantin; Lynchenko, Aleksander; Krivtsov, Valeriy

2018-04-01

This paper describes the problem of combining classification results of multiple observations of one object. This task can be regarded as a particular case of a decision-making using a combination of experts votes with calculated weights. The accuracy of various methods of combining the classification results depending on different models of input data is investigated on the example of frame-by-frame character recognition in a video stream. Experimentally it is shown that the strategy of choosing a single most competent expert in case of input data without irrelevant observations has an advantage (in this case irrelevant means with character localization and segmentation errors). At the same time this work demonstrates the advantage of combining several most competent experts according to multiplication rule or voting if irrelevant samples are present in the input data.

Islet Oxygen Consumption Rate (OCR) Dose Predicts Insulin Independence in Clinical Islet Autotransplantation.

PubMed

Papas, Klearchos K; Bellin, Melena D; Sutherland, David E R; Suszynski, Thomas M; Kitzmann, Jennifer P; Avgoustiniatos, Efstathios S; Gruessner, Angelika C; Mueller, Kathryn R; Beilman, Gregory J; Balamurugan, Appakalai N; Loganathan, Gopalakrishnan; Colton, Clark K; Koulmanda, Maria; Weir, Gordon C; Wilhelm, Josh J; Qian, Dajun; Niland, Joyce C; Hering, Bernhard J

2015-01-01

Reliable in vitro islet quality assessment assays that can be performed routinely, prospectively, and are able to predict clinical transplant outcomes are needed. In this paper we present data on the utility of an assay based on cellular oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in predicting clinical islet autotransplant (IAT) insulin independence (II). IAT is an attractive model for evaluating characterization assays regarding their utility in predicting II due to an absence of confounding factors such as immune rejection and immunosuppressant toxicity. Membrane integrity staining (FDA/PI), OCR normalized to DNA (OCR/DNA), islet equivalent (IE) and OCR (viable IE) normalized to recipient body weight (IE dose and OCR dose), and OCR/DNA normalized to islet size index (ISI) were used to characterize autoislet preparations (n = 35). Correlation between pre-IAT islet product characteristics and II was determined using receiver operating characteristic analysis. Preparations that resulted in II had significantly higher OCR dose and IE dose (p<0.001). These islet characterization methods were highly correlated with II at 6-12 months post-IAT (area-under-the-curve (AUC) = 0.94 for IE dose and 0.96 for OCR dose). FDA/PI (AUC = 0.49) and OCR/DNA (AUC = 0.58) did not correlate with II. OCR/DNA/ISI may have some utility in predicting outcome (AUC = 0.72). Commonly used assays to determine whether a clinical islet preparation is of high quality prior to transplantation are greatly lacking in sensitivity and specificity. While IE dose is highly predictive, it does not take into account islet cell quality. OCR dose, which takes into consideration both islet cell quality and quantity, may enable a more accurate and prospective evaluation of clinical islet preparations.

Ocular Counter Rolling in Astronauts After Short- and Long-Duration Spaceflight.

PubMed

Reschke, Millard F; Wood, Scott J; Clément, Gilles

2018-05-17

Ocular counter-rolling (OCR) is a reflex generated by the activation of the gravity sensors in the inner ear that stabilizes gaze and posture during head tilt. We compared the OCR measures that were obtained in 6 astronauts before, during, and after a spaceflight lasting 4-6 days with the OCR measures obtained from 6 astronauts before and after a spaceflight lasting 4-9 months. OCR in the short-duration fliers was measured using the afterimage method during head tilt at 15°, 30°, and 45°. OCR in the long-duration fliers was measured using video-oculography during whole body tilt at 25°. A control group of 7 subjects was used to compare OCR measures during head tilt and whole body tilt. No OCR occurred during head tilt in microgravity, and the response returned to normal within 2 hours of return from short-duration spaceflight. However, the amplitude of OCR was reduced for several days after return from long-duration spaceflight. This decrease in amplitude was not accompanied by changes in the asymmetry of OCR between right and left head tilt. These results indicate that the adaptation  of otolith-driven reflexes to microgravity is a long-duration process.

Efficient automatic OCR word validation using word partial format derivation and language model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Siyuan; Misra, Dharitri; Thoma, George R.

2010-01-01

In this paper we present an OCR validation module, implemented for the System for Preservation of Electronic Resources (SPER) developed at the U.S. National Library of Medicine.1 The module detects and corrects suspicious words in the OCR output of scanned textual documents through a procedure of deriving partial formats for each suspicious word, retrieving candidate words by partial-match search from lexicons, and comparing the joint probabilities of N-gram and OCR edit transformation corresponding to the candidates. The partial format derivation, based on OCR error analysis, efficiently and accurately generates candidate words from lexicons represented by ternary search trees. In our test case comprising a historic medico-legal document collection, this OCR validation module yielded the correct words with 87% accuracy and reduced the overall OCR word errors by around 60%.

Binarization algorithm for document image with complex background

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Miao, Shaojun; Lu, Tongwei; Min, Feng

2015-12-01

The most important step in image preprocessing for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is binarization. Due to the complex background or varying light in the text image, binarization is a very difficult problem. This paper presents the improved binarization algorithm. The algorithm can be divided into several steps. First, the background approximation can be obtained by the polynomial fitting, and the text is sharpened by using bilateral filter. Second, the image contrast compensation is done to reduce the impact of light and improve contrast of the original image. Third, the first derivative of the pixels in the compensated image are calculated to get the average value of the threshold, then the edge detection is obtained. Fourth, the stroke width of the text is estimated through a measuring of distance between edge pixels. The final stroke width is determined by choosing the most frequent distance in the histogram. Fifth, according to the value of the final stroke width, the window size is calculated, then a local threshold estimation approach can begin to binaries the image. Finally, the small noise is removed based on the morphological operators. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can effectively remove the noise caused by complex background and varying light.

A New Pivoting and Iterative Text Detection Algorithm for Biomedical Images

PubMed Central

Xu, Songhua; Krauthammer, Michael

2010-01-01

There is interest to expand the reach of literature mining to include the analysis of biomedical images, which often contain a paper’s key findings. Examples include recent studies that use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract image text, which is used to boost biomedical image retrieval and classification. Such studies rely on the robust identification of text elements in biomedical images, which is a non-trivial task. In this work, we introduce a new text detection algorithm for biomedical images based on iterative projection histograms. We study the effectiveness of our algorithm by evaluating the performance on a set of manually labeled random biomedical images, and compare the performance against other state-of-the-art text detection algorithms. In this paper, we demonstrate that a projection histogram-based text detection approach is well suited for text detection in biomedical images, with a performance of F score of .60. The approach performs better than comparable approaches for text detection. Further, we show that the iterative application of the algorithm is boosting overall detection performance. A C++ implementation of our algorithm is freely available through email request for academic use. PMID:20887803

Parallel processing considerations for image recognition tasks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Simske, Steven J.

2011-01-01

Many image recognition tasks are well-suited to parallel processing. The most obvious example is that many imaging tasks require the analysis of multiple images. From this standpoint, then, parallel processing need be no more complicated than assigning individual images to individual processors. However, there are three less trivial categories of parallel processing that will be considered in this paper: parallel processing (1) by task; (2) by image region; and (3) by meta-algorithm. Parallel processing by task allows the assignment of multiple workflows-as diverse as optical character recognition [OCR], document classification and barcode reading-to parallel pipelines. This can substantially decrease time to completion for the document tasks. For this approach, each parallel pipeline is generally performing a different task. Parallel processing by image region allows a larger imaging task to be sub-divided into a set of parallel pipelines, each performing the same task but on a different data set. This type of image analysis is readily addressed by a map-reduce approach. Examples include document skew detection and multiple face detection and tracking. Finally, parallel processing by meta-algorithm allows different algorithms to be deployed on the same image simultaneously. This approach may result in improved accuracy.

Indexed Captioned Searchable Videos: A Learning Companion for STEM Coursework

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tuna, Tayfun; Subhlok, Jaspal; Barker, Lecia; Shah, Shishir; Johnson, Olin; Hovey, Christopher

2017-02-01

Videos of classroom lectures have proven to be a popular and versatile learning resource. A key shortcoming of the lecture video format is accessing the content of interest hidden in a video. This work meets this challenge with an advanced video framework featuring topical indexing, search, and captioning (ICS videos). Standard optical character recognition (OCR) technology was enhanced with image transformations for extraction of text from video frames to support indexing and search. The images and text on video frames is analyzed to divide lecture videos into topical segments. The ICS video player integrates indexing, search, and captioning in video playback providing instant access to the content of interest. This video framework has been used by more than 70 courses in a variety of STEM disciplines and assessed by more than 4000 students. Results presented from the surveys demonstrate the value of the videos as a learning resource and the role played by videos in a students learning process. Survey results also establish the value of indexing and search features in a video platform for education. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of ICS videos framework and over 5 years of usage experience in several STEM courses.

RESEARCH ON ROBUST METHODS FOR EXTRACTING AND RECOGNIZING PHOTOGRAPHY MANAGEMENT ITEMS FROM VARIOUS IMAGE DATA Of CONSTRUCTION

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kitagawa, Etsuji; Tanaka, Shigenori; Abiko, Satoshi; Wakabayashi, Katsuma; Jiang, Wenyuan

Recently, an electronic delivery for various documents is carried out by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in construction fields. One of them is image data of construction photography that must be delivered with information of photography management items such as construction name or type of works, etc. However, there is a problem that a lot of cost is needed to treat contents of these items from characters printed and handwritten on blackboard into these image data. In this research, we develop the system which can treat contents of these items by extracting contents of these items from the image data of construction photography taken in various scenes with preprocessing the image, recognizing characters with OCR and correcting error with natural language process. And we confirm the effectiveness of the system, by experimenting in each function of system and in entire system.

Mitochondrial oxygen consumption in permeabilized fibers and its link to colour changes in bovine M. semimembranosus muscle.

PubMed

Phung, V T; Khatri, M; Liland, K H; Slinde, E; Sørheim, O; Almøy, T; Saarem, K; Egelandsdal, B

2013-01-01

Animal and muscle characteristics were recorded for 41 cattle. The oxygen consumption rate (OCR) of M. semimembranosus was measured between 3.0-6.4h post mortem (PM3-6) and after 3 weeks in a vacuum pack at 4°C. Colour change measurements were performed following the 3 weeks using reflectance spectra (400-1,100 nm) and the colour coordinates L, a and b, with the samples being packaged in oxygen permeable film and stored at 4°C for 167 h. Significant individual animal differences in OCR at PM3-6 were found for mitochondrial complexes I and II. OCR of complex I declined with increased temperature and time PM, while residual oxygen-consuming side-reactions (ROX) did not. OCR of stored muscles was dominated by complex II respiration. A three-way regression between samples, colour variables collected upon air exposure and OCR of 3 weeks old fibres revealed a positive relationship between OCR and complex II activity and also between OCR and OCR(ROX). The presence of complex I and β-oxidation activities increased metmyoglobin formation. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Real-Time Detection and Reading of LED/LCD Displays for Visually Impaired Persons

PubMed Central

Tekin, Ender; Coughlan, James M.; Shen, Huiying

2011-01-01

Modern household appliances, such as microwave ovens and DVD players, increasingly require users to read an LED or LCD display to operate them, posing a severe obstacle for persons with blindness or visual impairment. While OCR-enabled devices are emerging to address the related problem of reading text in printed documents, they are not designed to tackle the challenge of finding and reading characters in appliance displays. Any system for reading these characters must address the challenge of first locating the characters among substantial amounts of background clutter; moreover, poor contrast and the abundance of specular highlights on the display surface – which degrade the image in an unpredictable way as the camera is moved – motivate the need for a system that processes images at a few frames per second, rather than forcing the user to take several photos, each of which can take seconds to acquire and process, until one is readable. We describe a novel system that acquires video, detects and reads LED/LCD characters in real time, reading them aloud to the user with synthesized speech. The system has been implemented on both a desktop and a cell phone. Experimental results are reported on videos of display images, demonstrating the feasibility of the system. PMID:21804957

Characterization of Adipose Tissue Product Quality Using Measurements of Oxygen Consumption Rate.

PubMed

Suszynski, Thomas M; Sieber, David A; Mueller, Kathryn; Van Beek, Allen L; Cunningham, Bruce L; Kenkel, Jeffrey M

2018-03-14

Fat grafting is a common procedure in plastic surgery but associated with unpredictable graft retention. Adipose tissue (AT) "product" quality is affected by the methods used for harvest, processing and transfer, which vary widely amongst surgeons. Currently, there is no method available to accurately assess the quality of AT. In this study, we present a novel method for the assessment of AT product quality through direct measurements of oxygen consumption rate (OCR). OCR has exhibited potential in predicting outcomes following pancreatic islet transplant. Our study aim was to reapportion existing technology for its use with AT preparations and to confirm that these measurements are feasible. OCR was successfully measured for en bloc and postprocessed AT using a stirred microchamber system. OCR was then normalized to DNA content (OCR/DNA), which represents the AT product quality. Mean (±SE) OCR/DNA values for fresh en bloc and post-processed AT were 149.8 (± 9.1) and 61.1 (± 6.1) nmol/min/mg DNA, respectively. These preliminary data suggest that: (1) OCR and OCR/DNA measurements of AT harvested using conventional protocol are feasible; and (2) standard AT processing results in a decrease in overall AT product quality. OCR measurements of AT using existing technology can be done and enables accurate, real-time, quantitative assessment of the quality of AT product prior to transfer. The availability and further validation of this type of assay could enable optimization of fat grafting protocol by providing a tool for the more detailed study of procedural variables that affect AT product quality.

The video ocular counter-roll (vOCR): a clinical test to detect loss of otolith-ocular function

PubMed Central

Otero-Millan, Jorge; Treviño, Carolina; Winnick, Ariel; Zee, David S.; Carey, John P.; Kheradmand, Amir

2017-01-01

Conclusion vOCR can detect loss of otolith-ocular function without specifying the side of vestibular loss. Since vOCR is measured with a simple head tilt maneuver, it can be potentially used as a bedside clinical test in combination with video head impulse test. Objective Video-oculography (VOG) goggles are being integrated into the bedside assessment of patients with vestibular disorders. Lacking, however, is a method to evaluate otolith function. This study validated a VOG test for loss of otolith function. Methods VOG was used to measure ocular counter-roll (vOCR) in 12 healthy controls, 14 patients with unilateral vestibular loss (UVL), and six patients with bilateral vestibular loss (BVL) with a static lateral head tilt of 30°. The results were compared with vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMP), a widely-used laboratory test of otolith function. Results The average vOCR for healthy controls (4.6°) was significantly different from UVL (2.7°) and BVL (1.6°) patients (p < 0.0001). The vOCR and VEMP measurements were correlated across subjects, especially the click and tap oVEMPs (click oVEMP R = 0.45, tap oVEMP R = 0.51; p < 0.0003). The receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis showed that vOCR and VEMPs detected loss of otolith function equally well. The best threshold for vOCR to detect vestibular loss was at 3°. The vOCR values from the side of vestibular loss and the healthy side were not different in UVL patients (2.53° vs 2.8°; p = 0.59). PMID:28084887

Increasing the efficiency of digitization workflows for herbarium specimens.

PubMed

Tulig, Melissa; Tarnowsky, Nicole; Bevans, Michael; Anthony Kirchgessner; Thiers, Barbara M

2012-01-01

The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium has been databasing and imaging its estimated 7.3 million plant specimens for the past 17 years. Due to the size of the collection, we have been selectively digitizing fundable subsets of specimens, making successive passes through the herbarium with each new grant. With this strategy, the average rate for databasing complete records has been 10 specimens per hour. With 1.3 million specimens databased, this effort has taken about 130,000 hours of staff time. At this rate, to complete the herbarium and digitize the remaining 6 million specimens, another 600,000 hours would be needed. Given the current biodiversity and economic crises, there is neither the time nor money to complete the collection at this rate.Through a combination of grants over the last few years, The New York Botanical Garden has been testing new protocols and tactics for increasing the rate of digitization through combinations of data collaboration, field book digitization, partial data entry and imaging, and optical character recognition (OCR) of specimen images. With the launch of the National Science Foundation's new Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, we hope to move forward with larger, more efficient digitization projects, capturing data from larger portions of the herbarium at a fraction of the cost and time.

Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens using a modular and scalable approach.

PubMed

Haston, Elspeth; Cubey, Robert; Pullan, Martin; Atkins, Hannah; Harris, David J

2012-01-01

Digitisation programmes in many institutes frequently involve disparate and irregular funding, diverse selection criteria and scope, with different members of staff managing and operating the processes. These factors have influenced the decision at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to develop an integrated workflow for the digitisation of herbarium specimens which is modular and scalable to enable a single overall workflow to be used for all digitisation projects. This integrated workflow is comprised of three principal elements: a specimen workflow, a data workflow and an image workflow.The specimen workflow is strongly linked to curatorial processes which will impact on the prioritisation, selection and preparation of the specimens. The importance of including a conservation element within the digitisation workflow is highlighted. The data workflow includes the concept of three main categories of collection data: label data, curatorial data and supplementary data. It is shown that each category of data has its own properties which influence the timing of data capture within the workflow. Development of software has been carried out for the rapid capture of curatorial data, and optical character recognition (OCR) software is being used to increase the efficiency of capturing label data and supplementary data. The large number and size of the images has necessitated the inclusion of automated systems within the image workflow.

Selecting a restoration technique to minimize OCR error.

PubMed

Cannon, M; Fugate, M; Hush, D R; Scovel, C

2003-01-01

This paper introduces a learning problem related to the task of converting printed documents to ASCII text files. The goal of the learning procedure is to produce a function that maps documents to restoration techniques in such a way that on average the restored documents have minimum optical character recognition error. We derive a general form for the optimal function and use it to motivate the development of a nonparametric method based on nearest neighbors. We also develop a direct method of solution based on empirical error minimization for which we prove a finite sample bound on estimation error that is independent of distribution. We show that this empirical error minimization problem is an extension of the empirical optimization problem for traditional M-class classification with general loss function and prove computational hardness for this problem. We then derive a simple iterative algorithm called generalized multiclass ratchet (GMR) and prove that it produces an optimal function asymptotically (with probability 1). To obtain the GMR algorithm we introduce a new data map that extends Kesler's construction for the multiclass problem and then apply an algorithm called Ratchet to this mapped data, where Ratchet is a modification of the Pocket algorithm . Finally, we apply these methods to a collection of documents and report on the experimental results.

Increasing the efficiency of digitization workflows for herbarium specimens

PubMed Central

Tulig, Melissa; Tarnowsky, Nicole; Bevans, Michael; Anthony Kirchgessner; Thiers,  Barbara M.

2012-01-01

Abstract The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium has been databasing and imaging its estimated 7.3 million plant specimens for the past 17 years. Due to the size of the collection, we have been selectively digitizing fundable subsets of specimens, making successive passes through the herbarium with each new grant. With this strategy, the average rate for databasing complete records has been 10 specimens per hour. With 1.3 million specimens databased, this effort has taken about 130,000 hours of staff time. At this rate, to complete the herbarium and digitize the remaining 6 million specimens, another 600,000 hours would be needed. Given the current biodiversity and economic crises, there is neither the time nor money to complete the collection at this rate. Through a combination of grants over the last few years, The New York Botanical Garden has been testing new protocols and tactics for increasing the rate of digitization through combinations of data collaboration, field book digitization, partial data entry and imaging, and optical character recognition (OCR) of specimen images. With the launch of the National Science Foundation’s new Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, we hope to move forward with larger, more efficient digitization projects, capturing data from larger portions of the herbarium at a fraction of the cost and time. PMID:22859882

Looking at 3,000,000 References Without Growing Grey Hair

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Demleitner, M.; Accomazzi, A.; Eichhorn, G.; Grant, C. S.; Kurtz, M. J.; Murray, S. S.

1999-12-01

The article service of the Astrophysics Data System (ADS, http://adswww.harvard.edu) currently holds about 500,000 pages scanned from astronomical journals and conference proceedings. This data set not only facilitates an easy and convenient access to the majority of the astronomical literature from anywhere on the Internet but also allows highly automatized extraction of the information contained in the articles. As first steps towards processing and indexing the full texts of the articles, the ADS has been extracting abstracts and references from the bitmap images of the articles since May 1999. In this poster we describe the procedures and strategies to (a) automatically identify the regions within a paper containing the abstract or the references, (b) spot and correct errors in the data base or the identification of the regions, (c) resolve references obtained by optical character recognition (OCR) with its inherent uncertainties to parsed references (i.e., bibcodes) and (d) incorporate the data collected in this way into the ADS abstract service. We also give an overview of the extent of additional bibliographical material from this source. We estimate that by January 2000, these procedures will have yielded about 14,000 abstracts and 1,000,000 citation pairs (out of a total of 3,000,000 references) not previously present in the ADS.

CCD imaging technology and the war on crime

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McNeill, Glenn E.

1992-08-01

Linear array based CCD technology has been successfully used in the development of an Automatic Currency Reader/Comparator (ACR/C) system. The ACR/C system is designed to provide a method for tracking US currency in the organized crime and drug trafficking environments where large amounts of cash are involved in illegal transactions and money laundering activities. United States currency notes can be uniquely identified by the combination of the denomination serial number and series year. The ACR/C system processes notes at five notes per second using a custom transport a stationary linear array and optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to make such identifications. In this way large sums of money can be " marked" (using the system to read and store their identifiers) and then circulated within various crime networks. The system can later be used to read and compare confiscated notes to the known sets of identifiers from the " marked" set to document a trail of criminal activities. With the ACR/C law enforcement agencies can efficiently identify currency without actually marking it. This provides an undetectable means for making each note individually traceable and facilitates record keeping for providing evidence in a court of law. In addition when multiple systems are used in conjunction with a central data base the system can be used to track currency geographically. 1.

Line Segmentation in Handwritten Assamese and Meetei Mayek Script Using Seam Carving Based Algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kumar, Chandan Jyoti; Kalita, Sanjib Kr.

Line segmentation is a key stage in an Optical Character Recognition system. This paper primarily concerns the problem of text line extraction on color and grayscale manuscript pages of two major North-east Indian regional Scripts, Assamese and Meetei Mayek. Line segmentation of handwritten text in Assamese and Meetei Mayek scripts is an uphill task primarily because of the structural features of both the scripts and varied writing styles. Line segmentation of a document image is been achieved by using the Seam carving technique, in this paper. Researchers from various regions used this approach for content aware resizing of an image. However currently many researchers are implementing Seam Carving for line segmentation phase of OCR. Although it is a language independent technique, mostly experiments are done over Arabic, Greek, German and Chinese scripts. Two types of seams are generated, medial seams approximate the orientation of each text line, and separating seams separated one line of text from another. Experiments are performed extensively over various types of documents and detailed analysis of the evaluations reflects that the algorithm performs well for even documents with multiple scripts. In this paper, we present a comparative study of accuracy of this method over different types of data.

Ocular Counter-Rolling During Centrifugation and Static Tilt

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Cohen, Bernard; Clement, Gilles; Moore, Steven; Curthoys, Ian; Dai, Mingjia; Koizuka, Izumi; Kubo, Takeshi; Raphan, Theodore

2003-01-01

Activation of the gravity sensors in the inner ear-the otoliths-generates reflexes that act to maintain posture and gaze. Ocular counter-rolling (OCR) is an example of such a reflex. When the head is tilted to the side, the eyes rotate around the line of sight in the opposite direction (i.e., counter-rolling). While turning comers, undergoing centrifugation, or making side-to-side tilting head movements, the OCR reflex orients the eyes towards the sum of the accelerations from body movements and gravity. Deconditioning of otolith-mediated reflexes following adaptation to microgravity has been proposed as the basis of many of the postural, locomotor, and gaze control problems experienced by returning astronauts. Evidence suggests that OCR is reduced postflight in about 75% of astronauts tested; but the data are sparse, primarily due to difficulties in recording rotational eye movements. During the Neurolab mission, a short-arm human centrifuge was flown that generated sustained sideways accelerations of 0.5-G and one-G to the head and upper body. This produces OCR; and so for the first time, the responses to sustained centrifugation could be studied without the influence of Earth's gravity on the results. This allowed us to determine the relative importance of sideways and vertical acceleration in the generation of OCR. This also provided the first test of the effects of exposure to artificial gravity in space on postflight otolith-ocular reflexes. There was little difference between the responses to centrifugation in microgravity and on Earth. In both conditions, the induced OCR was roughly proportional to the applied acceleration, with the OCR magnitude during 0.5-G centrifugation approximately 60% of that generated during one-G centrifugation. The overall mean OCR from the four payload crewmembers in response to one-G of sideways acceleration was 5.7 plus or minus 1.1 degree (mean and SD) on Earth. Inflight one-G centrifugation generated 5.7 plus or minus 1.1 degree of OCR, which was a small but significant decrease in OCR magnitude. The postflight OCR was 5.9 plus or minus 1.4 degree, which was not significantly different from preflight values. During both 0.5-G and one-G centrifugation in microgravity, where the head vertical gravitational component was absent, the OCR magnitude was not significantly different from that produced by an equivalent acceleration during static tilt on Earth. This suggests that the larger OCR magnitude observed during centrifugation on Earth was due to the larger body vertical linear acceleration component, which may have activated either the otoliths or the body tilt receptors. In contrast to previous studies, there was no decrease in OCR gain postflight. Our findings raise the possibility that inflight exposure to artificial gravity, in the form of intermittent one-G and 0.5-G centripetal acceleration, may have been a countermeasure to deconditioning of otolith-based orientation reflexes.

Reactivity of cosmetic UV filters towards skin proteins: model studies with Boc-lysine, Boc-Gly-Phe-Gly-Lys-OH, BSA and gelatin.

PubMed

Stiefel, C; Schwack, W

2014-12-01

Organic UV filters are used as active ingredients in most sunscreens and also in a variety of daily care products. Their good (photo) stability is of special interest to guarantee protective function and to prevent interactions with the human skin. Due to the mostly electrophilic character of the UV filters, reactions with nucleophilic protein moieties like lysine side chains are conceivable. Prior studies showed that the UV filters octocrylene (OCR), butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane (BM-DBM), ethylhexyl salicylate (EHS), ethylhexyl methoxycinnamate (EHMC), benzophenone-3 (BP-3), ethylhexyl triazone (EHT) and dibenzoylmethane (DBM) were able to covalently bind to an HPTLC amino phase and the amino acid models ethanolamine and butylamine after slightly heating and/or radiation. Boc-protected lysine, the tetrapeptide Boc-Gly-Phe-Gly-Lys-OH, bovine serum albumin (BSA) and porcine gelatin were used as more complex models to determine the reactivity of the mentioned UV filters towards skin proteins under thermal or UV irradiation conditions. After gentle heating at 37°C, benzophenone imines were identified as reaction products of BP-3 and OCR with Boc-lysine and the tetrapeptide, whereas DBM and BM-DBM yielded enamines. For EHMC, a Michael-type reaction occurred, which resulted in addition of Boc-lysine or the tetrapeptide to the conjugated double bond. Ester aminolysis of EHS and EHT mainly afforded the corresponding amides. Reactions of the UV filters with BSA changed the UV spectrum of BSA, generally associated with an increase of the absorption strength in the UVA or UVB range. For all protein models, the UV filters showed an increasing reactivity in the order EHT < EHMC < EHS < BP-3 < OCR < DBM < BM-DBM. Especially the UV absorbers BM-DBM, OCR and BP-3, which are seen as common allergens or photoallergens, showed a high reactivity towards the different skin protein models. As the formation of protein adducts is recognized as important key element in the induction of skin sensitization, the results of this study can contribute to a better understanding of the underlying chemical mechanisms of such reactions. © 2014 Society of Cosmetic Scientists and the Société Française de Cosmétologie.

Traleika Glacier X-Stack Extension Final Report

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Fryman, Joshua

The XStack Extension Project continued along the direction of the XStack program in exploring the software tools and frameworks to support a task-based community runtime towards the goal of Exascale programming. The momentum built as part of the XStack project, with the development of the task-based Open Community Runtime (OCR) and related tools, was carried through during the XStack Extension with the focus areas of easing application development, improving performance and supporting more features. The infrastructure set up for a community-driven open-source development continued to be used towards these areas, with continued co-development of runtime and applications. A variety ofmore » OCR programming environments were studied, as described in Sections Revolutionary Programming Environments & Applications – to assist with application development on OCR, and we develop OCR Translator, a ROSE-based source-to-source compiler that parses high-level annotations in an MPI program to generate equivalent OCR code. Figure 2 compares the number of OCR objects needed to generate the 2D stencil workload using the translator, against manual approaches based on SPMD library or native coding. The rate of increase with the translator, with an increase in number of ranks, is consistent with other approaches. This is explored further in Section OCR Translator.« less

Triplet-triplet energy transfer from a UV-A absorber butylmethoxydibenzoylmethane to UV-B absorbers.

PubMed

Kikuchi, Azusa; Oguchi-Fujiyama, Nozomi; Miyazawa, Kazuyuki; Yagi, Mikio

2014-01-01

The phosphorescence decay of a UV-A absorber, 4-tert-butyl-4'-methoxydibenzolymethane (BMDBM) has been observed following a 355 nm laser excitation in the absence and presence of UV-B absorbers, 2-ethylhexyl 4-methoxycinnamate (octyl methoxycinnamate, OMC) and octocrylene (OCR) in ethanol at 77 K. The lifetime of the lowest excited triplet (T1) state of BMDBM is significantly reduced in the presence of OMC and OCR. The observed quenching of BMDBM triplet by OMC and OCR suggests that the intermolecular triplet-triplet energy transfer occurs from BMDBM to OMC and OCR. The T1 state of OCR is nonphosphorescent or very weakly phosphorescent. However, we have shown that the energy level of the T1 state of OCR is lower than that of the enol form of BMDBM. Our methodology of energy-donor phosphorescence decay measurements can be applied to the study of the triplet-triplet energy transfer between UV absorbers even if the energy acceptor is nonphosphorescent. In addition, the delayed fluorescence of BMDBM due to triplet-triplet annihilation was observed in the BMDBM-OMC and BMDBM-OCR mixtures in ethanol at 77 K. Delayed fluorescence is one of the deactivation processes of the excited states of BMDBM under our experimental conditions. © 2013 The American Society of Photobiology.

Effects of head tilt on visual field testing with a head-mounted perimeter imo

PubMed Central

Matsumoto, Chota; Nomoto, Hiroki; Numata, Takuya; Eura, Mariko; Yamashita, Marika; Hashimoto, Shigeki; Okuyama, Sachiko; Kimura, Shinji; Yamanaka, Kenzo; Chiba, Yasutaka; Aihara, Makoto; Shimomura, Yoshikazu

2017-01-01

Purpose A newly developed head-mounted perimeter termed “imo” enables visual field (VF) testing without a fixed head position. Because the positional relationship between the subject’s head and the imo is fixed, the effects of head position changes on the test results are small compared with those obtained using a stationary perimeter. However, only ocular counter-roll (OCR) induced by head tilt might affect VF testing. To quantitatively reveal the effects of head tilt and OCR on the VF test results, we investigated the associations among the head-tilt angle, OCR amplitude and VF testing results. Subjects and methods For 20 healthy subjects, we binocularly recorded static OCR (s-OCR) while tilting the subject’s head at an arbitrary angle ranging from 0° to 60° rightward or leftward in 10° increments. By monitoring iris patterns, we evaluated the s-OCR amplitude. We also performed blind spot detection while tilting the subject’s head by an arbitrary angle ranging from 0° to 50° rightward or leftward in 10° increments to calculate the angle by which the blind spot rotates because of head tilt. Results The association between s-OCR amplitude and head-tilt angle showed a sinusoidal relationship. In blind spot detection, the blind spot rotated to the opposite direction of the head tilt, and the association between the rotation angle of the blind spot and the head-tilt angle also showed a sinusoidal relationship. The rotation angle of the blind spot was strongly correlated with the s-OCR amplitude (R2≥0.94, p<0.0001). A head tilt greater than 20° with imo causes interference between adjacent test areas. Conclusions Both the s-OCR amplitude and the rotation angle of the blind spot were correlated with the head-tilt angle by sinusoidal regression. The rotated VF was correlated with the s-OCR amplitude. During perimetry using imo, the change in the subject’s head tilt should be limited to 20°. PMID:28945777

Human Ocular Counter-Rolling and Roll Tilt Perception during Off-Vertical Axis Rotation after Spaceflight

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Clement, Gilles; Denise, Pierre; Reschke, Millard; Wood, Scott J.

2007-01-01

Ocular counter-rolling (OCR) induced by whole body tilt in roll has been explored after spaceflight as an indicator of the adaptation of the otolith function to microgravity. It has been claimed that the overall pattern of OCR responses during static body tilt after spaceflight is indicative of a decreased role of the otolith function, but the results of these studies have not been consistent, mostly due to large variations in the OCR within and across individuals. By contrast with static head tilt, off-vertical axis rotation (OVAR) presents the advantage of generating a sinusoidal modulation of OCR, allowing averaged measurements over several cycles, thus improving measurement accuracy. Accordingly, OCR and the sense of roll tilt were evaluated in seven astronauts before and after spaceflight during OVAR at 45 /s in darkness at two angles of tilt (10 and 20 ). There was no significant difference in OCR during OVAR immediately after landing compared to preflight. However, the amplitude of the perceived roll tilt during OVAR was significantly larger immediately postflight, and then returned to control values in the following days. Since the OCR response is predominantly attributed to the shearing force exerted on the utricular macula, the absence of change in OCR postflight suggests that the peripheral otolith organs function normally after short-term spaceflight. However, the increased sense of roll tilt indicates an adaptation in the central processing of gravitational input, presumably related to a re-weigthing of the internal representation of gravitational vertical as a result of adaptation to microgravity.

Galactose enhances oxidative metabolism and reveals mitochondrial dysfunction in human primary muscle cells.

PubMed

Aguer, Céline; Gambarotta, Daniela; Mailloux, Ryan J; Moffat, Cynthia; Dent, Robert; McPherson, Ruth; Harper, Mary-Ellen

2011-01-01

Human primary myotubes are highly glycolytic when cultured in high glucose medium rendering it difficult to study mitochondrial dysfunction. Galactose is known to enhance mitochondrial metabolism and could be an excellent model to study mitochondrial dysfunction in human primary myotubes. The aim of the present study was to 1) characterize the effect of differentiating healthy human myoblasts in galactose on oxidative metabolism and 2) determine whether galactose can pinpoint a mitochondrial malfunction in post-diabetic myotubes. Oxygen consumption rate (OCR), lactate levels, mitochondrial content, citrate synthase and cytochrome C oxidase activities, and AMPK phosphorylation were determined in healthy myotubes differentiated in different sources/concentrations of carbohydrates: 25 mM glucose (high glucose (HG)), 5 mM glucose (low glucose (LG)) or 10 mM galactose (GAL). Effect of carbohydrates on OCR was also determined in myotubes derived from post-diabetic patients and matched obese non-diabetic subjects. OCR was significantly increased whereas anaerobic glycolysis was significantly decreased in GAL myotubes compared to LG or HG myotubes. This increased OCR in GAL myotubes occurred in conjunction with increased cytochrome C oxidase activity and expression, as well as increased AMPK phosphorylation. OCR of post-diabetic myotubes was not different than that of obese non-diabetic myotubes when differentiated in LG or HG. However, whereas GAL increased OCR in obese non-diabetic myotubes, it did not affect OCR in post-diabetic myotubes, leading to a significant difference in OCR between groups. The lack of an increase in OCR in post-diabetic myotubes differentiated in GAL was in relation with unaltered cytochrome C oxidase activity levels or AMPK phosphorylation. Our results indicate that differentiating human primary myoblasts in GAL enhances aerobic metabolism. Because this cell culture model elicited an abnormal response in cells from post-diabetic patients, it may be useful in further studies of the molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial dysfunction.

Office for Civil Rights Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 2006

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

US Department of Education, 2007

2007-01-01

In this report, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) provides a summary of its substantive achievements in FY 2006. OCR's mission is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil rights. This report details OCR's accomplishments in enforcing the civil rights laws…

Annual Report to Congress of the Office for Civil Rights. Fiscal Years 2007-08

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, 2009

2009-01-01

This paper is the Office for Civil Rights's (OCR's) "Annual Report to Congress" for fiscal years 2007 and 2008. This report details OCR's accomplishments in enforcing the civil rights laws under which OCR has been granted jurisdiction to address and remedy discrimination. These enforcement efforts include complaint investigation and resolution,…

Annual Report to Congress of the Office for Civil Rights. Fiscal Year 2006

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, 2007

2007-01-01

This paper is the Office for Civil Rights' (OCR's) "Annual Report to Congress" for fiscal year 2006. In this report, OCR provides a summary of its substantive achievements in FY 2006. OCR's mission is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil…

Enforcing Title IX. A Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Commission on Civil Rights, Washington, DC.

This report reassesses for the Department of Education (ED) the enforcement effort of Title IX by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and offers recommendations. OCR is criticized for being very slow to issue important guidelines, process complaints, conduct compliance reviews, and enforce the law. Also OCR is charged with showing little commitment…

The Belousov-Zhabotinskii Reaction: Improving the Oregonator Model with the Arrhenius Equation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pellitero, Miguel Aller; Lamsfus, Carlos Alvarez; Borge, Javier

2013-01-01

Oscillating chemical reactions (OCRs) have been known since 1828, with the Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction the most studied example. Initially, OCRs were considered to be special cases due to the small number detected and because the oscillatory behavior did not seem to agree with the second law of thermodynamics. However, OCRs have become…

Metabolic Profile of Pancreatic Acinar and Islet Tissue in Culture

PubMed Central

Suszynski, Thomas M.; Mueller, Kathryn; Gruessner, Angelika C.; Papas, Klearchos K.

2016-01-01

The amount and condition of exocrine impurities may affect the quality of islet preparations especially during culture. In this study, the objective was to determine the oxygen demandand viability of islet and acinar tissue post-isolation and whether they change disproportionately while in culture. We compare the OCR normalized to DNA (OCR/DNA, a measure of fractional viability in units nmol/min/mg DNA), and percent change in OCR and DNA recoveries between adult porcine islet and acinar tissue from the same preparation (paired) over a 6-9 days of standard culture. Paired comparisons were done to quantify differences in OCR/DNA between islet and acinar tissue from the same preparation, at specified time points during culture; the mean (± standard error) OCR/DNA was 74.0 (±11.7) units higher for acinar (vs. islet) tissue on the day of isolation (n=16, p<0.0001), but 25.7 (±9.4) units lower after 1 day (n=8, p=0.03), 56.6 (±11.5) units lower after 2 days (n=12, p=0.0004), and 65.9 (±28.7) units lower after 8 days (n=4, p=0.2) in culture. DNA and OCR recoveries decreased at different rates for acinar versus islet tissue over 6-9 days in culture (n=6). DNA recovery decreased to 24±7% for acinar and 75±8% for islets (p=0.002). Similarly, OCR recovery decreased to 16±3% for acinar and remained virtually constant for islets (p=0.005). Differences in the metabolic profile of acinarand islet tissue should be considered when culturing impure islet preparations. OCR-based measurements may help optimize pre-IT culture protocols. PMID:25131082

Keeping on Keeping on: OCR and Complaints of Racial Discrimination 50 Years after "Brown"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pollock, Mica

2005-01-01

This article, written by a former civil rights investigator in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), contends that ordinary Americans advocating for equal educational opportunity for students of color might enlist OCR more actively and knowingly to help secure racial equality of opportunity 50 years after "Brown." Now a…

Office for Civil Rights Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 2005

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

US Department of Education, 2006

2006-01-01

In this report, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) provides a summary of its FY 2005 accomplishments. Also, in recognition of the 25th anniversary, some of the significant cases that OCR has resolved over the years are highlighted. The last quarter century was eventful and challenging for OCR. Major U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as "Grove…

Deriving an Abstraction Network to Support Quality Assurance in OCRe

PubMed Central

Ochs, Christopher; Agrawal, Ankur; Perl, Yehoshua; Halper, Michael; Tu, Samson W.; Carini, Simona; Sim, Ida; Noy, Natasha; Musen, Mark; Geller, James

2012-01-01

An abstraction network is an auxiliary network of nodes and links that provides a compact, high-level view of an ontology. Such a view lends support to ontology orientation, comprehension, and quality-assurance efforts. A methodology is presented for deriving a kind of abstraction network, called a partial-area taxonomy, for the Ontology of Clinical Research (OCRe). OCRe was selected as a representative of ontologies implemented using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) based on shared domains. The derivation of the partial-area taxonomy for the Entity hierarchy of OCRe is described. Utilizing the visualization of the content and structure of the hierarchy provided by the taxonomy, the Entity hierarchy is audited, and several errors and inconsistencies in OCRe’s modeling of its domain are exposed. After appropriate corrections are made to OCRe, a new partial-area taxonomy is derived. The generalizability of the paradigm of the derivation methodology to various families of biomedical ontologies is discussed. PMID:23304341

Face recognition by applying wavelet subband representation and kernel associative memory.

PubMed

Zhang, Bai-Ling; Zhang, Haihong; Ge, Shuzhi Sam

2004-01-01

In this paper, we propose an efficient face recognition scheme which has two features: 1) representation of face images by two-dimensional (2-D) wavelet subband coefficients and 2) recognition by a modular, personalised classification method based on kernel associative memory models. Compared to PCA projections and low resolution "thumb-nail" image representations, wavelet subband coefficients can efficiently capture substantial facial features while keeping computational complexity low. As there are usually very limited samples, we constructed an associative memory (AM) model for each person and proposed to improve the performance of AM models by kernel methods. Specifically, we first applied kernel transforms to each possible training pair of faces sample and then mapped the high-dimensional feature space back to input space. Our scheme using modular autoassociative memory for face recognition is inspired by the same motivation as using autoencoders for optical character recognition (OCR), for which the advantages has been proven. By associative memory, all the prototypical faces of one particular person are used to reconstruct themselves and the reconstruction error for a probe face image is used to decide if the probe face is from the corresponding person. We carried out extensive experiments on three standard face recognition datasets, the FERET data, the XM2VTS data, and the ORL data. Detailed comparisons with earlier published results are provided and our proposed scheme offers better recognition accuracy on all of the face datasets.

Developing integrated workflows for the digitisation of herbarium specimens using a modular and scalable approach

PubMed Central

Haston, Elspeth; Cubey, Robert; Pullan, Martin; Atkins, Hannah; Harris, David J

2012-01-01

Abstract Digitisation programmes in many institutes frequently involve disparate and irregular funding, diverse selection criteria and scope, with different members of staff managing and operating the processes. These factors have influenced the decision at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to develop an integrated workflow for the digitisation of herbarium specimens which is modular and scalable to enable a single overall workflow to be used for all digitisation projects. This integrated workflow is comprised of three principal elements: a specimen workflow, a data workflow and an image workflow. The specimen workflow is strongly linked to curatorial processes which will impact on the prioritisation, selection and preparation of the specimens. The importance of including a conservation element within the digitisation workflow is highlighted. The data workflow includes the concept of three main categories of collection data: label data, curatorial data and supplementary data. It is shown that each category of data has its own properties which influence the timing of data capture within the workflow. Development of software has been carried out for the rapid capture of curatorial data, and optical character recognition (OCR) software is being used to increase the efficiency of capturing label data and supplementary data. The large number and size of the images has necessitated the inclusion of automated systems within the image workflow. PMID:22859881

Optical character recognition based on nonredundant correlation measurements.

PubMed

Braunecker, B; Hauck, R; Lohmann, A W

1979-08-15

The essence of character recognition is a comparison between the unknown character and a set of reference patterns. Usually, these reference patterns are all possible characters themselves, the whole alphabet in the case of letter characters. Obviously, N analog measurements are highly redundant, since only K = log(2)N binary decisions are enough to identify one out of N characters. Therefore, we devised K reference patterns accordingly. These patterns, called principal components, are found by digital image processing, but used in an optical analog computer. We will explain the concept of principal components, and we will describe experiments with several optical character recognition systems, based on this concept.

Loss of otolith function with age is associated with increased postural sway measures.

PubMed

Serrador, Jorge M; Lipsitz, Lewis A; Gopalakrishnan, Gosala S; Black, F Owen; Wood, Scott J

2009-11-06

Loss of balance and increased fall risk is a common problem associated with aging. Changes in vestibular function occur with aging but the contribution of reduced vestibular otolith function to fall risk remains unknown. We examined a population of 151 healthy individuals (aged 21-93) for both balance (sway measures) and ocular counter-rolling (OCR) function. We assessed balance function with eyes open and closed on a firm surface, eyes open and closed on a foam surface and OCR during +/-20 degree roll tilt at 0.005 Hz. Subjects demonstrated a significant age-related reduction in OCR and increase in postural sway. The effect of age on OCR was greater in females than males. The reduction in OCR was strongly correlated with the mediolateral measures of sway with eyes closed. This correlation was also present in the elderly group alone, suggesting that aging alone does not account for this effect. OCR decreased linearly with age and at a greater rate in females than males. This loss of vestibular otolith-ocular function is associated with increased mediolateral measures of sway which have been shown to be related to increased risk of falls. These data suggest a role for loss of otolith function in contributing to fall risk in the elderly. Further prospective, longitudinal studies are necessary to confirm these findings.

Aging per se Increases the Susceptibility to Free Fatty Acid–Induced Insulin Resistance

PubMed Central

Huffman, Derek M.; Fishman, Sigal; Jerschow, Elina; Heo, Hye J.; Atzmon, Gil; Schechter, Clyde; Muzumdar, Radhika H.

2010-01-01

Elevations in systemic free fatty acids (FFA) contribute to insulin resistance. To determine the effects of an acute elevation in FFA on insulin action with aging, we infused saline or intralipid (IL) during a hyperinsulinemic–euglycemic clamp in three groups of rats: young ad libitum–fed (YAL), old ad libitum–fed (OAL), and old on lifelong calorie restriction (OCR). The OCR group was included to distinguish between aging per se and age-related changes in body fat distribution. IL induced marked insulin resistance in both YAL and OCR, but the onset of insulin resistance was approximately two to three times more rapid in OCR as compared with YAL. In response to IL infusion, plasminogen-activating inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) expression was increased in subcutaneous fat from OAL animals. In visceral fat, a marked increase in PAI-1 and interleukin-6 expression was observed in OAL and OCR rats, but not YAL, in response to IL treatment. Thus, aging per se increases the inflammatory response to excess nutrients and vulnerability to FFA-induced insulin resistance with aging. PMID:20504893

Image based automatic water meter reader

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jawas, N.; Indrianto

2018-01-01

Water meter is used as a tool to calculate water consumption. This tool works by utilizing water flow and shows the calculation result with mechanical digit counter. Practically, in everyday use, an operator will manually check the digit counter periodically. The Operator makes logs of the number shows by water meter to know the water consumption. This manual operation is time consuming and prone to human error. Therefore, in this paper we propose an automatic water meter digit reader from digital image. The digits sequence is detected by utilizing contour information of the water meter front panel.. Then an OCR method is used to get the each digit character. The digit sequence detection is an important part of overall process. It determines the success of overall system. The result shows promising results especially in sequence detection.

Solvation of Cr 3+ cation in water-acetonitrile mixture studied by IR spectroscopy: molecular penetration into the solvation shells

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jamróz, Dorota; Wójcik, Marek; Lindgren, Jan

2000-09-01

Infrared spectra of mixtures of water and deuteroacetonitrile containing the Cr 3+ cation have been studied as a function of concentration, time and temperature. The CN stretching vibration of CD 3CN molecules has been used as a probe of the structural environments. The CN band in the spectra of the solutions is a superposition of four subbands, which may be attributed to CD 3CN bound in the first, second, and third solvation shells of the cation and to non-bound CD 3CN. The character of changes of the integral intensities of the subbands with time for various H 2O:Cr 3+ molar ratios are explained by suggesting mechanisms of molecular replacement within the solvation shells of Cr 3+.

Con-Text: Text Detection for Fine-grained Object Classification.

PubMed

Karaoglu, Sezer; Tao, Ran; van Gemert, Jan C; Gevers, Theo

2017-05-24

This work focuses on fine-grained object classification using recognized scene text in natural images. While the state-of-the-art relies on visual cues only, this paper is the first work which proposes to combine textual and visual cues. Another novelty is the textual cue extraction. Unlike the state-of-the-art text detection methods, we focus more on the background instead of text regions. Once text regions are detected, they are further processed by two methods to perform text recognition i.e. ABBYY commercial OCR engine and a state-of-the-art character recognition algorithm. Then, to perform textual cue encoding, bi- and trigrams are formed between the recognized characters by considering the proposed spatial pairwise constraints. Finally, extracted visual and textual cues are combined for fine-grained classification. The proposed method is validated on four publicly available datasets: ICDAR03, ICDAR13, Con-Text and Flickr-logo. We improve the state-of-the-art end-to-end character recognition by a large margin of 15% on ICDAR03. We show that textual cues are useful in addition to visual cues for fine-grained classification. We show that textual cues are also useful for logo retrieval. Adding textual cues outperforms visual- and textual-only in fine-grained classification (70.7% to 60.3%) and logo retrieval (57.4% to 54.8%).

Quantification of Oxygen Consumption in Retina Ex Vivo Demonstrates Limited Reserve Capacity of Photoreceptor Mitochondria

PubMed Central

Kooragayala, Keshav; Gotoh, Norimoto; Cogliati, Tiziana; Nellissery, Jacob; Kaden, Talia R.; French, Stephanie; Balaban, Robert; Li, Wei; Covian, Raul; Swaroop, Anand

2015-01-01

Purpose Cell death in neurodegeneration occurs at the convergence of diverse metabolic pathways. In the retina, a common underlying mechanism involves mitochondrial dysfunction since photoreceptor homeostasis and survival are highly susceptible to altered aerobic energy metabolism. We sought to develop an assay to directly measure oxygen consumption in intact retina with the goal of identifying alterations in respiration during photoreceptor dysfunction and degeneration. Methods Circular punches of freshly isolated mouse retina, adjacent to the optic nerve head, were used in the microplate-based Seahorse Extracellular Flux Analyzer to measure oxygen consumption. Tissue integrity was evaluated by propidium iodide staining and live imaging. Different substrates were tested for mitochondrial respiration. Basal and maximal respiration were expressed as oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and respectively measured in Ames' medium before and after the addition of mitochondrial uncoupler, BAM15. Results We show that glucose is an essential substrate for retinal mitochondria. At baseline, mitochondria respiration in the intact wild-type retina was close to maximal, with limited reserve capacity. Similar OCR and limited mitochondrial reserve capacity was also observed in cone-only Nrl−/− retina. However, the retina of Pde6brd1/rd1, Cep290rd16/rd16 and Rpgrip1−/− mice, all with dysfunctional or no photoreceptors, had reduced OCR and higher mitochondrial reserve capacity. Conclusions We have optimized a method to directly measure oxygen consumption in acutely isolated, ex vivo mouse retina and demonstrate that photoreceptors have low mitochondrial reserve capacity. Our data provide a plausible explanation for the high vulnerability of photoreceptors to altered energy homeostasis caused by mutations or metabolic challenges. PMID:26747773

Low-Frequency Otolith Function in Microgravity: A Re-Evaluation of the Otolith Tilt-Translation Reinterpretation (OTTR) Hypothesis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Moore, Steven T.; Cohen, Bernard; Clement, Gilles; Raphan, Theodore

1999-01-01

On Earth, the low-frequency afferent signal from the otoliths encodes head tilt with respect to the gravitational vertical, and the higher frequency components reflect both tilt and linear acceleration of the head. In microgravity, static tilt of the head does not influence otolith output, and the relationship between sensory input from the vestibular organs, and the visual, proprioceptive and somatosensory systems, would be disrupted. Several researchers have proposed that in 0-g this conflict may induce a reinterpretation of all otolith signals by the brain to encode only linear translation (otolith tilt-translation reinterpretation or OTTR). Ocular counter-rolling (OCR) is a low-frequency otolith-mediated reflex, which generates compensatory torsional eye movements (rotation about the visual axis) towards the spatial vertical during static roll tilt with a gain of approximately 10%. Transient linear acceleration and off-axis centrifugation at a constant angular velocity can also generate OCR. According to the OTTR hypothesis, OCR should be reduced in microgravity, and immediately upon return from a 0-g environment. Results to date have been inconclusive. OCR was reduced following the 10 day Spacelab-1 mission in response to leftward roll tilts (28-56% in 3 subjects and unchanged in one subject), and sinusoidal linear oscillations at 0.4 and 0.8 Hz. OCR gain declined 70% in four monkeys following a 14 day COSMOS mission. Following a 30 day MIR mission OCR gain decreased in one astronaut, but increased in two others following a 180 day mission. We have studied the affect of microgravity on low-frequency otolith function as part of a larger study of the interaction of vision and the vestibular system. This experiment (E-047) involved off-axis centrifugation of payload crewmembers and flew aboard the recent Neurolab mission (STS 90). Presented below are preliminary results focusing on perception and the OCR response during both centrifugation and static tilt.

Physicists Get INSPIREd: INSPIRE Project and Grid Applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Klem, Jukka; Iwaszkiewicz, Jan

2011-12-01

INSPIRE is the new high-energy physics scientific information system developed by CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC. INSPIRE combines the curated and trusted contents of SPIRES database with Invenio digital library technology. INSPIRE contains the entire HEP literature with about one million records and in addition to becoming the reference HEP scientific information platform, it aims to provide new kinds of data mining services and metrics to assess the impact of articles and authors. Grid and cloud computing provide new opportunities to offer better services in areas that require large CPU and storage resources including document Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing, full-text indexing of articles and improved metrics. D4Science-II is a European project that develops and operates an e-Infrastructure supporting Virtual Research Environments (VREs). It develops an enabling technology (gCube) which implements a mechanism for facilitating the interoperation of its e-Infrastructure with other autonomously running data e-Infrastructures. As a result, this creates the core of an e-Infrastructure ecosystem. INSPIRE is one of the e-Infrastructures participating in D4Science-II project. In the context of the D4Science-II project, the INSPIRE e-Infrastructure makes available some of its resources and services to other members of the resulting ecosystem. Moreover, it benefits from the ecosystem via a dedicated Virtual Organization giving access to an array of resources ranging from computing and storage resources of grid infrastructures to data and services.

Neuroanatomical term generation and comparison between two terminologies.

PubMed

Srinivas, Prashanti R; Gusfield, Daniel; Mason, Oliver; Gertz, Michael; Hogarth, Michael; Stone, James; Jones, Edward G; Gorin, Fredric A

2003-01-01

An approach and software tools are described for identifying and extracting compound terms (CTs), acronyms and their associated contexts from textual material that is associated with neuroanatomical atlases. A set of simple syntactic rules were appended to the output of a commercially available part of speech (POS) tagger (Qtag v 3.01) that extracts CTs and their associated context from the texts of neuroanatomical atlases. This "hybrid" parser. appears to be highly sensitive and recognized 96% of the potentially germane neuroanatomical CTs and acronyms present in the cat and primate thalamic atlases. A comparison of neuroanatomical CTs and acronymsbetween the cat and primate atlas texts was initially performed using exact-term matching. The implementation of string-matching algorithms significantly improved the identification of relevant terms and acronyms between the two domains. The End Gap Free string matcher identified 98% of CTs and the Needleman Wunsch (NW) string matcher matched 36% of acronyms between the two atlases. Combining several simple grammatical and lexical rules with the POS tagger ("hybrid parser") (1) extracted complex neuroanatomical terms and acronyms from selected cat and primate thalamic atlases and (2) and facilitated the semi-automated generation of a highly granular thalamic terminology. The implementation of string-matching algorithms (1) reconciled terminological errors generated by optical character recognition (OCR) software used to generate the neuroanatomical text information and (2) increased the sensitivity of matching neuroanatomical terms and acronyms between the two neuroanatomical domains that were generated by the "hybrid" parser.

Progress in recognizing typeset mathematics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fateman, Richard J.; Tokuyasu, Taku A.

1996-03-01

Printed mathematics has a number of features which distinguish it from conventional text. These include structure in two dimensions (fractions, exponents, limits), frequent font changes, symbols with variable shape (quotient bars), and substantially differing notational conventions from source to source. When compounded with more generic problems such as noise and merged or broken characters, printed mathematics offers a challenging arena for recognition. Our project was initially driven by the goal of scanning and parsing some 5,000 pages of elaborate mathematics (tables of definite integrals). While our prototype system demonstrates success on translating noise-free typeset equations into Lisp expressions appropriate for further processing, a more semantic top-down approach appears necessary for higher levels of performance. Such an approach may benefit the incorporation of these programs into a more general document processing viewpoint. We intend to release to the public our somewhat refined prototypes as utility programs in the hope that they will be of general use in the construction of custom OCR packages. These utilities are quite fast even as originally prototyped in Lisp, where they may be of particular interest to those working on 'intelligent' optical processing. Some routines have been re-written in C++ as well. Additional programs providing formula recognition and parsing also form a part of this system. It is important however to realize that distinct conflicting grammars are needed to cover variations in contemporary and historical typesetting, and thus a single simple solution is not possible.

Real-time assessment of encapsulated neonatal porcine islets prior to clinical xenotransplantation.

PubMed

Kitzmann, Jennifer P; Law, Lee; Shome, Avik; Muzina, Marija; Elliott, Robert B; Mueller, Kate R; Schuurman, Henk-Jan; Papas, Klearchos K

2012-01-01

Porcine islet transplantation is emerging as an attractive option for the treatment of patients with type 1 diabetes, with the possibility of providing islets of higher and more consistent quality and in larger volumes than available from human pancreata. The use of encapsulated neonatal porcine islets (ENPI) is appealing because it can address islet supply limitations while reducing the need for anti-rejection therapy. Pre-transplant characterization of ENPI viability and potency is an essential component of the production process. We applied the validated assay for oxygen consumption rate normalized for DNA content (OCR/DNA) to characterize ENPI viability. ENPI of low viscosity and high m alginate were prepared according to standard methods and characterized at various culture time points up to 5 weeks. The OCR/DNA (nmol/min·mgDNA ± SEM) of ENPI (235 ± 10, n = 9) was comparable to that of free NPI (255 ± 14, n = 13). After encapsulation, NPI OCR/DNA was sustained over a culture period of up to 5 weeks. The average OCR/DNA of ENPI cultured longer than 9 days was higher than that of freshly encapsulated NPI. This is the first characterization of ENPI by a validated and more sensitive method for product viability. The NPI encapsulation process does not compromise viability as measured by OCR/DNA, and ENPI can be cultured for up to 5 weeks with maintenance of viability. ENPI meet or exceed current adult porcine islet product release criteria (established at the University of Minnesota) for preclinical xenotransplantation in terms of OCR/DNA. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons A/S.

Oxygen consumption rate of early pre-antral follicles from vitrified human ovarian cortical tissue

PubMed Central

ISHIKAWA, Takayuki; KYOYA, Toshihiko; NAKAMURA, Yusuke; SATO, Eimei; TOMIYAMA, Tatsuhiro; KYONO, Koichi

2014-01-01

The study of human ovarian tissue transplantation and cryopreservation has advanced significantly. Autotransplantation of human pre-antral follicles isolated from cryopreserved cortical tissue is a promising option for the preservation of fertility in young cancer patients. The purpose of the present study was to reveal the effect of vitrification after low-temperature transportation of human pre-antral follicles by using the oxygen consumption rate (OCR). Cortical tissues from 9 ovaries of female-to-male transsexuals were vitrified after transportation (6 or 18 h). The follicles were enzymatically isolated from nonvitrified tissue (group I, 18 h of transportation), vitrified-warmed tissue (group II, 6 and 18 h of transportation) and vitrified-warmed tissue that had been incubated for 24 h (group III, 6 and 18 h of transportation). OCR measurement and the LIVE/DEAD viability assay were performed. Despite the ischemic condition, the isolated pre-antral follicles in group I consumed oxygen, and the mean OCRs increased with developmental stage. Neither the transportation time nor patient age seemed to affect the OCR in this group. Meanwhile, the mean OCR was significantly lower (P < 0.05) in group II but was comparable to that of group I after 24 h of incubation. The integrity of vitrified-warmed primordial and primary follicles was clearly corroborated by the LIVE/DEAD viability assay. These results demonstrate that the OCR can be used to directly estimate the effect of vitrification on the viability of primordial and primary follicles and to select the viable primordial and primary follicles from vitrified-warmed follicles. PMID:25262776

Restoring warped document images through 3D shape modeling.

PubMed

Tan, Chew Lim; Zhang, Li; Zhang, Zheng; Xia, Tao

2006-02-01

Scanning a document page from a thick bound volume often results in two kinds of distortions in the scanned image, i.e., shade along the "spine" of the book and warping in the shade area. In this paper, we propose an efficient restoration method based on the discovery of the 3D shape of a book surface from the shading information in a scanned document image. From a technical point of view, this shape from shading (SFS) problem in real-world environments is characterized by 1) a proximal and moving light source, 2) Lambertian reflection, 3) nonuniform albedo distribution, and 4) document skew. Taking all these factors into account, we first build practical models (consisting of a 3D geometric model and a 3D optical model) for the practical scanning conditions to reconstruct the 3D shape of the book surface. We next restore the scanned document image using this shape based on deshading and dewarping models. Finally, we evaluate the restoration results by comparing our estimated surface shape with the real shape as well as the OCR performance on original and restored document images. The results show that the geometric and photometric distortions are mostly removed and the OCR results are improved markedly.

A Large Scale Code Resolution Service Network in the Internet of Things

PubMed Central

Yu, Haining; Zhang, Hongli; Fang, Binxing; Yu, Xiangzhan

2012-01-01

In the Internet of Things a code resolution service provides a discovery mechanism for a requester to obtain the information resources associated with a particular product code immediately. In large scale application scenarios a code resolution service faces some serious issues involving heterogeneity, big data and data ownership. A code resolution service network is required to address these issues. Firstly, a list of requirements for the network architecture and code resolution services is proposed. Secondly, in order to eliminate code resolution conflicts and code resolution overloads, a code structure is presented to create a uniform namespace for code resolution records. Thirdly, we propose a loosely coupled distributed network consisting of heterogeneous, independent; collaborating code resolution services and a SkipNet based code resolution service named SkipNet-OCRS, which not only inherits DHT's advantages, but also supports administrative control and autonomy. For the external behaviors of SkipNet-OCRS, a novel external behavior mode named QRRA mode is proposed to enhance security and reduce requester complexity. For the internal behaviors of SkipNet-OCRS, an improved query algorithm is proposed to increase query efficiency. It is analyzed that integrating SkipNet-OCRS into our resolution service network can meet our proposed requirements. Finally, simulation experiments verify the excellent performance of SkipNet-OCRS. PMID:23202207

The Ontology of Clinical Research (OCRe): An Informatics Foundation for the Science of Clinical Research

PubMed Central

Sim, Ida; Tu, Samson W.; Carini, Simona; Lehmann, Harold P.; Pollock, Brad H.; Peleg, Mor; Wittkowski, Knut M.

2013-01-01

To date, the scientific process for generating, interpreting, and applying knowledge has received less informatics attention than operational processes for conducting clinical studies. The activities of these scientific processes — the science of clinical research — are centered on the study protocol, which is the abstract representation of the scientific design of a clinical study. The Ontology of Clinical Research (OCRe) is an OWL 2 model of the entities and relationships of study design protocols for the purpose of computationally supporting the design and analysis of human studies. OCRe’s modeling is independent of any specific study design or clinical domain. It includes a study design typology and a specialized module called ERGO Annotation for capturing the meaning of eligibility criteria. In this paper, we describe the key informatics use cases of each phase of a study’s scientific lifecycle, present OCRe and the principles behind its modeling, and describe applications of OCRe and associated technologies to a range of clinical research use cases. OCRe captures the central semantics that underlies the scientific processes of clinical research and can serve as an informatics foundation for supporting the entire range of knowledge activities that constitute the science of clinical research. PMID:24239612

Islet oxygen consumption rate (OCR) dose predicts insulin independence for first clinical islet allotransplants

PubMed Central

Kitzmann, JP; O’Gorman, D; Kin, T; Gruessner, AC; Senior, P; Imes, S; Gruessner, RW; Shapiro, AMJ; Papas, KK

2014-01-01

Human islet allotransplant (ITx) for the treatment of type 1 diabetes is in phase III clinical registration trials in the US and standard of care in several other countries. Current islet product release criteria include viability based on cell membrane integrity stains, glucose stimulated insulin release (GSIR), and islet equivalent (IE) dose based on counts. However, only a fraction of patients transplanted with islets that meet or exceed these release criteria become insulin independent following one transplant. Measurements of islet oxygen consumption rate (OCR) have been reported as highly predictive of transplant outcome in many models. In this paper we report on the assessment of clinical islet allograft preparations using islet oxygen consumption rate (OCR) dose (or viable IE dose) and current product release assays in a series of 13 first transplant recipients. The predictive capability of each assay was examined and successful graft function was defined as 100% insulin independence within 45 days post-transplant. Results showed that OCR dose was most predictive of CTO. IE dose was also highly predictive, while GSIR and membrane integrity stains were not. In conclusion, OCR dose can predict CTO with high specificity and sensitivity and is a useful tool for evaluating islet preparations prior to clinical ITx. PMID:25131089

A large scale code resolution service network in the Internet of Things.

PubMed

Yu, Haining; Zhang, Hongli; Fang, Binxing; Yu, Xiangzhan

2012-11-07

In the Internet of Things a code resolution service provides a discovery mechanism for a requester to obtain the information resources associated with a particular product code immediately. In large scale application scenarios a code resolution service faces some serious issues involving heterogeneity, big data and data ownership. A code resolution service network is required to address these issues. Firstly, a list of requirements for the network architecture and code resolution services is proposed. Secondly, in order to eliminate code resolution conflicts and code resolution overloads, a code structure is presented to create a uniform namespace for code resolution records. Thirdly, we propose a loosely coupled distributed network consisting of heterogeneous, independent; collaborating code resolution services and a SkipNet based code resolution service named SkipNet-OCRS, which not only inherits DHT’s advantages, but also supports administrative control and autonomy. For the external behaviors of SkipNet-OCRS, a novel external behavior mode named QRRA mode is proposed to enhance security and reduce requester complexity. For the internal behaviors of SkipNet-OCRS, an improved query algorithm is proposed to increase query efficiency. It is analyzed that integrating SkipNet-OCRS into our resolution service network can meet our proposed requirements. Finally, simulation experiments verify the excellent performance of SkipNet-OCRS.

Glycolysis-respiration relationships in a neuroblastoma cell line.

PubMed

Swerdlow, Russell H; E, Lezi; Aires, Daniel; Lu, Jianghua

2013-04-01

Although some reciprocal glycolysis-respiration relationships are well recognized, the relationship between reduced glycolysis flux and mitochondrial respiration has not been critically characterized. We concomitantly measured the extracellular acidification rate (ECAR) and oxygen consumption rate (OCR) of SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells under free and restricted glycolysis flux conditions. Under conditions of fixed energy demand ECAR and OCR values showed a reciprocal relationship. In addition to observing an expected Crabtree effect in which increasing glucose availability raised the ECAR and reduced the OCR, a novel reciprocal relationship was documented in which reducing the ECAR via glucose deprivation or glycolysis inhibition increased the OCR. Substituting galactose for glucose, which reduces net glycolysis ATP yield without blocking glycolysis flux, similarly reduced the ECAR and increased the OCR. We further determined how reduced ECAR conditions affect proteins that associate with energy sensing and energy response pathways. ERK phosphorylation, SIRT1, and HIF1a decreased while AKT, p38, and AMPK phosphorylation increased. These data document a novel intracellular glycolysis-respiration effect in which restricting glycolysis flux increases mitochondrial respiration. Since this effect can be used to manipulate cell bioenergetic infrastructures, this particular glycolysis-respiration effect can practically inform the development of new mitochondrial medicine approaches. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Imaging Prostate Cancer (Pca) Phenotype and Evolution

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-10-01

Extracellular flux analysis experiments with the Seahorse system showed a marked decrease in OCR after inhibition of ATP synthase by oligomycin...measured in each well 34 h after seeding the cells, using the Seahorse extracellular flux analyzer, as also described in Methods section. OCR

Gremlin 1 Identifies a Skeletal Stem Cell with Bone, Cartilage, and Reticular Stromal Potential

PubMed Central

Worthley, Daniel L.; Churchill, Michael; Compton, Jocelyn T.; Tailor, Yagnesh; Rao, Meenakshi; Si, Yiling; Levin, Daniel; Schwartz, Matthew G.; Uygur, Aysu; Hayakawa, Yoku; Gross, Stefanie; Renz, Bernhard W.; Setlik, Wanda; Martinez, Ashley N.; Chen, Xiaowei; Nizami, Saqib; Lee, Heon Goo; Kang, H. Paco; Caldwell, Jon-Michael; Asfaha, Samuel; Westphalen, C. Benedikt; Graham, Trevor; Jin, Guangchun; Nagar, Karan; Wang, Hongshan; Kheirbek, Mazen A.; Kolhe, Alka; Carpenter, Jared; Glaire, Mark; Nair, Abhinav; Renders, Simon; Manieri, Nicholas; Muthupalani, Sureshkumar; Fox, James G.; Reichert, Maximilian; Giraud, Andrew S.; Schwabe, Robert F.; Pradere, Jean-Phillipe; Walton, Katherine; Prakash, Ajay; Gumucio, Deborah; Rustgi, Anil K.; Stappenbeck, Thaddeus S.; Friedman, Richard A.; Gershon, Michael D.; Sims, Peter; Grikscheit, Tracy; Lee, Francis Y.; Karsenty, Gerard; Mukherjee, Siddhartha; Wang, Timothy C.

2014-01-01

The stem cells that maintain and repair the postnatal skeleton remain undefined. One model suggests that perisinusoidal mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) give rise to osteoblasts, chondrocytes, marrow stromal cells, and adipocytes, although the existence of these cells has not been proven through fate-mapping experiments. We demonstrate here that expression of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) antagonist gremlin 1 defines a population of osteochondroreticular (OCR) stem cells in the bone marrow. OCR stem cells self-renew and generate osteoblasts, chondrocytes, and reticular marrow stromal cells, but not adipocytes. OCR stem cells are concentrated within the metaphysis of long bones not in the perisinusoidal space and are needed for bone development, bone remodeling, and fracture repair. Grem1 expression also identifies intestinal reticular stem cells (iRSCs) that are cells of origin for the periepithelial intestinal mesenchymal sheath. Grem1 expression identifies distinct connective tissue stem cells in both the bone (OCR stem cells) and the intestine (iRSCs). PMID:25594183

Open source OCR framework using mobile devices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhou, Steven Zhiying; Gilani, Syed Omer; Winkler, Stefan

2008-02-01

Mobile phones have evolved from passive one-to-one communication device to powerful handheld computing device. Today most new mobile phones are capable of capturing images, recording video, and browsing internet and do much more. Exciting new social applications are emerging on mobile landscape, like, business card readers, sing detectors and translators. These applications help people quickly gather the information in digital format and interpret them without the need of carrying laptops or tablet PCs. However with all these advancements we find very few open source software available for mobile phones. For instance currently there are many open source OCR engines for desktop platform but, to our knowledge, none are available on mobile platform. Keeping this in perspective we propose a complete text detection and recognition system with speech synthesis ability, using existing desktop technology. In this work we developed a complete OCR framework with subsystems from open source desktop community. This includes a popular open source OCR engine named Tesseract for text detection & recognition and Flite speech synthesis module, for adding text-to-speech ability.

Enhancing vestibular function in the elderly with imperceptible electrical stimulation.

PubMed

Serrador, Jorge M; Deegan, Brian M; Geraghty, Maria C; Wood, Scott J

2018-01-10

Age-related loss of vestibular function can result in decrements in gaze stabilization and increased fall risk in the elderly. This study was designed to see if low levels of electrical stochastic noise applied transcutaneously to the vestibular system can improve a gaze stabilization reflex in young and elderly subject groups. Ocular counter-rolling (OCR) using a video-based technique was obtained in 16 subjects during low frequency passive roll tilts. Consistent with previous studies, there was a significant reduction in OCR gains in the elderly compared to the young group. Imperceptible stochastic noise significantly increased OCR in the elderly (Mean 23%, CI: 17-35%). Increases in OCR gain were greatest for those with lowest baseline gain and were negligible in those with normal gain. Since stimulation was effective at low levels undetectable to subjects, stochastic noise may provide a new treatment alternative to enhance vestibular function, specifically otolith-ocular reflexes, in the elderly or patient populations with reduced otolith-ocular function.

Protein expression and oxygen consumption rate of early postmortem mitochondria relate to meat tenderness.

PubMed

Grabež, V; Kathri, M; Phung, V; Moe, K M; Slinde, E; Skaugen, M; Saarem, K; Egelandsdal, B

2015-04-01

Oxygen consumption rate (OCR) of muscle fibers from bovine semimembranosus muscle of 41 animals was investigated 3 to 4 h and 3 wk postmortem. Significant relations (P < 0.05) were found between OCR measurements and Warner-Bratzler shear force measurement. Muscles with high mitochondrial OCR after 3 to 4 h and low nonmitochondrial oxygen consumption gave more tender meat. Tender (22.92 ± 2.2 N/cm2) and tough (72.98 ± 7.2 N/cm2) meat samples (4 samples each), separated based on their OCR measurements, were selected for proteomic studies using mitochondria isolated approximately 2.5 h postmortem. Twenty-six differently expressed proteins (P < 0.05) were identified in tender meat and 19 in tough meat. In tender meat, the more prevalent antioxidant and chaperon enzymes may reduce reactive oxygen species and prolong oxygen removal by the electron transport system (ETS). Glycolytic, Krebs cycle, and ETS enzymes were also more abundant in tender meat

AN OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION RESEARCH AND DEMONSTRATION PROJECT.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

1968

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROTOTYPE LIBRARY SYSTEMS WHICH UTILIZE OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION INPUT HAS CENTERED AROUND OPTICAL PAGE READERS AND DOCUMENT READERS. THE STATE-OF-THE-ART OF BOTH THESE OPTICAL SCANNERS IS SUCH THAT BOTH ARE ACCEPTABLE FOR LIBRARY INPUT PREPARATION. A DEMONSTRATION PROJECT UTILIZING THE TWO TYPES OF READERS, SINCE…

Interpretation of In situ Testing of Cohesive Soils Using Rational Methods

DTIC Science & Technology

1990-11-01

a circular steel diaphragm located on the flat face of the device. Section 5 describes a comprehensive analysis of the contact pressure for...9o II Z * 0~ 00 0 o- V 0 - V ( Cl c~0 114 U+ e 0 00 0 cn 0 - t 00 r- UI en tn m i > 0 3 115 WATER SEAL- SOIL SEAL UFRICTION SLEEVE BEARING LOAD CELL...difference with OCR (Sully et al., 1987) 127 5 0 1.0/F IV / r 4 Intact M50 0.4 0j 1 0 1 05 0 OCR * Figure 4.1 a Correlation of pore pressure ratio with OCR

Hypercorticism blunts circadian variations of osteocalcin regardless of nutritional status.

PubMed

Vergély, N; Lafage-Proust, M-H; Caillot-Augusseau, A; Millot, L; Lang, F; Estour, B

2002-02-01

Anorexia nervosa (AN) and Cushing's syndrome (CS) are both responsible for osteoporosis. The mechanisms leading to osteoporosis in AN include hypogonadism, nutritional depletion, and in some cases hypercorticism. Osteocalcin circulating level is a serum marker of osteoblastic activity that follows a circadian rhythm (OCR). Serum osteocalcin is decreased in both CS and AN and can be increased with treatment. In this study we analyzed the influence of combined cortisol and nutritional status on osteocalcin levels and its circadian rhythm in these two different models of hypercorticism, one nutritionally replete (CS) and one nutritionally deplete (AN), and we evaluated the effects of their treatment (surgical cure and weight gain, respectively). Before treatment, osteocalcin levels were lower in CS (n = 16) and AN (n = 42) than in controls and in the AN patient subgroup with hypercorticism (n = 13) compared to those without (n = 29). OCR was absent in CS and in AN patients with hypercorticism, whereas their circadian cortisol cycle was maintained. In CS, successful surgical treatment increased osteocalcin levels (n = 5) and restored OCR. In AN, weight gain (n = 13) induced a significant decrease in cortisol levels in hypercortisolic AN patients, and restored normal osteocalcin levels and OCR. In conclusion, we found that hypercorticism was associated with a decrease in osteocalcin levels in nutritionally replete or deplete patients and that OCR was more affected by cortisol levels than by cortisol cycle.

A Functional Nuclear Localization Sequence in the C. elegans TRPV Channel OCR-2

PubMed Central

Ezak, Meredith J.; Ferkey, Denise M.

2011-01-01

The ability to modulate gene expression in response to sensory experience is critical to the normal development and function of the nervous system. Calcium is a key activator of the signal transduction cascades that mediate the process of translating a cellular stimulus into transcriptional changes. With the recent discovery that the mammalian Cav1.2 calcium channel can be cleaved, enter the nucleus and act as a transcription factor to control neuronal gene expression, a more direct role for the calcium channels themselves in regulating transcription has begun to be appreciated. Here we report the identification of a nuclear localization sequence (NLS) in the C. elegans transient receptor potential vanilloid (TRPV) cation channel OCR-2. TRPV channels have previously been implicated in transcriptional regulation of neuronal genes in the nematode, although the precise mechanism remains unclear. We show that the NLS in OCR-2 is functional, being able to direct nuclear accumulation of a synthetic cargo protein as well as the carboxy-terminal cytosolic tail of OCR-2 where it is endogenously found. Furthermore, we discovered that a carboxy-terminal portion of the full-length channel can localize to the nucleus of neuronal cells. These results suggest that the OCR-2 TRPV cation channel may have a direct nuclear function in neuronal cells that was not previously appreciated. PMID:21957475

Ensuring Equal Access to High-Quality Education. Revised

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, 2011

2011-01-01

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education (Department) is a law enforcement agency charged with enforcing federal civil rights laws to ensure that educational institutions receiving federal financial assistance do not engage in discriminatory conduct. OCR enforces the federal civil rights laws that prohibit…

Securing Equal Educational Opportunity: Report to the President and Secretary of Education, Fiscal Year 2016

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, 2016

2016-01-01

In FY 2016, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) promoted equity and excellence in education through conducting investigations and monitoring schools under resolution agreements, promoting greater understanding of how OCR interprets and enforces civil rights laws through the release of policy guidance, providing technical assistance and outreach to…

Office for Civil Rights. Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 1994.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights (ED), Washington, DC.

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) enforces the laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, disability, and age in America's schools, colleges, and universities. To gauge how the department is fulfilling that mission, a description of the OCR's policy-guidance efforts, complaint investigations, and enforcement…

Office for Civil Rights Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Years 2007-08

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

US Department of Education, 2009

2009-01-01

This report details the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights' (OCRs') accomplishments in enforcing the civil rights laws under which OCR has been granted jurisdiction to address and remedy discrimination. These enforcement efforts include complaint investigation and resolution, compliance reviews and technical assistance, as well…

Document image improvement for OCR as a classification problem

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Summers, Kristen M.

2003-01-01

In support of the goal of automatically selecting methods of enhancing an image to improve the accuracy of OCR on that image, we consider the problem of determining whether to apply each of a set of methods as a supervised classification problem for machine learning. We characterize each image according to a combination of two sets of measures: a set that are intended to reflect the degree of particular types of noise present in documents in a single font of Roman or similar script and a more general set based on connected component statistics. We consider several potential methods of image improvement, each of which constitutes its own 2-class classification problem, according to whether transforming the image with this method improves the accuracy of OCR. In our experiments, the results varied for the different image transformation methods, but the system made the correct choice in 77% of the cases in which the decision affected the OCR score (in the range [0,1]) by at least .01, and it made the correct choice 64% of the time overall.

Reduction of ocular counter-rolling by adaptation to space

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dai, Mingjia; Mcgarvie, Leigh; Kozlovskaya, Inessa; Sirota, Mischa; Raphan, Theodore; Cohen, Bernard

1993-01-01

We studied the three-dimensional vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) of rhesus monkeys before and after the COSMOS Biosatellite 2229 Mission of 1992-1993. This included tests of ocular counter-rolling (OCR), the gain of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), and spatial orientation of velocity storage. A four-axis vestibular and oculomotor stimulator was transported to the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow for the pre- and postflight ground-based testing. Twelve normal juvenile male rhesus monkey were implanted surgically with eye coils and tested 60-90 days before spaceflight. Two monkey (7906 and 6151), selected from the twelve as flight animals, flew from 12/29/92 to 1/10/93. Upon recovery, they were tested for 11 days postflight along with three control animals. Compensatory ocular torsion was produced in two ways: (1) Lateral head tilts evoked OCR through otolith-ocular reflexes. OCR was also measured dynamically during off-vertical axis rotation (OVAR). (2) Rotation about a naso-occipital axis that was either vertical of horizontal elicited torsional nystagmus through semicircular canal-ocular reflexes (roll VOR). OCR from the otoliths was substantially reduced (70 percent) for 11 days after reentry on both modes of testing. The gain of the roll VOR was also decreased, but less than OCR. These data demonstrate that there was a long-lasting depression of torsional or roll eye movements after adaptation to microgravity in these monkeys, especially those movements produced by the otolith organs.

Elevated nitrate alters the metabolic activity of embryonic zebrafish.

PubMed

Conlin, Sarah M; Tudor, M Scarlett; Shim, Juyoung; Gosse, Julie A; Neilson, Andrew; Hamlin, Heather J

2018-04-01

Nitrate accumulation in aquatic reservoirs from agricultural pollution has often been overlooked as a water quality hazard, yet a growing body of literature suggests negative effects on human and wildlife health following nitrate exposure. This research seeks to understand differences in oxygen consumption rates between different routes of laboratory nitrate exposure, whether via immersion or injection, in zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryos. Embryos were exposed within 1 h post fertilization (hpf) to 0, 10, and 100 mg/L NO 3 -N with sodium nitrate, or to counter ion control (CIC) treatments using sodium chloride. Embryos in the immersion treatments received an injection of 4 nL of appropriate treatment solution into the perivitelline space. At 24 hpf, Oxygen Consumption Rates (OCR) were measured and recorded in vivo using the Agilent Technologies XF e 96 Extracellular Flux Analyzer and Spheroid Microplate. Immersion exposures did not induce significant changes in OCR, yet nitrate induced significant changes when injected through the embryo chorion. Injection of 10 and 100 mg/L NO 3 -N down-regulated OCR compared to the control treatment group. Injection of the 100 mg/L CIC also significantly down-regulated OCR compared to the control treatment group. Interestingly, the 100 mg/L NO 3 -N treatment further down-regulated OCR compared to the 100 mg/L CIC treatment, suggesting the potential for additive effects between the counter ion and the ion of interest. These data support that elevated nitrate exposure can alter normal metabolic activity by changing OCR in 24 hpf embryos. These results highlight the need for regularly examining the counter ion of laboratory nitrate compounds while conducting research with developing zebrafish, and justify examining different routes of laboratory nitrate exposure, as the chorion may act as an effective barrier to nitrate penetration in zebrafish, which may lead to conservative estimates of significant effects in other species for which nitrate more readily penetrates the chorion. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

New horizons for multiple sclerosis therapeutics: milestones in the development of ocrelizumab.

PubMed

Frau, Jessica; Coghe, Giancarlo; Lorefice, Lorena; Fenu, Giuseppe; Cocco, Eleonora

2018-01-01

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system, and both T and B cells are involved in its pathogenesis. The vast majority of disease-modifying drugs used for MS act on the inflammatory component of the disease and are approved for use in relapsing-remitting (RR) patients. Ocrelizumab (OCR) is the only MS drug that has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) not only for patients with RRMS but also for patients with primary progressive (PP) MS. OCR is a humanized anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody that can deplete the targeted B cells through antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity. Treatment involves administration by intravenous infusion every 6 months. OCR can cause long-lasting B-cell depletion and change the pool of reconstituted B cells. Phase III clinical trials have confirmed the results of previous Phase II studies. In particular, OPERA I and II trials, which were performed in patients with RRMS, showed a reduction in the annualized relapse rate, the risk of disability progression, and the number of new/enlarging T2 lesions and enhancing lesions measured using brain magnetic resonance. The ORATORIO trial, performed in PP subjects, showed that OCR can reduce disability progression, improve performance on the timed 25-foot walk, and decrease the total volume of T2 lesions and the mean number of new or enlarging T2 lesions. The most frequent adverse events were the infusion-related reactions and infections. Infections were mostly nasopharyngitis, as well as upper respiratory and urinary tract infections. OCR gives no indication for severe or opportunistic infections. There is not a clear increased risk of malignancies. Nevertheless, it could not be excluded. Real-life registries will provide more information about the long-term safety, the risk of exposure during pregnancy, and the risk of rare adverse events. In this review, we analyze the evidence regarding the efficacy and the safety of OCR.

Anonymization of DICOM Electronic Medical Records for Radiation Therapy

PubMed Central

Newhauser, Wayne; Jones, Timothy; Swerdloff, Stuart; Newhauser, Warren; Cilia, Mark; Carver, Robert; Halloran, Andy; Zhang, Rui

2014-01-01

Electronic medical records (EMR) and treatment plans are used in research on patient outcomes and radiation effects. In many situations researchers must remove protected health information (PHI) from EMRs. The literature contains several studies describing the anonymization of generic Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) files and DICOM image sets but no publications were found that discuss the anonymization of DICOM radiation therapy plans, a key component of an EMR in a cancer clinic. In addition to this we were unable to find a commercial software tool that met the minimum requirements for anonymization and preservation of data integrity for radiation therapy research. The purpose of this study was to develop a prototype software code to meet the requirements for the anonymization of radiation therapy treatment plans and to develop a way to validate that code and demonstrate that it properly anonymized treatment plans and preserved data integrity. We extended an open-source code to process all relevant PHI and to allow for the automatic anonymization of multiple EMRs. The prototype code successfully anonymized multiple treatment plans in less than 1 minute per patient. We also tested commercial optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms for the detection of burned-in text on the images, but they were unable to reliably recognize text. In addition, we developed and tested an image filtering algorithm that allowed us to isolate and redact alpha-numeric text from a test radiograph. Validation tests verified that PHI was anonymized and data integrity, such as the relationship between DICOM unique identifiers (UID) was preserved. PMID:25147130

Anonymization of DICOM electronic medical records for radiation therapy.

PubMed

Newhauser, Wayne; Jones, Timothy; Swerdloff, Stuart; Newhauser, Warren; Cilia, Mark; Carver, Robert; Halloran, Andy; Zhang, Rui

2014-10-01

Electronic medical records (EMR) and treatment plans are used in research on patient outcomes and radiation effects. In many situations researchers must remove protected health information (PHI) from EMRs. The literature contains several studies describing the anonymization of generic Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) files and DICOM image sets but no publications were found that discuss the anonymization of DICOM radiation therapy plans, a key component of an EMR in a cancer clinic. In addition to this we were unable to find a commercial software tool that met the minimum requirements for anonymization and preservation of data integrity for radiation therapy research. The purpose of this study was to develop a prototype software code to meet the requirements for the anonymization of radiation therapy treatment plans and to develop a way to validate that code and demonstrate that it properly anonymized treatment plans and preserved data integrity. We extended an open-source code to process all relevant PHI and to allow for the automatic anonymization of multiple EMRs. The prototype code successfully anonymized multiple treatment plans in less than 1min/patient. We also tested commercial optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms for the detection of burned-in text on the images, but they were unable to reliably recognize text. In addition, we developed and tested an image filtering algorithm that allowed us to isolate and redact alpha-numeric text from a test radiograph. Validation tests verified that PHI was anonymized and data integrity, such as the relationship between DICOM unique identifiers (UID) was preserved. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Development of a Machine-Vision System for Recording of Force Calibration Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Heamawatanachai, Sumet; Chaemthet, Kittipong; Changpan, Tawat

This paper presents the development of a new system for recording of force calibration data using machine vision technology. Real time camera and computer system were used to capture images of the reading from the instruments during calibration. Then, the measurement images were transformed and translated to numerical data using optical character recognition (OCR) technique. These numerical data along with raw images were automatically saved to memories as the calibration database files. With this new system, the human error of recording would be eliminated. The verification experiments were done by using this system for recording the measurement results from an amplifier (DMP 40) with load cell (HBM-Z30-10kN). The NIMT's 100-kN deadweight force standard machine (DWM-100kN) was used to generate test forces. The experiments setup were done in 3 categories; 1) dynamics condition (record during load changing), 2) statics condition (record during fix load), and 3) full calibration experiments in accordance with ISO 376:2011. The captured images from dynamics condition experiment gave >94% without overlapping of number. The results from statics condition experiment were >98% images without overlapping. All measurement images without overlapping were translated to number by the developed program with 100% accuracy. The full calibration experiments also gave 100% accurate results. Moreover, in case of incorrect translation of any result, it is also possible to trace back to the raw calibration image to check and correct it. Therefore, this machine-vision-based system and program should be appropriate for recording of force calibration data.

Endorsing the Practical Endorsement? OCR's Approach to Practical Assessment in Science A-Levels

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Evans, Steve; Wade, Neil

2015-01-01

This article summarises the practical requirements for new science A-levels in biology, chemistry and physics for first teaching from September 2015. It discusses the background to how the new approach was reached and how OCR has seen this taking shape in our assessment models. The opportunities presented by this new approach to practical…

Office for Civil Rights. Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 1991.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights (ED), Washington, DC.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is a law enforcement agency primarily responsible for ensuring that recipients of federal assistance do not discriminate against students, faculty, or other individuals on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, handicap, or age. OCR is responsible for enforcing the following Federal civil rights laws: the…

Delivering Justice: Report to the President and Secretary of Education, Fiscal Year 2015

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, 2015

2015-01-01

For decades, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has enforced civil rights in our nation's preschool through 12th grade (P-12) and post-secondary schools, which now serve almost 80 million students annually. In Fiscal Year 2015, the OCR promoted excellence in education through conducting investigations and monitoring schools under resolution…

Ensuring Equal Access to High-Quality Education. Revised.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights (ED), Washington, DC.

This brochure describes the activities of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education. The OCR is a law-enforcement agency charged with upholding the federal civil-rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, and age in programs and activities that receive federal…

Prevalence and predictors of depressive symptoms and wellbeing during and up to nine years after outpatient cardiac rehabilitation.

PubMed

Koçer, O; Wachter, M; Zellweger, M; Piazzalonga, S; Hoffmann, A

2011-07-30

Depression is an important independent prognostic variable in cardiac patients. The prevalence and predictors of depressive symptoms up to nine years after cardiac rehabilitation were studied. Follow-up questionnaires were sent to 2199 patients who had completed a 12-week exercise-based outpatient cardiac rehabilitation (OCR) programme between June 1999 and March 2006. Medical outcome, general wellbeing, and depressive symptoms were assessed, the latter by using two screening questions according to Arrol. Patients with incomplete data due to language problems, lack of compliance and non-response were excluded. Complete data for analysis was available for 710 patients. The median follow up period was 46 months (Interquartile range (IQR) 22-71, min. 6 months). At follow-up, 132 patients (19%) indicated low wellbeing, whereas 81 (11%) were having depressive symptoms. Multivariate analyses revealed impaired quality of life (p <0.001), diabetes (p = 0.013) and low exercise capacity after OCR (p = 0.003) to be independent predictors of low wellbeing at follow-up. Persistent smoking (p = 0.045) as well as negative mood (p = 0.022) at the end of OCR were independent predictors of depressive symptoms at follow-up. In a selected patient population a mean of four years after OCR, persistent smoking, diabetes, low exercise capacity and impaired quality of life at the end of OCR were independent long term predictors of low wellbeing and depressive symptoms, rather than specific cardiac variables. This highlights the need for close cooperation between cardiovascular and psychological specialists in cardiac rehabilitation.

The Impact of the Native American Languages Act on Public School Curriculum: A Different View.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Littlejohn, Jim

2000-01-01

Responds to Scott Ferrin's argument (EJ 583 598) and, as the former policy director for the U.S. Office for Civil Rights (OCR), decries both Ferrin and OCR for their relentless and, in his view, unwarranted promotion of bilingual education. Contends that no civil-rights laws, including the Native American Languages Act (NALA), support or allow…

Office for Civil Rights Survey Redesign: A Feasibility Survey. Contractor Report. Statistical Analysis Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mansfield, Wendy; Farris, Elizabeth

This report provides results of a Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics for the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The OCR wanted input for their decision-making process on possible modifications to their biennial survey of a national sample of public school districts (PSDs). The survey, the…

Office for Civil Rights. Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 1998. Guaranteeing Equal Access to High-Standards Education.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights (ED), Washington, DC.

This annual report details the responsibilities of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). It outlines the main purpose of the OCR--the agency within the United States Department of Education that regulates and enforces civil-rights laws against discrimination in education programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. The focus of the…

Finding the Common Denominator: The Capacity of State Agencies to Assist the HEW Office for Civil Rights.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Larson, Meredith A.; And Others

This two part study was designed to determine whether working relationships can be expanded between the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and various State agencies with similar missions. First, a survey of State laws and enforcement mechanisms identifies those States with current laws or policies similar to those that OCR administers. Results…

Decreased otolith-mediated vestibular response in 25 astronauts induced by long-duration spaceflight

PubMed Central

Hallgren, Emma; Kornilova, Ludmila; Fransen, Erik; Glukhikh, Dmitrii; Moore, Steven T.; Clément, Gilles; Van Ombergen, Angelique; MacDougall, Hamish; Naumov, Ivan

2016-01-01

The information coming from the vestibular otolith organs is important for the brain when reflexively making appropriate visual and spinal corrections to maintain balance. Symptoms related to failed balance control and navigation are commonly observed in astronauts returning from space. To investigate the effect of microgravity exposure on the otoliths, we studied the otolith-mediated responses elicited by centrifugation in a group of 25 astronauts before and after 6 mo of spaceflight. Ocular counterrolling (OCR) is an otolith-driven reflex that is sensitive to head tilt with regard to gravity and tilts of the gravito-inertial acceleration vector during centrifugation. When comparing pre- and postflight OCR, we found a statistically significant decrease of the OCR response upon return. Nine days after return, the OCR was back at preflight level, indicating a full recovery. Our large study sample allows for more general physiological conclusions about the effect of prolonged microgravity on the otolith system. A deconditioned otolith system is thought to be the cause of several of the negative effects seen in returning astronauts, such as spatial disorientation and orthostatic intolerance. This knowledge should be taken into account for future long-term space missions. PMID:27009158

EPA eXcats

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

The EPA eXcats is an enterprise-level data tracking application that provides management complaint tracking information for the EPA's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) External Compliance Program. EPA's OCR is responsible for enforcing several federal civil rights laws that together prohibit discrimination on the bases of race, color, national origin (including limited English proficiency), disability, sex and age in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance from the EPA.

Engineering Irisin for Understanding Its Benefits to Obesity

DTIC Science & Technology

2018-03-01

measurement of oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and extracellular acidification rates (ECAR). Following basal respiration, the mitochondrial effectors...mitochondrial respiration, respectively. Effects of irisin on cellular oxygen consumption rate (OCR; A and B) and ECAR (extracellular acidification rates; C...irisin alanine variants for 60 min at room temperature . The cells were then washed and resuspended in PBS/0.5% BSA. Fifty thousand events per sample

Impact of Changes to Practical Assessment at GCSE and A-Level: The Start of a Longitudinal Study by OCR

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Frances; Wade, Neil; Evans, Steve

2016-01-01

As part of a wider qualification reform at upper secondary level in England, the assessment of practical work is changing, following concerns that the legacy model of assessment was having a negative impact on teaching and learning. The OCR examination board is running a longitudinal survey of teachers' views on practical work, focusing on the…

Optical character recognition with feature extraction and associative memory matrix

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sasaki, Osami; Shibahara, Akihito; Suzuki, Takamasa

1998-06-01

A method is proposed in which handwritten characters are recognized using feature extraction and an associative memory matrix. In feature extraction, simple processes such as shifting and superimposing patterns are executed. A memory matrix is generated with singular value decomposition and by modifying small singular values. The method is optically implemented with two liquid crystal displays. Experimental results for the recognition of 25 handwritten alphabet characters clearly shows the effectiveness of the method.

Obstacle course runs: review of acquired injuries and illnesses at a series of Canadian events (RACE).

PubMed

Hawley, Alana; Mercuri, Mathew; Hogg, Kerstin; Hanel, Erich

2017-03-01

The growing popularity of obstacle course runs (OCRs) has led to significant concerns regarding their safety. The influx of injuries and illnesses in rural areas where OCRs are often held can impose a large burden on emergency medical services (EMS) and local EDs. Literature concerning the safety of these events is minimal and mostly consists of media reports. We sought to characterise the injury and illness profile of OCRs and the level of medical care required. This study analysed OCR events occurring in eight locations across Canada from May to August 2015 (total 45 285 participants). Data were extracted from event medical charts of patients presenting to the onsite medical team, including injury or illness type, onsite treatment and disposition. There were 557 race participants treated at eight OCR events (1.2% of all participants). There were 609 medical complaints in total. Three quarters of injuries were musculoskeletal in nature. Eighty-nine per cent returned to the event with no need for further medical care. The majority of treatments were completed with first aid and basic medical equipment. Eleven patients (2% of patients) required transfer to hospital by EMS for presentations including fracture, dislocation, head injury, chest pain, fall from height, and abdominal pain. We found that 1.2% of race participants presented to onsite medical services. The majority of complaints were minor and musculoskeletal in nature. Only 2% of those treated were transferred to hospital through EMS. This is consistent with other types of mass gathering events. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/.

Light-addressable measurements of cellular oxygen consumption rates in microwell arrays based on phase-based phosphorescence lifetime detection

PubMed Central

Huang, Shih-Hao; Hsu, Yu-Hsuan; Wu, Chih-Wei; Wu, Chang-Jer

2012-01-01

A digital light modulation system that utilizes a modified commercial digital micromirror device (DMD) projector, which is equipped with a UV light-emitting diode as a light modulation source, has been developed to spatially direct excited light toward a microwell array device to detect the oxygen consumption rate (OCR) of single cells via phase-based phosphorescence lifetime detection. The microwell array device is composed of a combination of two components: an array of glass microwells containing Pt(II) octaethylporphine (PtOEP) as the oxygen-sensitive luminescent layer and a microfluidic module with pneumatically actuated glass lids set above the microwells to controllably seal the microwells of interest. By controlling the illumination pattern on the DMD, the modulated excitation light can be spatially projected to only excite the sealed microwell for cellular OCR measurements. The OCR of baby hamster kidney-21 fibroblast cells cultivated on the PtOEP layer within a sealed microwell has been successfully measured at 104 ± 2.96 amol s−1 cell−1. Repeatable and consistent measurements indicate that the oxygen measurements did not adversely affect the physiological state of the measured cells. The OCR of the cells exhibited a good linear relationship with the diameter of the microwells, ranging from 400 to 1000 μm and containing approximately 480 to 1200 cells within a microwell. In addition, the OCR variation of single cells in situ infected by Dengue virus with a different multiplicity of infection was also successfully measured in real-time. This proposed platform provides the potential for a wide range of biological applications in cell-based biosensing, toxicology, and drug discovery. PMID:24348889

Effect of temperature on the standard metabolic rates of juvenile and adult Exopalaemon carinicauda

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Chengsong; Li, Fuhua; Xiang, Jianhai

2015-03-01

Ridgetail white prawn ( Exopalaemon carinicauda) are of significant economic importance in China where they are widely cultured. However, there is little information on the basic biology of this species. We evaluated the effect of temperature (16, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, and 34°C) on the standard metabolic rates (SMRs) of juvenile and adult E. carinicauda in the laboratory under static conditions. The oxygen consumption rate (OCR), ammonia-N excretion rate (AER), and atomic ratio of oxygen consumed to nitrogen consumed (O:N ratio) of juvenile and adult E. carinicauda were significantly influenced by temperature ( P < 0.05). Both the OCR and AER of juveniles increased significantly with increasing temperature from 16 to 34°C, but the maximum OCR for adults was at 31°C. Juvenile shrimp exhibited a higher OCR than the adults from 19 to 34°C. There was no significant difference between the AERs of the two life-stages from 16 to 31°C ( P >0.05). The O:N ratio in juveniles was significantly higher than that in the adults over the entire temperature range ( P <0.05). The temperature coefficient ( Q 10) of OCR and AER ranged from 5.03 to 0.86 and 6.30 to 0.85 for the adults, respectively, and from 6.09-1.03 and 3.66-1.80 for the juveniles, respectively. The optimal temperature range for growth of the juvenile and adult shrimp was from 28 to 31°C, based on Q 10 and SMR values. Results from the present study may be used to guide pond culture production of E. carinicauda.

In vitro evaluation of mitochondrial dysfunction and treatment with adeno-associated virus vector in fibroblasts from Doberman Pinschers with dilated cardiomyopathy and a pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase 4 mutation.

PubMed

Sosa, Ivan; Estrada, Amara H; Winter, Brandy D; Erger, Kirsten E; Conlon, Thomas J

2016-02-01

To compare mitochondrial oxygen consumption rate (OCR) of fibroblasts from Doberman Pinschers with and without dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and mutation of the gene for pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase isozyme 4 (PDK4) and to evaluate in vitro whether treatment with adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector (i.e., gene therapy) would alter metabolic efficiency. 10 Doberman Pinschers screened for DCM and PDK4 mutation. PROCEDURES Fibroblasts were harvested from skin biopsy specimens obtained from Doberman Pinschers, and dogs were classified as without DCM or PDK4 mutation (n = 3) or with occult DCM and heterozygous (4) or homozygous (3) for PDK4 mutation. Fibroblasts were or were not treated with tyrosine mutant AAV type 2 vector containing PDK4 at multiplicities of infection of 1,000. Mitochondrial OCR was measured to evaluate mitochondrial metabolism. The OCR was compared among dog groups and between untreated and treated fibroblasts within groups. Mean ± SD basal OCR of fibroblasts from heterozygous (74 ± 8 pmol of O2/min) and homozygous (58 ± 12 pmol of O2/min) dogs was significantly lower than that for dogs without PDK4 mutation (115 ± 9 pmol of O2/min). After AAV transduction, OCR did not increase significantly in any group (mutation-free group, 121 ± 26 pmol of O2/min; heterozygous group, 88 ± 6 pmol of O2/min; homozygous group, 59 ± 3 pmol of O2/min). Mitochondrial function was altered in skin fibroblasts of Doberman Pinschers with DCM and PDK4 mutation. Change in mitochondrial function after in vitro gene therapy at the multiplicities of infection used in this study was not significant.

Impact insertion of osteochondral grafts: Interference fit and central graft reduction affect biomechanics and cartilage damage.

PubMed

Su, Alvin W; Chen, Yunchan; Wailes, Dustin H; Wong, Van W; Cai, Shengqiang; Chen, Albert C; Bugbee, William D; Sah, Robert L

2018-01-01

An osteochondral graft (OCG) is an effective treatment for articular cartilage and osteochondral defects. Impact of an OCG during insertion into the osteochondral recipient site (OCR) can cause chondrocyte death and matrix damage. The aim of the present study was to analyze the effects of graft-host interference fit and a modified OCG geometry on OCG insertion biomechanics and cartilage damage. The effects of interference fit (radius of OCG - radius of OCR), loose (0.00 mm), moderate (0.05 mm), tight (0.10 mm), and of a tight fit with OCG geometry modification (central region of decreased radius), were analyzed for OCG cylinders and OCR blocks from adult bovine knee joints with an instrumented drop tower apparatus. An increasingly tight (OCG - OCR) interference fit led to increased taps for insertion, peak axial force, graft cartilage axial compression, cumulative and total energy delivery to cartilage, lower time of peak axial force, lesser graft advancement during each tap, higher total crack length in the cartilage surface, and lower chondrocyte viability. The modified OCG, with reduction of diameter in the central area, altered the biomechanical insertion variables and biological consequences to be similar to those of the moderate interference fit scenario. Micro-computed tomography confirmed structural interference between the OCR bone and both the proximal and distal bone segments of the OCGs, with the central regions being slightly separated for the modified OCGs. These results clarify OCG insertion biomechanics and mechanobiology, and introduce a simple modification of OCGs that facilitates insertion with reduced energy while maintaining a structural interference fit. © 2017 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 36:377-386, 2018. © 2017 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Producing good font attribute determination using error-prone information

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cooperman, Robert

1997-04-01

A method to provide estimates of font attributes in an OCR system, using detectors of individual attributes that are error-prone. For an OCR system to preserve the appearance of a scanned document, it needs accurate detection of font attributes. However, OCR environments have noise and other sources of errors, tending to make font attribute detection unreliable. Certain assumptions about font use can greatly enhance accuracy. Attributes such as boldness and italics are more likely to change between neighboring words, while attributes such as serifness are less likely to change within the same paragraph. Furthermore, the document as a whole, tends to have a limited number of sets of font attributes. These assumptions allow a better use of context than the raw data, or what would be achieved by simpler methods that would oversmooth the data.

Assaying Mitochondrial Respiration as an Indicator of Cellular Metabolism and Fitness.

PubMed

Smolina, Natalia; Bruton, Joseph; Kostareva, Anna; Sejersen, Thomas

2017-01-01

Mitochondrial respiration is the most important generator of cellular energy under most circumstances. It is a process of energy conversion of substrates into ATP. The Seahorse equipment allows measuring oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in living cells and estimates key parameters of mitochondrial respiration in real-time mode. Through use of mitochondrial inhibitors, four key mitochondrial respiration parameters can be measured: basal, ATP production-linked, maximal, and proton leak-linked OCR. This approach requires application of mitochondrial inhibitors-oligomycin to block ATP synthase, FCCP-to make the inner mitochondrial membrane permeable for protons and allow maximum electron flux through the electron transport chain, and rotenone and antimycin A-to inhibit complexes I and III, respectively. This chapter describes the protocol of OCR assessment in the culture of primary myotubes obtained upon satellite cell fusion.

Comparative implementation of Handwritten and Machine written Gurmukhi text utilizing appropriate parameters

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kaur, Jaswinder; Jagdev, Gagandeep, Dr.

2018-01-01

Optical character recognition is concerned with the recognition of optically processed characters. The recognition is done offline after the writing or printing has been completed, unlike online recognition where the computer has to recognize the characters instantly as they are drawn. The performance of character recognition depends upon the quality of scanned documents. The preprocessing steps are used for removing low-frequency background noise and normalizing the intensity of individual scanned documents. Several filters are used for reducing certain image details and enabling an easier or faster evaluation. The primary aim of the research work is to recognize handwritten and machine written characters and differentiate them. The language opted for the research work is Punjabi Gurmukhi and tool utilized is Matlab.

Automated detection of submerged navigational obstructions in freshwater impoundments with hull mounted sidescan sonar

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Morris, Phillip A.

The prevalence of low-cost side scanning sonar systems mounted on small recreational vessels has created improved opportunities to identify and map submerged navigational hazards in freshwater impoundments. However, these economical sensors also present unique challenges for automated techniques. This research explores related literature in automated sonar imagery processing and mapping technology, proposes and implements a framework derived from these sources, and evaluates the approach with video collected from a recreational grade sonar system. Image analysis techniques including optical character recognition and an unsupervised computer automated detection (CAD) algorithm are employed to extract the transducer GPS coordinates and slant range distance of objects protruding from the lake bottom. The retrieved information is formatted for inclusion into a spatial mapping model. Specific attributes of the sonar sensors are modeled such that probability profiles may be projected onto a three dimensional gridded map. These profiles are computed from multiple points of view as sonar traces crisscross or come near each other. As lake levels fluctuate over time so do the elevation points of view. With each sonar record, the probability of a hazard existing at certain elevations at the respective grid points is updated with Bayesian mechanics. As reinforcing data is collected, the confidence of the map improves. Given a lake's current elevation and a vessel draft, a final generated map can identify areas of the lake that have a high probability of containing hazards that threaten navigation. The approach is implemented in C/C++ utilizing OpenCV, Tesseract OCR, and QGIS open source software and evaluated in a designated test area at Lake Lavon, Collin County, Texas.

Recognition of Time Stamps on Full-Disk Hα Images Using Machine Learning Methods

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xu, Y.; Huang, N.; Jing, J.; Liu, C.; Wang, H.; Fu, G.

2016-12-01

Observation and understanding of the physics of the 11-year solar activity cycle and 22-year magnetic cycle are among the most important research topics in solar physics. The solar cycle is responsible for magnetic field and particle fluctuation in the near-earth environment that have been found increasingly important in affecting the living of human beings in the modern era. A systematic study of large-scale solar activities, as made possible by our rich data archive, will further help us to understand the global-scale magnetic fields that are closely related to solar cycles. The long-time-span data archive includes both full-disk and high-resolution Hα images. Prior to the widely use of CCD cameras in 1990s, 35-mm films were the major media to store images. The research group at NJIT recently finished the digitization of film data obtained by the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) covering the period of 1953 to 2000. The total volume of data exceeds 60 TB. To make this huge database scientific valuable, some processing and calibration are required. One of the most important steps is to read the time stamps on all of the 14 million images, which is almost impossible to be done manually. We implemented three different methods to recognize the time stamps automatically, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Classification Tree and TensorFlow. The latter two are known as machine learning algorithms which are very popular now a day in pattern recognition area. We will present some sample images and the results of clock recognition from all three methods.

Rescuing Paleomagnetic Data from Deep-Sea Cores Through the IEDA-CCNY Data Internship Program

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ismail, A.; Randel, C.; Palumbo, R. V.; Carter, M.; Cai, Y.; Kent, D. V.; Lehnert, K.; Block, K. A.

2016-12-01

Paleomagnetic data provides essential information for evaluating the chronostratigraphy of sedimentary cores. Lamont research vessels Vema and Robert Conrad collected over 10,000 deep-sea sediment cores around the world from 1953 to 1989. 10% of these cores have been sampled for paleomagnetic analyses at Lamont. Over the years, only 10% of these paleomagnetic records have been published. Moreover, data listings were only rarely made available in older publications because electronic appendices were not available and cyberinfrastructure was not in place for publishing and preserving these data. As a result, the majority of these datasets exist only as fading computer printouts in binders on the investigator's bookshelf. This summer, undergraduate students from the NSF-funded IEDA-CCNY Data Internship Program started digitizing this enormous dataset under the supervision of Dennis Kent, the current custodian of the data and one of the investigators who oversaw some of the data collection process, and an active leader in the field. Undergraduate students worked on digitizing paper records, proof-reading and organizing the data sheets for future integration into an appropriate repository. Through observing and plotting the data, the students learned about how sediment cores and paleomagnetic data are collected and used in research, and the best practices in data publishing and preservation from IEDA (Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance) team members. The students also compared different optical character recognition (OCR) softwares and established an efficient workflow to digitize these datasets. These datasets will eventually be incorporated in the Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC), so that they can be easily compared with similar datasets and have the potential to generate new findings. Through this data rescue project, the students had the opportunity to learn about an important field of scientific research and interact with world-class scientists.

High-speed railway real-time localization auxiliary method based on deep neural network

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Dongjie; Zhang, Wensheng; Yang, Yang

2017-11-01

High-speed railway intelligent monitoring and management system is composed of schedule integration, geographic information, location services, and data mining technology for integration of time and space data. Assistant localization is a significant submodule of the intelligent monitoring system. In practical application, the general access is to capture the image sequences of the components by using a high-definition camera, digital image processing technique and target detection, tracking and even behavior analysis method. In this paper, we present an end-to-end character recognition method based on a deep CNN network called YOLO-toc for high-speed railway pillar plate number. Different from other deep CNNs, YOLO-toc is an end-to-end multi-target detection framework, furthermore, it exhibits a state-of-art performance on real-time detection with a nearly 50fps achieved on GPU (GTX960). Finally, we realize a real-time but high-accuracy pillar plate number recognition system and integrate natural scene OCR into a dedicated classification YOLO-toc model.

Protecting the Civil Rights of English Language Learners Today: A Study of the Recent DOJ and OCR Investigations of Selected School Districts in the United States

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oyeleye, Omobola Awosika

2013-01-01

The purpose of the study was to examine the circumstances and practices that led to OCR and DOJ investigations in seven selected school districts, and to determine the emerging themes from the details of the settlement agreements between the school districts and the United States. The themes developed through this study were aimed at providing a…

Real-Time Measurement of Host Bioenergetics During Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Infection

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-05-01

antimycobacterial drugs on Mtb bioenergetics. We focused on Clofazimine (CFZ, targets Complex I), Bedaquiline (BDQ/TMC207, targets Complex V) and Q203 (targets... Complex III). Firstly we investigated the effect of CFZ and BDQ on the OCR profiles of Mtb mc2 6230 (Figure 3). These experiments were done in...addition with of CFZ. The decrease in OCR is consistent with ETC complex inhibition. BDQ caused a very surprising concentration-depended increase

Structural model constructing for optical handwritten character recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Khaustov, P. A.; Spitsyn, V. G.; Maksimova, E. I.

2017-02-01

The article is devoted to the development of the algorithms for optical handwritten character recognition based on the structural models constructing. The main advantage of these algorithms is the low requirement regarding the number of reference images. The one-pass approach to a thinning of the binary character representation has been proposed. This approach is based on the joint use of Zhang-Suen and Wu-Tsai algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed by the results of the experiments. The article includes the detailed description of the structural model constructing algorithm’s steps. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in character processing application and has been approved on MNIST handwriting characters database. Algorithms that could be used in case of limited reference images number were used for the comparison.

Adjunctive Local Application of Lidocaine during Scleral Buckling under General Anesthesia.

PubMed

Dehghani, Alireza; Montazeri, Kamran; Masjedi, Amin; Karbasi, Najmeh; Ashrafi, Leila; Saeedian, Behrooz

2011-07-01

To evaluate the effect of local lidocaine application on the incidence of the oculocardiac reflex (OCR) during scleral buckling (SB) for rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) under general anesthesia. In a randomized clinical trial, eyes with RRD scheduled for SB under general anesthesia were randomized to adjunctive local application of 1 ml lidocaine 2% versus normal saline to the muscles after conjunctival opening. Surgical stimulation was initiated 5 minutes afterwards. Additionally, 100 mg of lidocaine 2% was added to 50 ml of normal saline in the treatment group which was used for irrigation during surgery; control eyes were irrigated with normal saline. The incidence of the OCR, rate of postoperative nausea/vomiting (PONV), total intravenous (IV) analgesic dose, duration of surgery, and period of hospitalization were compared between the study groups. Thirty eyes of 30 patients including 22 (73.3%) male and 8 (26.7%) subjects with mean age of 49.4±16.3 years were operated. OCR and PONV occurred less frequently, and total intravenous analgesic dose was significantly lower in the lidocaine group (P < 0.05 for all comparisons). However, no significant difference was noted between the study groups in terms of duration of surgery and period of hospitalization. Adjunctive local application of lidocaine during SB under GA for RRD decreases the rate of OCR and PONV, reduces the intravenous analgesic dose, but does not affect the duration of surgery or hospitalization.

Noninvasive assessment of tissue-engineered graft viability by oxygen-17 magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

PubMed

Einstein, Samuel A; Weegman, Bradley P; Kitzmann, Jennifer P; Papas, Klearchos K; Garwood, Michael

2017-05-01

Transplantation of macroencapsulated tissue-engineered grafts (TEGs) is being investigated as a treatment for type 1 diabetes, but there is a critical need to measure TEG viability both in vitro and in vivo. Oxygen deficiency is the most critical issue preventing widespread implementation of TEG transplantation and delivery of supplemental oxygen (DSO) has been shown to enhance TEG survival and function in vivo. In this study, we demonstrate the first use of oxygen-17 magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( 17 O-MRS) to measure the oxygen consumption rate (OCR) of TEGs and show that in addition to providing therapeutic benefits to TEGs, DSO with 17 O 2 can also enable measurements of TEG viability. Macroencapsulated TEGs containing βTC3 murine insulinoma cells were prepared with three fractional viabilities and provided with 17 O 2 . Cellular metabolism of 17 O 2 into nascent mitochondrial water (H 2 17 O) was monitored by 17 O-MRS and, from the measured data, OCR was calculated. For comparison, OCR was simultaneously measured on a separate, but equivalent sample of cells with a well-established stirred microchamber technique. OCR measured by 17 O-MRS agreed well with measurements made in the stirred microchamber device. These studies confirm that 17 O-MRS can quantify TEG viability noninvasively. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2017;114: 1118-1121. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Scanners, optical character readers, Cyrillic alphabet and Russian translations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Johnson, Gordon G.

1995-01-01

The writing of code for capture, in a uniform format, of bit maps of words and characters from scanner PICT files is presented. The coding of Dynamic Pattern Matched for the identification of the characters, words and sentences in preparation for translation is discussed.

The Impact of a Modified Repeated-Reading Strategy Paired with Optical Character Recognition on the Reading Rates of Students with Visual Impairments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pattillo, Suzan Trefry; Heller, Kathryn Wolf; Smith, Maureen

2004-01-01

The repeated-reading strategy and optical character recognition were paired to demonstrate a functional relationship between the combined strategies and two factors: the reading rates of students with visual impairments and the students' self-perceptions, or attitudes, toward reading. The results indicated that all five students increased their…

The Compensatory Effectiveness of Optical Character Recognition/Speech Synthesis on Reading Comprehension of Postsecondary Students with Learning Disabilities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Higgins, Eleanor L.; Raskind, Marshall H.

1997-01-01

Thirty-seven college students with learning disabilities were given a reading comprehension task under the following conditions: (1) using an optical character recognition/speech synthesis system; (2) having the text read aloud by a human reader; or (3) reading silently without assistance. Findings indicated that the greater the disability, the…

Development of an optical character recognition pipeline for handwritten form fields from an electronic health record.

PubMed

Rasmussen, Luke V; Peissig, Peggy L; McCarty, Catherine A; Starren, Justin

2012-06-01

Although the penetration of electronic health records is increasing rapidly, much of the historical medical record is only available in handwritten notes and forms, which require labor-intensive, human chart abstraction for some clinical research. The few previous studies on automated extraction of data from these handwritten notes have focused on monolithic, custom-developed recognition systems or third-party systems that require proprietary forms. We present an optical character recognition processing pipeline, which leverages the capabilities of existing third-party optical character recognition engines, and provides the flexibility offered by a modular custom-developed system. The system was configured and run on a selected set of form fields extracted from a corpus of handwritten ophthalmology forms. The processing pipeline allowed multiple configurations to be run, with the optimal configuration consisting of the Nuance and LEADTOOLS engines running in parallel with a positive predictive value of 94.6% and a sensitivity of 13.5%. While limitations exist, preliminary experience from this project yielded insights on the generalizability and applicability of integrating multiple, inexpensive general-purpose third-party optical character recognition engines in a modular pipeline.

Development of an optical character recognition pipeline for handwritten form fields from an electronic health record

PubMed Central

Peissig, Peggy L; McCarty, Catherine A; Starren, Justin

2011-01-01

Background Although the penetration of electronic health records is increasing rapidly, much of the historical medical record is only available in handwritten notes and forms, which require labor-intensive, human chart abstraction for some clinical research. The few previous studies on automated extraction of data from these handwritten notes have focused on monolithic, custom-developed recognition systems or third-party systems that require proprietary forms. Methods We present an optical character recognition processing pipeline, which leverages the capabilities of existing third-party optical character recognition engines, and provides the flexibility offered by a modular custom-developed system. The system was configured and run on a selected set of form fields extracted from a corpus of handwritten ophthalmology forms. Observations The processing pipeline allowed multiple configurations to be run, with the optimal configuration consisting of the Nuance and LEADTOOLS engines running in parallel with a positive predictive value of 94.6% and a sensitivity of 13.5%. Discussion While limitations exist, preliminary experience from this project yielded insights on the generalizability and applicability of integrating multiple, inexpensive general-purpose third-party optical character recognition engines in a modular pipeline. PMID:21890871

Open-Shell-Character-Based Molecular Design Principles: Applications to Nonlinear Optics and Singlet Fission.

PubMed

Nakano, Masayoshi

2017-01-01

Open-shell character, e. g., diradical character, is a quantum chemically well-defined quantity in ground-state molecular systems, which is not an observable but can quantify the degree of effective bond weakness in the chemical sense or electron correlation strength in the physical sense. Because this quantity also correlates to specific excited states, physicochemical properties concerned with those states are expected to strongly correlate to the open-shell character. This feature enables us to open a new path to revealing the mechanism of these properties as well as to realizing new design principles for efficient functional molecular systems. This account explains the open-shell-character-based molecular design principles and introduces their applications to the rational design of highly efficient nonlinear optical and singlet fission molecular systems. © 2017 The Chemical Society of Japan & Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Biochemical and physical factors affecting discoloration characteristics of 19 bovine muscles.

PubMed

McKenna, D R; Mies, P D; Baird, B E; Pfeiffer, K D; Ellebracht, J W; Savell, J W

2005-08-01

Steaks from muscles (n=19 from nine beef carcasses) were evaluated over the course of retail display (0-, 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- or 5-d) for objective measures of discoloration (metmyoglobin, oxymyoglobin, L*-, a*-, and b*-values), reducing ability (metmyoglobin reductase activity (MRA), resistance to induced metmyoglobin formation (RIMF), and nitric oxide metmyoglobin reducing ability (NORA)), oxygen consumption rate (OCR), oxygen penetration depth, myoglobin content, oxidative rancidity, and pH. Muscles were grouped according to objective color measures of discoloration. M. longissimus lumborum, M. longissimus thoracis, M. semitendinosus, and M. tensor fasciae latae were grouped as "high" color stability muscles, M. semimembranosus, M. rectus femoris, and M. vastus lateralis were grouped as "moderate" color stability muscles, M. trapezius, M. gluteus medius, and M. latissimus dorsi were grouped as "intermediate" color stability muscles, M. triceps brachi - long head, M. biceps femoris, M. pectoralis profundus, M. adductor, M. triceps brachi - lateral head, and M. serratus ventralis were grouped as "low" color stability muscles, and M. supraspinatus, M. infraspinatus, and M. psoas major were grouped as "very low" color stability muscles. Generally, muscles of high color stability had high RIMF, nitric oxide reducing ability, and oxygen penetration depth and possessed low OCRs, myoglobin content, and oxidative rancidity. In contrast, muscles of low color stability had high MRA, OCRs, myoglobin content, and oxidative rancidity and low RIMF, NORA, and oxygen penetration depth. Data indicate that discoloration differences between muscles are related to the amount of reducing activity relative to the OCR.

Adjunctive Local Application of Lidocaine during Scleral Buckling under General Anesthesia

PubMed Central

Dehghani, Alireza; Montazeri, Kamran; Masjedi, Amin; Karbasi, Najmeh; Ashrafi, Leila; Saeedian, Behrooz

2011-01-01

Purpose To evaluate the effect of local lidocaine application on the incidence of the oculocardiac reflex (OCR) during scleral buckling (SB) for rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) under general anesthesia. Methods In a randomized clinical trial, eyes with RRD scheduled for SB under general anesthesia were randomized to adjunctive local application of 1 ml lidocaine 2% versus normal saline to the muscles after conjunctival opening. Surgical stimulation was initiated 5 minutes afterwards. Additionally, 100 mg of lidocaine 2% was added to 50 ml of normal saline in the treatment group which was used for irrigation during surgery; control eyes were irrigated with normal saline. The incidence of the OCR, rate of postoperative nausea/vomiting (PONV), total intravenous (IV) analgesic dose, duration of surgery, and period of hospitalization were compared between the study groups. Results Thirty eyes of 30 patients including 22 (73.3%) male and 8 (26.7%) subjects with mean age of 49.4±16.3 years were operated. OCR and PONV occurred less frequently, and total intravenous analgesic dose was significantly lower in the lidocaine group (P < 0.05 for all comparisons). However, no significant difference was noted between the study groups in terms of duration of surgery and period of hospitalization. Conclusion Adjunctive local application of lidocaine during SB under GA for RRD decreases the rate of OCR and PONV, reduces the intravenous analgesic dose, but does not affect the duration of surgery or hospitalization. PMID:22454732

Altered Glycolysis and Mitochondrial Respiration in a Zebrafish Model of Dravet Syndrome.

PubMed

Kumar, Maneesh G; Rowley, Shane; Fulton, Ruth; Dinday, Matthew T; Baraban, Scott C; Patel, Manisha

2016-01-01

Altered metabolism is an important feature of many epileptic syndromes but has not been reported in Dravet syndrome (DS), a catastrophic childhood epilepsy associated with mutations in a voltage-activated sodium channel, Nav1.1 (SCN1A). To address this, we developed novel methodology to assess real-time changes in bioenergetics in zebrafish larvae between 4 and 6 d postfertilization (dpf). Baseline and 4-aminopyridine (4-AP) stimulated glycolytic flux and mitochondrial respiration were simultaneously assessed using a Seahorse Biosciences extracellular flux analyzer. Scn1Lab mutant zebrafish showed a decrease in baseline glycolytic rate and oxygen consumption rate (OCR) compared to controls. A ketogenic diet formulation rescued mutant zebrafish metabolism to control levels. Increasing neuronal excitability with 4-AP resulted in an immediate increase in glycolytic rates in wild-type zebrafish, whereas mitochondrial OCR increased slightly and quickly recovered to baseline values. In contrast, scn1Lab mutant zebrafish showed a significantly slower and exaggerated increase of both glycolytic rates and OCR after 4-AP. The underlying mechanism of decreased baseline OCR in scn1Lab mutants was not because of altered mitochondrial DNA content or dysfunction of enzymes in the electron transport chain or tricarboxylic acid cycle. Examination of glucose metabolism using a PCR array identified five glycolytic genes that were downregulated in scn1Lab mutant zebrafish. Our findings in scn1Lab mutant zebrafish suggest that glucose and mitochondrial hypometabolism contribute to the pathophysiology of DS.

Charactering lidar optical subsystem using four quadrants method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tian, Xiaomin; Liu, Dong; Xu, Jiwei; Wang, Zhenzhu; Wang, Bangxin; Wu, Decheng; Zhong, Zhiqing; Xie, Chenbo; Wang, Yingjian

2018-02-01

Lidar is a kind of active optical remote sensing instruments , can be applied to sound atmosphere with a high spatial and temporal resolution. Many parameter of atmosphere can be get by using different inverse algorithm with lidar backscatter signal. The basic setup of a lidar consist of a transmitter and a receiver. To make sure the quality of lidar signal data, the lidar must be calibrated before being used to measure the atmospheric variables. It is really significant to character and analyze lidar optical subsystem because a well equiped lidar optical subsystem contributes to high quality lidar signal data. we pay close attention to telecover test to character and analyze lidar optical subsystem.The telecover test is called four quadrants method consisting in dividing the telescope aperture in four quarants. when a lidar is well configured with lidar optical subsystem, the normalized signal from four qudrants will agree with each other on some level. Testing our WARL-II lidar by four quadrants method ,we find the signals of the four basically consistent with each other both in near range and in far range. But in detail, the signals in near range have some slight distinctions resulting from overlap function, some signals distinctions are induced by atmospheric instability.

Biallelic mutations in the ferredoxin reductase gene cause novel mitochondriopathy with optic atrophy

PubMed Central

Peng, Yanyan; Shinde, Deepali N; Valencia, C Alexander; Mo, Jun-Song; Rosenfeld, Jill; Truitt Cho, Megan; Chamberlin, Adam; Li, Zhuo; Liu, Jie; Gui, Baoheng; Brockhage, Rachel; Basinger, Alice; Alvarez-Leon, Brenda; Heydemann, Peter; Magoulas, Pilar L; Lewis, Andrea M; Scaglia, Fernando; Gril, Solange; Chong, Shuk Ching; Bower, Matthew; Monaghan, Kristin G; Willaert, Rebecca; Plona, Maria-Renee; Dineen, Rich; Milan, Francisca; Hoganson, George; Helbig, Katherine L; Keller-Ramey, Jennifer; Harris, Belinda; Anderson, Laura C; Green, Torrian; Sukoff Rizzo, Stacey J; Kaylor, Julie; Chen, Jiani; Guan, Min-Xin; Sellars, Elizabeth; Sparagana, Steven P; Gibson, James B; Reinholdt, Laura G; Tang, Sha; Huang, Taosheng

2017-01-01

Abstract Iron–sulfur (Fe-S) clusters are ubiquitous cofactors essential to various cellular processes, including mitochondrial respiration, DNA repair, and iron homeostasis. A steadily increasing number of disorders are being associated with disrupted biogenesis of Fe–S clusters. Here, we conducted whole-exome sequencing of patients with optic atrophy and other neurological signs of mitochondriopathy and identified 17 individuals from 13 unrelated families with recessive mutations in FDXR, encoding the mitochondrial membrane-associated flavoprotein ferrodoxin reductase required for electron transport from NADPH to cytochrome P450. In vitro enzymatic assays in patient fibroblast cells showed deficient ferredoxin NADP reductase activity and mitochondrial dysfunction evidenced by low oxygen consumption rates (OCRs), complex activities, ATP production and increased reactive oxygen species (ROS). Such defects were rescued by overexpression of wild-type FDXR. Moreover, we found that mice carrying a spontaneous mutation allelic to the most common mutation found in patients displayed progressive gait abnormalities and vision loss, in addition to biochemical defects consistent with the major clinical features of the disease. Taken together, these data provide the first demonstration that germline, hypomorphic mutations in FDXR cause a novel mitochondriopathy and optic atrophy in humans. PMID:29040572

Biallelic mutations in the ferredoxin reductase gene cause novel mitochondriopathy with optic atrophy.

PubMed

Peng, Yanyan; Shinde, Deepali N; Valencia, C Alexander; Mo, Jun-Song; Rosenfeld, Jill; Truitt Cho, Megan; Chamberlin, Adam; Li, Zhuo; Liu, Jie; Gui, Baoheng; Brockhage, Rachel; Basinger, Alice; Alvarez-Leon, Brenda; Heydemann, Peter; Magoulas, Pilar L; Lewis, Andrea M; Scaglia, Fernando; Gril, Solange; Chong, Shuk Ching; Bower, Matthew; Monaghan, Kristin G; Willaert, Rebecca; Plona, Maria-Renee; Dineen, Rich; Milan, Francisca; Hoganson, George; Powis, Zoe; Helbig, Katherine L; Keller-Ramey, Jennifer; Harris, Belinda; Anderson, Laura C; Green, Torrian; Sukoff Rizzo, Stacey J; Kaylor, Julie; Chen, Jiani; Guan, Min-Xin; Sellars, Elizabeth; Sparagana, Steven P; Gibson, James B; Reinholdt, Laura G; Tang, Sha; Huang, Taosheng

2017-12-15

Iron-sulfur (Fe-S) clusters are ubiquitous cofactors essential to various cellular processes, including mitochondrial respiration, DNA repair, and iron homeostasis. A steadily increasing number of disorders are being associated with disrupted biogenesis of Fe-S clusters. Here, we conducted whole-exome sequencing of patients with optic atrophy and other neurological signs of mitochondriopathy and identified 17 individuals from 13 unrelated families with recessive mutations in FDXR, encoding the mitochondrial membrane-associated flavoprotein ferrodoxin reductase required for electron transport from NADPH to cytochrome P450. In vitro enzymatic assays in patient fibroblast cells showed deficient ferredoxin NADP reductase activity and mitochondrial dysfunction evidenced by low oxygen consumption rates (OCRs), complex activities, ATP production and increased reactive oxygen species (ROS). Such defects were rescued by overexpression of wild-type FDXR. Moreover, we found that mice carrying a spontaneous mutation allelic to the most common mutation found in patients displayed progressive gait abnormalities and vision loss, in addition to biochemical defects consistent with the major clinical features of the disease. Taken together, these data provide the first demonstration that germline, hypomorphic mutations in FDXR cause a novel mitochondriopathy and optic atrophy in humans. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.

A Report on the Investigation of the Civil Rights Enforcement Activities of the Office for Civil Rights. U.S. Department of Education. By the Majority Staff of the Committee on Education and Labor. U.S. House of Representatives, 100th Congress, Second Session.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Congress of the U.S., Washington, DC. House Committee on Education and Labor.

Since 1981, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the United States Department of Education has been accused of failing to enforce the civil rights laws according to its mandate. OCR is responsible for enforcing Federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, handicap, or age in educational programs or activities…

PIMS-Universal Payload Information Management

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Elmore, Ralph; McNair, Ann R. (Technical Monitor)

2002-01-01

As the overall manager and integrator of International Space Station (ISS) science payloads and experiments, the Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) at Marshall Space Flight Center had a critical need to provide an information management system for exchange and management of ISS payload files as well as to coordinate ISS payload related operational changes. The POIC's information management system has a fundamental requirement to provide secure operational access not only to users physically located at the POIC, but also to provide collaborative access to remote experimenters and International Partners. The Payload Information Management System (PIMS) is a ground based electronic document configuration management and workflow system that was built to service that need. Functionally, PIMS provides the following document management related capabilities: 1. File access control, storage and retrieval from a central repository vault. 2. Collect supplemental data about files in the vault. 3. File exchange with a PMS GUI client, or any FTP connection. 4. Files placement into an FTP accessible dropbox for pickup by interfacing facilities, included files transmitted for spacecraft uplink. 5. Transmission of email messages to users notifying them of new version availability. 6. Polling of intermediate facility dropboxes for files that will automatically be processed by PIMS. 7. Provide an API that allows other POIC applications to access PIMS information. Functionally, PIMS provides the following Change Request processing capabilities: 1. Ability to create, view, manipulate, and query information about Operations Change Requests (OCRs). 2. Provides an adaptable workflow approval of OCRs with routing through developers, facility leads, POIC leads, reviewers, and implementers. Email messages can be sent to users either involving them in the workflow process or simply notifying them of OCR approval progress. All PIMS document management and OCR workflow controls are coordinated through and routed to individual user's "to do" list tasks. A user is given a task when it is their turn to perform some action relating to the approval of the Document or OCR. The user's available actions are restricted to only functions available for the assigned task. Certain actions, such as review or action implementation by non-PIMS users, can also be coordinated through automated emails.

Evidence for a retinal velocity memory underlying the direction of anticipatory smooth pursuit eye movements.

PubMed

Murdison, T Scott; Paré-Bingley, Chanel A; Blohm, Gunnar

2013-08-01

To compute spatially correct smooth pursuit eye movements, the brain uses both retinal motion and extraretinal signals about the eyes and head in space (Blohm and Lefèvre 2010). However, when smooth eye movements rely solely on memorized target velocity, such as during anticipatory pursuit, it is unknown if this velocity memory also accounts for extraretinal information, such as head roll and ocular torsion. To answer this question, we used a novel behavioral updating paradigm in which participants pursued a repetitive, spatially constant fixation-gap-ramp stimulus in series of five trials. During the first four trials, participants' heads were rolled toward one shoulder, inducing ocular counterroll (OCR). With each repetition, participants increased their anticipatory pursuit gain, indicating a robust encoding of velocity memory. On the fifth trial, they rolled their heads to the opposite shoulder before pursuit, also inducing changes in ocular torsion. Consequently, for spatially accurate anticipatory pursuit, the velocity memory had to be updated across changes in head roll and ocular torsion. We tested how the velocity memory accounted for head roll and OCR by observing the effects of changes to these signals on anticipatory trajectories of the memory decoding (fifth) trials. We found that anticipatory pursuit was updated for changes in head roll; however, we observed no evidence of compensation for OCR, representing the absence of ocular torsion signals within the velocity memory. This indicated that the directional component of the memory must be coded retinally and updated to account for changes in head roll, but not OCR.

A pilot study of the feasibility of an Internet-based electronic Outpatient Cardiac Rehabilitation (eOCR) program in rural primary care.

PubMed

Clark, Robyn A; Tideman, Phillip; Tirimacco, Rosy; Wanguhu, Ken; Poulsen, Vanessa; Simpson, Paul; Duncan, Mitch J; Van Itallie, Anetta; Corry, Kelly; Vandelanotte, Corneel; Mummery, W Kerry

2013-05-01

Interventions that facilitate access to cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention programs are in demand. This pilot study used a mixed methods design to evaluate the feasibility of an Internet-based, electronic Outpatient Cardiac Rehabilitation (eOCR). Patients who had suffered a cardiac event and their case managers were recruited from rural primary practices. Feasibility was evaluated in terms of the number of patients enrolled and patient and case manager engagement with the eOCR website. Four rural general practices, 16 health professionals (cardiologists, general practitioners, nurses and allied health) and 24 patients participated in the project and 11 (46%) completed the program. Utilisation of the website during the 105 day evaluation period by participating health professionals was moderate to low (mean of 8.25 logins, range 0-28 logins). The mean login rate for patients was 16 (range 1-77 logins), mean time from first login to last (days using the website) was 51 (range 1-105 days). Each patient monitored at least five risk factors and read at least one of the secondary prevention articles. There was low utilisation of other tools such as weekly workbooks and discussion boards. It was important to evaluate how an eOCR website would be used within an existing healthcare setting. These results will help to guide the implementation of future internet based cardiac rehabilitation programs considering barriers such as access and appropriate target groups of participants. Crown Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A novel method for multiparameter physiological phenotype characterization at the single-cell level

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kelbauskas, Laimonas; Ashili, Shashanka; Houkal, Jeff; Smith, Dean; Mohammadreza, Aida; Lee, Kristen; Kumar, Ashok; Anis, Yasser; Paulson, Tom; Youngbull, Cody; Tian, Yanqing; Johnson, Roger; Holl, Mark; Meldrum, Deirdre

2011-02-01

Non-genetic intercellular heterogeneity has been increasingly recognized as one of the key factors in a variety of core cellular processes including proliferation, stimulus response, carcinogenesis and drug resistance. Many diseases, including cancer, originate in a single or a few cells. Early detection and characterization of these abnormal cells can provide new insights into the pathogenesis and serve as a tool for better disease diagnosis and treatment. We report on a novel technology for multiparameter physiological phenotype characterization at the single-cell level. It is based on real-time measurements of concentrations of several metabolites by means of extracellular optical sensors in microchambers of sub-nL volume containing single cells. In its current configuration, the measurement platform features the capability to detect oxygen consumption rate and pH changes under normoxic and hypoxic conditions at the single-cell level. We have conceived, designed and developed a semi-automated method for single-cell manipulation and loading into microwells utilizing custom, high-precision fluid handling at the nanoliter scale. We present the results of a series of measurements of oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) of single human metaplastic esophageal epithelial cells. In addition, to assess the effects of cell-to-cell interactions, we have measured OCRs of two and three cells placed in a single well. The major advantages of the approach are a) multiplexed characterization of cell phenotype at the single-cell level, b) minimal invasiveness due to the distant positioning of sensors, and c) flexibility in terms of accommodating measurements of other metabolites or biomolecules of interest.

Computerized literature reference system: use of an optical scanner and optical character recognition software.

PubMed

Lossef, S V; Schwartz, L H

1990-09-01

A computerized reference system for radiology journal articles was developed by using an IBM-compatible personal computer with a hand-held optical scanner and optical character recognition software. This allows direct entry of scanned text from printed material into word processing or data-base files. Additionally, line diagrams and photographs of radiographs can be incorporated into these files. A text search and retrieval software program enables rapid searching for keywords in scanned documents. The hand scanner and software programs are commercially available, relatively inexpensive, and easily used. This permits construction of a personalized radiology literature file of readily accessible text and images requiring minimal typing or keystroke entry.

De Novo Design of Protein Mimics of B-DNA

PubMed Central

Yüksel, Deniz; Bianco, Piero R.; Kumar, Krishna

2015-01-01

Structural mimicry of DNA is utilized in nature as a strategy to evade molecular defences mounted by host organisms. One such example is the protein Ocr – the first translation product to be expressed as the bacteriophage T7 infects E. coli. The structure of Ocr reveals an intricate and deliberate arrangement of negative charges that endows it with the ability to mimic ∼24 base pair stretches of B–DNA. This uncanny resemblance to DNA enables Ocr to compete in binding the type I restriction modification (R/M) system, and neutralizes the threat of hydrolytic cleavage of viral genomic material. Here, we report the de novo design and biophysical characterization of DNA mimicking peptides, and describe the inhibitory action of the designed helical bundles on a type I R/M enzyme, EcoR124I. This work validates the use of charge patterning as a design principle for creation of protein mimics of DNA, and serves as a starting point for development of therapeutic peptide inhibitors against human pathogens that employ molecular camouflage as part of their invasion stratagem. PMID:26568416

Goal-oriented rectification of camera-based document images.

PubMed

Stamatopoulos, Nikolaos; Gatos, Basilis; Pratikakis, Ioannis; Perantonis, Stavros J

2011-04-01

Document digitization with either flatbed scanners or camera-based systems results in document images which often suffer from warping and perspective distortions that deteriorate the performance of current OCR approaches. In this paper, we present a goal-oriented rectification methodology to compensate for undesirable document image distortions aiming to improve the OCR result. Our approach relies upon a coarse-to-fine strategy. First, a coarse rectification is accomplished with the aid of a computationally low cost transformation which addresses the projection of a curved surface to a 2-D rectangular area. The projection of the curved surface on the plane is guided only by the textual content's appearance in the document image while incorporating a transformation which does not depend on specific model primitives or camera setup parameters. Second, pose normalization is applied on the word level aiming to restore all the local distortions of the document image. Experimental results on various document images with a variety of distortions demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed rectification methodology using a consistent evaluation methodology that encounters OCR accuracy and a newly introduced measure using a semi-automatic procedure.

Inhibition of MCU forces extramitochondrial adaptations governing physiological and pathological stress responses in heart

PubMed Central

Rasmussen, Tyler P.; Wu, Yuejin; Joiner, Mei-ling A.; Koval, Olha M.; Wilson, Nicholas R.; Luczak, Elizabeth D.; Wang, Qinchuan; Chen, Biyi; Gao, Zhan; Zhu, Zhiyong; Wagner, Brett A.; Soto, Jamie; McCormick, Michael L.; Kutschke, William; Weiss, Robert M.; Yu, Liping; Boudreau, Ryan L.; Abel, E. Dale; Zhan, Fenghuang; Spitz, Douglas R.; Buettner, Garry R.; Song, Long-Sheng; Zingman, Leonid V.; Anderson, Mark E.

2015-01-01

Myocardial mitochondrial Ca2+ entry enables physiological stress responses but in excess promotes injury and death. However, tissue-specific in vivo systems for testing the role of mitochondrial Ca2+ are lacking. We developed a mouse model with myocardial delimited transgenic expression of a dominant negative (DN) form of the mitochondrial Ca2+ uniporter (MCU). DN-MCU mice lack MCU-mediated mitochondrial Ca2+ entry in myocardium, but, surprisingly, isolated perfused hearts exhibited higher O2 consumption rates (OCR) and impaired pacing induced mechanical performance compared with wild-type (WT) littermate controls. In contrast, OCR in DN-MCU–permeabilized myocardial fibers or isolated mitochondria in low Ca2+ were not increased compared with WT, suggesting that DN-MCU expression increased OCR by enhanced energetic demands related to extramitochondrial Ca2+ homeostasis. Consistent with this, we found that DN-MCU ventricular cardiomyocytes exhibited elevated cytoplasmic [Ca2+] that was partially reversed by ATP dialysis, suggesting that metabolic defects arising from loss of MCU function impaired physiological intracellular Ca2+ homeostasis. Mitochondrial Ca2+ overload is thought to dissipate the inner mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm) and enhance formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as a consequence of ischemia-reperfusion injury. Our data show that DN-MCU hearts had preserved ΔΨm and reduced ROS during ischemia reperfusion but were not protected from myocardial death compared with WT. Taken together, our findings show that chronic myocardial MCU inhibition leads to previously unanticipated compensatory changes that affect cytoplasmic Ca2+ homeostasis, reprogram transcription, increase OCR, reduce performance, and prevent anticipated therapeutic responses to ischemia-reperfusion injury. PMID:26153425

Thickness and marking quality of different occlusal contact registration strips

PubMed Central

TOLEDO, Maria Fernanda de Souza Mauá Serapião; JÓIAS, Renata Pilli; MARQUES-IASI, Yves Santini; NEVES, Ana Christina Claro; RODE, Sigmar de Mello

2014-01-01

Objectives Evaluate the thickness and the marking quality of different occlusal contact registration strips (OCRS) and a possible correlation between them. Material and Methods The following OCRS were selected: Accufilm II, BK20, BK21, BK22, BK23, BK28, and BK31. The thickness was measured in three points of the OCRS with an electronic measuring device (TESA), and the mean was calculated. To produce the marks on the strips, composite resin specimens were adapted to a universal testing machine (Versat 2000) with 40 kgf load cell at a speed of 1.0 mm/min. The mark images were photographed with a stereoscopic microscope (Stemi SV11) and processed and analyzed by the 550-Leica Qwin® analyzer. Results Values (μm) found in the 1st and 2nd thickness measurements were: Accufilm II - 16.4 and 14.2; BK20 - 10.0 and 8.1; BK21 - 9.5 and 8.0; BK22 - 9.7 and 8.7; BK23 - 9.8 and 7.9; BK28 - 12.8 and 10.0; and BK31 - 8.4 and 8.0, respectively. The mean (mm2) values found in the mark areas were: Accufilm II - 0.078; BK20 - 0.035; BK21 - 0.045; BK22 - 0.012; BK23 - 0.022; BK28 - 0.024; and BK31 - 0.024. The results were submitted to the Kruskal-Wallis (p<0.05) and Pearson’s correlation tests. Conclusions Only in the 2nd measurement, the OCRS thickness observed was similar to the value indicated by the manufacturers; the Accufilm II and the BK28 strips showed the better marks; and no correlation was found between the thickness and the marking area. PMID:25591020

Generation method of synthetic training data for mobile OCR system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chernyshova, Yulia S.; Gayer, Alexander V.; Sheshkus, Alexander V.

2018-04-01

This paper addresses one of the fundamental problems of machine learning - training data acquiring. Obtaining enough natural training data is rather difficult and expensive. In last years usage of synthetic images has become more beneficial as it allows to save human time and also to provide a huge number of images which otherwise would be difficult to obtain. However, for successful learning on artificial dataset one should try to reduce the gap between natural and synthetic data distributions. In this paper we describe an algorithm which allows to create artificial training datasets for OCR systems using russian passport as a case study.

Imaging Systems: What, When, How.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lunin, Lois F.; And Others

1992-01-01

The three articles in this special section on document image files discuss intelligent character recognition, including comparison with optical character recognition; selection of displays for document image processing, focusing on paperlike displays; and imaging hardware, software, and vendors, including guidelines for system selection. (MES)

Occupational cognitive requirements and late-life cognitive aging.

PubMed

Pool, Lindsay R; Weuve, Jennifer; Wilson, Robert S; Bültmann, Ute; Evans, Denis A; Mendes de Leon, Carlos F

2016-04-12

To examine whether occupational cognitive requirements, as a marker of adulthood cognitive activity, are associated with late-life cognition and cognitive decline. Main lifetime occupation information for 7,637 participants aged >65 years of the Chicago Health and Aging Project (CHAP) was linked with standardized data on worker attributes and job characteristics from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). Ratings of cognitive processes required in 10 work-related tasks were used to create a summary measure of occupational cognitive requirements (possible range 0-7). Multivariable-adjusted linear mixed models were used to estimate the association of occupational cognitive requirements score (OCRS) with cognitive function and rate of cognitive decline. Higher OCRS corresponded to significantly better late-life cognitive performance at baseline in 1993 (p < 0.001) and to slower decline in global cognitive function over time (p = 0.004). Within a genotyped subsample (n = 4,104), the associations of OCRS with rate of cognitive decline did not differ significantly by APOE ε4 carriership (p = 0.11). Findings suggest that occupational cognitive requirements are associated with better cognition and a slower rate of cognitive decline in older age. Adulthood cognitive activity may contribute to cognitive reserve in late life. © 2016 American Academy of Neurology.

Influence of cell detachment on the respiration rate of tumor and endothelial cells.

PubMed

Danhier, Pierre; Copetti, Tamara; De Preter, Géraldine; Leveque, Philippe; Feron, Olivier; Jordan, Bénédicte F; Sonveaux, Pierre; Gallez, Bernard

2013-01-01

Cell detachment is a procedure routinely performed in cell culture and a necessary step in many biochemical assays including the determination of oxygen consumption rates (OCR) in vitro. In vivo, cell detachment has been shown to exert profound metabolic influences notably in cancer but also in other pathologies, such as retinal detachment for example. In the present study, we developed and validated a new technique combining electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) oximetry and the use of cytodex 1 and collagen-coated cytodex 3 dextran microbeads, which allowed the unprecedented comparison of the OCR of adherent and detached cells with high sensitivity. Hence, we demonstrated that both B16F10 melanoma cells and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) experience strong OCR decrease upon trypsin or collagenase treatments. The reduction of cell oxygen consumption was more pronounced with a trypsin compared to a collagenase treatment. Cells remaining in suspension also encounter a marked intracellular ATP depletion and an increase in the lactate production/glucose uptake ratio. These findings highlight the important influence exerted by cell adhesion/detachment on cell respiration, which can be probed with the unprecedented experimental assay that was developed and validated in this study.

A procedure for the measurement of Oxygen Consumption Rates (OCRs) in red wines and some observations about the influence of wine initial chemical composition.

PubMed

Marrufo-Curtido, Almudena; Carrascón, Vanesa; Bueno, Mónica; Ferreira, Vicente; Escudero, Ana

2018-05-15

The rates at which wine consumes oxygen are important technological parameters for whose measurement there are not accepted procedures. In this work, volumes of 8 wines are contacted with controlled volumes of air in air-tight tubes containing oxygen-sensors and are further agitated at 25 °C until O 2 consumption is complete. Three exposure levels of O 2 were used: low (10 mg/L) and medium or high (18 or 32 mg/L plus the required amount to oxidize all wine SO 2 ). In each oxygen level, 2-4 independent segments following pseudo-first order kinetics were identified, plus an initial segment at which wine consumed O 2 very fast. Overall, multivariate data techniques identify six different Oxygen-Consumption-Rates (OCRs) as required to completely define wine O 2 consumption. Except the last one, all could be modeled from the wine initial chemical composition. Total acetaldehyde, Mn, Cu/Fe, blue and red pigments and gallic acid seem to be essential to determine these OCRs. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Influence of Cell Detachment on the Respiration Rate of Tumor and Endothelial Cells

PubMed Central

Danhier, Pierre; Copetti, Tamara; De Preter, Géraldine; Leveque, Philippe; Feron, Olivier; Jordan, Bénédicte F.; Sonveaux, Pierre; Gallez, Bernard

2013-01-01

Cell detachment is a procedure routinely performed in cell culture and a necessary step in many biochemical assays including the determination of oxygen consumption rates (OCR) in vitro. In vivo, cell detachment has been shown to exert profound metabolic influences notably in cancer but also in other pathologies, such as retinal detachment for example. In the present study, we developed and validated a new technique combining electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) oximetry and the use of cytodex 1 and collagen-coated cytodex 3 dextran microbeads, which allowed the unprecedented comparison of the OCR of adherent and detached cells with high sensitivity. Hence, we demonstrated that both B16F10 melanoma cells and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) experience strong OCR decrease upon trypsin or collagenase treatments. The reduction of cell oxygen consumption was more pronounced with a trypsin compared to a collagenase treatment. Cells remaining in suspension also encounter a marked intracellular ATP depletion and an increase in the lactate production/glucose uptake ratio. These findings highlight the important influence exerted by cell adhesion/detachment on cell respiration, which can be probed with the unprecedented experimental assay that was developed and validated in this study. PMID:23382841

The Role of Oxygen in Avascular Tumor Growth

PubMed Central

Grimes, David Robert; Kannan, Pavitra; McIntyre, Alan; Kavanagh, Anthony; Siddiky, Abul; Wigfield, Simon; Harris, Adrian; Partridge, Mike

2016-01-01

The oxygen status of a tumor has significant clinical implications for treatment prognosis, with well-oxygenated subvolumes responding markedly better to radiotherapy than poorly supplied regions. Oxygen is essential for tumor growth, yet estimation of local oxygen distribution can be difficult to ascertain in situ, due to chaotic patterns of vasculature. It is possible to avoid this confounding influence by using avascular tumor models, such as tumor spheroids, a much better approximation of realistic tumor dynamics than monolayers, where oxygen supply can be described by diffusion alone. Similar to in situ tumours, spheroids exhibit an approximately sigmoidal growth curve, often approximated and fitted by logistic and Gompertzian sigmoid functions. These describe the basic rate of growth well, but do not offer an explicitly mechanistic explanation. This work examines the oxygen dynamics of spheroids and demonstrates that this growth can be derived mechanistically with cellular doubling time and oxygen consumption rate (OCR) being key parameters. The model is fitted to growth curves for a range of cell lines and derived values of OCR are validated using clinical measurement. Finally, we illustrate how changes in OCR due to gemcitabine treatment can be directly inferred using this model. PMID:27088720

Acoustic and optical borehole-wall imaging for fractured-rock aquifer studies

USGS Publications Warehouse

Williams, J.H.; Johnson, C.D.

2004-01-01

Imaging with acoustic and optical televiewers results in continuous and oriented 360?? views of the borehole wall from which the character, relation, and orientation of lithologic and structural planar features can be defined for studies of fractured-rock aquifers. Fractures are more clearly defined under a wider range of conditions on acoustic images than on optical images including dark-colored rocks, cloudy borehole water, and coated borehole walls. However, optical images allow for the direct viewing of the character of and relation between lithology, fractures, foliation, and bedding. The most powerful approach is the combined application of acoustic and optical imaging with integrated interpretation. Imaging of the borehole wall provides information useful for the collection and interpretation of flowmeter and other geophysical logs, core samples, and hydraulic and water-quality data from packer testing and monitoring. ?? 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

BanglaLekha-Isolated: A multi-purpose comprehensive dataset of Handwritten Bangla Isolated characters.

PubMed

Biswas, Mithun; Islam, Rafiqul; Shom, Gautam Kumar; Shopon, Md; Mohammed, Nabeel; Momen, Sifat; Abedin, Anowarul

2017-06-01

BanglaLekha-Isolated, a Bangla handwritten isolated character dataset is presented in this article. This dataset contains 84 different characters comprising of 50 Bangla basic characters, 10 Bangla numerals and 24 selected compound characters. 2000 handwriting samples for each of the 84 characters were collected, digitized and pre-processed. After discarding mistakes and scribbles, 1,66,105 handwritten character images were included in the final dataset. The dataset also includes labels indicating the age and the gender of the subjects from whom the samples were collected. This dataset could be used not only for optical handwriting recognition research but also to explore the influence of gender and age on handwriting. The dataset is publicly available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/hf6sf8zrkc/2.

Notes on Experiments.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Physics Education, 1986

1986-01-01

Describes (1) computer graphics for the coefficient of restitution; (2) an experiment on the optical processing of images; and (3) a simple, coherent optical system for character recognition using Polaroid (Type 665) negative film. (JN)

RIMPAC 08: Naval Oceanographic Office glider operations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mahoney, Kevin L.; Grembowicz, Ken; Bricker, Bruce; Crossland, Steve; Bryant, Danielle; Torres, Marc; Giddings, Tom

2009-05-01

The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) Glider Operations Center (GOC) supported its first joint-mission exercise during Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 08, a multi-national naval exercise conducted during July 2008 near the Hawaiian Islands. NAVOCEANO personnel deployed four Seagliders from USNS SUMNER for Anti-submarine Warfare (ASW) operations and four Slocum gliders for Mine Warfare (MIW) operations. Each Seaglider was equipped with a Sea-Bird Electronics (SBE) 41cp CTD and Wet Labs, Inc. bb2fl ECO-puck optical sensor. The instrumentation suite on the Slocum gliders varied, but each Slocum glider had an SBE 41cp CTD combined with one of the following optical sensors: a Wet Labs, Inc. AUVb scattering sensor, a Wet Labs, Inc. bb3slo ECO-puck backscattering sensor, or a Satlantic, Inc. OCR radiometer. Using Iridium communications, the GOC had command and control of all eight gliders, with Department of Defense (DoD) personnel and DoD contractors serving as glider pilots. Raw glider data were transmitted each time a glider surfaced, and the subsequent data flow included processing, quality-control procedures, and the generation of operational and tactical products. The raw glider data were also sent to the Naval Research Laboratory at Stennis Space Center (NRLSSC) for fusion with satellite data and modeled data (currents, tides, etc.) to create optical forecasting, optical volume, and electro-optical identification (EOID) performance surface products. The glider-based products were delivered to the ASW and MIW Reach Back Cells for incorporation into METOC products and for dissemination to the Fleet. Based on the metrics presented in this paper, the inaugural joint-mission operation was a success.

The DNA-mimic antirestriction proteins ArdA ColIB-P9, Arn T4, and Ocr T7 as activators of H-NS-dependent gene transcription.

PubMed

Melkina, Olga E; Goryanin, Ignatiy I; Zavilgelsky, Gennadii B

2016-11-01

The antirestriction proteins ArdA ColIb-P9, Arn T4 and Ocr T7 specifically inhibit type I and type IV restriction enzymes and belong to the family of DNA-mimic proteins because their three-dimensional structure is similar to the double-helical B-form DNA. It is proposed that the DNA-mimic proteins are able to bind nucleoid protein H-NS and alleviate H-NS-silencing of the transcription of bacterial genes. Escherichia coli lux biosensors were constructed by inserting H-NS-dependent promoters into a vector, thereby placing each fragment upstream of the promoterless Photorhabdus luminescens luxCDABE operon. It was demonstrated that the DNA-mimic proteins ArdA, Arn and Ocr activate the transcription of H-NS-dependent promoters of the lux operon of marine luminescent bacteria (mesophilic Aliivibrio fischeri and psychrophilic Aliivibrio logei), and the dps gene from E. coli. It was also demonstrated that the ArdA antirestriction protein, the genes of which are located on transmissive plasmids ColIb-P9, R64, PK101, decreases levels of H-NS silencing of the PluxC promoter during conjugation in the recipient bacteria. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Gravity-driven postseismic deformation following the Mw 6.3 2009 L’Aquila (Italy) earthquake

PubMed Central

Albano, Matteo; Barba, Salvatore; Saroli, Michele; Moro, Marco; Malvarosa, Fabio; Costantini, Mario; Bignami, Christian; Stramondo, Salvatore

2015-01-01

The present work focuses on the postseismic deformation observed in the region of L’Aquila (central Italy) following the Mw 6.3 earthquake that occurred on April 6, 2009. A new, 16-month-long dataset of COSMO-SkyMed SAR images was analysed using the Persistent Scatterer Pairs interferometric technique. The analysis revealed the existence of postseismic ground subsidence in the mountainous rocky area of Mt Ocre ridge, contiguous to the sedimentary plain that experienced coseismic subsidence. The postseismic subsidence was characterized by displacements of 10 to 35 mm along the SAR line of sight. In the Mt Ocre ridge, widespread morphological elements associated with gravitational spreading have been previously mapped. We tested the hypothesis that the postseismic subsidence of the Mt Ocre ridge compensates the loss of equilibrium induced by the nearby coseismic subsidence. Therefore, we simulated the coseismic and postseismic displacement fields via the finite element method. We included the gravitational load and fault slip and accounted for the geometrical and rheological characteristics of the area. We found that the elastoplastic behaviour of the material under gravitational loading best explains the observed postseismic displacement. These findings emphasize the role of gravity in the postseismic processes at the fault scale. PMID:26553120

Investigation of Galactic open cluster remnants: the case of NGC 7193

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

de Souza Angelo, Mateus; Francisco Coelho dos Santos, João, Jr.; Barbosa Corradi, Wagner José; Ferreira de Souza Maia, Francisco; Piatti, Andrés Eduardo

2017-01-01

Galactic open clusters (OCs) that survive the early gas-expulsion phase are gradually destroyed over time by the action of disruptive dynamical processes. Their final evolutionary stages are characterized by a poorly populated concentration of stars called an open cluster remnant (OCR). This study is devoted to assessing the real physical nature of the OCR candidate NGC 7193. GMOS/Gemini spectroscopy of 53 stars in the inner target region were obtained to derive radial velocities and atmospheric parameters. We also employed photometric and proper motion data. The analysis method consists of the following steps: (i) analysis of the statistical resemblance between the cluster and a set of field samples with respect to the sequences defined in color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs); (ii) a 5-dimensional iterative exclusion routine was employed to identify outliers from kinematical and positional data; (iii) isochrone fitting to the Ks×(J-Ks) CMD of the remaining stars and the dispersion of spectral types along empirical sequences in the (J-H)×(H-Ks) diagram were checked. A group of stars was identified for which the mean heliocentric distance is compatible with that obtained via isochrone fitting and whose metallicities are compatible with each other. Fifteen of the member stars observed spectroscopically were identified together with another 19 probable members. Our results indicate that NGC 7193 is a genuine OCR, of a once very populous OC, for which the following parameters were derived: d = 501±46 pc, t=2.5+/-1.2 Gyr, < [Fe/H] >=-0.17+/-0.23 and E(B-V)=0.05+/-0.05. Its luminosity and mass functions show depletion of low mass stars, confirming the OCR is in a dynamically evolved state. Based on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the AURA under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: NSF (United States), STFC (United Kingdom), NRC (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), ARC (Australia), CNPq (Brazil) and CONICET (Argentina).

Method for physiologic phenotype characterization at the single-cell level in non-interacting and interacting cells.

PubMed

Kelbauskas, Laimonas; Ashili, Shashanka P; Houkal, Jeff; Smith, Dean; Mohammadreza, Aida; Lee, Kristen B; Forrester, Jessica; Kumar, Ashok; Anis, Yasser H; Paulson, Thomas G; Youngbull, Cody A; Tian, Yanqing; Holl, Mark R; Johnson, Roger H; Meldrum, Deirdre R

2012-03-01

Intercellular heterogeneity is a key factor in a variety of core cellular processes including proliferation, stimulus response, carcinogenesis, and drug resistance. However, cell-to-cell variability studies at the single-cell level have been hampered by the lack of enabling experimental techniques. We present a measurement platform that features the capability to quantify oxygen consumption rates of individual, non-interacting and interacting cells under normoxic and hypoxic conditions. It is based on real-time concentration measurements of metabolites of interest by means of extracellular optical sensors in cell-isolating microwells of subnanoliter volume. We present the results of a series of measurements of oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) of individual non-interacting and interacting human epithelial cells. We measured the effects of cell-to-cell interactions by using the system's capability to isolate two and three cells in a single well. The major advantages of the approach are: 1. ratiometric, intensity-based characterization of the metabolic phenotype at the single-cell level, 2. minimal invasiveness due to the distant positioning of sensors, and 3. ability to study the effects of cell-cell interactions on cellular respiration rates. © 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

A method of neighbor classes based SVM classification for optical printed Chinese character recognition.

PubMed

Zhang, Jie; Wu, Xiaohong; Yu, Yanmei; Luo, Daisheng

2013-01-01

In optical printed Chinese character recognition (OPCCR), many classifiers have been proposed for the recognition. Among the classifiers, support vector machine (SVM) might be the best classifier. However, SVM is a classifier for two classes. When it is used for multi-classes in OPCCR, its computation is time-consuming. Thus, we propose a neighbor classes based SVM (NC-SVM) to reduce the computation consumption of SVM. Experiments of NC-SVM classification for OPCCR have been done. The results of the experiments have shown that the NC-SVM we proposed can effectively reduce the computation time in OPCCR.

Older Persons' Evaluations of Health Care: The Effects of Medical Skepticism and Worry about Health

PubMed Central

Borders, Tyrone F; Rohrer, James E; Xu, K Tom; Smith, David R

2004-01-01

Objective To describe how skepticism about medical care and other individual differences, including worry about health status, are associated with evaluations of health care among the noninstitutionalized elderly. Data Sources/Study Setting Data were collected through a survey of approximately 5,000 community-dwelling elders (aged 65 and older) in a southwestern region of the United States. Study Design Global evaluations of health care were measured with two items from the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) instrument, an overall care rating (OCR) and a personal doctor rating (PDR). Multivariate ordered logit regression models were tested to examine how medical skepticism and other factors were associated with ratings of 0–7, 8–9, and 10. Principal Findings Consumers who were skeptical of prescription drugs relative to home remedies, who held attitudes that they understand their health better than most doctors, and who worried about their health had worse OCR and PDR. Those who held attitudes that individual behavior determines how soon one gets better when sick had better PDR and OCR. Conclusions Health policymakers, managers, and providers may need to consider the degree to which they should attempt to satisfy skeptical consumers, many of whom may never rate their care highly. Alternatively, they may need to target skeptical consumers with educational efforts explaining the benefits of medical care. PMID:14965076

[Ehler-Danlos syndrome type VIII].

PubMed

Ciarloni, L; Perrigouard, C; Lipsker, D; Cribier, B

2010-03-01

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) comprises a heterogeneous group of diseases involving genetic collagen fibre impairment. We describe a case of a patient presenting the rare type VIII, in which dermatitis ocre was associated with parodontal disease, and which was diagnosed late. A 29-year-old man consulted for a pretibial ulcer present for seven years, resulting from a post-traumatic haematoma that had failed to heal. In view of the longiliner morphology, it had previously been diagnosed as Marfan syndrome. Subsequently, edentation was observed as well as "alveolar bone fragility". Examination revealed a marfanoid morphotype, a pretibial ulcer set within long-standing bilateral dermatitis ocre and papyraceous scars, but no joint hyperlaxity or cutaneous hyperelasticity. The diagnosis was consequently corrected to EDS type VIII. Type VIII is a rare form of EDS, and the molecular mechanism is poorly understood. The involvement of parodontal connective tissue suggests impairment of collagen I and III proteins. It is important to identify this type of the disease since it involves parodontal disease for which early treatment is required in order to try to prevent edentation. The present case demonstrates the importance of diagnosis, which may be based upon appearance of bilateral dermatitis ocre from the age of 15 years associated with skin fragility. This sign is not part of the classical picture of Marfan syndrome, with which EDS type VIII is often confounded. Copyright 2009 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Secreted Human Adipose Leptin Decreases Mitochondrial Respiration in HCT116 Colon Cancer Cells

PubMed Central

Yehuda-Shnaidman, Einav; Nimri, Lili; Tarnovscki, Tanya; Kirshtein, Boris; Rudich, Assaf; Schwartz, Betty

2013-01-01

Obesity is a key risk factor for the development of colon cancer; however, the endocrine/paracrine/metabolic networks mediating this connection are poorly understood. Here we hypothesize that obesity results in secreted products from adipose tissue that induce malignancy-related metabolic alterations in colon cancer cells. Human HCT116 colon cancer cells, were exposed to conditioned media from cultured human adipose tissue fragments of obese vs. non-obese subjects. Oxygen consumption rate (OCR, mostly mitochondrial respiration) and extracellular acidification rate (ECAR, mostly lactate production via glycolysis) were examined vis-à-vis cell viability and expression of related genes and proteins. Our results show that conditioned media from obese (vs. non-obese) subjects decreased basal (40%, p<0.05) and maximal (50%, p<0.05) OCR and gene expression of mitochondrial proteins and Bax without affecting cell viability or expression of glycolytic enzymes. Similar changes could be recapitulated by incubating cells with leptin, whereas, leptin-receptor specific antagonist inhibited the reduced OCR induced by conditioned media from obese subjects. We conclude that secreted products from the adipose tissue of obese subjects inhibit mitochondrial respiration and function in HCT116 colon cancer cells, an effect that is at least partly mediated by leptin. These results highlight a putative novel mechanism for obesity-associated risk of gastrointestinal malignancies, and suggest potential new therapeutic avenues. PMID:24073224

Rocket Ozone Data Recovery for Digital Archival

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hwang, S. H.; Krueger, A. J.; Hilsenrath, E.; Haffner, D. P.; Bhartia, P. K.

2014-12-01

Ozone distributions in the photochemically-controlled upper stratosphere and mesosphere were first measured using spectrometers on V-2 rockets after WWII. The IGY(1957-1958) spurred development of new optical and chemical instruments for flight on meteorological and sounding rockets. In the early 1960's, the US Navy developed an Arcas rocket-borne optical ozonesonde and NASA GSFC developed chemiluminescent ozonesonde onboard Nike_Cajun and Arcas rocket. The Navy optical ozone program was moved in 1969 to GSFC where rocket ozone research was expanded and continued until 1994 using Super Loki-Dart rocket at 11 sites in the range of 0-65N and 35W-160W. Over 300 optical ozone soundings and 40 chemiluminescent soundings were made. The data have been used to produce the US Standard Ozone Atmosphere, determine seasonal and diurnal variations, and validate early photochemical models. The current effort includes soundings conducted by Australia, Japan, and Korea using optical techniques. New satellite ozone sounding techniques were initially calibrated and later validated using the rocket ozone data. As satellite techniques superseded the rocket methods, the sponsoring agencies lost interest in the data and many of those records have been discarded. The current task intends to recover as much of the data as possible from the private records of the experimenters and their publications, and to archive those records in the WOUDC (World Ozone and Ultraviolet Data Centre). The original data records are handwritten tabulations, computer printouts that are scanned with OCR techniques, and plots digitized from publications. This newly recovered digital rocket ozone profile data from 1965 to 2002 could make significant contributions to the Earth science community in atmospheric research including long-term trend analysis.

Reading Machines for Blind People.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fender, Derek H.

1983-01-01

Ten stages of developing reading machines for blind people are analyzed: handling of text material; optics; electro-optics; pattern recognition; character recognition; storage; speech synthesizers; browsing and place finding; computer indexing; and other sources of input. Cost considerations of the final product are emphasized. (CL)

A Method of Neighbor Classes Based SVM Classification for Optical Printed Chinese Character Recognition

PubMed Central

Zhang, Jie; Wu, Xiaohong; Yu, Yanmei; Luo, Daisheng

2013-01-01

In optical printed Chinese character recognition (OPCCR), many classifiers have been proposed for the recognition. Among the classifiers, support vector machine (SVM) might be the best classifier. However, SVM is a classifier for two classes. When it is used for multi-classes in OPCCR, its computation is time-consuming. Thus, we propose a neighbor classes based SVM (NC-SVM) to reduce the computation consumption of SVM. Experiments of NC-SVM classification for OPCCR have been done. The results of the experiments have shown that the NC-SVM we proposed can effectively reduce the computation time in OPCCR. PMID:23536777

Foam Optics and Mechanics

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Durian, Douglas J.; Zimmerli, Gregory A.

2002-01-01

The Foam Optics and Mechanics (FOAM) project will exploit the microgravity environment to more accurately measure the rheological and optical characteristics of wet aqueous foams. Using both rheology and laser light scattering diagnostics, the goal is to quantify the unusual elastic character of foams in terms of their underlying microscopic structure and dynamics. Of particular interest is determining how the elastic character vanishes, i.e., how the foam 'melts' into a simple viscous liquid, as a function of both increasing liquid content and increasing shear strain rate. The unusual elastic character of foams will be quantified macroscopically by measurement of the shear stress as a function of shear strain rate and of time following a step strain. Such data will be analyzed in terms of a yield stress, shear moduli, and dynamical time scales. Microscopic information about bubble packing and rearrangement dynamics, from which the macroscopic non-Newtonian properties ultimately arise, will be obtained non-invasively by multiple-light scattering: diffuse transmission spectroscopy (DTS) and diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS). Quantitative trends with materials parameters, most importantly average bubble size and liquid content, will be sought in order to elucidate the fundamental connection between the microscopic structure and dynamics and the macroscopic rheology.

Development of real-time motion capture system for 3D on-line games linked with virtual character

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Jong Hyeong; Ryu, Young Kee; Cho, Hyung Suck

2004-10-01

Motion tracking method is being issued as essential part of the entertainment, medical, sports, education and industry with the development of 3-D virtual reality. Virtual human character in the digital animation and game application has been controlled by interfacing devices; mouse, joysticks, midi-slider, and so on. Those devices could not enable virtual human character to move smoothly and naturally. Furthermore, high-end human motion capture systems in commercial market are expensive and complicated. In this paper, we proposed a practical and fast motion capturing system consisting of optic sensors, and linked the data with 3-D game character with real time. The prototype experiment setup is successfully applied to a boxing game which requires very fast movement of human character.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Liang, Bin; Li, Yongbao; Liu, Bo

Purpose: CyberKnife system is initially equipped with fixed circular cones for stereotactic radiosurgery. Two dose calculation algorithms, Ray-Tracing and Monte Carlo, are available in the supplied treatment planning system. A multileaf collimator system was recently introduced in the latest generation of system, capable of arbitrarily shaped treatment field. The purpose of this study is to develop a model based dose calculation algorithm to better handle the lateral scatter in an irregularly shaped small field for the CyberKnife system. Methods: A pencil beam dose calculation algorithm widely used in linac based treatment planning system was modified. The kernel parameters and intensitymore » profile were systematically determined by fitting to the commissioning data. The model was tuned using only a subset of measured data (4 out of 12 cones) and applied to all fixed circular cones for evaluation. The root mean square (RMS) of the difference between the measured and calculated tissue-phantom-ratios (TPRs) and off-center-ratio (OCR) was compared. Three cone size correction techniques were developed to better fit the OCRs at the penumbra region, which are further evaluated by the output factors (OFs). The pencil beam model was further validated against measurement data on the variable dodecagon-shaped Iris collimators and a half-beam blocked field. Comparison with Ray-Tracing and Monte Carlo methods was also performed on a lung SBRT case. Results: The RMS between the measured and calculated TPRs is 0.7% averaged for all cones, with the descending region at 0.5%. The RMSs of OCR at infield and outfield regions are both at 0.5%. The distance to agreement (DTA) at the OCR penumbra region is 0.2 mm. All three cone size correction models achieve the same improvement in OCR agreement, with the effective source shift model (SSM) preferred, due to their ability to predict more accurately the OF variations with the source to axis distance (SAD). In noncircular field validation, the pencil beam calculated results agreed well with the film measurement of both Iris collimators and the half-beam blocked field, fared much better than the Ray-Tracing calculation. Conclusions: The authors have developed a pencil beam dose calculation model for the CyberKnife system. The dose calculation accuracy is better than the standard linac based system because the model parameters were specifically tuned to the CyberKnife system and geometry correction factors. The model handles better the lateral scatter and has the potential to be used for the irregularly shaped fields. Comprehensive validations on MLC equipped system are necessary for its clinical implementation. It is reasonably fast enough to be used during plan optimization.« less

Nonlinear filtering for character recognition in low quality document images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Diaz-Escobar, Julia; Kober, Vitaly

2014-09-01

Optical character recognition in scanned printed documents is a well-studied task, where the captured conditions like sheet position, illumination, contrast and resolution are controlled. Nowadays, it is more practical to use mobile devices for document capture than a scanner. So as a consequence, the quality of document images is often poor owing to presence of geometric distortions, nonhomogeneous illumination, low resolution, etc. In this work we propose to use multiple adaptive nonlinear composite filters for detection and classification of characters. Computer simulation results obtained with the proposed system are presented and discussed.

Liquid lens: advances in adaptive optics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Casey, Shawn Patrick

2010-12-01

'Liquid lens' technologies promise significant advancements in machine vision and optical communications systems. Adaptations for machine vision, human vision correction, and optical communications are used to exemplify the versatile nature of this technology. Utilization of liquid lens elements allows the cost effective implementation of optical velocity measurement. The project consists of a custom image processor, camera, and interface. The images are passed into customized pattern recognition and optical character recognition algorithms. A single camera would be used for both speed detection and object recognition.

Feature-extracted joint transform correlation.

PubMed

Alam, M S

1995-12-10

A new technique for real-time optical character recognition that uses a joint transform correlator is proposed. This technique employs feature-extracted patterns for the reference image to detect a wide range of characters in one step. The proposed technique significantly enhances the processing speed when compared with the presently available joint transform correlator architectures and shows feasibility for multichannel joint transform correlation.

How to File a Complaint of Discrimination brochure

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) External Compliance and Complaints (ECC) Program is responsible for enforcing several civil rights laws which, together, prohibit discrimination.

76 FR 39757 - Filing Procedures

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-07-06

... an optical character recognition process, such a document may contain recognition errors. CAUTION... network speed e-filing of these documents may be difficult. Pursuant to section II(C) above, the Secretary... optical scan format or a typed ``electronic signature,'' e.g., ``/s/Jane Doe.'' (3) In the case of a...

Geometric rectification of camera-captured document images.

PubMed

Liang, Jian; DeMenthon, Daniel; Doermann, David

2008-04-01

Compared to typical scanners, handheld cameras offer convenient, flexible, portable, and non-contact image capture, which enables many new applications and breathes new life into existing ones. However, camera-captured documents may suffer from distortions caused by non-planar document shape and perspective projection, which lead to failure of current OCR technologies. We present a geometric rectification framework for restoring the frontal-flat view of a document from a single camera-captured image. Our approach estimates 3D document shape from texture flow information obtained directly from the image without requiring additional 3D/metric data or prior camera calibration. Our framework provides a unified solution for both planar and curved documents and can be applied in many, especially mobile, camera-based document analysis applications. Experiments show that our method produces results that are significantly more OCR compatible than the original images.

Seahorse Xfe24 Extracellular Flux Analyzer-based analysis of cellular respiration in Caenorhabditis elegans

PubMed Central

Luz, Anthony L.; Smith, Latasha L.; Rooney, John P.

2015-01-01

Mitochondria are critical for their role in ATP production as well as multiple nonenergetic functions, and mitochondrial dysfunction is causal in myriad human diseases. Less well appreciated is the fact that mitochondria integrate environmental and inter- as well as intracellular signals to modulate function. Because mitochondria function in an organismal milieu, there is need for assays capable of rapidly assessing mitochondrial health in vivo. Here, using the Seahorse XFe24 Extracellular Flux Analyzer and the pharmacological inhibitors dicyclohexylcarbodiimide (DCCD, ATP synthase inhibitor), carbonyl cyanide-p-trifluoromethoxyphenylhydrazone (FCCP, mitochondrial uncoupler) and sodium azide (cytochrome c oxidase inhibitor), we describe how to obtain in vivo measurements of the fundamental parameters (basal oxygen consumption rate (OCR), ATP-linked respiration, maximal OCR, spare respiratory capacity and proton leak) of the mitochondrial respiratory chain in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. PMID:26523474

Comparison of the scanned pages of the contractual documents

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Andreeva, Elena; Arlazarov, Vladimir V.; Manzhikov, Temudzhin; Slavin, Oleg

2018-04-01

In this paper the problem statement is given to compare the digitized pages of the official papers. Such problem appears during the comparison of two customer copies signed at different times between two parties with a view to find the possible modifications introduced on the one hand. This problem is a practically significant in the banking sector during the conclusion of contracts in a paper format. The method of comparison based on the recognition, which consists in the comparison of two bag-of-words, which are the recognition result of the master and test pages, is suggested. The described experiments were conducted using the OCR Tesseract and the siamese neural network. The advantages of the suggested method are the steady operation of the comparison algorithm and the high exacting precision, and one of the disadvantages is the dependence on the chosen OCR.

Validation of ocean color sensors using a profiling hyperspectral radiometer

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ondrusek, M. E.; Stengel, E.; Rella, M. A.; Goode, W.; Ladner, S.; Feinholz, M.

2014-05-01

Validation measurements of satellite ocean color sensors require in situ measurements that are accurate, repeatable and traceable enough to distinguish variability between in situ measurements and variability in the signal being observed on orbit. The utility of using a Satlantic Profiler II equipped with HyperOCR radiometers (Hyperpro) for validating ocean color sensors is tested by assessing the stability of the calibration coefficients and by comparing Hyperpro in situ measurements to other instruments and between different Hyperpros in a variety of water types. Calibration and characterization of the NOAA Satlantic Hyperpro instrument is described and concurrent measurements of water-leaving radiances conducted during cruises are presented between this profiling instrument and other profiling, above-water and moored instruments. The moored optical instruments are the US operated Marine Optical BuoY (MOBY) and the French operated Boussole Buoy. In addition, Satlantic processing versions are described in terms of accuracy and consistency. A new multi-cast approach is compared to the most commonly used single cast method. Analysis comparisons are conducted in turbid and blue water conditions. Examples of validation matchups with VIIRS ocean color data are presented. With careful data collection and analysis, the Satlantic Hyperpro profiling radiometer has proven to be a reliable and consistent tool for satellite ocean color validation.

Drp1 loss-of-function reduces cardiomyocyte oxygen dependence protecting the heart from ischemia-reperfusion injury.

PubMed

Zepeda, Ramiro; Kuzmicic, Jovan; Parra, Valentina; Troncoso, Rodrigo; Pennanen, Christian; Riquelme, Jaime A; Pedrozo, Zully; Chiong, Mario; Sánchez, Gina; Lavandero, Sergio

2014-06-01

Mitochondria are key organelles for ATP production in cardiomyocytes, which is regulated by processes of fission and fusion. We hypothesized that the mitochondria fusion protein dynamin-related protein 1 (Drp1) inhibition, attenuates ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury through modifications in mitochondrial metabolism. Rats were subjected to I/R through coronary artery ligation, and isolated cardiomyocytes were treated with an ischemia-mimicking solution. In vivo, cardiac function, myocardial infarction area, and mitochondrial morphology were determined, whereas in vitro, viability, mitochondrial membrane potential, intracellular ATP levels, and oxygen consumption rate (OCR) were assessed. In both models, an adenovirus expressing Drp1 dominant-negative K38A (Drp1K38A) was used to induce Drp1 loss-of-function. Our results showed that I/R stimulated mitochondrial fission. Myocardial infarction size and cell death induced by I/R were significantly reduced, whereas cardiac function after I/R was improved in Drp1K38A-treated rats compared with controls. Drp1K38A-transduced cardiomyocytes showed lower OCR with no decrease in intracellular ATP levels, and on I/R, a larger decrease in OCR with a smaller reduction in intracellular ATP level was observed. However, proton leak-associated oxygen consumption was comparatively higher in Drp1K38A-treated cardiomyocytes, suggesting a protective mitochondrial uncoupling effect against I/R. Collectively, our results show that Drp1 inhibition triggers cardioprotection by reducing mitochondrial metabolism during I/R.

Supplements in human islet culture: human serum albumin is inferior to fetal bovine serum.

PubMed

Avgoustiniatos, Efstathios S; Scott, William E; Suszynski, Thomas M; Schuurman, Henk-Jan; Nelson, Rebecca A; Rozak, Phillip R; Mueller, Kate R; Balamurugan, A N; Ansite, Jeffrey D; Fraga, Daniel W; Friberg, Andrew S; Wildey, Gina M; Tanaka, Tomohiro; Lyons, Connor A; Sutherland, David E R; Hering, Bernhard J; Papas, Klearchos K

2012-01-01

Culture of human islets before clinical transplantation or distribution for research purposes is standard practice. At the time the Edmonton protocol was introduced, clinical islet manufacturing did not include culture, and human serum albumin (HSA), instead of fetal bovine serum (FBS), was used during other steps of the process to avoid the introduction of xenogeneic material. When culture was subsequently introduced, HSA was also used for medium supplementation instead of FBS, which was typically used for research islet culture. The use of HSA as culture supplement was not evaluated before this implementation. We performed a retrospective analysis of 103 high-purity islet preparations (76 research preparations, all with FBS culture supplementation, and 27 clinical preparations, all with HSA supplementation) for oxygen consumption rate per DNA content (OCR/DNA; a measure of viability) and diabetes reversal rate in diabetic nude mice (a measure of potency). After 2-day culture, research preparations exhibited an average OCR/DNA 51% higher (p < 0.001) and an average diabetes reversal rate 54% higher (p < 0.05) than clinical preparations, despite 87% of the research islet preparations having been derived from research-grade pancreata that are considered of lower quality. In a prospective paired study on islets from eight research preparations, OCR/DNA was, on average, 27% higher with FBS supplementation than that with HSA supplementation (p < 0.05). We conclude that the quality of clinical islet preparations can be improved when culture is performed in media supplemented with serum instead of albumin.

Loss of mitochondrial exo/endonuclease EXOG affects mitochondrial respiration and induces ROS-mediated cardiomyocyte hypertrophy.

PubMed

Tigchelaar, Wardit; Yu, Hongjuan; de Jong, Anne Margreet; van Gilst, Wiek H; van der Harst, Pim; Westenbrink, B Daan; de Boer, Rudolf A; Silljé, Herman H W

2015-01-15

Recently, a locus at the mitochondrial exo/endonuclease EXOG gene, which has been implicated in mitochondrial DNA repair, was associated with cardiac function. The function of EXOG in cardiomyocytes is still elusive. Here we investigated the role of EXOG in mitochondrial function and hypertrophy in cardiomyocytes. Depletion of EXOG in primary neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes (NRVCs) induced a marked increase in cardiomyocyte hypertrophy. Depletion of EXOG, however, did not result in loss of mitochondrial DNA integrity. Although EXOG depletion did not induce fetal gene expression and common hypertrophy pathways were not activated, a clear increase in ribosomal S6 phosphorylation was observed, which readily explains increased protein synthesis. With the use of a Seahorse flux analyzer, it was shown that the mitochondrial oxidative consumption rate (OCR) was increased 2.4-fold in EXOG-depleted NRVCs. Moreover, ATP-linked OCR was 5.2-fold higher. This increase was not explained by mitochondrial biogenesis or alterations in mitochondrial membrane potential. Western blotting confirmed normal levels of the oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) complexes. The increased OCR was accompanied by a 5.4-fold increase in mitochondrial ROS levels. These increased ROS levels could be normalized with specific mitochondrial ROS scavengers (MitoTEMPO, mnSOD). Remarkably, scavenging of excess ROS strongly attenuated the hypertrophic response. In conclusion, loss of EXOG affects normal mitochondrial function resulting in increased mitochondrial respiration, excess ROS production, and cardiomyocyte hypertrophy. Copyright © 2015 the American Physiological Society.

Metabolic Impact of Rapamycin (Sirolimus) and B-Estradiol Using Mouse Embryonic Fibroblasts as a Model for Lymphangioleiomyomatosis.

PubMed

Marsh, Katherine M; Schipper, David; Ferng, Alice S; Johnson, Kitsie; Fisher, Julia; Knapp, Shannon; Dicken, Destiny; Khalpey, Zain

2017-08-01

Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) is a rare, progressive cystic lung disease that predominantly affects women of childbearing age. Exogenous rapamycin (sirolimus) has been shown to improve clinical outcomes and was recently approved to treat LAM, whereas estrogen (E 2 ) is implicated in disease progression. No consistent metabolic model currently exists for LAM, therefore wild-type mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF +/+) and TSC2 knockout cells (MEF -/-) were used in this study as a model for LAM. Oxygen consumption rates (OCR) and redox potential were measured to determine metabolic state across control cells, MEF +/+ and -/- cells treated with rapamycin (Rapa), and MEF +/+ and -/- cells treated with E 2 . An XF96 extracellular flux analyzer from Seahorse Bioscience ® was used to measure OCR, and a RedoxSYS™ ORP was used to measure redox potential. OCR of MEF -/- cells treated with rapamycin (MEF -/- Rapa) versus MEF -/- control were significantly lower across all conditions. The static oxidation reduction potential of the MEF -/- Rapa group was also lower, approaching significance. The coupling efficiency and ratio of ATP-linked respiration to maximum respiration were statistically lower in MEF -/- Rapa compared to MEF +/+ Rapa. There were no significant metabolic findings across any of the MEF cells treated with E 2 . MEF -/- control cells versus MEF +/+ control cells were not found to significantly differ. MEF cells are thought to be a feasible metabolic model for LAM, which has implications for future pharmacologic and biologic testing.

Caenorhabditis elegans TRPV Channels Function in a Modality-Specific Pathway to Regulate Response to Aberrant Sensory Signaling

PubMed Central

Ezak , Meredith J.; Hong , Elizabeth; Chaparro-Garcia , Angela; Ferkey , Denise M.

2010-01-01

Olfaction and some forms of taste (including bitter) are mediated by G protein-coupled signal transduction pathways. Olfactory and gustatory ligands bind to chemosensory G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in specialized sensory cells to activate intracellular signal transduction cascades. G protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) are negative regulators of signaling that specifically phosphorylate activated GPCRs to terminate signaling. Although loss of GRK function usually results in enhanced cellular signaling, Caenorhabditis elegans lacking GRK-2 function are not hypersensitive to chemosensory stimuli. Instead, grk-2 mutant animals do not chemotax toward attractive olfactory stimuli or avoid aversive tastes and smells. We show here that loss-of-function mutations in the transient receptor potential vanilloid (TRPV) channels OSM-9 and OCR-2 selectively restore grk-2 behavioral avoidance of bitter tastants, revealing modality-specific mechanisms for TRPV channel function in the regulation of C. elegans chemosensation. Additionally, a single amino acid point mutation in OCR-2 that disrupts TRPV channel-mediated gene expression, but does not decrease channel function in chemosensory primary signal transduction, also restores grk-2 bitter taste avoidance. Thus, loss of GRK-2 function may lead to changes in gene expression, via OSM-9/OCR-2, to selectively alter the levels of signaling components that transduce or regulate bitter taste responses. Our results suggest a novel mechanism and multiple modality-specific pathways that sensory cells employ in response to aberrant signal transduction. PMID:20176974

Novel shadowless imaging for eyes-like diagnosis in vivo

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xue, Ning; Jiang, Kai; Li, Qi; Zhang, Lili; Ma, Li; Huang, Guoliang

2016-10-01

Eyes-like diagnosis was a traditional Chinese medicine method for many diseases, such as chronic gastritis, diabetes, hypertension etc. There was a close relationship between viscera and eyes-like. White-Eye was divided into fourteen sections, which corresponded to different viscera, so eyes-like was the reflection of status of viscera, in another words, it was an epitome of viscera health condition. In this paper, we developed a novel shadowless imaging technology and system for eyes-like diagnosis in vivo, which consisted of an optical shadowless imaging device for capturing and saving images of patients' eyes-like, and a computer linked to the device for image processing. A character matching algorithm was developed to extract the character of white-eye in corresponding sections of eyes-like images taken by the optical shadowless imaging device, according to the character of eyes-like, whether there were viscera diseases could be learned. A series of assays were carried out, and the results verified the feasibility of eyes-like diagnosis technique.

A DDC Bibliography on Optical or Graphic Information Processing (Information Sciences Series). Volume I.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Defense Documentation Center, Alexandria, VA.

This unclassified-unlimited bibliography contains 183 references, with abstracts, dealing specifically with optical or graphic information processing. Citations are grouped under three headings: display devices and theory, character recognition, and pattern recognition. Within each group, they are arranged in accession number (AD-number) sequence.…

A distinguishing method of printed and handwritten legal amount on Chinese bank check

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhu, Ningbo; Lou, Zhen; Yang, Jingyu

2003-09-01

While carrying out Optical Chinese Character Recognition, distinguishing the font between printed and handwritten characters at the early phase is necessary, because there is so much difference between the methods on recognizing these two types of characters. In this paper, we proposed a good method on how to banish seals and its relative standards that can judge whether they should be banished. Meanwhile, an approach on clearing up scattered noise shivers after image segmentation is presented. Four sets of classifying features that show discrimination between printed and handwritten characters are well adopted. The proposed approach was applied to an automatic check processing system and tested on about 9031 checks. The recognition rate is more than 99.5%.

Probing plasmonic breathing modes optically

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Krug, Markus K., E-mail: markus.krug@uni-graz.at; Reisecker, Michael; Hohenau, Andreas

2014-10-27

The confinement of surface plasmon modes in flat nanoparticles gives rise to plasmonic breathing modes. With a vanishing net dipole moment, breathing modes do not radiate, i.e., they are optically dark. Having thus escaped optical detection, breathing modes were only recently revealed in silver nanodisks with electron energy loss spectroscopy in an electron microscope. We show that for disk diameters >200 nm, retardation induced by oblique optical illumination relaxes the optically dark character. This makes breathing modes and thus the full plasmonic mode spectrum accessible to optical spectroscopy. The experimental spectroscopy data are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.

Optical systems engineering - A tutorial

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wyman, C. L.

1979-01-01

The paper examines the use of the systems engineering approach in the design of optical systems, noting that the use of such an approach which involves an integrated interdisciplinary approach to the development of systems is most appropriate for optics. It is shown that the high precision character of optics leads to complex and subtle effects on optical system performance, resulting from structural, thermal dynamical, control system, and manufacturing and assembly considerations. Attention is given to communication problems that often occur among users and optical engineers due to the unique factors of optical systems. It is concluded that it is essential that the optics community provide leadership to resolve communication problems and fully formalize the field of optical systems engineering.

2011 NRL REVIEW

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-01-01

other mechanism ? What accelerates the solar wind? What are the near- Sun plasma properties (particle density, magnetic field)? Does the solar wind come...microstructure character iza tion, elec tronic ceramics, solid-state physics, fiber optics, electro-optics, microelectronics, fracture mechan ics...computational fluid mechanics , experi mental structural mechanics , solid me chan ics, elastic/plastic fracture mechanics , materials, finite-element

Exploring the novel donor-nanotube archetype as an efficient third-order nonlinear optical material: asymmetric open-shell carbon nanotubes.

PubMed

Muhammad, Shabbir; Nakano, Masayoshi; Al-Sehemi, Abdullah G; Irfan, Ahmad; Chaudhry, Aijaz Rasool; Tonami, Takayoshi; Ito, Soichi; Kishi, Ryohei; Kitagawa, Yasutaka

2018-06-06

Contrary to the enormous number of previous studies on carbon nanotubes (CNTs), herein, we realized the origin of the intrinsic open-shell diradical character and second hyperpolarizability γ using a broken symmetry approach. This study was inspired by our recent findings (S. Muhammad, et al., Nanoscale, 2016, 8, 17998 and Nakano, et al., J. Phys. Chem. C, 2016, 120, 1193). We performed structural modifications through a unique asymmetric donor-nanotube framework, which led to a novel paradigm of modified CNTs with tunable open-shell diradical character and remarkably superior NLO response properties. Interestingly, asymmetry and diradical character were found to be the crucial factors to modulate the second hyperpolarizability γ. We initially performed a comparative analysis of the diradical characters and γ amplitudes of boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) and CNTs possessing significant ionic characters and covalent characters, respectively. The basic findings for these simple configurations were further extended to the donor-acceptor CNT paradigm, which finally led to excellent asymmetric donor-CNT configurations with remarkably larger γ amplitudes. Furthermore, among the CNTs, finite length zigzag CNT(6,0)3 were modified with different donor-acceptor configurations. Interestingly, for the first time, unique donor-nanotube configurations [1,4-(NH2)2CNT-(6,0)3 and 1,4-(NH2)2CNT-(6,0)5] were found; they showed significantly robust γ amplitudes as large as 2519 × 103 and 4090 × 103 a.u. at the LC-UBLYP(μ = 0.33)/6-31G* level of theory. Additionally, several molecular level insights have been obtained for these novel donor-nanotube configurations using their odd electron densities, molecular electrostatic maps, densities of states and γ density analyses to highlight the realization of these novel materials for highly efficient optical and NLO applications.

77 FR 23229 - Submission for OMB Review; Assurance of Compliance-Civil Rights Certificate

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-04-18

... rights laws, including Title VI, Title IX, Section 504, the Age Discrimination Act, and the Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act. To meet these responsibilities, OCR collects assurances of compliance from...

10 CFR 9.35 - Duplication fees.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

...) copying of ADAMS documents to paper (applies to images, OCR TIFF, and PDF text) is $0.30 per page. (B) EFT... is $0.30 per page. (vi) Priority rates (rush processing) are as follows: (A) The priority rate...

10 CFR 9.35 - Duplication fees.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

...) copying of ADAMS documents to paper (applies to images, OCR TIFF, and PDF text) is $0.30 per page. (B) EFT... is $0.30 per page. (vi) Priority rates (rush processing) are as follows: (A) The priority rate...

10 CFR 9.35 - Duplication fees.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

...) copying of ADAMS documents to paper (applies to images, OCR TIFF, and PDF text) is $0.30 per page. (B) EFT... is $0.30 per page. (vi) Priority rates (rush processing) are as follows: (A) The priority rate...

Update on HIPAA privacy: are you ready?

PubMed

Cole, Laura J; Fleisher, Lynn D

2003-01-01

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) created new requirements for health care providers to protect the privacy and security of individually identifiable health information. Regulations to implement HIPAA's privacy provisions were published by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in "final" form in December 2000 (the Privacy Rules). In March, 2002, HHS proposed modifications to the Privacy Rules, which were published on August 14, 2002. The modified final regulations differed from the 2000 regulations in a number of important respects. Most recently, on December 4, 2002, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is charged with enforcement of HIPAA, published "Guidance Explaining Significant Aspects of the Privacy Rule." The Privacy Rules went into effect on April 14, 2003. This article provides a summary of the modified Privacy Rules, discusses some interesting aspects of OCR's "guidance," and highlights the requirements that are most likely to impact the practice of medical genetics.

Quantum phases of spinful Fermi gases in optical cavities

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Colella, E.; Citro, R.; Barsanti, M.; Rossini, D.; Chiofalo, M.-L.

2018-04-01

We explore the quantum phases emerging from the interplay between spin and motional degrees of freedom of a one-dimensional quantum fluid of spinful fermionic atoms, effectively interacting via a photon-mediating mechanism with tunable sign and strength g , as it can be realized in present-day experiments with optical cavities. We find the emergence, in the very same system, of spin- and atomic-density wave ordering, accompanied by the occurrence of superfluidity for g >0 , while cavity photons are seen to drive strong correlations at all g values, with fermionic character for g >0 , and bosonic character for g <0 . Due to the long-range nature of interactions, to infer these results we combine mean-field and exact-diagonalization methods supported by bosonization analysis.

Distinct Effects of Rotenone, 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium and 6-hydroxydopamine on Cellular Bioenergetics and Cell Death

PubMed Central

Giordano, Samantha; Lee, Jisun; Darley-Usmar, Victor M.; Zhang, Jianhua

2012-01-01

Parkinson’s disease is characterized by dopaminergic neurodegeneration and is associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. The bioenergetic susceptibility of dopaminergic neurons to toxins which induce Parkinson’s like syndromes in animal models is then of particular interest. For example, rotenone, 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) and its active metabolite 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium (MPP+), and 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA), have been shown to induce dopaminergic cell death in vivo and in vitro. Exposure of animals to these compounds induce a range of responses characteristics of Parkinson’s disease, including dopaminergic cell death, and Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) production. Here we test the hypothesis that cellular bioenergetic dysfunction caused by these compounds correlates with induction of cell death in differentiated dopaminergic neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells. At increasing doses, rotenone induced significant cell death accompanied with caspase 3 activation. At these concentrations, rotenone had an immediate inhibition of mitochondrial basal oxygen consumption rate (OCR) concomitant with a decrease of ATP-linked OCR and reserve capacity, as well as a stimulation of glycolysis. MPP+ exhibited a different behavior with less pronounced cell death at doses that nearly eliminated basal and ATP-linked OCR. Interestingly, MPP+, unlike rotenone, stimulated bioenergetic reserve capacity. The effects of 6-OHDA on bioenergetic function was markedly less than the effects of rotenone or MPP+ at cytotoxic doses, suggesting a mechanism largely independent of bioenergetic dysfunction. These studies suggest that these dopaminergic neurotoxins induce cell death through distinct mechanisms and differential effects on cellular bioenergetics. PMID:22970265

A Review of Heavy-Fueled Rotary Engine Combustion Technologies

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-05-01

and Flame Quenching ...................................................................................56  4.6  Turbocharging and Supercharging... turbocharged engine). ...........................................................51  Figure 60. ISFC, exhaust temperature, power, and volumetric efficiency...OCR, CCR, and LCCR. ..............................................................61  Figure 70. Theoretical turbocharging effects on BSFC

23 CFR 230.411 - Guidance for conducting reviews.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... Highways FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION CIVIL RIGHTS EXTERNAL PROGRAMS... forwarded through appropriate channels to the Washington Headquarters, Office of Civil Rights. After approval, the Washington Headquarters, Office of Civil Rights, (OCR) shall request the appropriate region...

Genetic modification of human mesenchymal stem cells helps to reduce adiposity and improve glucose tolerance in an obese diabetic mouse model.

PubMed

Sen, Sabyasachi; Domingues, Cleyton C; Rouphael, Carol; Chou, Cyril; Kim, Chul; Yadava, Nagendra

2015-12-09

Human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent cells that can differentiate into fat, muscle, bone and cartilage cells. Exposure of subcutaneous abdominal adipose tissue derived AD-MSCs to high glucose (HG) leads to superoxide accumulation and up-regulation of inflammatory molecules. Our aim was to inquire how HG exposure affects MSCs differentiation and whether the mechanism is reversible. We exposed human adipose tissue derived MSCs to HG (25 mM) and compared it to normal glucose (NG, 5.5 mM) exposed cells at 7, 10 and 14 days. We examined mitochondrial superoxide accumulation (Mitosox-Red), cellular oxygen consumption rate (OCR, Seahorse) and gene expression. HG increased reactive superoxide (ROS) accumulation noted by day 7 both in cytosol and mitochondria. The OCR between the NG and HG exposed groups however did not change until 10 days at which point OCR of HG exposed cells were reduced significantly. We noted that HG exposure upregulated mRNA expression of adipogenic (PPARG, FABP-4, CREBP alpha and beta), inflammatory (IL-6 and TNF alpha) and antioxidant (SOD2 and Catalase) genes. Next, we used AdSOD2 to upregulate SOD2 prior to HG exposure and thereby noted reduction in superoxide generation. SOD2 upregulation helped reduce mRNA over-expression of PPARG, FABP-4, IL-6 and TNFα. In a series of separate experiments, we delivered the eGFP and SOD2 upregulated MSCs (5 days post ex-vivo transduction) and saline intra-peritoneally (IP) to obese diabetic (db/db) mice. We confirmed homing-in of eGFP labeled MSCs, delivered IP, to different inflamed fat pockets, particularly omental fat. Mice receiving SOD2-MSCs showed progressive reduction in body weight and improved glucose tolerance (GTT) at 4 weeks, post MSCs transplantation compared to the GFP-MSC group (control). High glucose evokes superoxide generation, OCR reduction and adipogenic differentiation. Mitochondrial superoxide dismutase upregulation quenches excess superoxide and reduces adipocyte inflammation. Delivery of superoxide dismutase (SOD2) using MSCs as a gene delivery vehicle reduces inflammation and improves glucose tolerance in vivo. Suppression of superoxide production and adipocyte inflammation using mitochondrial superoxide dismutase may be a novel and safe therapeutic tool to combat hyperglycemia mediated effects.

Optical and digital pattern recognition; Proceedings of the Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, Jan. 13-15, 1987

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Liu, Hua-Kuang (Editor); Schenker, Paul (Editor)

1987-01-01

The papers presented in this volume provide an overview of current research in both optical and digital pattern recognition, with a theme of identifying overlapping research problems and methodologies. Topics discussed include image analysis and low-level vision, optical system design, object analysis and recognition, real-time hybrid architectures and algorithms, high-level image understanding, and optical matched filter design. Papers are presented on synthetic estimation filters for a control system; white-light correlator character recognition; optical AI architectures for intelligent sensors; interpreting aerial photographs by segmentation and search; and optical information processing using a new photopolymer.

Pressure-induced elastic, electronic and optical properties of Ba(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3 using first principles calculations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Islam, A. K. M. Farid Ul; Liton, M. N. H.; Anowar, M. G. M.

2018-06-01

The pressure dependent mechanical stability, electronic structure and optical properties of Ba(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3 (BMN) perovskite have been investigated in the framework of the density functional theory. Geometry optimization shows that the BMN possesses more compressibility along c-axis. The dependency of the elastic constants, the aggregated elastic moduli (B, G) and the elastic anisotropy on pressure has also been studied. BMN shows brittle character at ambient pressure but it becomes ductile, and also stiffer and anisotropic nature due to external pressure. Electronic structure indicates the conversion of indirect to direct band gap with increasing pressure. Dominated ionic character of BMN is confirmed from the bond population analysis. By analyzing the optical spectra, a red shift at the band edge is observed in the visible range indicating the band gap tuning. It is seen that the static dielectric constant increases with pressure.

Beyond Word Processing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haight, Larry

1989-01-01

Types of specialty software that can help in computer editing are discussed, including programs for file transformation, optical character recognition, facsimile transmission, spell-checking, style assistance, editing, indexing, and headline-writing. (MSE)

Trainable multiscript orientation detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Van Beusekom, Joost; Rangoni, Yves; Breuel, Thomas M.

2010-01-01

Detecting the correct orientation of document images is an important step in large scale digitization processes, as most subsequent document analysis and optical character recognition methods assume upright position of the document page. Many methods have been proposed to solve the problem, most of which base on ascender to descender ratio computation. Unfortunately, this cannot be used for scripts having no descenders nor ascenders. Therefore, we present a trainable method using character similarity to compute the correct orientation. A connected component based distance measure is computed to compare the characters of the document image to characters whose orientation is known. This allows to detect the orientation for which the distance is lowest as the correct orientation. Training is easily achieved by exchanging the reference characters by characters of the script to be analyzed. Evaluation of the proposed approach showed accuracy of above 99% for Latin and Japanese script from the public UW-III and UW-II datasets. An accuracy of 98.9% was obtained for Fraktur on a non-public dataset. Comparison of the proposed method to two methods using ascender / descender ratio based orientation detection shows a significant improvement.

Principal Component 2-D Long Short-Term Memory for Font Recognition on Single Chinese Characters.

PubMed

Tao, Dapeng; Lin, Xu; Jin, Lianwen; Li, Xuelong

2016-03-01

Chinese character font recognition (CCFR) has received increasing attention as the intelligent applications based on optical character recognition becomes popular. However, traditional CCFR systems do not handle noisy data effectively. By analyzing in detail the basic strokes of Chinese characters, we propose that font recognition on a single Chinese character is a sequence classification problem, which can be effectively solved by recurrent neural networks. For robust CCFR, we integrate a principal component convolution layer with the 2-D long short-term memory (2DLSTM) and develop principal component 2DLSTM (PC-2DLSTM) algorithm. PC-2DLSTM considers two aspects: 1) the principal component layer convolution operation helps remove the noise and get a rational and complete font information and 2) simultaneously, 2DLSTM deals with the long-range contextual processing along scan directions that can contribute to capture the contrast between character trajectory and background. Experiments using the frequently used CCFR dataset suggest the effectiveness of PC-2DLSTM compared with other state-of-the-art font recognition methods.

Galex and Optical Observations of GW Librae during the Long Decline from Superoutburst

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-03-01

1995). Time - resolved spectroscopy (Szkody et al. 2000; Thorstensen et al. 2002) revealed a very short orbital period of 76.78 minutes, consistent with...entered. As of the current time , the white dwarf has not yet resumed its pre-outburst character. Yet, the photometry has re- vealed some interesting...that could be due to the various satellite orbits. 2.2. Optical Photometry Optical photometric data were obtained with multiple tele- scopes between 2007

76 FR 59180 - Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Request and Comment Request

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-09-23

... criteria. Respondents complete Form SSA-1026-REDE under the following circumstances: (1) When individuals...,420 SSA-1026-OCR-SM-REDE 225,000 1 18 67,500 Total 236,400 70,920 II. SSA submitted the information...

MSL: Facilitating automatic and physical analysis of published scientific literature in PDF format.

PubMed

Ahmed, Zeeshan; Dandekar, Thomas

2015-01-01

Published scientific literature contains millions of figures, including information about the results obtained from different scientific experiments e.g. PCR-ELISA data, microarray analysis, gel electrophoresis, mass spectrometry data, DNA/RNA sequencing, diagnostic imaging (CT/MRI and ultrasound scans), and medicinal imaging like electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), echocardiography  (ECG), positron-emission tomography (PET) images. The importance of biomedical figures has been widely recognized in scientific and medicine communities, as they play a vital role in providing major original data, experimental and computational results in concise form. One major challenge for implementing a system for scientific literature analysis is extracting and analyzing text and figures from published PDF files by physical and logical document analysis. Here we present a product line architecture based bioinformatics tool 'Mining Scientific Literature (MSL)', which supports the extraction of text and images by interpreting all kinds of published PDF files using advanced data mining and image processing techniques. It provides modules for the marginalization of extracted text based on different coordinates and keywords, visualization of extracted figures and extraction of embedded text from all kinds of biological and biomedical figures using applied Optimal Character Recognition (OCR). Moreover, for further analysis and usage, it generates the system's output in different formats including text, PDF, XML and images files. Hence, MSL is an easy to install and use analysis tool to interpret published scientific literature in PDF format.

Investigating mitochondrial dysfunction in human lung cells exposed to redox-active PM components.

PubMed

Lavrich, Katelyn S; Corteselli, Elizabeth M; Wages, Phillip A; Bromberg, Philip A; Simmons, Steven O; Gibbs-Flournoy, Eugene A; Samet, James M

2018-03-01

Exposure to ambient particulate matter (PM) causes cardiopulmonary morbidity and mortality through mechanisms that involve oxidative stress. 1,2-naphthoquinone (1,2-NQ) is a ubiquitous component of PM and a potent redox-active electrophile. We previously reported that 1,2-NQ increases mitochondrial H 2 O 2 production through an unidentified mechanism. We sought to characterize the effects of 1,2-NQ exposure on mitochondrial respiration as a source of H 2 O 2 in human airway epithelial cells. We measured the effects of acute exposure to 1,2-NQ on oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in the human bronchial epithelial cell line BEAS-2B and mitochondrial preparations using extracellular flux analysis. Complex-specific assays and NADPH depletion by glucose deprivation distinguished between mitochondrial and non-mitochondrial oxygen utilization. 1,2-NQ exposure of BEAS cells caused a rapid, marked dose-dependent increase in OCR that was independent of mitochondrial respiration, exceeded the OCR observed after mitochondrial uncoupling, and remained sensitive to NADPH depletion, implicating extra-mitochondrial redox cycling processes. Similar effects were observed with the environmentally relevant redox-cycling quinones 1,4-naphthoquinone and 9,10-phenanthrenequinone, but not with quinones that do not redox cycle, such as 1,4-benzoquinone. In mitochondrial preparations, 1,2-NQ caused a decrease in Complex I-linked substrate oxidation, suggesting impairment of pyruvate utilization or transport, a novel mechanism of mitochondrial inhibition by an environmental exposure. This study also highlights the methodological utility and challenges in the use of extracellular flux analysis to elucidate the mechanisms of action of redox-active electrophiles present in ambient air. Published by Elsevier Inc.

An administrative right to be free from sexual violence? Title IX enforcement in historical and institutional perspective.

PubMed

Tani, Karen M

One of the most controversial administrative actions in recent years is the U.S. Department of Education's campaign against sexual assault on college campuses. Using its authority under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (mandating nondiscrimination on the basis of sex in all educational programs and activities receiving federal funds), the Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has launched an enforcement effort that critics denounce as aggressive, manipulative, and corrosive of individual liberties. Missing from the commentary is a historically informed understanding of why this administrative campaign unfolded as it did. This Article offers crucial context by reminding readers that freedom from sexual violence was once celebrated as a national civil right--upon the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994--but then lost that status in a 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. OCR's recent campaign reflects a legal and political landscape in which at least some potential victims of sexual violence had come to feel rightfully connected to the institutions of the federal government, and then became righteously outraged by the endurance of such violence in their communities. OCR's campaign also reflects the unique role of federal administrative agencies in this landscape. Thanks to the power of the purse and the conditions that Congress has attached to funding streams, agencies enjoy a powerful form of jurisdiction over particular spaces and institutions. Attempts to harness this jurisdiction in service of aspirational rights claims should not surprise us; indeed, we should expect such efforts to continue. Building on this insight, the Article concludes with a research agenda for other scholars seeking to understand and evaluate OCR’s handiwork.

In vitro measurements of oxygen consumption rates in hTERT-RPE cells exposed to low levels of red light

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wigle, Jeffrey C.; Castellanos, Cherry C.

2016-03-01

Exposure to 2.88 J/cm2 of red light induces an adaptive response against a lethal pulse of 2.0 μm laser radiation in hTERT-RPE cells in vitro, but not in a knockdown mutant for vascular endothelial growth factor c (VEGF-C). The generally accepted initiation sequence for photobiomodulation is that absorption of red light by cytochome c oxidase (CCOX) of the electron transport chain increases the binding affinity of CCOX for O2 vs. nitric oxide (NO). This results in displacement of NO by O2 in the active site of CCOX, thereby increasing cellular respiration and intracellular ATP. We've previously reported that red-light exposure induces a small, but consistently reproducible, increase in NO levels in these cells. But the relative importance of NO and oxidative phosphorylation is unclear because little is known about the relative contributions of NO and ATP to the response. However, if NO dissociation from CCOX actually increases oxidative phosphorylation, one should see a corresponding increase in oxygen consumption. A Seahorse Extracellular Flux Analyzer was used to measure oxygen consumption rates (OCR) in normal and mutant cells as a proxy for oxidative phosphorylation. Both basal respiration and maximum respiration rates in normal cells are significantly higher than in the mutant. The normal cells have a significant amount of "excess capacity," whereas the VEGF-C(KD) have little or none. The OCR in exposed normal cells is lower than in unexposed cells when measured immediately after exposure. The exposures used for these experiments had no effect on the OCR in mutant cells.

Investigation of a direct effect of nanosecond pulse electric fields on mitochondria

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Estlack, Larry E.; Roth, Caleb C.; Cerna, Cesario Z.; Wilmink, Gerald J.; Ibey, Bennett L.

2014-03-01

The unique cellular response to nanosecond pulsed electric field (nsPEF) exposure, as compared to longer pulse exposure, has been theorized to be due to permeabilization of intracellular organelles including the mitochondria. In this investigation, we utilized a high-throughput oxygen and pH sensing system (Seahorse® XF24 extracellular flux analyzer) to assess the mitochondrial activity of Jurkat and U937 cells after nsPEF. The XF Analyzer uses a transient micro-chamber of only a few μL in specialized cell culture micro-plates to enable oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and extracellular acidification rate (ECAR) to be monitored in real-time. We found that for nsPEF exposures of 10 pulses at 10-ns pulse width and at 50 kV/cm e-field, we were able to cause an increase in OCR in both U937 and Jurkat cells. We also found that high pulse numbers (>100) caused a significant decrease in OCR. Higher amplitude 150 kV/cm exposures had no effect on U937 cells and yet they had a deleterious effect on Jurkat cells, matching previously published 24 hour survival data. These results suggest that the exposures were modulating metabolic activity in cells possibly due to direct effects on the mitochondria themselves. To validate this hypothesis, we isolated mitochondria from U937 cells and exposed them similarly and found no significant change in metabolic activity for any pulse number. In a final experiment, we removed calcium from the buffer solution that the cells were exposed in and found that no significant enhancement in metabolic activity was observed. These results suggest that direct permeabilization of the mitochondria is unlikely a primary effect of nsPEF exposure and calcium-mediated intracellular pathway activation is likely responsible for observed pulse-induced mitochondrial effects.

Structural effects of radiation-induced volumetric expansion on unreinforced concrete biological shields

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Le Pape, Y.

Limited literature (Pomaro et al., 2011, Mirhosseini et al., 2014, Salomoni et al., 2014 and Andreev and Kapliy, 2014) is available on the structural analysis of irradiated concrete biological shield (CBS), although extended operations of nuclear powers plants may lead to critical neutron exposure above 1.0 × 10 +19 n cm ₋2. To the notable exception of Andreev and Kapliy, available structural models do not account for radiation-induced volumetric expansion, although it was found to develop important linear dimensional change of the order of 1%, and, can lead to significant concrete damage (Le Pape et al., 2015). A 1D-cylindrical model of an unreinforced CBS accounting for temperature and irradiation effects is developed. Irradiated concrete properties are characterized probabilistically using the updated database collected by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Field et al., 2015). The overstressed concrete ratio (OCR) of the CBS, i.e., the proportion of the wall thickness being subject to stresses beyond the resistance of concrete, is derived by deterministic and probabilistic analysis assuming that irradiated concrete behaves as an elastic materials. In the bi-axial compressive zone near the reactor cavity, the OCR is limited to 5.7%, i.e., 8.6 cm (3more » $$_2^1$$ in.), whereas, in the tension zone, the OCR extends to 72%, i.e., 1.08 m (42$$_2^1$$ in.). Finally, we find that these results, valid for a maximum neutron fluence on the concrete surface of 3.1 × 10 +19 n cm ₋2 (E > 0.1 MeV) and, obtained after 80 years of operation, give an indication of the potential detrimental effects of prolonged irradiation of concrete in nuclear power plants.« less

Determination of selected UV filters in indoor dust by matrix solid-phase dispersion and gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

PubMed

Negreira, N; Rodríguez, I; Rubí, E; Cela, R

2009-07-31

A simple, inexpensive sample preparation procedure, based on the matrix solid-phase dispersion (MSPD) technique, for the determination of six UV filters: 2-ethylhexyl salicylate (EHS), 3,3,5-trimethylcyclohexyl salicylate (Homosalate, HMS), 3-(4-methylbenzylidene) camphor (4-MBC), isoamyl-p-methoxycinnamate (IAMC), 2-ethylhexyl-p-methoxycinnamate (EHMC) and octocrylene (OCR), in dust from indoor environments is presented and the influence of several operational parameters on the extraction performance discussed. Under the final working conditions, sieved samples (0.5 g) were mixed with the same amount of anhydrous sodium sulphate and dispersed with 2 g of octadecyl bonded silica (C18) in a mortar with a pestle. This blend was transferred to a polypropylene solid-phase extraction cartridge containing 2 g of activated silica, as the clean-up co-sorbent. The cartridge was first rinsed with 5 mL of n-hexane and the analytes were then recovered with 4 mL of acetonitrile. This extract was adjusted to 1 mL, filtered and the compounds were determined by gas chromatography combined with tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS). Recoveries for samples spiked at two different concentrations ranged between 77% and 99%, and the limits of quantification (LOQs) of the method between 10 and 40 ng g(-1). Analysis of settled dust from different indoor areas, including private flats, public buildings and vehicle cabins, showed that EHMC and OCR were ubiquitous in this matrix, with maximum concentrations of 15 and 41 microg g(-1), respectively. Both UV filters were also quantified in dust reference material SRM 2585 for first time. EHS, 4-MBC and IAMC were detected in some of the analyzed samples, although at lower concentrations than EHMC and OCR.

A Case Study of Landholder Attitudes and Behaviour Toward the Conservation of Renosterveld, a Critically Endangered Vegetation Type in Cape Floral Kingdom, South Africa

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Winter, Susan J.; Prozesky, Heidi; Esler, Karen J.

2007-07-01

The attitudes and behaviours of private landholders toward the conservation of a highly transformed and critically endangered habitat, Overberg Coastal Renosterveld (OCR) (a grassy shrubland of the Cape Floral Region, South Africa) are described. Personal, semistructured interviews were conducted with landholders, representing 40 properties in the Overberg region, on topics such as management and utilisation of OCR, the depth of their knowledge of its conservation importance, what they perceive its value to be, and the extent of their willingness to conserve it. General attitudes toward conservation incentives and provincial conservation authorities were also investigated. Farmers more willing to conserve were younger, did not necessarily have a better education, and owned larger farms (>500 ha) with a greater amount of remnant renosterveld (>300 ha) than those less willing to conserve. Attitudes toward the OCR were largely negative, related to associated problem plants and animals and the fact that it is believed not to be economically advantageous to retain it. However, farmers are of the opinion that provision of incentives and increased extension support will provide practical positive inducements for conservation. Landholder education is paramount to prevent further transformation of critically endangered habitats. The success of private-conservation programs depends on the attitudes of landowners toward (1) the particular habitat or species to be conserved (which can vary depending on the type of land use practised and the associated benefits and disadvantages of that habitat type); (2) the conservation agency or extension officers responsible for that area; and (3) willingness of landowners to participate in a conservation program, which is influenced by landowner age, farm size, and the amount of natural habitat left to conserve.

The importance of physiological oxygen concentrations in the sandwich cultures of rat hepatocytes on gas-permeable membranes.

PubMed

Xiao, Wenjin; Shinohara, Marie; Komori, Kikuo; Sakai, Yasuyuki; Matsui, Hitoshi; Osada, Tomoharu

2014-01-01

Oxygen supply is a critical issue in the optimization of in vitro hepatocyte microenvironments. Although several strategies have been developed to balance complex oxygen requirements, these techniques are not able to accurately meet the cellular oxygen demand. Indeed, neither the actual oxygen concentration encountered by cells nor the cellular oxygen consumption rates (OCR) was assessed. The aim of this study is to define appropriate oxygen conditions at the cell level that could accurately match the OCR and allow hepatocytes to maintain liver specific functions in a normoxic environment. Matrigel overlaid rat hepatocytes were cultured on the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membranes under either atmospheric oxygen concentration [20%-O2 (+)] or physiological oxygen concentrations [10%-O2 (+), 5%-O2 (+)], respectively, to investigate the effects of various oxygen concentrations on the efficient functioning of hepatocytes. In parallel, the gas-impermeable cultures (polystyrene) with PDMS membrane inserts were used as the control groups [PS-O2 (-)]. The results indicated that the hepatocytes under 10%-O2 (+) exhibited improved survival and maintenance of metabolic activities and functional polarization. The dramatic elevation of cellular OCR up to the in vivo liver rate proposed a normoxic environment for hepatocytes, especially when comparing with PS-O2 (-) cultures, in which the cells generally tolerated hypoxia. Additionally, the expression levels of 84 drug-metabolism genes were the closest to physiological levels. In conclusion, this study clearly shows the benefit of long-term culture of hepatocytes at physiological oxygen concentration, and indicates on an oxygen-permeable membrane system to provide a simple method for in vitro studies. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Feeding State, Insulin and NPR-1 Modulate Chemoreceptor Gene Expression via Integration of Sensory and Circuit Inputs

PubMed Central

Gruner, Matthew; Nelson, Dru; Winbush, Ari; Hintz, Rebecca; Ryu, Leesun; Chung, Samuel H.; Kim, Kyuhyung; Gabel, Chrisopher V.; van der Linden, Alexander M.

2014-01-01

Feeding state and food availability can dramatically alter an animals' sensory response to chemicals in its environment. Dynamic changes in the expression of chemoreceptor genes may underlie some of these food and state-dependent changes in chemosensory behavior, but the mechanisms underlying these expression changes are unknown. Here, we identified a KIN-29 (SIK)-dependent chemoreceptor, srh-234, in C. elegans whose expression in the ADL sensory neuron type is regulated by integration of sensory and internal feeding state signals. We show that in addition to KIN-29, signaling is mediated by the DAF-2 insulin-like receptor, OCR-2 TRPV channel, and NPR-1 neuropeptide receptor. Cell-specific rescue experiments suggest that DAF-2 and OCR-2 act in ADL, while NPR-1 acts in the RMG interneurons. NPR-1-mediated regulation of srh-234 is dependent on gap-junctions, implying that circuit inputs regulate the expression of chemoreceptor genes in sensory neurons. Using physical and genetic manipulation of ADL neurons, we show that sensory inputs from food presence and ADL neural output regulate srh-234 expression. While KIN-29 and DAF-2 act primarily via the MEF-2 (MEF2) and DAF-16 (FOXO) transcription factors to regulate srh-234 expression in ADL neurons, OCR-2 and NPR-1 likely act via a calcium-dependent but MEF-2- and DAF-16-independent pathway. Together, our results suggest that sensory- and circuit-mediated regulation of chemoreceptor genes via multiple pathways may allow animals to precisely regulate and fine-tune their chemosensory responses as a function of internal and external conditions. PMID:25357003

Structural effects of radiation-induced volumetric expansion on unreinforced concrete biological shields

DOE PAGES

Le Pape, Y.

2015-11-22

Limited literature (Pomaro et al., 2011, Mirhosseini et al., 2014, Salomoni et al., 2014 and Andreev and Kapliy, 2014) is available on the structural analysis of irradiated concrete biological shield (CBS), although extended operations of nuclear powers plants may lead to critical neutron exposure above 1.0 × 10 +19 n cm ₋2. To the notable exception of Andreev and Kapliy, available structural models do not account for radiation-induced volumetric expansion, although it was found to develop important linear dimensional change of the order of 1%, and, can lead to significant concrete damage (Le Pape et al., 2015). A 1D-cylindrical model of an unreinforced CBS accounting for temperature and irradiation effects is developed. Irradiated concrete properties are characterized probabilistically using the updated database collected by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Field et al., 2015). The overstressed concrete ratio (OCR) of the CBS, i.e., the proportion of the wall thickness being subject to stresses beyond the resistance of concrete, is derived by deterministic and probabilistic analysis assuming that irradiated concrete behaves as an elastic materials. In the bi-axial compressive zone near the reactor cavity, the OCR is limited to 5.7%, i.e., 8.6 cm (3more » $$_2^1$$ in.), whereas, in the tension zone, the OCR extends to 72%, i.e., 1.08 m (42$$_2^1$$ in.). Finally, we find that these results, valid for a maximum neutron fluence on the concrete surface of 3.1 × 10 +19 n cm ₋2 (E > 0.1 MeV) and, obtained after 80 years of operation, give an indication of the potential detrimental effects of prolonged irradiation of concrete in nuclear power plants.« less

Geotechnical Parameters of Alluvial Soils from in-situ Tests

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Młynarek, Zbigniew; Stefaniak, Katarzyna; Wierzbicki, Jędrzej

2012-10-01

The article concentrates on the identification of geotechnical parameters of alluvial soil represented by silts found near Poznan and Elblag. Strength and deformation parameters of the subsoil tested were identified by the CPTU (static penetration) and SDMT (dilatometric) methods, as well as by the vane test (VT). Geotechnical parameters of the subsoil were analysed with a view to using the soil as an earth construction material and as a foundation for buildings constructed on the grounds tested. The article includes an analysis of the overconsolidation process of the soil tested and a formula for the identification of the overconsolidation ratio OCR. Equation 9 reflects the relation between the undrained shear strength and plasticity of the silts analyzed and the OCR value. The analysis resulted in the determination of the Nkt coefficient, which might be used to identify the undrained shear strength of both sediments tested. On the basis of a detailed analysis of changes in terms of the constrained oedometric modulus M0, the relations between the said modulus, the liquidity index and the OCR value were identified. Mayne's formula (1995) was used to determine the M0 modulus from the CPTU test. The usefullness of the sediments found near Poznan as an earth construction material was analysed after their structure had been destroyed and compacted with a Proctor apparatus. In cases of samples characterised by different water content and soil particle density, the analysis of changes in terms of cohesion and the internal friction angle proved that these parameters are influenced by the soil phase composition (Fig. 18 and 19). On the basis of the tests, it was concluded that the most desirable shear strength parameters are achieved when the silt is compacted below the optimum water content.

Geotechnical Parameters of Alluvial Soils from in-situ Tests

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Młynarek, Zbigniew; Stefaniak, Katarzyna; Wierzbicki, Jedrzej

2012-10-01

The article concentrates on the identification of geotechnical parameters of alluvial soil represented by silts found near Poznan and Elblag. Strength and deformation parameters of the subsoil tested were identified by the CPTU (static penetration) and SDMT (dilatometric) methods, as well as by the vane test (VT). Geotechnical parameters of the subsoil were analysed with a view to using the soil as an earth construction material and as a foundation for buildings constructed on the grounds tested. The article includes an analysis of the overconsolidation process of the soil tested and a formula for the identification of the overconsolidation ratio OCR. Equation 9 reflects the relation between the undrained shear strength and plasticity of the silts analyzed and the OCR value. The analysis resulted in the determination of the Nkt coefficient, which might be used to identify the undrained shear strength of both sediments tested. On the basis of a detailed analysis of changes in terms of the constrained oedometric modulus M0, the relations between the said modulus, the liquidity index and the OCR value were identified. Mayne's formula (1995) was used to determine the M0 modulus from the CPTU test. The usefullness of the sediments found near Poznan as an earth construction material was analysed after their structure had been destroyed and compacted with a Proctor apparatus. In cases of samples characterised by different water content and soil particle density, the analysis of changes in terms of cohesion and the internal friction angle proved that these parameters are influenced by the soil phase composition (Fig. 18 and 19). On the basis of the tests, it was concluded that the most desirable shear strength parameters are achieved when the silt is compacted below the optimum water content.

Bioenergetic effects of mitochondrial-targeted coenzyme Q analogs in endothelial cells.

PubMed

Fink, Brian D; Herlein, Judith A; Yorek, Mark A; Fenner, Amanda M; Kerns, Robert J; Sivitz, William I

2012-09-01

Mitochondrial-targeted analogs of coenzyme Q (CoQ) are under development to reduce oxidative damage induced by a variety of disease states. However, there is a need to understand the bioenergetic effects of these agents and whether or not these effects are related to redox properties, including their known pro-oxidant effects. We examined the bioenergetic effects of two mitochondrial-targeted CoQ analogs in their quinol forms, mitoquinol (MitoQ) and plastoquinonyl-decyl-triphenylphosphonium (SkQ1), in bovine aortic endothelial cells. We used an extracellular oxygen and proton flux analyzer to assess mitochondrial action at the intact-cell level. Both agents, in dose-dependent fashion, reduced the oxygen consumption rate (OCR) directed at ATP turnover (OCR(ATP)) (IC₅₀ values of 189 ± 13 nM for MitoQ and 181 ± 7 for SKQ1; difference not significant) while not affecting or mildly increasing basal oxygen consumption. Both compounds increased extracellular acidification in the basal state consistent with enhanced glycolysis. Both compounds enhanced mitochondrial superoxide production assessed by using mitochondrial-targeted dihydroethidium, and both increased H₂O₂ production from mitochondria of cells treated before isolation of the organelles. The manganese superoxide dismutase mimetic manganese(III) tetrakis(1-methyl-4-pyridyl)porphyrin did not alter or actually enhanced the actions of the targeted CoQ analogs to reduce OCR(ATP). In contrast, N-acetylcysteine mitigated this effect of MitoQ and SkQ1. In summary, our data demonstrate the important bioenergetic effects of targeted CoQ analogs. Moreover, these effects are mediated, at least in part, through superoxide production but depend on conversion to H₂O₂. These bioenergetic and redox actions need to be considered as these compounds are developed for therapeutic purposes.

A case study of landholder attitudes and behaviour toward the conservation of renosterveld, a critically endangered vegetation type in Cape Floral Kingdom, South Africa.

PubMed

Winter, Susan J; Prozesky, Heidi; Esler, Karen J

2007-07-01

The attitudes and behaviours of private landholders toward the conservation of a highly transformed and critically endangered habitat, Overberg Coastal Renosterveld (OCR) (a grassy shrubland of the Cape Floral Region, South Africa) are described. Personal, semistructured interviews were conducted with landholders, representing 40 properties in the Overberg region, on topics such as management and utilisation of OCR, the depth of their knowledge of its conservation importance, what they perceive its value to be, and the extent of their willingness to conserve it. General attitudes toward conservation incentives and provincial conservation authorities were also investigated. Farmers more willing to conserve were younger, did not necessarily have a better education, and owned larger farms (>500 ha) with a greater amount of remnant renosterveld (>300 ha) than those less willing to conserve. Attitudes toward the OCR were largely negative, related to associated problem plants and animals and the fact that it is believed not to be economically advantageous to retain it. However, farmers are of the opinion that provision of incentives and increased extension support will provide practical positive inducements for conservation. Landholder education is paramount to prevent further transformation of critically endangered habitats. The success of private-conservation programs depends on the attitudes of landowners toward (1) the particular habitat or species to be conserved (which can vary depending on the type of land use practised and the associated benefits and disadvantages of that habitat type); (2) the conservation agency or extension officers responsible for that area; and (3) willingness of landowners to participate in a conservation program, which is influenced by landowner age, farm size, and the amount of natural habitat left to conserve.

Oxygen consumption of human heart cells in monolayer culture.

PubMed

Sekine, Kaori; Kagawa, Yuki; Maeyama, Erina; Ota, Hiroki; Haraguchi, Yuji; Matsuura, Katsuhisa; Shimizu, Tatsuya

2014-09-26

Tissue engineering in cardiovascular regenerative therapy requires the development of an efficient oxygen supply system for cell cultures. However, there are few studies which have examined human cardiomyocytes in terms of oxygen consumption and metabolism in culture. We developed an oxygen measurement system equipped with an oxygen microelectrode sensor and estimated the oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) by using the oxygen concentration profiles in culture medium. The heart is largely made up of cardiomyocytes, cardiac fibroblasts, and cardiac endothelial cells. Therefore, we measured the oxygen consumption of human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs), cardiac fibroblasts, human cardiac microvascular endothelial cell and aortic smooth muscle cells. Then we made correlations with their metabolisms. In hiPSC-CMs, the value of the OCR was 0.71±0.38pmol/h/cell, whereas the glucose consumption rate and lactate production rate were 0.77±0.32pmol/h/cell and 1.61±0.70pmol/h/cell, respectively. These values differed significantly from those of the other cells in human heart. The metabolism of the cells that constitute human heart showed the molar ratio of lactate production to glucose consumption (L/G ratio) that ranged between 1.97 and 2.2. Although the energy metabolism in adult heart in vivo is reported to be aerobic, our data demonstrated a dominance of anaerobic glycolysis in an in vitro environment. With our measuring system, we clearly showed the differences in the metabolism of cells between in vivo and in vitro monolayer culture. Our results regarding cell OCRs and metabolism may be useful for future tissue engineering of human heart. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

40 CFR 7.115 - Postaward compliance.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

...) The nature of and schedule for review, or investigation; and (2) Its opportunity, before the... § 7.115 Postaward compliance. (a) Periodic review. The OCR may periodically conduct compliance reviews... information, and may conduct on-site reviews when it has reason to believe that discrimination may be...

Research on Fault Characteristics and Line Protections Within a Large-scale Photovoltaic Power Plant

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Chi; Zeng, Jie; Zhao, Wei; Zhong, Guobin; Xu, Qi; Luo, Pandian; Gu, Chenjie; Liu, Bohan

2017-05-01

Centralized photovoltaic (PV) systems have different fault characteristics from distributed PV systems due to the different system structures and controls. This makes the fault analysis and protection methods used in distribution networks with distributed PV not suitable for a centralized PV power plant. Therefore, a consolidated expression for the fault current within a PV power plant under different controls was calculated considering the fault response of the PV array. Then, supported by the fault current analysis and the on-site testing data, the overcurrent relay (OCR) performance was evaluated in the collection system of an 850 MW PV power plant. It reveals that the OCRs at downstream side on overhead lines may malfunction. In this case, a new relay scheme was proposed using directional distance elements. In the PSCAD/EMTDC, a detailed PV system model was built and verified using the on-site testing data. Simulation results indicate that the proposed relay scheme could effectively solve the problems under variant fault scenarios and PV plant output levels.

Ecotoxicological effect characterisation of widely used organic UV filters.

PubMed

Kaiser, D; Sieratowicz, A; Zielke, H; Oetken, M; Hollert, H; Oehlmann, J

2012-04-01

Chemical UV filters are used in sun protection and personal care products in order to protect consumers from skin cancer induced by ultraviolet (UV) radiation. The present study aims to evaluate the effects of three common UV filters butyl-methoxydibenzoylmethane (B-MDM) ethylhexyl-methoxycinnamate (EHMC) and octocrylene (OCR) on aquatic organism, focussing particularly on infaunal and epibentic invertebrates (Chironomus riparius, Lumbriculus variegatus, Melanoides tuberculata and Potamopyrgus antipodarum). Due to their life habits, these organism are especially affected by lipophilic substances. Additionally, two direct sediment contact assays utilising zebra fish (Danio rerio) embryos and bacteria (Arthrobacter globiformis) were conducted. EHMC caused a toxic effect on reproduction in both snails with lowest observed effect concentrations (LOEC) of 0.4 mg/kg (Potamopyrgus antipodarum) and 10 mg/kg (Melanoides tuberculata). At high concentrations sublethal effects could be observed for D. rerio after exposure to EHMC (NOEC 100 mg/kg). B-MDM and OCR showed no effects on any of the tested organism. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Semi-automated XML markup of biosystematic legacy literature with the GoldenGATE editor.

PubMed

Sautter, Guido; Böhm, Klemens; Agosti, Donat

2007-01-01

Today, digitization of legacy literature is a big issue. This also applies to the domain of biosystematics, where this process has just started. Digitized biosystematics literature requires a very precise and fine grained markup in order to be useful for detailed search, data linkage and mining. However, manual markup on sentence level and below is cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we present and evaluate the GoldenGATE editor, which is designed for the special needs of marking up OCR output with XML. It is built in order to support the user in this process as far as possible: Its functionality ranges from easy, intuitive tagging through markup conversion to dynamic binding of configurable plug-ins provided by third parties. Our evaluation shows that marking up an OCR document using GoldenGATE is three to four times faster than with an off-the-shelf XML editor like XML-Spy. Using domain-specific NLP-based plug-ins, these numbers are even higher.

Tracker: Image-Processing and Object-Tracking System Developed

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Klimek, Robert B.; Wright, Theodore W.

1999-01-01

Tracker is an object-tracking and image-processing program designed and developed at the NASA Lewis Research Center to help with the analysis of images generated by microgravity combustion and fluid physics experiments. Experiments are often recorded on film or videotape for analysis later. Tracker automates the process of examining each frame of the recorded experiment, performing image-processing operations to bring out the desired detail, and recording the positions of the objects of interest. It can load sequences of images from disk files or acquire images (via a frame grabber) from film transports, videotape, laser disks, or a live camera. Tracker controls the image source to automatically advance to the next frame. It can employ a large array of image-processing operations to enhance the detail of the acquired images and can analyze an arbitrarily large number of objects simultaneously. Several different tracking algorithms are available, including conventional threshold and correlation-based techniques, and more esoteric procedures such as "snake" tracking and automated recognition of character data in the image. The Tracker software was written to be operated by researchers, thus every attempt was made to make the software as user friendly and self-explanatory as possible. Tracker is used by most of the microgravity combustion and fluid physics experiments performed by Lewis, and by visiting researchers. This includes experiments performed on the space shuttles, Mir, sounding rockets, zero-g research airplanes, drop towers, and ground-based laboratories. This software automates the analysis of the flame or liquid s physical parameters such as position, velocity, acceleration, size, shape, intensity characteristics, color, and centroid, as well as a number of other measurements. It can perform these operations on multiple objects simultaneously. Another key feature of Tracker is that it performs optical character recognition (OCR). This feature is useful in extracting numerical instrumentation data that are embedded in images. All the results are saved in files for further data reduction and graphing. There are currently three Tracking Systems (workstations) operating near the laboratories and offices of Lewis Microgravity Science Division researchers. These systems are used independently by students, scientists, and university-based principal investigators. The researchers bring their tapes or films to the workstation and perform the tracking analysis. The resultant data files generated by the tracking process can then be analyzed on the spot, although most of the time researchers prefer to transfer them via the network to their offices for further analysis or plotting. In addition, many researchers have installed Tracker on computers in their office for desktop analysis of digital image sequences, which can be digitized by the Tracking System or some other means. Tracker has not only provided a capability to efficiently and automatically analyze large volumes of data, saving many hours of tedious work, but has also provided new capabilities to extract valuable information and phenomena that was heretofore undetected and unexploited.

Pattern recognition technique

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hong, J. P.

1971-01-01

Technique operates regardless of pattern rotation, translation or magnification and successfully detects out-of-register patterns. It improves accuracy and reduces cost of various optical character recognition devices and page readers and provides data input to computer.

Keyboarding: An Important Skill for the Office of the Future.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burford, Anna M.

1980-01-01

Defines the components of the office of the future: data processing, micrographics, optical character recognition, telecommunications, and word processing. Also discusses teacher responsibility, student preparation, future challenges, and teacher awareness. (CT)

Enter Words and Pictures the Easy Way--Scan Them.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olivas, Jerry

1989-01-01

Discusses image scanning and optical character recognition. Describes how computer scanners work. Summarizes scan quality, scanning speed requirements, and hardware requirements for scanners. Surveys the range of scanners currently available. (MVL)

Optical character recognition of camera-captured images based on phase features

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Diaz-Escobar, Julia; Kober, Vitaly

2015-09-01

Nowadays most of digital information is obtained using mobile devices specially smartphones. In particular, it brings the opportunity for optical character recognition in camera-captured images. For this reason many recognition applications have been recently developed such as recognition of license plates, business cards, receipts and street signal; document classification, augmented reality, language translator and so on. Camera-captured images are usually affected by geometric distortions, nonuniform illumination, shadow, noise, which make difficult the recognition task with existing systems. It is well known that the Fourier phase contains a lot of important information regardless of the Fourier magnitude. So, in this work we propose a phase-based recognition system exploiting phase-congruency features for illumination/scale invariance. The performance of the proposed system is tested in terms of miss classifications and false alarms with the help of computer simulation.

Optical analysis of the star-tracker telescope for Gravity Probe

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Zissa, D. E.

1984-01-01

A ray tracing modeling of the star tracker telescope for Gravity Probe was used to predict the character of the output signal and its sensitivity to fabrication errors. In particular, the impact of the optical subsystem on the requirement of 1 milliarc second signal linearity over a + or - 50 milliarc second range was examined. Photomultiplier and solid state detector options were considered. Recommendations are made.

A theoretical study of the non-linear optical properties of a series of Ni-dithiolene derivatives

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Avramopoulos, Aggelos; Papadopoulos, Manthos G.

2015-01-01

The linear and nonlinear optical properties of a series of nickel derivatives have been studied. The results have been verified and interpreted by employing a series of methods (e.g. UCCSD(T), CASSCF/CASPT2). The diradicaloid character of Ni ( SCH )4 is discussred. The effect on the properties of changes in the structure of NiBDT is analysed.

Charge-transfer optical absorption mechanism of DNA:Ag-nanocluster complexes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Longuinhos, R.; Lúcio, A. D.; Chacham, H.; Alexandre, S. S.

2016-05-01

Optical properties of DNA:Ag-nanoclusters complexes have been successfully applied experimentally in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind their optical activity remain unresolved. In this work, we present a time-dependent density functional study of optical absorption in DNA:Ag4. In all 23 different complexes investigated, we obtain new absorption peaks in the visible region that are not found in either the isolated Ag4 or isolated DNA base pairs. Absorption from red to green are predominantly of charge-transfer character, from the Ag4 to the DNA fragment, while absorption in the blue-violet range are mostly associated to electronic transitions of a mixed character, involving either DNA-Ag4 hybrid orbitals or intracluster orbitals. We also investigate the role of exchange-correlation functionals in the calculated optical spectra. Significant differences are observed between the calculations using the PBE functional (without exact exchange) and the CAM-B3LYP functional (which partly includes exact exchange). Specifically, we observe a tendency of charge-transfer excitations to involve purines bases, and the PBE spectra error is more pronounced in the complexes where the Ag cluster is bound to the purines. Finally, our results also highlight the importance of adding both the complementary base pair and the sugar-phosphate backbone in order to properly characterize the absorption spectrum of DNA:Ag complexes.

Charge-transfer optical absorption mechanism of DNA:Ag-nanocluster complexes.

PubMed

Longuinhos, R; Lúcio, A D; Chacham, H; Alexandre, S S

2016-05-01

Optical properties of DNA:Ag-nanoclusters complexes have been successfully applied experimentally in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind their optical activity remain unresolved. In this work, we present a time-dependent density functional study of optical absorption in DNA:Ag_{4}. In all 23 different complexes investigated, we obtain new absorption peaks in the visible region that are not found in either the isolated Ag_{4} or isolated DNA base pairs. Absorption from red to green are predominantly of charge-transfer character, from the Ag_{4} to the DNA fragment, while absorption in the blue-violet range are mostly associated to electronic transitions of a mixed character, involving either DNA-Ag_{4} hybrid orbitals or intracluster orbitals. We also investigate the role of exchange-correlation functionals in the calculated optical spectra. Significant differences are observed between the calculations using the PBE functional (without exact exchange) and the CAM-B3LYP functional (which partly includes exact exchange). Specifically, we observe a tendency of charge-transfer excitations to involve purines bases, and the PBE spectra error is more pronounced in the complexes where the Ag cluster is bound to the purines. Finally, our results also highlight the importance of adding both the complementary base pair and the sugar-phosphate backbone in order to properly characterize the absorption spectrum of DNA:Ag complexes.

45 CFR 88.6 - Complaint handling and investigating.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... 88.6 Public Welfare DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES GENERAL ADMINISTRATION ENSURING THAT DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES FUNDS DO NOT SUPPORT COERCIVE OR DISCRIMINATORY POLICIES OR PRACTICES § 88.6 Complaint handling and investigating. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of...

7 CFR 2003.6 - Office of the Under Secretary.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... information retrieval. This office also serves as a liaison with Office of Congressional Relations (OCR... Secretary on all matters relating to mission area budget policy. (2) The Research, Analysis and Information Division analyzes information on rural conditions and the strategies and techniques for promoting rural...

7 CFR 2003.6 - Office of the Under Secretary.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... information retrieval. This office also serves as a liaison with Office of Congressional Relations (OCR... Secretary on all matters relating to mission area budget policy. (2) The Research, Analysis and Information Division analyzes information on rural conditions and the strategies and techniques for promoting rural...

7 CFR 2003.6 - Office of the Under Secretary.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... information retrieval. This office also serves as a liaison with Office of Congressional Relations (OCR... Secretary on all matters relating to mission area budget policy. (2) The Research, Analysis and Information Division analyzes information on rural conditions and the strategies and techniques for promoting rural...

32 CFR 806.4 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

.... Records are classified; originated with a nongovernment source; are part of the Air Force's decision... managers to assist IDAs in making decisions on FOIA requests. (f) OCR. A DoD element with an official... Defense Department of Defense (Continued) DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE ADMINISTRATION AIR FORCE FREEDOM OF...

45 CFR 85.61 - Compliance procedures.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... 45 Public Welfare 1 2011-10-01 2011-10-01 false Compliance procedures. 85.61 Section 85.61 Public... SERVICES § 85.61 Compliance procedures. (a) Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, this... Federal government entity. (f) OCR shall notify the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance...

reCAPTCHA: human-based character recognition via Web security measures.

PubMed

von Ahn, Luis; Maurer, Benjamin; McMillen, Colin; Abraham, David; Blum, Manuel

2008-09-12

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are widespread security measures on the World Wide Web that prevent automated programs from abusing online services. They do so by asking humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet perform, such as deciphering distorted characters. Our research explored whether such human effort can be channeled into a useful purpose: helping to digitize old printed material by asking users to decipher scanned words from books that computerized optical character recognition failed to recognize. We showed that this method can transcribe text with a word accuracy exceeding 99%, matching the guarantee of professional human transcribers. Our apparatus is deployed in more than 40,000 Web sites and has transcribed over 440 million words.

The Study of ( n, d) Reaction Cross Sections for New Evaluated Semi-Empirical Formula Using Optical Model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bölükdemir, M. H.; Tel, E.; Okuducu, Ş.; Aydın, A.

2009-12-01

Nuclear fusion can be one of the most attractive sources of energy from the viewpoint of safety and minimal environmental impact. The neutron scattering cross sections data have a critical importance on fusion reactor (and in the fusion-fission hybrid) reactors. So, the study of the systematic of ( n, d) etc., reaction cross sections is of great importance in the definition of the excitation function character for reaction taking place on various nuclei at energies up to 20 MeV. In this study, non-elastic cross-sections have been calculated by using optical model for ( n, d) reactions at 14-15 MeV energy. The excitation function character and reaction Q-values depending on the asymmetry term effect for the ( n, d) reaction have been investigated. New coefficients have been obtained and the semi-empirical formulas including optical model non-elastic effects by fitting two parameters for the ( n, d) reaction cross-sections have been suggested. The obtained cross-section formulas with new coefficients have been compared with the available experimental data and discussed.

Quantitative analysis of eyes and other optical systems in linear optics.

PubMed

Harris, William F; Evans, Tanya; van Gool, Radboud D

2017-05-01

To show that 14-dimensional spaces of augmented point P and angle Q characteristics, matrices obtained from the ray transference, are suitable for quantitative analysis although only the latter define an inner-product space and only on it can one define distances and angles. The paper examines the nature of the spaces and their relationships to other spaces including symmetric dioptric power space. The paper makes use of linear optics, a three-dimensional generalization of Gaussian optics. Symmetric 2 × 2 dioptric power matrices F define a three-dimensional inner-product space which provides a sound basis for quantitative analysis (calculation of changes, arithmetic means, etc.) of refractive errors and thin systems. For general systems the optical character is defined by the dimensionally-heterogeneous 4 × 4 symplectic matrix S, the transference, or if explicit allowance is made for heterocentricity, the 5 × 5 augmented symplectic matrix T. Ordinary quantitative analysis cannot be performed on them because matrices of neither of these types constitute vector spaces. Suitable transformations have been proposed but because the transforms are dimensionally heterogeneous the spaces are not naturally inner-product spaces. The paper obtains 14-dimensional spaces of augmented point P and angle Q characteristics. The 14-dimensional space defined by the augmented angle characteristics Q is dimensionally homogenous and an inner-product space. A 10-dimensional subspace of the space of augmented point characteristics P is also an inner-product space. The spaces are suitable for quantitative analysis of the optical character of eyes and many other systems. Distances and angles can be defined in the inner-product spaces. The optical systems may have multiple separated astigmatic and decentred refracting elements. © 2017 The Authors Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics © 2017 The College of Optometrists.

40 CFR 51.362 - Motorist compliance enforcement program oversight.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... collection through the use of automatic data capture systems such as bar-code scanners or optical character... determination of compliance through parking lot surveys, road-side pull-overs, or other in-use vehicle...

40 CFR 51.362 - Motorist compliance enforcement program oversight.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... collection through the use of automatic data capture systems such as bar-code scanners or optical character... determination of compliance through parking lot surveys, road-side pull-overs, or other in-use vehicle...

Optical stabilization for time transfer infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vojtech, Josef; Altmann, Michal; Skoda, Pavel; Horvath, Tomas; Slapak, Martin; Smotlacha, Vladimir; Havlis, Ondrej; Munster, Petr; Radil, Jan; Kundrat, Jan; Altmannova, Lada; Velc, Radek; Hula, Miloslav; Vohnout, Rudolf

2017-08-01

In this paper, we propose and present verification of all-optical methods for stabilization of the end-to-end delay of an optical fiber link. These methods are verified for deployment within infrastructure for accurate time and stable frequency distribution, based on sharing of fibers with research and educational network carrying live data traffic. Methods range from path length control, through temperature conditioning method to transmit wavelength control. Attention is given to achieve continuous control for relatively broad range of delays. We summarize design rules for delay stabilization based on the character and the total delay jitter.

Aspects of quality insurance in digitizing historical climate data in Germany

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mächel, H.; Behrends, J.; Kapala, A.

2010-09-01

This contribution presents some of the problems and offers solutions regarding the digitization of historical meteorological data, and explains the need for verification and quality control. For the assessment of changes in climate extremes, long-term and complete observational records with a high temporal resolution are needed. However, in most countries, including Germany, such climate data are rare. Therefore, in 2005, the German Weather Service launched a project to inventory and digitize historical daily climatic records in cooperation with the Meteorological Institute of the University of Bonn. Experience with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) show that it is only of very limited use, as even printed tables (e.g. yearbooks) are not sufficiently recognized (10-20% error). In hand-written records, the recognition rate is about 50%. By comparing daily and monthly values, it is possible to auto-detect errors, but they can not be automatically corrected, since there is often more than one error per month. These erroneous data must then be controlled manually on an individual basis, which is significantly more error-prone than direct manual input. Therefore, both precipitation and climate station data are digitized manually. The time required to digitize one year of precipitation data (including the recording of daily precipitation amount and type, snow amount and type, and weather events such as thunder storms, fog, etc.) is equivalent to about five hours for one year of data. This involves manually typing, reformatting and quality control of the digitized data, as well as creating a digital photograph. For climate stations with three observations per day, the working time is 30-50 hours for one year of data, depending on the number of parameters and the condition of the documents. Several other problems occur when creating the digital records from historical observational data, some of which are listed below. Older records often used varying units and different conventions. For example, a value of 100 was added to the observed temperatures to avoid negative values. Furthermore, because standardization of the observations was very low when measurements began up to 200 years ago, the data often reflect a greater part of non-climatic influences. Varying daily observation times make it difficult to calculate a representative daily value. Even unconventional completed tables cost labor and requires experienced and trained staff. Data homogenization as well as both manual and automatic quality control may address some of these problems.

Eukaryotic genomes may exhibit up to 10 generic classes of gene promoters.

PubMed

Gagniuc, Paul; Ionescu-Tirgoviste, Constantin

2012-09-28

The main function of gene promoters appears to be the integration of different gene products in their biological pathways in order to maintain homeostasis. Generally, promoters have been classified in two major classes, namely TATA and CpG. Nevertheless, many genes using the same combinatorial formation of transcription factors have different gene expression patterns. Accordingly, we tried to ask ourselves some fundamental questions: Why certain genes have an overall predisposition for higher gene expression levels than others? What causes such a predisposition? Is there a structural relationship of these sequences in different tissues? Is there a strong phylogenetic relationship between promoters of closely related species? In order to gain valuable insights into different promoter regions, we obtained a series of image-based patterns which allowed us to identify 10 generic classes of promoters. A comprehensive analysis was undertaken for promoter sequences from Arabidopsis thaliana, Drosophila melanogaster, Homo sapiens and Oryza sativa, and a more extensive analysis of tissue-specific promoters in humans. We observed a clear preference for these species to use certain classes of promoters for specific biological processes. Moreover, in humans, we found that different tissues use distinct classes of promoters, reflecting an emerging promoter network. Depending on the tissue type, comparisons made between these classes of promoters reveal a complementarity between their patterns whereas some other classes of promoters have been observed to occur in competition. Furthermore, we also noticed the existence of some transitional states between these classes of promoters that may explain certain evolutionary mechanisms, which suggest a possible predisposition for specific levels of gene expression and perhaps for a different number of factors responsible for triggering gene expression. Our conclusions are based on comprehensive data from three different databases and a new computer model whose core is using Kappa index of coincidence. To fully understand the connections between gene promoters and gene expression, we analyzed thousands of promoter sequences using our Kappa Index of Coincidence method and a specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) neural network. Under our criteria, 10 classes of promoters were detected. In addition, the existence of "transitional" promoters suggests that there is an evolutionary weighted continuum between classes, depending perhaps upon changes in their gene products.

The Importance of Phonons with Negative Phase Quotient in Disordered Solids.

PubMed

Seyf, Hamid Reza; Lv, Wei; Rohskopf, Andrew; Henry, Asegun

2018-02-08

Current understanding of phonons is based on the phonon gas model (PGM), which is best rationalized for crystalline materials. However, most of the phonons/modes in disordered materials have a different character and thus may contribute to heat conduction in a fundamentally different way than is described by PGM. For the modes in crystals, which have sinusoidal character, one can separate the modes into two primary categories, namely acoustic and optical modes. However, for the modes in disordered materials, such designations may no longer rigorously apply. Nonetheless, the phase quotient (PQ) is a quantity that can be used to evaluate whether a mode more so shares a distinguishing property of acoustic vibrations manifested as a positive PQ, or a distinguishing property of an optical vibrations manifested as negative PQ. In thinking about this characteristic, there is essentially no intuition regarding the role of positive vs. negative PQ vibrational modes in disordered solids. Given this gap in understanding, herein we studied the respective contributions to thermal conductivity for several disordered solids as a function of PQ. The analysis sheds light on the importance of optical like/negative PQ modes in structurally/compositionally disordered solids, whereas in crystalline materials, the contributions of optical modes are usually small.

Virtual file system for PSDS

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Runnels, Tyson D.

1993-01-01

This is a case study. It deals with the use of a 'virtual file system' (VFS) for Boeing's UNIX-based Product Standards Data System (PSDS). One of the objectives of PSDS is to store digital standards documents. The file-storage requirements are that the files must be rapidly accessible, stored for long periods of time - as though they were paper, protected from disaster, and accumulative to about 80 billion characters (80 gigabytes). This volume of data will be approached in the first two years of the project's operation. The approach chosen is to install a hierarchical file migration system using optical disk cartridges. Files are migrated from high-performance media to lower performance optical media based on a least-frequency-used algorithm. The optical media are less expensive per character stored and are removable. Vital statistics about the removable optical disk cartridges are maintained in a database. The assembly of hardware and software acts as a single virtual file system transparent to the PSDS user. The files are copied to 'backup-and-recover' media whose vital statistics are also stored in the database. Seventeen months into operation, PSDS is storing 49 gigabytes. A number of operational and performance problems were overcome. Costs are under control. New and/or alternative uses for the VFS are being considered.

40 CFR 7.180 - Mediation of age discrimination complaints.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 1 2014-07-01 2014-07-01 false Mediation of age discrimination... Discrimination Prohibited on the Basis of Age § 7.180 Mediation of age discrimination complaints. (a) The OCR will refer all accepted complaints alleging age discrimination to the Mediation Agency designated by...

40 CFR 7.180 - Mediation of age discrimination complaints.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 1 2013-07-01 2013-07-01 false Mediation of age discrimination... Discrimination Prohibited on the Basis of Age § 7.180 Mediation of age discrimination complaints. (a) The OCR will refer all accepted complaints alleging age discrimination to the Mediation Agency designated by...

40 CFR 7.180 - Mediation of age discrimination complaints.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 1 2012-07-01 2012-07-01 false Mediation of age discrimination... Discrimination Prohibited on the Basis of Age § 7.180 Mediation of age discrimination complaints. (a) The OCR will refer all accepted complaints alleging age discrimination to the Mediation Agency designated by...

40 CFR 7.180 - Mediation of age discrimination complaints.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 1 2011-07-01 2011-07-01 false Mediation of age discrimination... Discrimination Prohibited on the Basis of Age § 7.180 Mediation of age discrimination complaints. (a) The OCR will refer all accepted complaints alleging age discrimination to the Mediation Agency designated by...

40 CFR 7.180 - Mediation of age discrimination complaints.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Mediation of age discrimination... Discrimination Prohibited on the Basis of Age § 7.180 Mediation of age discrimination complaints. (a) The OCR will refer all accepted complaints alleging age discrimination to the Mediation Agency designated by...

77 FR 65190 - National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics: Meeting

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-10-25

... Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The Committee will also discuss its draft report on Data Stewardship in Community Health... DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics: Meeting...

76 FR 20711 - Hearings of the Review Panel on Prison Rape

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-04-13

... DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Office of Justice Programs [OJP (OCR) Docket No. 1548] Hearings of the Review Panel on Prison Rape AGENCY: Office of Justice Programs, Justice. ACTION: Notice of hearing. SUMMARY: The Office of Justice Programs (OJP) announces that the Review Panel on Prison Rape (Panel) will...

78 FR 77495 - Hearings of the Review Panel on Prison Rape

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-12-23

... DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Office of Justice Programs [OJP (OCR) Docket No. 1642] Hearings of the Review Panel on Prison Rape AGENCY: Office of Justice Programs, Justice. ACTION: Notice of Hearing. SUMMARY: The Office of Justice Programs (OJP) announces that the Review Panel on Prison Rape (Panel) will...

DOE Research and Development Accomplishments Help

Science.gov Websites

be used to search, locate, access, and electronically download full-text research and development (R Browse Downloading, Viewing, and/or Searching Full-text Documents/Pages Searching the Database Search Features Search allows you to search the OCRed full-text document and bibliographic information, the

Nondiscrimination in Employment Practices in Education.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights (ED), Washington, DC.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Department of Education, prepared this brochure for the general public and for education agencies and institutions that have programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance. The brochure summarizes the requirements pertaining to employment practices contained in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act…

Notice of Nondiscrimination.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights (ED), Washington, DC.

The Department of Education's (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) enforces several statutes that protect the rights of beneficiaries in programs or activities that receive financial assistance from ED. These laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), sex (Title IX of the…

76 FR 10476 - Special Conditions: Boeing Model 787-8 Airplane; Overhead Crew-Rest Compartment

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-02-25

...\\ in interior volume, the design must ensure the ability to contain a fire likely to occur within the... or unusual design features associated with installation of an overhead crew-rest (OCR) compartment... this design feature. These special conditions contain the additional safety standards that the...

40 CFR 7.75 - Transition plan.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... of Handicap § 7.75 Transition plan. If structural changes to facilities are necessary to make the...) Requirements. The transition plan must set forth the steps needed to complete the structural changes required... the OCR upon request and to the public for inspection at either the site of the project or at the...

QR code based noise-free optical encryption and decryption of a gray scale image

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiao, Shuming; Zou, Wenbin; Li, Xia

2017-03-01

In optical encryption systems, speckle noise is one major challenge in obtaining high quality decrypted images. This problem can be addressed by employing a QR code based noise-free scheme. Previous works have been conducted for optically encrypting a few characters or a short expression employing QR codes. This paper proposes a practical scheme for optically encrypting and decrypting a gray-scale image based on QR codes for the first time. The proposed scheme is compatible with common QR code generators and readers. Numerical simulation results reveal the proposed method can encrypt and decrypt an input image correctly.

Bragg-Berry mirrors: reflective broadband q-plates.

PubMed

Rafayelyan, Mushegh; Brasselet, Etienne

2016-09-01

We report on the experimental realization of flat mirrors enabling the broadband generation of optical vortices upon reflection. The effect is based on the geometric Berry phase associated with the circular Bragg reflection phenomenon from chiral uniaxial media. We show the reflective optical vortex generation from both diffractive and nondiffractive paraxial light beams using spatially patterned chiral liquid crystal films. The intrinsic spectrally broadband character of spin-orbit generation of optical phase singularities is demonstrated over the full visible domain. Our results do not rely on any birefringent retardation requirement and, consequently, foster the development of a novel generation of robust optical elements for spin-orbit photonic technologies.

MSL: Facilitating automatic and physical analysis of published scientific literature in PDF format

PubMed Central

Ahmed, Zeeshan; Dandekar, Thomas

2018-01-01

Published scientific literature contains millions of figures, including information about the results obtained from different scientific experiments e.g. PCR-ELISA data, microarray analysis, gel electrophoresis, mass spectrometry data, DNA/RNA sequencing, diagnostic imaging (CT/MRI and ultrasound scans), and medicinal imaging like electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), echocardiography  (ECG), positron-emission tomography (PET) images. The importance of biomedical figures has been widely recognized in scientific and medicine communities, as they play a vital role in providing major original data, experimental and computational results in concise form. One major challenge for implementing a system for scientific literature analysis is extracting and analyzing text and figures from published PDF files by physical and logical document analysis. Here we present a product line architecture based bioinformatics tool ‘Mining Scientific Literature (MSL)’, which supports the extraction of text and images by interpreting all kinds of published PDF files using advanced data mining and image processing techniques. It provides modules for the marginalization of extracted text based on different coordinates and keywords, visualization of extracted figures and extraction of embedded text from all kinds of biological and biomedical figures using applied Optimal Character Recognition (OCR). Moreover, for further analysis and usage, it generates the system’s output in different formats including text, PDF, XML and images files. Hence, MSL is an easy to install and use analysis tool to interpret published scientific literature in PDF format. PMID:29721305

Metabolic analysis of radioresistant medulloblastoma stem-like clones and potential therapeutic targets.

PubMed

Sun, Lue; Moritake, Takashi; Ito, Kazuya; Matsumoto, Yoshitaka; Yasui, Hironobu; Nakagawa, Hidehiko; Hirayama, Aki; Inanami, Osamu; Tsuboi, Koji

2017-01-01

Medulloblastoma is a fatal brain tumor in children, primarily due to the presence of treatment-resistant medulloblastoma stem cells. The energy metabolic pathway is a potential target of cancer therapy because it is often different between cancer cells and normal cells. However, the metabolic properties of medulloblastoma stem cells, and whether specific metabolic pathways are essential for sustaining their stem cell-like phenotype and radioresistance, remain unclear. We have established radioresistant medulloblastoma stem-like clones (rMSLCs) by irradiation of the human medulloblastoma cell line ONS-76. Here, we assessed reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, mitochondria function, oxygen consumption rate (OCR), energy state, and metabolites of glycolysis and tricarboxylic acid cycle in rMSLCs and parental cells. rMSLCs showed higher lactate production and lower oxygen consumption rate than parental cells. Additionally, rMSLCs had low mitochondria mass, low endogenous ROS production, and existed in a low-energy state. Treatment with the metabolic modifier dichloroacetate (DCA) resulted in mitochondria dysfunction, glycolysis inhibition, elongated mitochondria morphology, and increased ROS production. DCA also increased radiosensitivity by suppression of the DNA repair capacity through nuclear oxidization and accelerated the generation of acetyl CoA to compensate for the lack of ATP. Moreover, treatment with DCA decreased cancer stem cell-like characters (e.g., CD133 positivity and sphere-forming ability) in rMSLCs. Together, our findings provide insights into the specific metabolism of rMSLCs and illuminate potential metabolic targets that might be exploited for therapeutic benefit in medulloblastoma.

Metabolic analysis of radioresistant medulloblastoma stem-like clones and potential therapeutic targets

PubMed Central

Sun, Lue; Moritake, Takashi; Ito, Kazuya; Matsumoto, Yoshitaka; Yasui, Hironobu; Nakagawa, Hidehiko; Hirayama, Aki; Inanami, Osamu; Tsuboi, Koji

2017-01-01

Medulloblastoma is a fatal brain tumor in children, primarily due to the presence of treatment-resistant medulloblastoma stem cells. The energy metabolic pathway is a potential target of cancer therapy because it is often different between cancer cells and normal cells. However, the metabolic properties of medulloblastoma stem cells, and whether specific metabolic pathways are essential for sustaining their stem cell-like phenotype and radioresistance, remain unclear. We have established radioresistant medulloblastoma stem-like clones (rMSLCs) by irradiation of the human medulloblastoma cell line ONS-76. Here, we assessed reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, mitochondria function, oxygen consumption rate (OCR), energy state, and metabolites of glycolysis and tricarboxylic acid cycle in rMSLCs and parental cells. rMSLCs showed higher lactate production and lower oxygen consumption rate than parental cells. Additionally, rMSLCs had low mitochondria mass, low endogenous ROS production, and existed in a low-energy state. Treatment with the metabolic modifier dichloroacetate (DCA) resulted in mitochondria dysfunction, glycolysis inhibition, elongated mitochondria morphology, and increased ROS production. DCA also increased radiosensitivity by suppression of the DNA repair capacity through nuclear oxidization and accelerated the generation of acetyl CoA to compensate for the lack of ATP. Moreover, treatment with DCA decreased cancer stem cell-like characters (e.g., CD133 positivity and sphere-forming ability) in rMSLCs. Together, our findings provide insights into the specific metabolism of rMSLCs and illuminate potential metabolic targets that might be exploited for therapeutic benefit in medulloblastoma. PMID:28426747

Document Delivery: An Annotated Selective Bibliography.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Khalil, Mounir A.; Katz, Suzanne R.

1992-01-01

Presents a selective annotated bibliography of 61 items that deal with topics related to document delivery, including networks; hypertext; interlibrary loan; computer security; electronic publishing; copyright; online catalogs; resource sharing; electronic mail; electronic libraries; optical character recognition; microcomputers; liability issues;…

Decoding divergent series in nonparaxial optics.

PubMed

Borghi, Riccardo; Gori, Franco; Guattari, Giorgio; Santarsiero, Massimo

2011-03-15

A theoretical analysis aimed at investigating the divergent character of perturbative series involved in the study of free-space nonparaxial propagation of vectorial optical beams is proposed. Our analysis predicts a factorial divergence for such series and provides a theoretical framework within which the results of recently published numerical experiments concerning nonparaxial propagation of vectorial Gaussian beams find a meaningful interpretation in terms of the decoding operated on such series by the Weniger transformation.

Mechanism analysis and numerical investigation of optical bistability in 2μm Tm,Ho:YLF solid laser

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Xin-Lu; Jiang, Bo; Dong, Guang-Zong; Li, Li; Peng, Yu-Feng

2010-11-01

A self-saturated absorption regime is proposed to theoretically investigate the optical bistability of Tm,Ho:YLF laser. Based on this bistability regime, the rate equation model of the optical bistability is established. The optical bistability behaviors of Tm,Ho:YLF laser are obtained by numerical simulating. The relation between laser gain and loss are also analyzed to confirm the rationality of the bistability mechanism. Furthermore, the time characters of the optical bistability are investigated. It is found that the high pulse power and the duration of the pre-pump are two major factors that affect the laser turn-on delay time and their influences on the turn-on delay are analyzed.

Optical connections on flexible substrates

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bosman, Erwin; Geerinck, Peter; Christiaens, Wim; Van Steenberge, Geert; Vanfleteren, Jan; Van Daele, Peter

2006-04-01

Optical interconnections integrated on a flexible substrate combine the advantages of optical data transmissions (high bandwidth, no electromagnetic disturbance and low power consumption) and those of flexible substrates (compact, ease of assembly...). Especially the flexible character of the substrates can significantly lower the assembly cost and leads to more compact modules. Especially in automotive-, avionic-, biomedical and sensing applications there is a great potential for these flexible optical interconnections because of the increasing data-rates, increasing use of optical sensors and requirement for smaller size and weight. The research concentrates on the integration of commercially available polymer optical layers (Truemode Backplane TM Polymer, Ormocer®) on a flexible Polyimide film, the fabrication of waveguides and out-of plane deflecting 45° mirrors, the characterization of the optical losses due to the bending of the substrate, and the fabrication of a proof-of-principal demonstrator. The resulting optical structures should be compatible with the standard fabrication of flexible printed circuit boards.

75 FR 60757 - Office for Civil Rights; Statement of Organization, Functions, and Delegations of Authority

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-10-01

... DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES Office of the Secretary Office for Civil Rights; Statement of Organization, Functions, and Delegations of Authority The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has... of Authority for the Department of Health and Human Services, Chapter AT, Office for Civil Rights...

Statistical Techniques for Efficient Indexing and Retrieval of Document Images

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bhardwaj, Anurag

2010-01-01

We have developed statistical techniques to improve the performance of document image search systems where the intermediate step of OCR based transcription is not used. Previous research in this area has largely focused on challenges pertaining to generation of small lexicons for processing handwritten documents and enhancement of poor quality…

OCR Pace on Probes Quickens

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maxwell, Lesli A.

2011-01-01

In the 21 months since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stood on an iconic bridge in Selma, Alabama, and pledged to aggressively combat discrimination in the nation's schools, federal education officials have launched dozens of new probes in school districts and states that reach into civil rights issues that previously received little, if…

And the Survey Says …

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Susan C.

2016-01-01

We are continuing our examination of very different physics availability numbers reported by AIP Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The essential difference appears to be the number of schools included in the denominator. The U.S. Department of Education classifies schools into one of five types based…

Surface Observation Climatic Summaries (SOCS) for Simmons AAF, North Carolina

DTIC Science & Technology

1992-02-01

CHIRF, CLIMATIC APPLICATIONS, OL-A IIRLT~ M 8a. llS SCIRlTIUIC AND TCIICAL INFOlRMATIO 06 OCr ig• III USAFETAC/DS--92/267 - Page 2 REPORT DOCUMENTATION...B-2-1 0MIMLY TOTALS ................................................ B-2-2 DAILY EMM M ... M ........................................................ E-2-1 [INuS........................................................... E-2-2 MEA.N

Office for Civil Rights Annual Report to Congress, Fiscal Year 2004

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

US Department of Education, 2005

2005-01-01

This report covers the activities of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) from Oct. 1, 2003, to Sept. 30, 2004. From investigating the misidentification of minority students in special education, to ensuring accessibility of college campuses for students with disabilities, to facilitating access of women to equal…

Illegal Procedure? Title IX and Sexual Assault

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sullivan, Ariel

2015-01-01

Many higher education institutions are scrutinized by their campus community and the media for the way that they respond, or fail to respond, to allegations of sexual assault. Tack on the fact that nearly 100 colleges and universities are currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for possible…

75 FR 75 - Special Conditions: Boeing Model 787-8 Airplane; Overhead Crew Rest Compartment

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-01-04

..., explain the reason for any recommended change, and include supporting data. We ask that you send us two...-site operational evaluation. Any changes to the approved OCR compartment configuration that affect crewmember emergency egress or any other procedures affecting safety of the occupying crewmembers or related...

Analysis of Percent On-Cell Reformation of Methane in SOFC Stacks: Thermal, Electrical and Stress Analysis

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Recknagle, Kurtis P.; Yokuda, Satoru T.; Jarboe, Daniel T.

2006-04-07

This report summarizes a parametric analysis performed to determine the effect of varying the percent on-cell reformation (OCR) of methane on the thermal and electrical performance for a generic, planar solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack design. OCR of methane can be beneficial to an SOFC stack because the reaction (steam-methane reformation) is endothermic and can remove excess heat generated by the electrochemical reactions directly from the cell. The heat removed is proportional to the amount of methane reformed on the cell. Methane can be partially pre-reformed externally, then supplied to the stack, where rapid reaction kinetics on the anodemore » ensures complete conversion. Thus, the thermal load varies with methane concentration entering the stack, as does the coupled scalar distributions, including the temperature and electrical current density. The endotherm due to the reformation reaction can cause a temperature depression on the anode near the fuel inlet, resulting in large thermal gradients. This effect depends on factors that include methane concentration, local temperature, and stack geometry.« less

The kinetics of oxygen and SO2 consumption by red wines. What do they tell about oxidation mechanisms and about changes in wine composition?

PubMed

Carrascón, Vanesa; Vallverdú-Queralt, Anna; Meudec, Emmanuelle; Sommerer, Nicolas; Fernandez-Zurbano, Purificación; Ferreira, Vicente

2018-02-15

This work seeks to understand the kinetics of O 2 and SO 2 consumption of air-saturated red wine as a function of its chemical composition, and to describe the chemical changes suffered during the process in relation to the kinetics. Oxygen Consumption Rates (OCRs) are faster with higher copper and epigallocatechin contents and with higher absorbance at 620nm and slower with higher levels of gallic acid and catechin terminal units in tannins. Acetaldehyde Reactive Polyphenols (ARPs) may be key elements determining OCRs. It is confirmed that SO 2 is poorly consumed in the first saturation. Phenylalanine, methionine and maybe, cysteine, seem to be consumed instead. A low SO 2 consumption is favoured by low levels of SO 2 , by a low availability of free SO 2 caused by a high anthocyanin/tannin ratio, and by a polyphenolic profile poor in epigallocatechin and rich in catechin-rich tannins. Wines consuming SO 2 efficiently consume more epigallocatechin, prodelphinidins and procyanidins. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Reviews Book: Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air Equipment: Doppler Effect Unit Book: The Physics of Rugby Book: Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World Equipment: Brunel Eyecam Equipment: 200x Digital Microscope Book: The Atom and the Apple: Twelve Tales from Contemporary Physics Book: Physics 2 for OCR Web Watch

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

2009-09-01

WE RECOMMEND Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air This excellent book makes sense of energy facts and figures Doppler Effect Unit Another simple, effective piece of kit from SEP Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World Intriguing and unique write-up of an intellectual fraud case Brunel Eyecam An affordable digital eyepiece for your microscope 200x Digital Microscope An adjustable digital flexcam for classroom use The Atom and the Apple: Twelve Tales from Contemporary Physics A fascinating round-up of the recent history of physics WORTH A LOOK The Physics of Rugby Book uses sport analogy and context to teach physics concepts Physics 2 for OCR Essential textbook for the course but otherwise pointless WEB WATCH Some free teaching materials are better than those you'd pay for

Light respiration by subtropical seaweeds.

PubMed

Carvalho, Matheus C; Eyre, Bradley D

2017-06-01

Here, we report the first-ever measurements of light CO 2 respiration rate (CRR) by seaweeds. We measured the influence of temperature (15-25°C) and light (irradiance from 60 to 670 μmol · m -2  · s -1 ) on the light CCR of two subtropical seaweed species, and measured the CRR of seven different seaweed species under the same light (150 μmol · m -2  · s -1 ) and temperature (25°C). There was little effect of irradiance on light CRR, but there was an effect of temperature. Across the seven species light CRR was similar to OCR (oxygen consumption rate in the dark), with the exception of a single species. The outlier species was a coralline alga, and the higher light CRR was probably driven by calcification. CRR could be estimated from OCR, as well as carbon photosynthetic rates from oxygen photosynthetic rates, which suggests that previous studies have probably provided good estimations of gross photosynthesis for seaweeds. © 2017 Phycological Society of America.

Modular initiator with integrated optical diagnostic

DOEpatents

Alam, M Kathleen [Cedar Crest, NM; Schmitt, Randal L [Tijeras, NM; Welle, Eric J [Niceville, FL; Madden, Sean P [Arlington, MA

2011-05-17

A slapper detonator which integrally incorporates an optical wavequide structure for determining whether there has been degradation of the explosive in the explosive device that is to be initiated by the detonator. Embodiments of this invention take advantage of the barrel-like character of a typical slapper detonator design. The barrel assembly, being in direct contact with the energetic material, incorporates an optical diagnostic device into the barrel assembly whereby one can monitor the state of the explosive material. Such monitoring can be beneficial because the chemical degradation of the explosive plays an important in achieving proper functioning of a detonator/initiator device.

In vivo optical imaging of cortical spreading depression in rat

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Shangbin; Li, Pengcheng; Luo, Weihua; Gong, Hui; Cheng, Haiying; Luo, Qingming

2003-12-01

Intrinsic optical signals imaging (IOSI) and laser speckle imaging (LSI) are both novel techniques for functional neuroimaging in vivo. Combining them to study cortical spreading depression (CSD) which is an important disease model for migraine and other neurological disorders. CSD were induced by pinprick in Sprague-Dawley rats. Intrinsic optical signals (IOS) at 540 nm showed CSD evolution happened in one hemisphere cortex at speeds of 3.7+/-0.4 mm/min, and the vasodilation closely correlated a four-phasic response. By LSI, we observed a transient and significant increase cerebral blood flow (CBF). In this paper, optical imaging would be showed as a powerful tool for describing the hemodynamic character during CSD in rat.

Experimental realization of the analogy of quantum dense coding in classical optics

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Yang, Zhenwei; Sun, Yifan; Li, Pengyun

2016-06-15

We report on the experimental realization of the analogy of quantum dense coding in classical optical communication using classical optical correlations. Compared to quantum dense coding that uses pairs of photons entangled in polarization, we find that the proposed design exhibits many advantages. Considering that it is convenient to realize in optical communication, the attainable channel capacity in the experiment for dense coding can reach 2 bits, which is higher than that of the usual quantum coding capacity (1.585 bits). This increased channel capacity has been proven experimentally by transmitting ASCII characters in 12 quaternary digitals instead of the usualmore » 24 bits.« less

Effect of a mitochondrial-targeted coenzyme Q analog on pancreatic β-cell function and energetics in high fat fed obese mice.

PubMed

Imai, Yumi; Fink, Brian D; Promes, Joseph A; Kulkarni, Chaitanya A; Kerns, Robert J; Sivitz, William I

2018-06-01

We recently reported that mitoquinone (mitoQ, 500 μmol/L) added to drinking water of C57BL/6J mice attenuated weight gain and reduced oxidative stress when administered to high-fat (HF) fed mice. Here, we examined the effects of mitoQ administered to HF fed mice on pancreatic islet morphology, dynamics of insulin secretion, and islet mitochondrial metabolism. C57BL/6J mice were fed HF for 130 days while we administered vehicle (cyclodextrin [CD]) or mitoQ added to the drinking water at up to 500 μmol/L. MitoQ-treated mice vs vehicle gained significantly less weight, expended significantly more energy as determined by indirect calorimetry, and trended to consume less (nonsignificant) food. As we and others reported before, mitoQ-treated mice drank less water but showed no difference in percent body fluid by nuclear magnetic resonance. Circulating insulin and glucose-stimulated insulin secretion by isolated islets were decreased in mitoQ-treated mice while insulin sensitivity (plasma insulin x glucose) was greater. Islet respiration as basal oxygen consumption (OCR), OCR directed at ATP synthesis, and maximal uncoupled OCR were also reduced in mitoQ-treated mice. Quantitative morphologic studies revealed that islet size was reduced in the mitoQ-treated mice while visual inspection of histochemically stained sections suggested that mitoQ reduced islet lipid peroxides. MitoQ markedly improved liver function as determined by plasma alanine aminotransferase. In summary, mitoQ treatment reduced the demand for insulin and reduced islet size, likely consequent to the action of mitoQ to mitigate weight gain and improve liver function. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.

Losartan reverses COX-2-dependent vascular dysfunction in offspring of hyperglycaemic rats.

PubMed

de Queiroz, Diego Barbosa; Ramos-Alves, Fernanda Elizabethe; Santos-Rocha, Juliana; Duarte, Gloria Pinto; Xavier, Fabiano Elias

2017-09-01

This study examined whether chronic treatment with losartan, an angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT 1 R) antagonist, might reverse COX-2-mediated vascular dysfunction in mesenteric resistance arteries (MRA) from offspring of hyperglycaemic rats. Male 12-month-old offspring of hyperglycaemic (O-DR) and normoglycaemic (O-CR) rats were treated with losartan (15mg·kg·day -1 ) during 2months. Third order MRA of untreated and losartan-treated O-DR and O-CR were mounted in wire myograph for isometric tension measurements. COX-2 expression was analyzed by Western blot; TxA 2 , PGE 2 and PGF 2α release was measured using commercial kits. O-DR showed increased blood pressure, impaired acetylcholine-induced vasodilation and increased noradrenaline-induced vasoconstriction than O-CR. All these parameters were normalized by losartan in O-DR. Pre-incubation of MRA with indomethacin (COX-1/2 inhibitor), NS-398 (COX-2 inhibitor) or tempol (superoxide dismutase mimetic) increased relaxation to acetylcholine and reduced contraction to noradrenaline only in O-DR. COX-2 expression, TxA 2 , PGE 2 and PGF 2α release were increased in O-DR. In losartan-treated O-DR, NS-398, indomethacin or tempol failed to produce any effect on acetylcholine or noradrenaline responses. Losartan treatment reduced COX-2 expression, TxA 2 , PGE 2 and PGF 2α release in O-DR. The present results reveal that chronic losartan administration in O-DR normalizes endothelial function in MRA by correcting the existing COX-2 overexpression and the imbalance between endothelium-derived relaxing and contracting factors. These findings not only support the beneficial effects of AT 1 receptor antagonist in O-DR, but also suggest the implication of angiotensin II as a putative mediator of hyperglycemia-programmed vascular dysfunction in rats. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Effects of Artificial Gravity and Bed Rest on Spatial Orientation and Balance Control

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Paloski, William H.; Moore, S. T.; Feiveson, A. H.; Taylor, L. C.

2007-01-01

While the vestibular system should be well-adapted to bed rest (a condition it experiences approximately 8/24 hrs each day), questions remain regarding the degree to which repeated exposures to the unusual gravito-inertial force environment of a short-radius centrifuge might affect central processing of vestibular information used in spatial orientation and balance control. Should these functions be impaired by intermittent AG, its feasibility as a counter-measure would be diminished. We, therefore, examined the effects of AG on spatial orientation and balance control in 15 male volunteers before and after 21 days of 6 HDT bed rest (BR). Eight of the subjects were treated with daily 1hr AG exposures (2.5g at the feet; 1.0g at the heart) aboard a short radius (3m) centrifuge, while the other seven served as controls (C). Spatial orientation was assessed by measures of ocular counter-rolling (OCR; rotation of the eye about the line of sight, an otolith-mediated reflex) and subjective visual vertical (SVV; perception of the spatial upright). Both OCR and SVV measurements were made with the subject upright, lying on their left sides, and lying on their right sides. OCR was measured from binocular eye orientation recordings made while the subjects fixated for 10s on a point target directly in front of the face at a distance of 1 m. SVV was assessed by asking subjects (in the dark) to adjust to upright (using a handheld controller) the orientation of a luminous bar randomly perturbed (15) to either side of the vertical meridian. Balance control performance was assessed using a computerized dynamic posturography (CDP) protocol similar to that currently required for all returning crew members. During each session, the subjects completed a combination of trials of sensory organization test (SOT) 2 (eyes closed, fixed platform) and SOT 5 (eyes closed, sway-referenced platform) with and without static and dynamic pitch plane head movements (plus or minus 20 deg., dynamic paced by an audible tone at 0.33Hz). OCR and CDP performance were unaffected by BR and BR+AG; post-BR measures were unchanged from baseline for both AG and C groups. Similarly, BR did not affect SVV in the C group. However, BR+AG disrupted one measure of spatial orientation: SVV error was significantly increased on R+0 and R+1 following BR in the AG group. These results suggest a transient untoward effect on central vestibular processing may accompany repeated exposure to intermittent AG, a potential side-effect that should be studied more closely in future studies.

Selected area growth integrated wavelength converter based on PD-EAM optical logic gate

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bin, Niu; Jifang, Qiu; Daibing, Zhou; Can, Zhang; Song, Liang; Dan, Lu; Lingjuan, Zhao; Jian, Wu; Wei, Wang

2014-09-01

A selected area growth wavelength converter based on a PD-EAM optical logic gate for WDM application is presented, integrating an EML transmitter and a SOA-PD receiver. The design, fabrication, and DC characters were analyzed. A 2 Gb/s NRZ signal based on the C-band wavelength converted to 1555 nm with the highest extinction ratio of 7 dB was achieved and wavelength converted eye diagrams with eyes opened were presented.

Recent advances in M13 bacteriophage-based optical sensing applications.

PubMed

Kim, Inhong; Moon, Jong-Sik; Oh, Jin-Woo

2016-01-01

Recently, M13 bacteriophage has started to be widely used as a functional nanomaterial for various electrical, chemical, or optical applications, such as battery components, photovoltaic cells, sensors, and optics. In addition, the use of M13 bacteriophage has expanded into novel research, such as exciton transporting. In these applications, the versatility of M13 phage is a result of its nontoxic, self-assembling, and specific binding properties. For these reasons, M13 phage is the most powerful candidate as a receptor for transducing chemical or optical phenomena of various analytes into electrical or optical signal. In this review, we will overview the recent progress in optical sensing applications of M13 phage. The structural and functional characters of M13 phage will be described and the recent results in optical sensing application using fluorescence, surface plasmon resonance, Förster resonance energy transfer, and surface enhanced Raman scattering will be outlined.

Recent advances in M13 bacteriophage-based optical sensing applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Inhong; Moon, Jong-Sik; Oh, Jin-Woo

2016-10-01

Recently, M13 bacteriophage has started to be widely used as a functional nanomaterial for various electrical, chemical, or optical applications, such as battery components, photovoltaic cells, sensors, and optics. In addition, the use of M13 bacteriophage has expanded into novel research, such as exciton transporting. In these applications, the versatility of M13 phage is a result of its nontoxic, self-assembling, and specific binding properties. For these reasons, M13 phage is the most powerful candidate as a receptor for transducing chemical or optical phenomena of various analytes into electrical or optical signal. In this review, we will overview the recent progress in optical sensing applications of M13 phage. The structural and functional characters of M13 phage will be described and the recent results in optical sensing application using fluorescence, surface plasmon resonance, Förster resonance energy transfer, and surface enhanced Raman scattering will be outlined.

Predicting scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy of mass-produced plasmonic devices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Otto, Lauren M.; Burgos, Stanley P.; Staffaroni, Matteo; Ren, Shen; Süzer, Özgün; Stipe, Barry C.; Ashby, Paul D.; Hammack, Aeron T.

2018-05-01

Scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy enables optical imaging and characterization of plasmonic devices with nanometer-scale resolution well below the diffraction limit. This technique enables developers to probe and understand the waveguide-coupled plasmonic antenna in as-fabricated heat-assisted magnetic recording heads. In order to validate and predict results and to extract information from experimental measurements that is physically comparable to simulations, a model was developed to translate the simulated electric field into expected near-field measurements using physical parameters specific to scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy physics. The methods used in this paper prove that scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy can be used to determine critical sub-diffraction-limited dimensions of optical field confinement, which is a crucial metrology requirement for the future of nano-optics, semiconductor photonic devices, and biological sensing where the near-field character of light is fundamental to device operation.

Heuristic algorithm for optical character recognition of Arabic script

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yarman-Vural, Fatos T.; Atici, A.

1996-02-01

In this paper, a heuristic method is developed for segmentation, feature extraction and recognition of the Arabic script. The study is part of a large project for the transcription of the documents in Ottoman Archives. A geometrical and topological feature analysis method is developed for segmentation and feature extraction stages. Chain code transformation is applied to main strokes of the characters which are then classified by the hidden Markov model (HMM) in the recognition stage. Experimental results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is impressive, provided that the thinning process does not yield spurious branches.

Crystalline lens changes in porcine eyes with implanted phakic IOL (ICL) with a central hole

PubMed Central

Shimizu, Kimiya; Fujisawa, Kunitoshi; Uga, Shigekazu; Nagano, Koichi; Murakami, Yuuki

2008-01-01

Background We calculated the smallest diameter of a hole in the center of the optic at which the optical character of a phakic IOL (ICL) may be maintained. The changes induced in the aqueous humor dynamics and the pathology of cataract development with such a hole were investigated. Methods A simulation was performed using ZEMAX software to calculate the hole diameter that makes possible the maintenance of a stable optical character of a phakic IOL. After a hole of calculated diameter was trepanned in the center of the optic of the ICL, the latter was implanted into one eye of a 5-month-old minipig, and an unperforated ICL into the other. The postoperative course was observed for 3 months. Then, Evans blue was injected into the vitreous body under general anesthesia to stain the anterior capsule of the crystalline lens. Within 30 min, the eye was enucleated and the tissues removed were fixed. Results The MTF of the perforated ICL (hole diameter, 1.0 mm) in the center of the optic resembled that of the unperforated ICL. In all cases with non-perforated ICLs, subcapsular turbidity developed, but no staining caused by EB was observed in the anterior capsule. On the other hand, the anterior capsules of the eyes fitted with ICLs with a 1.0-mm hole were stained, but exhibited no turbidity. Conclusion An ICL with a central hole of diameter 1.0 mm in the optic is similar to an unperforated ICL. The size of the hole influenced the aqueous humor dynamics and increased the aqueous humor perfusion volume over the entire anterior surface of the crystalline lens. The possibility of preventing cataracts was therefore suggested. PMID:18299877

Dear Colleague Letter Harassment and Bullying (October 26, 2010). Background, Summary, and Fast Facts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

US Department of Education, 2010

2010-01-01

The Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) does the following: (1) Clarifies the relationship between bullying and discriminatory harassment under the civil rights laws enforced by the Department of Education's (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR); (2) Explains how student misconduct that falls under an anti-bullying policy also may trigger responsibilities…

And the Survey Says …

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Susan C.

2016-01-01

We have been looking at two different numbers that have been used to describe the availability of physics in U.S. high schools: 60% and 95%. Last month we noted that the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) includes over 7,000 more public schools in the denominator than American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistics does.…

Dear Colleague Letter: Responding to Bullying of Students with Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lhamon, Catherine E.

2014-01-01

While there is broad consensus that bullying is wrong and cannot be tolerated in schools, the reality is that bullying persists in schools today, and especially for students with disabilities. In recent years, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education (Department) has received an ever-increasing number of complaints…

Guidelines for Producing Instructional and Other Printed Materials in Alternate Media for Persons with Disabilities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

California Community Colleges, Sacramento. Office of the Chancellor.

Title II, Section 504 of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) requires community colleges to provide access to print and computer-based information for students with visual impairments. In response, the Chancellor's Office of the California Community College system prepared a budget change proposal (BCP) for the…

Public Education: Meeting the Needs of Students with Limited English Proficiency. Report to Congressional Requesters.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shaul, Marnie S.

This report examines: how long children with limited English proficiency need to become proficient, what approaches are used to teach them, and what requirements the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) expects school districts to meet. Researchers reviewed available studies; talked to experts; reviewed Department of Education survey data; contacted 12…

78 FR 21370 - Funding Opportunity Announcement for Family Violence Prevention and Services/Grants for Domestic...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-04-10

..., psychological trauma, isolation from family and friends, harm to children living with a parent or caretaker who..., these dynamics may be compounded by barriers such as the isolation of vast rural areas, the concern for... these bases. Please see www.hhs.gov/ocr/civilrights/understanding/index.html . HHS also provides...

Desegregation Case Studies. Volume I: Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Russell, Susan Higley; And Others

This study focused on the role played in school desegregation by the Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA), Title IV of the Civil Rights Act, and Office of Civil Rights (OCR) enforcement of Title IV. The study examined the ways in which five urban school districts made use of assistance programs and have been affected by Title IV. School district…

Findings from a Multiyear Scale-Up Effectiveness Trial of Open Court Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vaden-Kiernan, Michael; Borman, Geoffrey; Caverly, Sarah; Bell, Nance; Sullivan, Kate; Ruiz de Castilla, Veronica; Fleming, Grace; Rodriguez, Debra; Henry, Chad; Long, Tracy; Hughes Jones, Debra

2018-01-01

This multiyear scale-up effectiveness study of Open Court Reading (OCR) involved approximately 4,500 students and more than 1,000 teachers per year in Grades K-5 from 49 elementary schools in seven districts across the country. Using a school-level cluster randomized trial design, we assessed the implementation and effectiveness of Open Court…

Students with Disabilities Participation in Extracurricular Athletics: School District Obligations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yell, Mitchell L.; Losinski, Mickey L.; Katsiyannis, Antonis

2014-01-01

On January 25, 2013 the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter (DCL) that addressed the obligations of school districts under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act regarding the participation of students with disabilities in extracurricular athletic activities (U.S. Department of Education,…

A License for Bias: Sex Discrimination, Schools, and Title IX.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morse, Susan Ed.

This report discusses non-sports-related Title IX complaints filed with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) from 1993-1997. Its purpose is to dispel the popular belief that Title IX is a sports-equity law and to determine the effectiveness of the legislation. The document examines the kinds of complaints filed, the status…

A Multisite Cluster Randomized Field Trial of Open Court Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Borman, Geoffrey D.; Dowling, N. Maritza; Schneck, Carrie

2008-01-01

In this article, the authors report achievement outcomes of a multisite cluster randomized field trial of Open Court Reading 2005 (OCR), a K-6 literacy curriculum published by SRA/McGraw-Hill. The participants are 49 first-grade through fifth-grade classrooms from predominantly minority and poor contexts across the nation. Blocking by grade level…

Method for physiologic phenotype characterization at the single-cell level in non-interacting and interacting cells

PubMed Central

Ashili, Shashanka P.; Houkal, Jeff; Smith, Dean; Mohammadreza, Aida; Lee, Kristen B.; Forrester, Jessica; Kumar, Ashok; Anis, Yasser H.; Paulson, Thomas G.; Youngbull, Cody A.; Tian, Yanqing; Holl, Mark R.; Johnson, Roger H.; Meldrum, Deirdre R.

2012-01-01

Abstract. Intercellular heterogeneity is a key factor in a variety of core cellular processes including proliferation, stimulus response, carcinogenesis, and drug resistance. However, cell-to-cell variability studies at the single-cell level have been hampered by the lack of enabling experimental techniques. We present a measurement platform that features the capability to quantify oxygen consumption rates of individual, non-interacting and interacting cells under normoxic and hypoxic conditions. It is based on real-time concentration measurements of metabolites of interest by means of extracellular optical sensors in cell-isolating microwells of subnanoliter volume. We present the results of a series of measurements of oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) of individual non-interacting and interacting human epithelial cells. We measured the effects of cell-to-cell interactions by using the system’s capability to isolate two and three cells in a single well. The major advantages of the approach are: 1. ratiometric, intensity-based characterization of the metabolic phenotype at the single-cell level, 2. minimal invasiveness due to the distant positioning of sensors, and 3. ability to study the effects of cell-cell interactions on cellular respiration rates. PMID:22502580

Assembly of quasicrystalline photonic heterostructures

DOEpatents

Grier, David G.; Roichman, Yael; Man, Weining; Chaikin, Paul Michael; Steinhardt, Paul Joseph

2013-03-12

A method and system for assembling a quasicrystalline heterostructure. A plurality of particles is provided with desirable predetermined character. The particles are suspended in a medium, and holographic optical traps are used to position the particles in a way to achieve an arrangement which provides a desired property.

Assembly of quasicrystalline photonic heterostructures

DOEpatents

Grier, David G [New York, NY; Roichman, Yael [New York, NY; Man, Weining [Princeton, NJ; Chaikin, Paul Michael [Pennington, NJ; Steinhardt, Paul Joseph [Princeton, NJ

2011-07-19

A method and system for assembling a quasicrystalline heterostructure. A plurality of particles is provided with desirable predetermined character. The particles are suspended in a medium, and holographic optical traps are used to position the particles in a way to achieve an arrangement which provides a desired property.

Assistive Technology and Adults with Learning Disabilities: A Blueprint for Exploration and Advancement.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raskind, Marshall

1993-01-01

This article describes assistive technologies for persons with learning disabilities, including word processing, spell checking, proofreading programs, outlining/"brainstorming" programs, abbreviation expanders, speech recognition, speech synthesis/screen review, optical character recognition systems, personal data managers, free-form databases,…

Electronic structure and magneto-optical effects in CeSb

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Liechtenstein, A.I.; Antropov, V.P.; Harmon, B.N.

1994-04-15

The electronic structure and magneto-optical spectra of CeSb have been calculated using the self-consistent local-density approximation with explicit on-site Coulomb parameters for the correlated [ital f] state of cerium. The essential electronic structure of cerium antimonide consists of one occupied [ital f] band, predominantly with orbital [ital m]=[minus]3 character and spin [sigma]=1 located 2 eV below the Fermi level and interacting with broad Sb [ital p] bands crossing [ital E][sub [ital F

Optical Mapping of Brain Activation and Connectivity in Occipitotemporal Cortex During Chinese Character Recognition.

PubMed

Hu, Zhishan; Zhang, Juan; Couto, Tania Alexandra; Xu, Shiyang; Luan, Ping; Yuan, Zhen

2018-06-22

In this study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine the brain activation and connectivity in occipitotemporal cortex during Chinese character recognition (CCR). Eighteen healthy participants were recruited to perform a well-designed task with three categories of stimuli (real characters, pseudo characters, and checkerboards). By inspecting the brain activation difference and its relationship with behavioral data, the left laterality during CCR was clearly identified in the Brodmann area (BA) 18 and 19. In addition, our novel findings also demonstrated that the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG), bilateral BA 19, and left fusiform gyrus were also involved in high-level lexical information processing such as semantic and phonological ones. Meanwhile, by examining functional brain networks, we discovered that the right BA 19 exhibited enhanced brain connectivity. In particular, the connectivity in the right fusiform gyrus, right BA 19, and left STG showed significant correlation with the performance of CCR. Consequently, the combination of fNIRS technique with functional network analysis paves a new avenue for improved understanding of the cognitive mechanism underlying CCR.

Fiber optic sensor for monitoring a density of road traffic

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nedoma, Jan; Fajkus, Marcel; Martinek, Radek; Mec, Pavel; Novak, Martin; Jargus, Jan; Vasinek, Vladimir

2017-10-01

Authors of this article have focused on the use of fiber-optic technology in the car traffic. The article describes the use of fiber-optic interferometer for the purpose of the dynamic calculation of traffic density and inclusion the vehicle into the traffic lane. The objective is to increase safety and traffic flow. Presented solution is characterized by the non-destructive character to the road - sensor no need built into the roadway. The sensor works with standard telecommunications fibers of the G.652 standard. Other hallmarks are immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI) and passivity of concerning the power supply. The massive expansion of optical cables within telecommunication needs along roads offers the possibility of connecting to the existing telecommunications fiber-optic network without a converter. Information can be transmitted at distances of several km up to tens km by this fiber-optic network. Set of experimental measurements in real traffic flow verified the functionality of presented solution.

High temperature low cycle fatigue mechanisms for nickel base and a copper base alloy. M.S. Thesis Final Report

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Shih, C. I.

1982-01-01

Damage mechanisms were studied in Rene' 95 and NARloy Z, using optical, scanning and transmission in microscopy. In necklace Rene' 95, crack initiation was mainly associated with cracking of surface MC carbides, except for hold time tests at higher strain ranges where initiation was associated more with a grain boundary mechanism. A mixed mode of propagation with a faceted fracture morphology was typical for all cycle characters. The dependence of life on maximum tensile stress can be demonstrated by the data falling onto three lines corresponding to the three tensile hold times, in the life against maximum tensile stress plot. In NARloy Z, crack initiation was always at the grain boundaries. The mode of crack propagation depended on the cycle character. The life decreased with decreasing strain rate and with tensile holds. In terms of damage mode, different life prediction laws may be applicable to different cycle characters.

Multi-level structure in the large scale distribution of optically luminous galaxies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Deng, Xin-fa; Deng, Zu-gan; Liu, Yong-zhen

1992-04-01

Fractal dimensions in the large scale distribution of galaxies have been calculated with the method given by Wen et al. [1] Samples are taken from CfA redshift survey in northern and southern galactic [2] hemisphere in our analysis respectively. Results from these two regions are compared with each other. There are significant differences between the distributions in these two regions. However, our analyses do show some common features of the distributions in these two regions. All subsamples show multi-level fractal character distinctly. Combining it with the results from analyses of samples given by IRAS galaxies and results from samples given by redshift survey in pencil-beam fields, [3,4] we suggest that multi-level fractal structure is most likely to be a general and important character in the large scale distribution of galaxies. The possible implications of this character are discussed.

The JSTOR Solution: Accessing and Preserving the Past.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guthrie, Kevin M.; Lougee, Wendy P.

1997-01-01

Describes JSTOR (Journal Storage), a not-for-profit organization located in New York City, established to use digital technology to preserve and make accessible core journal literature. Highlights include publisher participation and license agreements; scanning and optical character recognition; missing information; systems design; project goals;…

High Tech and Library Access for People with Disabilities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roatch, Mary A.

1992-01-01

Describes tools that enable people with disabilities to access print information, including optical character recognition, synthetic voice output, other input devices, Braille access devices, large print displays, television and video, TDD (Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf), and Telebraille. Use of technology by libraries to meet mandates…

Storing and Viewing Electronic Documents.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Falk, Howard

1999-01-01

Discusses the conversion of fragile library materials to computer storage and retrieval to extend the life of the items and to improve accessibility through the World Wide Web. Highlights include entering the images, including scanning; optical character recognition; full text and manual indexing; and available document- and image-management…

77 FR 53830 - Retirement of FASTforward

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-09-04

... States Postal Service, Domestic Mail Manual (DMM[supreg]) 602.5.0 to terminate the use of FASTforward...-address system, was developed in 1996 to enable Multi-Line Optical Character Reader (MLOCR) users a means... the following changes to Mailing Standards of the United States Postal Service, Domestic Mail Manual...

The Chemical Bond and Solid-state Physics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Phillips, James C.

1970-01-01

Proposes a new scale of ionicity, with which the ionic character of bonding in crystals can be predicted and measured. This new scale of ionicity has led to improved understanding of such crystalline properties as lattice structure, heats of formation, elastic constants, and nonlinear optical properties. Bibliography. (LC)

Variational Iterative Methods for Nonsymmetric Systems of Linear Equations.

DTIC Science & Technology

1981-08-01

With a third matrix-vector product, b(i) can be computed as i j ( ATAr i+l’pj)/ApjpApj), and the previous (Apj) need not be saved. Page 8 I OCR I Orthomin... Economics and Mathematical Systems, Volume 134, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1976. [51 Paul Concus, Gene H. Golub, and Dianne P. O’Leary. A generalized

Identification of Prostate Cancer Prognostic Markers

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-10-01

Technologies). For this, the oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in the PC-3 control and ECI1-overexpressing clones was measured following their maintenance...carnitine Carnitine β-oxydation Etomoxir Page 25 of 31 Figure 10: Mitochondrial Respiration in ECI1-overexpressing PC-3 Clones. Oxygen Consumption rate... FISH ), prognostic markers, biomarkers, tissue microarrays, autophagy 16. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF: 17. LIMITATION OF ABSTRACT 18. NUMBER OF PAGES

An Evaluation of the Air-to-Air Engagement Models in the Naval Warfare Gaming System.

DTIC Science & Technology

1984-03-01

documentaticr 9valuation phase andI ths =acomera-aticns Phasr?. During tzhe descri-ption ph as e, a closs examira-tion and analysi-s of the : cutines and...modelin asoacts ,Of the = cutines . In this appendix, most o f thIe- alimizis rativs- programming isbypassed. In Appendix B, the 23 Mod-? _1ira nIs ocr

School Issues Under [Section] 504 and the ADA: The Latest and Greatest.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aleman, Steven R.

This paper highlights recent guidance and rulings from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of interest to administrators, advocates, and attorneys. It is a companion piece to Student Issues on SectionNB504/ADA: The Latest and Greatest. Compliance with SectionNB504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) continues to involve debate and dialog on…

Protecting Civil Rights, Advancing Equity: Report to the President and Secretary of Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, 2015

2015-01-01

For nearly five decades, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has stood as a guardian of civil rights in educational institutions nationwide. This office takes very seriously the charge to remove barriers to students' full participation in every facet of educational life. As the contents of this report illustrate, OCR…

Alterations in bioenergetic function induced by Parkinson's disease mimetic compounds: Lack of correlation with superoxide generation

PubMed Central

Dranka, Brian P.; Zielonka, Jacek; Kanthasamy, Anumantha G.; Kalyanaraman, Balaraman

2012-01-01

In vitro and in vivo models of Parkinson's disease (PD) suggest that increased oxidant production leads to mitochondrial dysfunction in dopaminergic neurons and subsequent cell death. However, it remains unclear if cell death in these models is caused by inhibition of mitochondrial function or oxidant production. The objective of the present study was to determine the relationship between mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidant production in response to multiple PD neurotoxicant mimetics. MPP+ caused a dose-dependent decrease in the basal oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in dopaminergic N27 cells, indicating a loss of mitochondrial function. In parallel, we found that MPP+ only modestly increased oxidation of hydroethidine as a diagnostic marker of superoxide production in these cells. Similar results were found using rotenone as a mitochondrial inhibitor, or 6-hydroxydopamine as a mechanistically distinct PD neurotoxicant, but not with exposure to paraquat. Additionally, the Extracellular Acidification Rate, used as a marker of glycolysis, was stimulated to compensate for OCR inhibition after exposure to MPP+, rotenone, or 6-hydroxydopamine, but not paraquat. Together these data indicate that MPP+, rotenone and 6-hydroxydopamine dramatically shift bioenergetic function away from the mitochondria and towards glycolysis in N27 cells. PMID:22708893

Faxed document image restoration method based on local pixel patterns

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Akiyama, Teruo; Miyamoto, Nobuo; Oguro, Masami; Ogura, Kenji

1998-04-01

A method for restoring degraded faxed document images using the patterns of pixels that construct small areas in a document is proposed. The method effectively restores faxed images that contain the halftone textures and/or density salt-and-pepper noise that degrade OCR system performance. The halftone image restoration process, white-centered 3 X 3 pixels, in which black-and-white pixels alternate, are identified first using the distribution of the pixel values as halftone textures, and then the white center pixels are inverted to black. To remove high-density salt- and-pepper noise, it is assumed that the degradation is caused by ill-balanced bias and inappropriate thresholding of the sensor output which results in the addition of random noise. Restored image can be estimated using an approximation that uses the inverse operation of the assumed original process. In order to process degraded faxed images, the algorithms mentioned above are combined. An experiment is conducted using 24 especially poor quality examples selected from data sets that exemplify what practical fax- based OCR systems cannot handle. The maximum recovery rate in terms of mean square error was 98.8 percent.

Mocr: A novel fusion tag for enhancing solubility that is compatible with structural biology applications

PubMed Central

DelProposto, James; Majmudar, Chinmay Y.; Smith, Janet L.; Brown, William Clay

2010-01-01

A persistent problem in heterologous protein production is insolubility of the target protein when expressed to high level in the host cell. A widely employed strategy for overcoming this problem is the use of fusion tags. The best fusion tags promote solubility, may function as purification handles and either do not interfere with downstream applications or may be removed from the passenger protein preparation. A novel fusion tag is identified that meets these criteria. This fusion tag is a monomeric mutant of the Ocr protein (0.3 gene product) of bacteriophage T7. This fusion tag displays solubilizing activity with a variety of different passenger proteins. We show that it may be used as a purification handle similar to other fusion tags. Its small size and compact structure are compatible with its use in downstream applications of the passenger protein or it may be removed and purified away from the passenger protein. The use of monomeric Ocr (Mocr) as a complement to other fusion tags such as maltose-binding protein will provide greater flexibility in protein production and processing for a wide variety of protein applications. PMID:18824232

Islet Assessment for Transplantation

PubMed Central

Papas, Klearchos K.; Suszynski, Thomas M.; Colton, Clark. K.

2010-01-01

Purpose of review There is a critical need for meaningful viability and potency assays that characterize islet preparations for release prior to clinical islet cell transplantation (ICT). Development, testing, and validation of such assays have been the subject of intense investigation for the past decade. These efforts are reviewed, highlighting the most recent results while focusing on the most promising assays. Recent Findings Assays based on membrane integrity do not reflect true viability when applied to either intact islets or dispersed islet cells. Assays requiring disaggregation of intact islets into individual cells for assessment introduce additional problems of cell damage and loss. Assays evaluating mitochondrial function, specifically mitochondrial membrane potential, bioenergetic status, and cellular oxygen consumption rate (OCR), especially when conducted with intact islets, appear most promising in evaluating their quality prior to ICT. Prospective, quantitative assays based on measurements of OCR with intact islets have been developed, validated and their results correlated with transplant outcomes in the diabetic nude mouse bioassay. Conclusion More sensitive and reliable islet viability and potency tests have been recently developed and tested. Those evaluating mitochondrial function are most promising, correlate with transplant outcomes in mice, and are currently being evaluated in the clinical setting. PMID:19812494

Photostability of cosmetic UV filters on mammalian skin under UV exposure.

PubMed

Stiefel, Constanze; Schwack, Wolfgang; Nguyen, Yen-Thi Hai

2015-01-01

Previous studies showed that the common UV filter substances benzophenone-3 (BP-3), butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane (BM-DBM), octocrylene (OCR), ethylhexyl methoxycinnamate (EHMC), ethylhexyl salicylate (EHS) and ethylhexyl triazone (EHT) were able to react with amino side chains of different proteins in vitro. To transfer the results to mammalian skin conditions, sunscreen products were applied on both prepared fresh porcine skin and glass plates, followed by UV irradiation and the determination of depletion of the respective UV filters. Significantly lower recoveries of the UV filters extracted from skin samples than from glass plates indicated the additional reaction of the UV filters with skin constituents, when proteins will be the most important reactants. Among the products tested, BP-3 showed the greatest differences in recoveries between glass and skin samples of about 13% and 24% after 2 and 4 h of irradiation, respectively, followed by EHS > BM-DBM > OCR > EHMC > EHT. The obtained results raise the question, whether the common in vitro evaluations of sunscreens, using inert substrate materials like roughened quartz or polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plates are really suitable to fully replace in vivo methods, as they cannot include skin-typical reactions. © 2014 The American Society of Photobiology.

Mocr: a novel fusion tag for enhancing solubility that is compatible with structural biology applications.

PubMed

DelProposto, James; Majmudar, Chinmay Y; Smith, Janet L; Brown, William Clay

2009-01-01

A persistent problem in heterologous protein production is insolubility of the target protein when expressed to high level in the host cell. A widely employed strategy for overcoming this problem is the use of fusion tags. The best fusion tags promote solubility, may function as purification handles and either do not interfere with downstream applications or may be removed from the passenger protein preparation. A novel fusion tag is identified that meets these criteria. This fusion tag is a monomeric mutant of the Ocr protein (0.3 gene product) of bacteriophage T7. This fusion tag displays solubilizing activity with a variety of different passenger proteins. We show that it may be used as a purification handle similar to other fusion tags. Its small size and compact structure are compatible with its use in downstream applications of the passenger protein or it may be removed and purified away from the passenger protein. The use of monomeric Ocr (Mocr) as a complement to other fusion tags such as maltose-binding protein will provide greater flexibility in protein production and processing for a wide variety of protein applications.

Solvent effects in time-dependent self-consistent field methods. I. Optical response calculations

DOE PAGES

Bjorgaard, J. A.; Kuzmenko, V.; Velizhanin, K. A.; ...

2015-01-22

In this study, we implement and examine three excited state solvent models in time-dependent self-consistent field methods using a consistent formalism which unambiguously shows their relationship. These are the linear response, state specific, and vertical excitation solvent models. Their effects on energies calculated with the equivalent of COSMO/CIS/AM1 are given for a set of test molecules with varying excited state charge transfer character. The resulting solvent effects are explained qualitatively using a dipole approximation. It is shown that the fundamental differences between these solvent models are reflected by the character of the calculated excitations.

Seeing the light: Applications of in situ optical measurements for understanding DOM dynamics in river systems (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pellerin, B. A.; Bergamaschi, B. A.; Downing, B. D.; Saraceno, J.; Fleck, J.; Shanley, J. B.; Aiken, G.; Boss, E.; Fujii, R.

2009-12-01

A critical challenge for understanding the sources, character and cycling of dissolved organic matter (DOM) is making measurements at the time scales in which changes occur in aquatic systems. Traditional approaches for data collection (daily to monthly discrete sampling) are often limited by analytical and field costs, site access and logistical challenges, particularly for long-term sampling at a large number of sites. The ability to make optical measurements of DOM in situ has been known for more than 50 years, but much of the work on in situ DOM absorbance and fluorescence using commercially-available instruments has taken place in the last few years. Here we present several recent examples that highlight the application of in situ measurements for understanding DOM dynamics in riverine systems at intervals of minutes to hours. Examples illustrate the utility of in situ optical sensors for studies of DOM over short-duration events of days to weeks (diurnal cycles, tidal cycles, storm events and snowmelt periods) as well as longer-term continuous monitoring for months to years. We also highlight the application of in situ optical DOM measurements as proxies for constituents that are significantly more difficult and expensive to measure at high frequencies (e.g. methylmercury, trihalomethanes). Relatively simple DOM absorbance and fluorescence measurements made in situ could be incorporated into short and long-term ecological research and monitoring programs, resulting in advanced understanding of organic matter sources, character and cycling in riverine systems.

Development of a written music-recognition system using Java and open source technologies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Loibner, Gernot; Schwarzl, Andreas; Kovač, Matthias; Paulus, Dietmar; Pölzleitner, Wolfgang

2005-10-01

We report on the development of a software system to recognize and interpret printed music. The overall goal is to scan printed music sheets, analyze and recognize the notes, timing, and written text, and derive the all necessary information to use the computers MIDI sound system to play the music. This function is primarily useful for musicians who want to digitize printed music for editing purposes. There exist a number of commercial systems that offer such a functionality. However, on testing these systems, we were astonished on how weak they behave in their pattern recognition parts. Although we submitted very clear and rather flawless scanning input, none of these systems was able to e.g. recognize all notes, staff lines, and systems. They all require a high degree of interaction, post-processing, and editing to get a decent digital version of the hard copy material. In this paper we focus on the pattern recognition area. In a first approach we tested more or less standard methods of adaptive thresholding, blob detection, line detection, and corner detection to find the notes, staff lines, and candidate objects subject to OCR. Many of the objects on this type of material can be learned in a training phase. None of the commercial systems we saw offers the option to train special characters or unusual signatures. A second goal in this project is to use a modern software engineering platform. We were interested in how well Java and open source technologies are suitable for pattern recognition and machine vision. The scanning of music served as a case-study.

Real-time text extraction based on the page layout analysis system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Soua, M.; Benchekroun, A.; Kachouri, R.; Akil, M.

2017-05-01

Several approaches were proposed in order to extract text from scanned documents. However, text extraction in heterogeneous documents stills a real challenge. Indeed, text extraction in this context is a difficult task because of the variation of the text due to the differences of sizes, styles and orientations, as well as to the complexity of the document region background. Recently, we have proposed the improved hybrid binarization based on Kmeans method (I-HBK)5 to extract suitably the text from heterogeneous documents. In this method, the Page Layout Analysis (PLA), part of the Tesseract OCR engine, is used to identify text and image regions. Afterwards our hybrid binarization is applied separately on each kind of regions. In one side, gamma correction is employed before to process image regions. In the other side, binarization is performed directly on text regions. Then, a foreground and background color study is performed to correct inverted region colors. Finally, characters are located from the binarized regions based on the PLA algorithm. In this work, we extend the integration of the PLA algorithm within the I-HBK method. In addition, to speed up the separation of text and image step, we employ an efficient GPU acceleration. Through the performed experiments, we demonstrate the high F-measure accuracy of the PLA algorithm reaching 95% on the LRDE dataset. In addition, we illustrate the sequential and the parallel compared PLA versions. The obtained results give a speedup of 3.7x when comparing the parallel PLA implementation on GPU GTX 660 to the CPU version.

Using Computer Technology To Monitor Student Progress and Remediate Reading Problems.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCullough, C. Sue

1995-01-01

Focuses on research about application of text-to-speech systems in diagnosing and remediating word recognition, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension disabilities. As school psychologists move toward a consultative model of service delivery, they need to know about technology such as speech synthesizers, digitizers, optical-character-recognition…

Choosing a Scanner: Points To Consider before Buying a Scanner.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raby, Chris

1998-01-01

Outlines ten factors to consider before buying a scanner: size of document; type of document; color; speed and volume; resolution; image enhancement; image compression; optical character recognition; scanning subsystem; and the option to use a commercial bureau service. The importance of careful analysis of requirements is emphasized. (AEF)

Electronic Information Delivery Systems: Reports on Five Projects Sponsored by the Fred Meyer Charitable Trust.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferguson, Douglas K.; And Others

1987-01-01

Describes five research projects that are setting up electronic information delivery systems to serve rural areas in the Pacific Northwest. The technologies being evaluated include simultaneous remote searching, facsimile transmissions, bit map image transmissions, and a combination of optical character recognition equipment and television…

Add-Ons: The Ultimate Guide to Peripherals for the Blind Computer User.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Croft, Diane L., Ed.

Detailed product information on peripherals for the blind computer user is provided and applications, availability, reliability, price, and selection considerations are described. Chapters address the following topics and product categories: (1) scanners (optical character readers, Kurzweil Reading Machine); (2) a buyer's guide to modems; (3)…

Assistive technology for children and young people with low vision.

PubMed

Thomas, Rachel; Barker, Lucy; Rubin, Gary; Dahlmann-Noor, Annegret

2015-06-18

Recent technological developments, such as the near universal spread of mobile phones and portable computers and improvements in the accessibility features of these devices, give children and young people with low vision greater independent access to information. Some electronic technologies, such as closed circuit TV, are well established low vision aids and newer versions, such as electronic readers or off-the shelf tablet computers, may offer similar functionalities with easier portability and at lower cost. To assess the effect of electronic assistive technologies on reading, educational outcomes and quality of life in children and young people with low vision. We searched CENTRAL (which contains the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group Trials Register) (2014, Issue 9), Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid MEDLINE In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citations, Ovid MEDLINE Daily, Ovid OLDMEDLINE (January 1946 to October 2014), EMBASE (January 1980 to October 2014), the Health Technology Assessment Programme (HTA) (www.hta.ac.uk/), the metaRegister of Controlled Trials (mRCT) (www.controlled-trials.com), ClinicalTrials.gov (www.clinicaltrials.gov) and the World Health Organization (WHO) International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) (www.who.int/ictrp/search/en). We did not use any date or language restrictions in the electronic searches for trials. We last searched the electronic databases on 30 October 2014. We intended to include randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-RCTs in this review. We planned to include trials involving children between the ages of 5 and 16 years with low vision as defined by, or equivalent to, the WHO 1992 definition of low vision. We planned to include studies that explore the use of assistive technologies (ATs). These could include all types of closed circuit television/electronic vision enhancement systems (CCTV/EVES), computer technology including tablet computers and adaptive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnification and optical character recognition (OCR). We intended to compare the use of ATs with standard optical aids, which include distance refractive correction (with appropriate near addition for aphakic (no lens)/pseudophakic (with lens implant) patients) and monocular/binoculars for distance and brightfield magnifiers for near. We also planned to include studies that compare different types of ATs with each other, without or in addition to conventional optical aids, and those that compare ATs given with or without instructions for use. Independently, two review authors reviewed titles and abstracts for eligibility. They divided studies into categories to 'definitely include', 'definitely exclude' and 'possibly include', and the same two authors made final judgements about inclusion/exclusion by obtaining full-text copies of the studies in the 'possibly include' category. We did not identify any randomised controlled trials in this subject area. High-quality evidence about the usefulness of electronic AT for children and young people with visual impairment is needed to inform the choice healthcare and education providers and family have to make when selecting a technology. Randomised controlled trials are needed to assess the impact of AT. Research protocols should carefully select outcomes relevant not only to the scientific community, but more importantly to families and teachers. Functional outcomes such as reading accuracy, comprehension and speed should be recorded, as well as the impact of AT on independent learning and quality of life.

Experimental Determination of Solubilities of Sodium Polyborates In MgCl 2 Solutions: Solubility Constant of Di-Sodium Hexaborate Tetrahydrate, and Implications For the Diagenetic Formation of Ameghinite

DOE PAGES

Xiong, Yongliang; Kirkes, Leslie; KNOX, Jandi; ...

2017-11-01

In this paper, solubility measurements were conducted for sodium polyborates in MgCl 2 solutions at 22.5 ± 0.5 °C. According to solution chemistry and XRD patterns, di-sodium tetraborate decahydrate (borax) dissolves congruently, and is the sole solubility-controlling phase, in a 0.01 mol/kg MgCl 2 solution: Na 2B 4O 7•10H 2O(cr) ⇌ 2Na + + 4B(OH) 4 + 2H + + H 2O(l). However, in a 0.1 mol/kg MgCl 2 solution borax dissolves incongruently and is in equilibrium with di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate: 2Na 2B 6O 10•4H 2O(cr) + 2Na + + 23H 2O(l) ⇌ 3Na 2B 4O 7•10H 2O(cr) + 2Hmore » +. In this study, the equilibrium constant (log K 0) for Reaction 2 at 25 °C and infinite dilution was determined to be –16.44 ± 0.13 (2σ) based on the experimental data and the Pitzer model for calculations of activity coefficients of aqueous species. In accordance with the log K 0 for Reaction 1 from a previous publication from this research group, and log K 0 for Reaction 2 from this study, the equilibrium constant for dissolution of di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate at 25 °C and at infinite dilution, Na 2B 6O 10•4H 2O(cr) + 10H 2O(l) ⇌ 2Na + + 6B(OH) 4 - + 4H + was derived to be –45.42 ± 0.16 (2σ). The equilibrium constants determined in this study can find applications in many fields. For example, in the field of nuclear waste management, the formation of di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate in brines containing magnesium will decrease borate concentrations, making less borate available for interactions with Am(III). In the field of experimental investigations, based on the equilibrium constant for Reaction 2, the experimental systems can be controlled in terms of acidity around neutral pH by using the equilibrium assemblage of borax and di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate at 25 °C. As salt lakes and natural brines contain both borate and magnesium as well as sodium, the formation of sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate may influence the chemical evolution of salt lakes and natural brines. Di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate is a polymorph of the mineral ameghinite [chemical formula Na 2B 6O 10•4H 2O; structural formula NaB 3O 3(OH) 4 or Na 2B 6O 6(OH) 8]. Finally, di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate could be a precursor of ameghinite and could be transformed when borate deposits are subject to diagenesis.« less

Experimental Determination of Solubilities of Sodium Polyborates In MgCl 2 Solutions: Solubility Constant of Di-Sodium Hexaborate Tetrahydrate, and Implications For the Diagenetic Formation of Ameghinite

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Xiong, Yongliang; Kirkes, Leslie; KNOX, Jandi

In this paper, solubility measurements were conducted for sodium polyborates in MgCl 2 solutions at 22.5 ± 0.5 °C. According to solution chemistry and XRD patterns, di-sodium tetraborate decahydrate (borax) dissolves congruently, and is the sole solubility-controlling phase, in a 0.01 mol/kg MgCl 2 solution: Na 2B 4O 7•10H 2O(cr) ⇌ 2Na + + 4B(OH) 4 + 2H + + H 2O(l). However, in a 0.1 mol/kg MgCl 2 solution borax dissolves incongruently and is in equilibrium with di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate: 2Na 2B 6O 10•4H 2O(cr) + 2Na + + 23H 2O(l) ⇌ 3Na 2B 4O 7•10H 2O(cr) + 2Hmore » +. In this study, the equilibrium constant (log K 0) for Reaction 2 at 25 °C and infinite dilution was determined to be –16.44 ± 0.13 (2σ) based on the experimental data and the Pitzer model for calculations of activity coefficients of aqueous species. In accordance with the log K 0 for Reaction 1 from a previous publication from this research group, and log K 0 for Reaction 2 from this study, the equilibrium constant for dissolution of di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate at 25 °C and at infinite dilution, Na 2B 6O 10•4H 2O(cr) + 10H 2O(l) ⇌ 2Na + + 6B(OH) 4 - + 4H + was derived to be –45.42 ± 0.16 (2σ). The equilibrium constants determined in this study can find applications in many fields. For example, in the field of nuclear waste management, the formation of di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate in brines containing magnesium will decrease borate concentrations, making less borate available for interactions with Am(III). In the field of experimental investigations, based on the equilibrium constant for Reaction 2, the experimental systems can be controlled in terms of acidity around neutral pH by using the equilibrium assemblage of borax and di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate at 25 °C. As salt lakes and natural brines contain both borate and magnesium as well as sodium, the formation of sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate may influence the chemical evolution of salt lakes and natural brines. Di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate is a polymorph of the mineral ameghinite [chemical formula Na 2B 6O 10•4H 2O; structural formula NaB 3O 3(OH) 4 or Na 2B 6O 6(OH) 8]. Finally, di-sodium hexaborate tetrahydrate could be a precursor of ameghinite and could be transformed when borate deposits are subject to diagenesis.« less