Structural and functional connectivity of the whole brain and subnetworks in individuals with mild traumatic brain injury:predictors of patient prognosis

Patients with mild traumatic brain injury have a diverse clinical presentation,and the underlying pathophysiology remains poorly understood.Magnetic resonance imaging is a non-invasive technique that has been widely utilized to investigate neuro biological markers after mild traumatic brain injury.This approach has emerged as a promising tool for investigating the pathogenesis of mild traumatic brain injury.G raph theory is a quantitative method of analyzing complex networks that has been widely used to study changes in brain structure and function.However,most previous mild traumatic brain injury studies using graph theory have focused on specific populations,with limited exploration of simultaneous abnormalities in structural and functional connectivity.Given that mild traumatic brain injury is the most common type of traumatic brain injury encounte red in clinical practice,further investigation of the patient characteristics and evolution of structural and functional connectivity is critical.In the present study,we explored whether abnormal structural and functional connectivity in the acute phase could serve as indicators of longitudinal changes in imaging data and cognitive function in patients with mild traumatic brain injury.In this longitudinal study,we enrolled 46 patients with mild traumatic brain injury who were assessed within 2 wee ks of injury,as well as 36 healthy controls.Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion-weighted imaging data were acquired for graph theoretical network analysis.In the acute phase,patients with mild traumatic brain injury demonstrated reduced structural connectivity in the dorsal attention network.More than 3 months of followup data revealed signs of recovery in structural and functional connectivity,as well as cognitive function,in 22 out of the 46 patients.Furthermore,better cognitive function was associated with more efficient networks.Finally,our data indicated that small-worldness in the acute stage could serve as a predictor of longitudinal changes in connectivity in patients with mild traumatic brain injury.These findings highlight the importance of integrating structural and functional connectivity in unde rstanding the occurrence and evolution of mild traumatic brain injury.Additionally,exploratory analysis based on subnetworks could serve a predictive function in the prognosis of patients with mild traumatic brain injury.

A multi-feature-based intelligent redundancy elimination scheme for cloud-assisted health systems

Redundancy elimination techniques are extensively investigated to reduce storage overheads for cloud-assisted health systems.Deduplication eliminates the redundancy of duplicate blocks by storing one physical instance referenced by multiple duplicates.Delta compression is usually regarded as a complementary technique to deduplication to further remove the redundancy of similar blocks,but our observations indicate that this is disobedient when data have sparse duplicate blocks.In addition,there are many overlapped deltas in the resemblance detection process of post-deduplication delta compression,which hinders the efficiency of delta compression and the index phase of resemblance detection inquires abundant non-similar blocks,resulting in inefficient system throughput.Therefore,a multi-feature-based redundancy elimination scheme,called MFRE,is proposed to solve these problems.The similarity feature and temporal locality feature are excavated to assist redundancy elimination where the similarity feature well expresses the duplicate attribute.Then,similarity-based dynamic post-deduplication delta compression and temporal locality-based dynamic delta compression discover more similar base blocks to minimise overlapped deltas and improve compression ratios.Moreover,the clustering method based on block-relationship and the feature index strategy based on bloom filters reduce IO overheads and improve system throughput.Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method,compared to the state-of-the-art method,improves the compression ratio and system throughput by 9.68%and 50%,respectively.

A Concise and Varied Visual Features-Based Image Captioning Model with Visual Selection

Image captioning has gained increasing attention in recent years.Visual characteristics found in input images play a crucial role in generating high-quality captions.Prior studies have used visual attention mechanisms to dynamically focus on localized regions of the input image,improving the effectiveness of identifying relevant image regions at each step of caption generation.However,providing image captioning models with the capability of selecting the most relevant visual features from the input image and attending to them can significantly improve the utilization of these features.Consequently,this leads to enhanced captioning network performance.In light of this,we present an image captioning framework that efficiently exploits the extracted representations of the image.Our framework comprises three key components:the Visual Feature Detector module(VFD),the Visual Feature Visual Attention module(VFVA),and the language model.The VFD module is responsible for detecting a subset of the most pertinent features from the local visual features,creating an updated visual features matrix.Subsequently,the VFVA directs its attention to the visual features matrix generated by the VFD,resulting in an updated context vector employed by the language model to generate an informative description.Integrating the VFD and VFVA modules introduces an additional layer of processing for the visual features,thereby contributing to enhancing the image captioning model’s performance.Using the MS-COCO dataset,our experiments show that the proposed framework competes well with state-of-the-art methods,effectively leveraging visual representations to improve performance.The implementation code can be found here:https://github.com/althobhani/VFDICM(accessed on 30 July 2024).

Novel Private Data Access Control Scheme Suitable for Mobile Edge Computing

Efficient response speed and information processing speed are among the characteristics of mobile edge computing(MEC).However,MEC easily causes information leakage and loss problems because it requires frequent data exchange.This work proposes an anonymous privacy data protection and access control scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography(ECC)and bilinear pairing to protect the communication security of the MEC.In the proposed scheme,the information sender encrypts private information through the ECC algorithm,and the information receiver uses its own key information and bilinear pairing to extract and verify the identity of the information sender.During each round of communication,the proposed scheme uses timestamps and random numbers to ensure the freshness of each round of conversation.Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has good security performance and can provide data privacy protection,integrity verification,and traceability for the communication process of MEC.The proposed scheme has a lower cost than other related schemes.The communication and computational cost of the proposed scheme are reduced by 31.08% and 22.31% on average compared with those of the other related schemes.

An Extension to ns-3 for Simulating Mobile Charging with Wireless Energy Transfer

Many theoretical derivation of the energy model requires extensive simulation in Internet of Things (IoT). Network Simulator 3 (ns-3) provides a simulation platform for various experimental studies including energy harvest.However, the function of charge schedule and wireless energy transfer model is not yet implemented. To address this problem, in this paper we propose an extension to ns-3 for simulating mobile charging with wireless energy transfer.First, we utilize a WET Harvest Class to harvest energy from the environment and a Charge Schedule Class for the mobile charger to choose the optimal node charging in the charging request queue in ns-3. Second, we use Charge Energy Model to judge what the mobile charger will do next when the energy of current node is higher or lower than energy threshold. Evaluation results show that our improvements are feasible and helpful with charge schedule and energy model in ns-3.

A survey of visual analytics techniques for online education

Visual analytics techniques are widely utilized to facilitate the exploration of online educational data.To help researchers better understand the necessity and the efficiency of these techniques in online education,we systematically review related works of the past decade to provide a comprehensive view of the use of visualization in online education problems.We establish a taxonomy based on the analysis goal and classify the existing visual analytics techniques into four categories:learning behavior analysis,learning content analysis,analysis of interactions among students,and prediction and recommendation.The use of visual analytics techniques is summarized in each category to show their benefits in different analysis tasks.At last,we discuss the future research opportunities and challenges in the utilization of visual analytics techniques for online education.

TVseer:A visual analytics system for television ratings

The television ratings provide an effective way to analyze the popularity of TV programs and audiences’watching habits.Most previous studies have analyzed the ratings from a single perspective.Few efforts have integrated analysis from different perspectives and explored the reasons for changes in ratings.In this paper,we design a visual analysis system called TVseer to analyze audience ratings from three perspectives:TV channels,TV programs,and audiences.The system can help users explore the factors that affect ratings,and assist them in decisions about program productions and schedules.There are six linked views in TVseer:the channel ratings view and program ratings view show ratings change information from the perspective of TV channels and programs respectively;the overlapping program competition view and the same-type program competition view indicate the competitive relationships among programs;the audience transfer view shows how audiences are moving among different channels;the audience group view displays audience groups based on their watching behavior.Besides,we also construct case studies and expert interviews to prove our system is useful and effective.