Objectives: Recently, there have been important advances in the clinical application of targeted hybrid near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent-radioactive tracers. ICG-99mTc-nanocolloid, for example, is already being used by some centres for sentinel lymph node biopsy in head and neck cancer. The radioactive component allows imaging at depths which would not be possible with NIR alone and, once exposed, the NIR fluorescence reporter can be imaged at very high resolution. Gamma detection is currently carried out with a separate hand-held gamma camera or with a non-imaging probe. Visualisation of NIR fluorescence during surgery requires a dedicated NIR camera, several of which are available commercially. We describe a novel hand-held hybrid NIR-gamma small field of view camera, capable of displaying co-aligned images from both modalities, which can be fused into one image or viewed separately. This study is a preliminary investigation of the performance of the fluorescence component of this camera, including phantom studies and first images from a preclinical pilot study. Methods: The hybrid camera consists of a 1500 µm thick thallium doped caesium iodide columnar (CsI:Tl) scintillator coupled to an electron multiplying charged coupled device (EMCCD). A 1.0mm diameter tungsten pinhole collimator gives a 40mm x 40mm nominal field of view for an 8mm x 8mm CCD detection area. A fluorescence camera was aligned to provide the same field of view as the gamma camera with an LED ring as the excitation source. The performance of the fluorescence imaging was quantified in this study for the fluorophores ICG and IRDye800CW (CW800) using a range of bespoke phantom experiments. In vivo images were also obtained from a preclinical study of a targeted hybrid tracer (cRGD-CW800-TCO + TCO-DOTA-111In) in mice with HT29 colorectal cancer xenografts. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The portable hybrid camera prototype has been shown to successfully image dual NIR-gamma tracers using both in vitro and in vivo experimental models. With further development, this camera could be used intraoperatively, offering the benefits of gamma imaging at depth in tissues and high resolution surface NIR fluorescence imaging in a single imaging system.
Aggression is a negative form of an anti-social behavior. It is produced because of a particular reason, desire, want, need, or due to the psychological state of the aggressor. It injures others physically or psychologically. Aggressive behaviors in human interactions cause discomfort and disharmony among interlocutors. The paper aims to identify how aggressive language manifests itself in the data under scrutiny in terms of the pragmatic paradigm. Two British literary works are the data; namely, Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956), and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter (1957). This paper endeavors to answer the question of how aggressive language is represented in literature pragmatically? It is hoped to be significant to
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Proverbs are considered as a major source of ancient events and happenings. Similar to other past events related to life, proverbs have many important and famous values in people's life. This study will shed lights on the use of proverbs as short sentences based on long experiences. The aim of the study is to explicate the roles, and the importance of proverbs in our life and how they are used to convey thoughts to people throughout simple words with denotation. Thus, proverbs explicate the truth and experience of our grandfathers when directed for criticism. Few proverbs were used by writers to criticize, mimic and reprint their personalities. Hence, proverbs will achieve portions of the unique roles of understanding. The model to
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In this study, we have created a new Arabic dataset annotated according to Ekman’s basic emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness and Surprise). This dataset is composed from Facebook posts written in the Iraqi dialect. We evaluated the quality of this dataset using four external judges which resulted in an average inter-annotation agreement of 0.751. Then we explored six different supervised machine learning methods to test the new dataset. We used Weka standard classifiers ZeroR, J48, Naïve Bayes, Multinomial Naïve Bayes for Text, and SMO. We also used a further compression-based classifier called PPM not included in Weka. Our study reveals that the PPM classifier significantly outperforms other classifiers such as SVM and N
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The basic solution to overcome difficult issues related to huge size of digital images is to recruited image compression techniques to reduce images size for efficient storage and fast transmission. In this paper, a new scheme of pixel base technique is proposed for grayscale image compression that implicitly utilize hybrid techniques of spatial modelling base technique of minimum residual along with transformed technique of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) that also impels mixed between lossless and lossy techniques to ensure highly performance in terms of compression ratio and quality. The proposed technique has been applied on a set of standard test images and the results obtained are significantly encourage compared with Joint P
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