Browsing by Type "Conference Paper"

The purpose of disease mapping is to find spatial clustering and identify risk areas and potential epidemic initiators. Rather than relying on plotting either the case number or incidence rate, this chapter proposes three temporal risk indices: the probability of case occurrence (how often did uneven cases occur), the duration of an epidemic (how long did cases persist), and the intensity of a transmission (were the case of chronological significance). By integrating the three indicators using the local indicator of spatial autocorrelation (LISA) statistic, this chapter intends to develop a novel approach for evaluating spatial-temporal relationships with different risk patterns in the 2002 dengue epidemic, the worst outbreak in the past sixty years. With this approach, not only are hypotheses generated through the mapping processes in furthering investigation, but also procedures provided to identify spatial health risk levels with temporal characteristics. ? Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.

Because air pollutants seriously affect human health, the government in Taiwan attempts to reduce the pollutants by passing many environmental laws and establishing various large-scale and expensive air quality monitoring systems. These monitoring systems are capable of large-scale monitoring, but they cannot immediately detect small-scale air quality changes. Wireless sensor networks are novel monitoring tools for small-scale monitoring. Through a wireless network, a large number of tiny sensor nodes can be deployed to a monitoring area. In this research, a reliable medium access control (MAC) protocol is presented for the urban air quality monitoring system based on the wireless sensor network. The proposed MAC protocol uses the concept of overhearing to reduce previously required control messages and data messages in the network. The reconfiguration and rejoining functions are also incorporated into the proposed MAC protocol for improving the stability of data transmission. Moreover, the proposed MAC protocol is designed for the sensor nodes built upon the TinyOS, aiming at air urban quality monitoring in Taipei, Taiwan. This urban monitoring system consists of 36 sensor nodes to detect carbon monoxide (CO) concentration, humidity, and temperature. The experimental data shows that the proposed MAC protocol is capable of stably working a long period of time, and it also indicates a significant difference in the pollutant concentration between the rush and non-rush hours. © 2012 IEEE.

Hepatitis B is not only a preventable but now treatable disease. Five drugs have been approved for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection: standard interferon-α (IFN), pegylated IFN, lamivudine, adefovir dipivoxil and entecavir. Among these agents, the responses to interferon therapy are invariably influenced by both host and viral factors. Therefore, understanding these factors is important for practicing hepatologists, and it may help design individualized medicine for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B. HBV genotypes affect the disease progression and outcomes of HBV-related chronic liver disease, as well as the response to antiviral treatments. Existing data indicate a better sustained response to standard IFN-α in HBeAg positive genotype B patients than genotype C patients, and in genotype A patients than genotype D patients. Nevertheless, conflicting results exist regarding the response to pegylated IFN, and more studies are needed. As to HBV genetic polymorphisms, a recent study showed that an IFN sensitivity-determiningregion may not exist within the whole genome of HBV subgenotype Ba, and host factors as well as virus-host interactions may be more important than viral factors alone in determining the treatment outcomes with IFN. Regarding host genetic polymorphisms, single nucleotide polymorphisms within eukaryotic translation initiation factor 2 and MxA promoter regions may be associated with the responsiveness to standard IFN-α treatment in patients with HBeAg positive chronic hepatitis B. In the foreseeable future, individualized chronic hepatitis B treatment algorithms should be tailored to host (immune status, ALT level and genomic polymorphisms), virus (HBeAg status, HBV DNA level, genotype, precore/ basal core promoter mutants and pre-S deletion mutant) as well as liver disease status (hepatitis activity and fibrosis stage). ? 2007 The Japan Society of Hepatology.

The size and shape of corpus callosum are important indicators for assisting diagnosis of many neurological diseases involving morphological changes of corpus callosum. A new automatic segmentation approach was proposed in this paper for boundary delineation of corpus callosum. The basic idea of the proposed approach was to perform segmentation on the red component of color-coded map of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance image (MR-DTI). The boundary of corpus callosum was delineated in two phases. Firstly, a rough boundary surrounding corpus callosum was derived by using a built-in contour function in Matlab. Then, this cell competition algorithm was applied to the area inside the rough boundary derived in the first phase. The proposed segmentation approach has been evaluated and compared to the Chan and Vese level set method by using the MR-DTI images of a healthy volunteer and a systemic lupus erythematorsus (SLE) patient. The implementation results showed that the proposed approach could delineate the boundaries of corpus callosum reasonably well for both cases, whereas the Chan and Vese level set method failed to catch the weak edge for the SLE patient. ? 2008 IEEE.

Organo-cobalt complexes have demonstrated unique properties in the mediation of radical polymerizations such as catalytic chain transfer polymerization (CCTP) of methacrylates and reversible deactivation radical polymerization (RDRP) of unconjugated monomers particularly vinyl acetate (VAc). Two pathways of reversible termination (RT) and degenerative transfer (DT) have been rationalized as the major control mechanisms in cobalt mediated RDRP. In this chapter, cobalt(II) phenoxy-imine complexes mediated radical polymerization of vinyl acetate is reported. The increasing of electron donating property of phenoxy-imine ligand could switch the polymerization mechanism from RDRP to CCTP, demonstrating the potential of this system to combine CCTP and RDRP techniques. ? 2018 American Chemical Society.

Cerebral vascular disease (or stroke) is the main cause of disabilities in adults. Upper-limb dysfunction after stroke usually exists, leading to severe limits of motor capabilities as well as daily activities. Therefore, effective treatment interventions for upper-limb rehabilitation after stroke are needed. Based on the neurophysiological evidence and clinical measures, combined bilateral arm training (BAT) with functional electric stimulation (FES) could improve hand function in stroke patients. In this study, we attempt to combine BAT with FES applying to the post-stroke paretic arm. A linear guide platform with FES feedback control was developed to execute the training of bilateral reaching movements. 35 stroke subjects were recruited and divided into two groups (BAT with FES and BAT alone). 23 participants completed this experiment with 3-week intervention. According to our preliminary results, a favorable trend toward improvement in experimental group (BAT with FES) existed after treatment and at follow-up. Further analysis would be conducted to investigate the kinematic change on motor performance. Moreover, various treatment doses as well as more functional approaches would also be considered for better effects of upper limb rehabilitation after stroke. ? 2011 IEEE.

Adenocarcinomas (ADC) is the major subtype of non-small cell lung cancers. Currently, surgery is used as the main approach for the treatment of the early-stage ADCs. However, different histological subtypes of ADC classified by the IASLC/ATS/ERS system may potentially impact on the surgical management, which subsequently influence the prognosis of the surgery. Thus, preoperative determination of ADC subtypes is essential and highly desirable. Nevertheless, the histological subtypes of ADCs may be either unknown or incompletely determined by biopsy before the surgery. Alternatively, the histological subtypes of ADCs may be predicted from the pulmonary computed tomographic (CT) images. However, previous studies showed limitations on the prediction results due to the complex composition of ADC subtypes. One possible reason is the radiomic descriptors used to differentiate different subtypes could be very different. The conventional approaches based on the same set of descriptors to distinguish all subtypes are inherently infeasible. Another possible reason is the complex composition of multiple subtypes in a lung nodule may hinder the extraction of effective radiomic descriptors to characterize each subtype. To overcome these challenges, a competing round-robin prediction model was proposed to predict the histological subtypes of ADCs, which was composed of three key ideas, namely, pair-specific radiomic descriptors for differentiation of every pair of subtypes, inter-regional descriptors for characterization of complex composition of subtypes in a nodule, and a multi-level round-robin classifier. Based on 70 ADCs patients, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 86.3% in predicting five histological subtypes of adenocarcinomas. ? 2018 SPIE.

The purpose of this study is to understand how positive and negative factors influence people on performing electricity-saving behaviors in households based on the MOA theory and 'Green Consumption Behavior Model'. Research data were collected through a professional market survey, in which the 1,067 sampling respondents represent the characteristics of Taiwanese population. This study found that, through structural equation modeling, coefficients of most of the paths in the model were significant, with only one exception. In addition to positive and negative factors, effectiveness of intervening variables (such as 'electricity-saving knowledge and beliefs') worth discussion because of their impacts on dependent variables (such as 'sustaining electricity-saving behavior'). Consequently, the effectiveness of direct paths seemed preferable to that of indirect paths. © 2016 IEEE.

Taiwan introduced a new Grade 1-9 Integrated Curriculum (G1-9 IC) in 2001. New curriculum standards provide only guidelines of major contents in 7 learning areas and focus on reminding teachers the basic abilities students should have and not providing standardized and detail textbooks. The national Health e-Learning Network (HeN) is one of six education networks funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to support G1-9 IC. After one year planning, the construction of the website (http://health.edu.tw) launched in 2003. The development team recruited more than 100 experts. About 40 elementary and secondary partner schools all over the country are collaborated to promote the website and digital learning contents. According to the three stages principle of preventive medicine and seven major contents of health and physical education learning area of G1-9 IC.. Through the implementation of information and network technology, many multimedia e-learning units(MeU) were developed. School teachers, students and parents can access these contents freely and share their experience interactively on the user community platform linked on the website. In the future, HEN will further coordinate the resources from public and private sectors to establish a health e-learning portal and provide life long health education. The family physician-based community integrated delivery system in conjunction with health information management and referral system will be integrated to provide a comprehensive and continuous holistic health care to reach the goal of health for all. ? 2006 by Knowledge Systems Institute Graduate School. All rights reserved.