ALBERT

Description: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the incidence of glaucoma in patients diagnosed with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) via the application of the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan. A retrospective cohort study was conducted. Patients with a diagnosis of SNHL were enrolled in the study group after an exclusion procedure and a propensity score matched group without SNHL was served as the control group with a 1:2 ratio. The main outcome was regarded as the emergence of glaucoma diagnostic codes. Cox proportional hazard regression was applied to analyze the incidence and adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) of glaucoma in the multivariate model. A total of 15,686 patients diagnosed with SNHL were enrolled in the study group while another 31,372 non-SNHL individuals served as the control group. There were 444 glaucoma events in the study group and 647 glaucoma events in those non-SNHL individuals after the follow-up interval of 16 years. The study group demonstrated a significantly higher aHR compared to the control group after adjusting for multiple possible risk factors. In the subgroup analysis, both the normal tension glaucoma and angle closure glaucoma subgroups revealed a higher aHR in the study group. In conclusion, the patients with SNHL demonstrated a higher incidence of developing glaucoma. Moreover, the incidence was more prominent for patients diagnosed with normal tension glaucoma and angle closure glaucoma.

Description: To evaluate the relationship between subconjunctival hemorrhage (SCH) and dermatologic vasculature diseases (DVDs) via the national health insurance research database (NHIRD) of Taiwan. This retrospective cohort study used data from the NHIRD for the 2009 to 2013 period. Patients diagnosed with DVDs were enrolled in the study group, and a propensity score-matching population was selected as the control group after exclusion. The main outcome was set as the development of SCH in both groups. Multivariable Cox regression analysis and survival analysis were performed to estimate the adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) and cumulative probability of SCH. A total number of 3426 patients were enrolled and split equally into the study and the control groups. There was no prominent difference between the age, gender, urbanization, income level, systemic co-morbidities, and ocular diseases between the two groups after matching. During the whole study period, 131 patients in the study group and 98 patients in the control group developed SCH with a significant higher aHR of 2.69 in the study group (p 〈 0.05). In the survival analysis, the study group also demonstrated a higher cumulative probability of developing SCH than the control group throughout the study period (p = 0.02). In conclusion, the presence of DVDs may be a risk factor for the development of SCH.

Description: Music is a series of harmonious sounds well arranged by musical elements including rhythm, melody, and harmony (RMH). Since music digitalization has resulted in a wide variety of new musical applications used in daily life, the use of music genre classification (MGC), especially MGC automation, is increasingly playing a key role in the development of novel musical services. However, achieving satisfactory performance of MGC automation is a practical challenge. This paper proposes a two-step approach for music genre classification (called TSMGC) on the strength of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) weighted musical features. Compared with other MGC approaches, the TSMGC has three strong points for better performance: (1) various musical features extracted from the RMH and the calculated entropy are comprehensively considered, (2) the weight of features and their impact values determined by AHP are applied on the basis of the Exponential Distribution function, (3) music can be accurately categorized into a main-class and further sub-classes through a two-step classification process. According to the conducted experiment, the result exhibits an accuracy rate of 87%, which demonstrates the potential for the proposed TSMGC method to meet the emerging needs of MGC automation.

Description: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the risk of developing keratopathy in patients with surgery-indicated chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) via the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan. Patients with a diagnostic code of CRS and who received functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) were considered to have surgery-indicated CRS. The exclusion criteria were legal blindness, an ocular tumor, eyeball removal or previous keratopathy, and each individual in the study group was matched to four non-CRS patients by age and sex. The outcome was set as the occurrence of keratopathy according to the diagnostic codes after the index date. Cox proportional hazard regression was used for statistical analysis. A total of 6053 patients with surgery-indicated CRS and another 24,212 non-CRS individuals were enrolled after exclusions. The age and sex distributions were identical between the two groups due to matching, while comorbidities, including hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and other cardiovascular disorders, were significantly higher in the study group. There were 231 episodes of keratopathy in the study group, and 695 episodes of keratopathy in the control group after the index date, for which study group showed a significantly higher rate of developing keratopathy with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.208 and a higher cumulative probability. In subgroup analysis, female sex with surgery-indicated CRS showed a significantly greater risk of developing keratopathy. In conclusion, surgery-indicated CRS that needs FESS to relieve symptoms is a potential risk factor for keratopathy.

Description: Multiple important physical parameters in the vanadium redox flow battery are difficult to measure accurately, and the multiple important physical parameters (e.g., temperature, flow, voltage, current, pressure, and electrolyte concentration) are correlated with each other; all of them have a critical influence on the performance and life of vanadium redox flow battery. In terms of the feed of fuel to vanadium redox flow battery, the pump conveys electrolytes from the outside to inside for reaction. As the performance of vanadium redox flow battery can be tested only by an external machine—after which, the speed of pump is adjusted to control the flow velocity of electrolyte—the optimum performance cannot be obtained. There is a demand for internal real-time microscopic diagnosis of vanadium redox flow batteries, and this study uses micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology to develop a flexible five-in-one (temperature, flow, voltage, current, and pressure) microsensor, which is embedded in vanadium redox flow battery, for real-time sensing. Its advantages include: (1) Small size and the simultaneous measurement of five important physical quantities; (2) elastic measurement position and accurate embedding; and (3) high accuracy, sensitivity, and quick response time. The flexible five-in-one microsensor embedded in the vanadium redox flow battery can instantly monitor the changes in different physical quantities in the vanadium redox flow battery during charging; as such, optimum operating parameters can be found out so that performance and life can be enhancec.

Description: Many factories were built and scattered around the farmlands in Taiwan due to inappropriate land use planning. Illegal effluent discharge of high concentration of metals from the nearby factories has been threatening the farmlands, causing damages to agricultural production, food safety, and human health. Sampling was mostly responsible for monitoring the water quality of the agricultural environment; however, the analysis is of high cost and time consuming. Due to uneasy controlled environmental factors (i.e., illegal effluents) and time-consuming and expensive traditional analysis techniques (i.e., atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), atomic fluorescence spectrometry (AFS), inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES), inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS)), we develop a fast-screening method, which is the combination of ion exchange resins and the portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy to identify the source of contaminants in a mixed industrial and agricultural area in Taoyuan County, Taiwan. The time-lapse ion exchange resin sachet (TIERS) is a non-woven bag that is filled with resins and placed in the irrigation channels for continuously absorbing the metal and trace elements in water. The standardization ratios of Cu/Sr and Zn/Sr were calculated as the pollutant indicators for fast-screening the highly polluted sites of exceedance probability of 2.27% in the monitoring area. The TIERS is verified to detect the metal and trace element concentration in an efficient and sufficient way.

Description: Pluvial floods are the most frequent natural hazard impacting urban cities because of extreme rainfall intensity within short duration. Owing to the complex interaction between rainfall, drainage systems and overland flow, pluvial flood warning poses a challenge for many metropolises. Although physical-based flood inundation models could identify inundated locations, hydrodynamic modeling is limited in terms of computational costs and sophisticated calibration. Thus, herein, a quick pluvial flood warning system using rainfall thresholds for central Taipei is developed. A tabu search algorithm is implemented with hydrological-analysis-based initial boundary conditions to optimize rainfall thresholds. Furthermore, a cross test is adopted to evaluate the effect of each rainfall event on rainfall threshold optimization. Urban sewer flood is simulated via hydrodynamic modeling with calibration using crowdsourced data. The locations and time of occurrence of pluvial floods can be obtained to increase the quality of observed data that dominate the accuracy of pluvial flood warning when using rainfall thresholds. The optimization process is a tabu search based on flood reports and observed data for six flood-prone districts in central Taipei. The results show that optimum rainfall thresholds can be efficiently determined through tabu search and the accuracy of the issued flood warnings can be significantly improved.

Description: Facial Expression Recognition (FER) can be widely applied to various research areas, such as mental diseases diagnosis and human social/physiological interaction detection. With the emerging advanced technologies in hardware and sensors, FER systems have been developed to support real-world application scenes, instead of laboratory environments. Although the laboratory-controlled FER systems achieve very high accuracy, around 97%, the technical transferring from the laboratory to real-world applications faces a great barrier of very low accuracy, approximately 50%. In this survey, we comprehensively discuss three significant challenges in the unconstrained real-world environments, such as illumination variation, head pose, and subject-dependence, which may not be resolved by only analysing images/videos in the FER system. We focus on those sensors that may provide extra information and help the FER systems to detect emotion in both static images and video sequences. We introduce three categories of sensors that may help improve the accuracy and reliability of an expression recognition system by tackling the challenges mentioned above in pure image/video processing. The first group is detailed-face sensors, which detect a small dynamic change of a face component, such as eye-trackers, which may help differentiate the background noise and the feature of faces. The second is non-visual sensors, such as audio, depth, and EEG sensors, which provide extra information in addition to visual dimension and improve the recognition reliability for example in illumination variation and position shift situation. The last is target-focused sensors, such as infrared thermal sensors, which can facilitate the FER systems to filter useless visual contents and may help resist illumination variation. Also, we discuss the methods of fusing different inputs obtained from multimodal sensors in an emotion system. We comparatively review the most prominent multimodal emotional expression recognition approaches and point out their advantages and limitations. We briefly introduce the benchmark data sets related to FER systems for each category of sensors and extend our survey to the open challenges and issues. Meanwhile, we design a framework of an expression recognition system, which uses multimodal sensor data (provided by the three categories of sensors) to provide complete information about emotions to assist the pure face image/video analysis. We theoretically analyse the feasibility and achievability of our new expression recognition system, especially for the use in the wild environment, and point out the future directions to design an efficient, emotional expression recognition system.

Description: Sustainable conservation aims to ensure the sustained conservation of landscape multi-functionality which in turn requires ensuring ecosystem service (ES) and habitat quality (HQ) sustainability with inclusive landscape-scale conservation planning. This study proposes a landscape conservation planning (LCP) framework for landscape-scale ES-HQ conservation and sustainability. Spatially explicit hotspots for five ESs and HQs are identified via InVEST and LISA software. Spatiotemporal changes in ES-HQ hotspots, in terms of stability and resilience, are delineated. The Zonation technique is applied to prioritize areas for conservation based on ES-HQ hotspot stability and resilience maps. High priority conservation areas are identified and are used as reserve area inputs for land use modeling with CLUE-S software to simulate future land use change under climate change scenarios. This study reports that varied rainfall and climate are major driving factors of ES-HQ sustainability disturbance in the study area. Furthermore, our proposed conservation Strategy 2 demonstrates that a larger extent of landscape multi-functionality can be sustained when the existing conservation area includes the total area of identified ES-HQ resilient hotspots. This study effectively identifies the stability and resiliency of ES-HQ hotspot areas affected by disturbances for high priority landscape conservation requirements to ensure ES-HQ sustainability and landscape multi-functionality in the study area.

Description: The study proposed a vertex-based authentication algorithm based on spatial subdivision. A binary space partitioning tree was employed to subdivide the bounding volume of the input model into voxels. Each vertex could then be encoded into a series of binary digits, denoted as its authentication code, by traversing the constructed tree. Finally, the above authentication code was embedded into the corresponding reference vertex by modulating its position within the located subspace. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm provided high embedding capacity and high robustness. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm supported controllable distortion and self-recovery.