A recent alert from the UK Committee on Safety of Medicines stated that the dangers of treatment of depression with paroxetine outweigh the benefits in those under 18. Such a warning should focus our minds on the evidence on which clinical practice is based. Antidepressant treatment of depression in the under-18s has been thought to be justified because clinical trials show that it works so wel...

A new trend in medicine is the use of algorithms to analyze big datasets, e.g. using everything your phone measures about you for diagnostics or monitoring. However, these algorithms are commonly compared against weak baselines, which may contribute to excessive optimism. To assess how well an algorithm works, scientists typically ask how well its output correlates with medically assigned score...

A model of the normal processing of gestures to account for the complexity of the different patterns of apraxia has been proposed by Rothi et al. (1991; 1997) and recently refined by Cubelli et al. (2000). This model, in analogy with the dual-route models of reading (e.g., Coltheart et al., 1993) encompasses three processing components1: (i) A “lexical route” which supports recognition (action ...

Distance concentration is the phenomenon that, in certain conditions, the contrast between the nearest and the farthest neighbouring points vanishes as the data dimensionality increases. It affects high dimensional data processing, analysis, retrieval, and indexing, which all rely on some notion of distance or dissimilarity. Previous work has characterised this phenomenon in the limit of infini...

Studies on attentional selection typically use unpredictable and meaningless stimuli, such as simple shapes and oriented lines. The assumption is that using these stimuli minimizes effects due to learning or prior knowledge, such that the task performance indexes a "pure" measure of the underlying cognitive ability. However, prior knowledge of the test stimuli and related stimuli acquired befor...

Region search is widely used for object localization. Typically, the region search methods project the score of a classifier into an image plane, and then search the region with the maximal score. The recently proposed region search methods, such as efficient subwindow search and efficient region search, are much more efficient than sliding window search. However, for some classifiers and tasks...

We present results of using Bayesian inference for recovering the 3-D shape and texture of an object based on information extracted from a single 2-D image. We are using a number of different models for specific object classes. The goal is to combine the classes to a hierarchical structure. Instead of searching for the most probable explanation we estimate the entire posterior distribution of t...

The use of hand gesture provides an attractive alternative to cumbersome interface devices for human-computer interaction (HCI). In particular, visual interpretation of hand gestures can help achieve easy and natural comprehension for HCI. Many methods for hand gesture recognition using visual analysis have been proposed such as syntactical analysis, neural network (NN), and hidden Markov model...

The clinical assessment prior to any surgical intervention is generally carried out by an anaesthesiologist, however, in many cases the cardiologist is also required given that the cardiovascular risk has the greatest clinical and prognosis significance in the majority of interventions. The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a firmly established element of the preoperative cardiological assessment. Off...