BACKGROUND SmokeFree Sports (SFS) was a multi-component sport-for-health intervention aiming at preventing smoking among nine to ten year old primary school children from North West England. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the process and implementation of SFS, examining intervention reach, dose, fidelity, acceptability and sustainability, in order to understand the feasibility and ch...

This paper proposes image processing algorithms to recognize five types of white blood cells in peripheral blood automatically. First, a method based on Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization is proposed along with a snake algorithm to segment nucleus and cytoplasm of the cells. Then, a variety of features are extracted from the segmented regions. Next, most discriminative features are selected using a...

This paper presents a novel optimal watermarking scheme based on singular value decomposition (SVD) using differential evolution algorithm (DE). The singular values (SVs) of the host image are modified to embed the watermark image by employing multiple scaling factors (SFs). Modifications are optimised using DE to obtain the highest possible robustness without losing the transparency. Experimen...

Low-resource malware families are highly susceptible to being overlooked when using machine learning models or deep for automated detection because of the small amount data samples. When we target train a classifier low-resource family, training family itself is not sufficient good classifier. In this work, study relationship between different and improve performance model based on method in de...

This paper suggests a discriminative approach for wavelet denoising where a set of shrinkage functions (SF) are designed to perform optimally (in a MSE sense) with respect to a given set of images. Using the suggested scheme a new set of SFs are generated which are different from the traditional soft/hard thresholding in the overcomplete case. These SFs are demonstrated to obtain the state-of-t...

Sulfated fucans (SFs) and sulfated galactans (SGs) are currently the marine non-glycosaminoglycan (GAG) sulfated glycans most studied in glycomics. These compounds exhibit therapeutic effects in several pathophysiological systems such as blood coagulation, thrombosis, neovascularization, cancer, inflammation, and microbial infections. As analogs of the largely employed GAGs and due to some limi...

Dissipative Kerr cavity solitons experience a so-called self-frequency shift (SFS) as a result of Raman interactions. The frequency shift has been observed in several microcavity systems. The Raman process has also been shown numerically to influence the soliton pumping efficiency. Here, a perturbed Lagrangian approach is used to derive simple analytical expressions for the SFS and the soliton ...

The time evolution of structure factors (SF) in the disordering process of an initially phase-separated lattice depends crucially on the microscopic disordering mechanism, such as Kawasaki dynamics (KD) or vacancy-mediated disordering (VMD). Monte Carlo simulations show unexpected "dips" in the SFs. A phenomenological model is introduced to explain the dips in the odd SFs, and an analytical sol...

BACKGROUND We investigated the renoprotective ability of healthy people against kidney stone formation. To clarify intratubular crystal kinetics and processing in human kidneys, we performed a quantitative and morphological observation of nephrectomized renal parenchyma tissues. METHODS Clinical data and pathological samples from 60 patients who underwent radical nephrectomy for renal cancer ...

Deficits in social functioning are a core symptom of schizophrenia and an important criterion for evaluating the success of treatment. However, there is little agreement regarding its measurement. A common, often cited instrument for assessing self-reported social functioning is the Social Functioning Scale (SFS). The study aimed to investigate the reliability and validity of the German transla...