An Image AdaptiveWatermarking method based on the Discrete Wavelet Transform is presented in this paper. The robustness and fidelity of the proposed method are evaluated and the method is compared to state-of-the-art watermarking techniques available in the literature. For the evaluation of watermark transparency, an image fidelity factor based on a perceptual distortion metric is introduced. O...

Designing and optimizing complex systems generally requires the use of numerical models. However, it is often too expensive to evaluate these models at each step of an optimization problem. Instead surrogate models can be used to explore the design space, as they are much cheaper to evaluate. Constructing a surrogate becomes challenging when different numerical models are used to compute the sa...

BACKGROUND Childhood obesity prevention studies have yielded disappointing results. Understanding intervention fidelity is necessary in explaining why interventions are (or are not) successful and ultimately improving future intervention. In spite of this, intervention fidelity it is not consistently reported in the obesity prevention literature. The purpose of the current study was to develop ...

Mycosis fungoides (MF), the most common type of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, has various unspecific clinical and histological characteristics. Its early diagnosis is challenging. The application of T-cell receptor (TCR) gene clonal rearrangement to the diagnosis of MF has been widely studied. In this study, we used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to investigate the diagnostic significance of dete...

The traditional single clonal selection algorithm has a lot of disadvantages, for example, it is easy to be trapped into local optima, and it has a lot of massive redudacy iteration in its later period and inferior global search ability and so on. In this paper, a new artificial immune algorithm is proposed based on the clonal selection theory and the structure of anti-idiotype(IAAI), which is ...

UNLABELLED To date, the majority of work on RNA virus replication fidelity has focused on the viral RNA polymerase, while the potential role of other viral replicase proteins in this process is poorly understood. Previous studies used resistance to broad-spectrum RNA mutagens, such as ribavirin, to identify polymerases with increased fidelity that avoid misincorporation of such base analogues. ...

The error rate of RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRp) affects the mutation frequency in a population of viral RNAs. Using chikungunya virus (CHIKV), we describe a unique arbovirus fidelity variant with a single C483Y amino acid change in the nsP4 RdRp that increases replication fidelity and generates populations with reduced genetic diversity. In mosquitoes, high fidelity CHIKV presents lower ...

Clonal selection has been a dominant theme in many immune-inspired algorithms applied to machine learning and optimisation. We examine existing clonal selections algorithms for learning from a theoretical and empirical perspective and assert that the widely accepted computational interpretation of clonal selection is compromised both algorithmically and biologically. We suggest a more capable a...

Acute leukemia which is the most common cancer in children is a heterogeneous group of clonal malignancies. The conversion of the leukemic cell lineage during the course of the disease or later is termed lineage switch. It has been rarely reported in the literature. In leukemia lineage switch, conversions from lymphoblastic leukemia to myeloid leukemia or vice versa are reported. Herein, we rep...

OBJECTIVES The increasing prevalence of extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Escherichia coli has been associated with the emergence of the CTX-M-producing sequence type 131 (ST131) pandemic clonal group, a member of the O25b serogroup and the B2 phylogenetic group. To assess the clonal spread of ESBL-producing E. coli in Japan, a regional surveillance programme was conducted. METHO...