Contrast enhancements, such as histogram equalization or gamma correction, are widely used by malicious attackers to conceal the cut-and-paste trails in doctored images. Therefore, detecting the traces left by contrast enhancements can be an effective way of exposing cut-and-paste image forgery. In this work, two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images are ...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to assess the usefulness of various enzymes, cytokines and biochemical studies of pleural fluid for the differential diagnosis of tuberculosis from malignant pleural effusions, and to clarify the role of combining diagnostic tests. METHODS The study group included 39 cases with tuberculous effusions and 31 cases with malignant effusions, whose diagnoses...

Let \(\varLambda (T)\) denote the set of leaves in a tree T. One natural problem is to look for spanning T given graph G such that as large possible. Recently, similar but stronger notion called robust connectivity was introduced, which defined minimum value \(\frac{|R \cap \varLambda (T)|}{|R|}\) taken over all nonempty subsets \({R\subseteq V(G)}\), where \(T = T(R)\) on chosen maximize \({|R...

In diabetes screening with hemoglobin A1c in lieu of plasma glucose, the optimum cut-off point for predicting the incidence of diabetes mellitus in the four-year period was examined. In addition, considerations were given on items in the screening and questionnaire aside from hemoglobin A1c, which would be useful in predicting diabetes aside from hemoglobin A1c. The optimum cut-off point of hem...

BACKGROUND Cut-point finding is a crucial step for clinical decision making when dealing with diagnostic (or prognostic) biomarkers. The extension of ROC-based cut-point finding methods to the case of censored failure time outcome is of interest when we are in the presence of a biomarker, measured at baseline, used to identify whether there will be the development, or not, of some disease condi...

Expert forecasts of quantitative variables in the form of continuous subjective probability distributions are more useful to decision makers than are point estimates or confidence intervals. We present 2 experiments using participants recruited via the Internet aimed at (a) developing methods for estimating and modeling continuous subjective distributions from small numbers of judgments, and (b...