Academic literature on the topic 'Posed pain'

The text presents a transhumanist point of view on evolution. It focuses on the lack of clear and obvious evolutionary solutions to the issue of involuntary suffering. It poses difficult questions about the possibility of enhencement of human nature and respecting the laws of evolution. It reflects on the positive role of pain for the development of individual people and the entire human species. It considers the thesis that perhaps evolution “needs” pain for proper human development. It asks whether the transition to a higher than evolutionary stage of human development, as proposed by transhumanists, will not lead to the extinction of our species? After all, it relates all this mosaic of thoughts and theories to God, who can be the answer to many posed questions.

Orthopedic disorders are common among horses, often leading to euthanasia, which often could have been avoided with earlier detection. These conditions often create varying degrees of subtle long-term pain. It is challenging to train a visual pain recognition method with video data depicting such pain, since the resulting pain behavior also is subtle, sparsely appearing, and varying, making it challenging for even an expert human labeller to provide accurate ground-truth for the data. We show that a model trained solely on a dataset of horses with acute experimental pain (where labeling is less ambiguous) can aid recognition of the more subtle displays of orthopedic pain. Moreover, we present a human expert baseline for the problem, as well as an extensive empirical study of various domain transfer methods and of what is detected by the pain recognition method trained on clean experimental pain in the orthopedic dataset. Finally, this is accompanied with a discussion around the challenges posed by real-world animal behavior datasets and how best practices can be established for similar fine-grained action recognition tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/sofiabroome/painface-recognition.

This study focused on the ergonomic risk assessment of salt workers in Occidental Mindoro. The study intended to determine which work activities posed risks to the farm workers, find if significant relationship between profile variables and the total pain and body parts pain experienced by the salt workers from doing the work activities that posed risks. The Nordic Questionnaire was used to detect symptoms to the neck, back, shoulders and extremities. It is composed of 28 multiple choice questions and structured into two well-differentiated parts, the first part refers to symptoms in nine parts of the body(neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists/hands, upper back, lower back, hip/thighs, knees and ankles during the last 12 months. The second part refers to the symptoms in three parts of the body (neck, shoulders and lower back) throughout the subject’s working life/seven days beforehand. To interpret data, correlation analysis and descriptive statistics were used. Findings of the study revealed that the salt workers are middle adults, have been working in the salt farms for most of their lives, have heights and weights that are well within the average height and weight for Filipino males. Results further suggest that the work activities that posed risks and caused pain to the salt workers are, transporting salt, collecting salt and filling the salterns with brine. Further, age and years of working in the salt farms are also found to be significantly related to the pain in body parts experienced by the saltworkers in doing the activities that pose risks to them. The body parts that are likely to feel pain are neck, lower and upper back and knees. Lastly, in knowing the risky work activities of salt farmers, mitigation measures can be proposed.

Accurately assessing the intensity of pain from facial expressions captured in videos is crucial for effective pain management and critical for a wide range of healthcare applications. However, in uncontrolled environments, detecting facial expressions from full left and right profiles remains a significant challenge, and even the most advanced models for recognizing pain levels based on facial expressions can suffer from declining performance. In this study, we present a novel model designed to overcome the challenges posed by full left and right profiles—Sparse Autoencoders for Facial Expressions-based Pain Assessment (SAFEPA). Our model utilizes Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) to reconstruct the upper part of the face from the input image, and feeds both the original image and the reconstructed upper face into two pre-trained concurrent and coupled Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This approach gives more weight to the upper part of the face, resulting in superior recognition performance. Moreover, SAFEPA’s design leverages CNNs’ strengths while also accommodating variations in head poses, thus eliminating the need for face detection and upper-face extraction preprocessing steps needed in other models. SAFEPA achieves high accuracy in recognizing four levels of pain on the widely used UNBC-McMaster shoulder pain expression archive dataset. SAFEPA is extended for facial expression recognition, where we show it to outperform state-of-the-art models in recognizing seven facial expressions viewed from five different angles, including the challenging full left and right profiles, on the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) dataset. Furthermore, the SAFEPA system is capable of processing BioVid Heat Pain datasets with an average processing time of 17.82 s per video (5 s in length), while maintaining a competitive accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art pain detection systems. This experiment demonstrates its applicability in real-life scenarios for monitoring systems. With SAFEPA, we have opened new possibilities for accurate pain assessment, even in challenging situations with varying head poses.

A series of 76 patients with 85 neurilemomas of the lower extremity was reviewed. The tumors were located throughout the lower extremity and had varied clinical presentations, which often posed problems in diagnosis. Pain, however, was a consistent symptom, and 63 (83%) of the patients presented with local or radiating (or both) pain. Electromyography was done in seven cases, but the results were abnormal in only two. When evaluating a painful mass or an atypical pain in the lower extremity, the clinician should have a high index of suspicion for neurilemoma.

La capacité à ressentir la douleur est cruciale pour la vie, car elle sert de système d’alerteprécoce en cas de dommages potentiels pour le corps. La majorité des évaluations dela douleur reposent sur les rapports des patients. En revanche, les patients incapablesd’exprimer leur douleur doivent plutôt se fier aux rapports de tierces personnes sur leursouffrance. En raison des biais potentiel de l’observateur, les rapports sur la douleurpeuvent contenir des inexactitudes. En outre, il serait impossible de surveiller les patients 24 heures sur 24. Afin de mieux gérer la douleur, notamment chez les patients avec des difficultés de communication, des techniques de détection automatique de la douleur pourraient être mises en œuvre pour aider les soignants et compléter leur service. Les expressions faciales sont utilisées par la plupart des systèmes d’évaluation de la douleur basés sur l’observation, car elles constituent un indicateur fiable de la douleur et peuvent être interprétées à distance.En considérant que la douleur génère généralement un comportement facial spontané, les expressions faciales pourraient être utilisées pour détecter la présence de la douleur. Dans cette thèse, nous analysons les expressions faciales de la douleur afin d’aborder l’estimation de la douleur. Tout d’abord, nous présentons une analyse approfondie du problème en comparant de nombreuses architectures CNN (réseau de neurones convolutifs) courantes, telles que MobileNet, GoogleNet, ResNeXt-50, ResNet18et DenseNet-161. Nous utilisons ces réseaux dans deux modes uniques : autonome et extraction de caractéristiques. En mode autonome, les modèles (c’est-à-dire les réseaux)sont utilisés pour estimer directement la douleur. En mode extracteur de caractéristiques, les "valeurs" de la couche intermédiaire sont extraites et introduites dans desclassificateurs tels que la régression à vecteur de support (SVR) et la régression à forêtsd’arbres décisionnels (RFR).Les CNN ont obtenu des résultats significatifs dans la classification d’images et ontconnu un grand succès. Plus récemment, l’efficacité des Transformers en vision par ordinateur a été démontrée par plusieurs études. Des architectures basées sur les Transformers ont été proposées dans la deuxième section de cette thèse. Ces deux architectures distinctes ont été présentées pour répondre à deux problèmes distincts liés àla douleur : la détection de la douleur (douleur vs absence de douleur) et la distinction entre la douleur authentique et la douleur simulée. L’architecture innovante pourl’identification binaire de la douleur faciale est basée sur des transformateurs d’imagesefficaces en termes de données (Deit). Deux bases de données, UNBC-McMaster shoulder pain et BioVid heat pain, ont été utilisées pour affiner et évaluer le modèle formé. Ladeuxième architecture proposée, repose sur des transformateurs de vision pour la détection de douleurs authentiques et simulées à partir des expressions faciales (ViT). Pour distinguer la douleur authentique de la douleur simulée, le modèle doit accorder uneattention particulière aux changements subtils des expressions faciales dans le temps.L’approche employée prend en compte l’aspect séquentiel et capture les variations des expressions faciales. Les expériences ont été menées sur la base de données BioVid HeatPain démontrent l’efficacité de notre stratégie
The ability to feel pain is crucial for life, since it serves as an early warning system forpotential harm to the body. The majority of pain evaluations rely on patient reports. Patients who are unable to express their own pain must instead rely on third-party reportsof their suffering. Due to potential observer bias, pain reports may contain inaccuracies. In addition, it would be impossible for people to keep watch around the clock. Inorder to better manage pain, especially in noncommunicative patients, automatic paindetection technologies might be implemented to aid human caregivers and complementtheir service. Facial expressions are used by all observer-based pain assessment systemsbecause they are a reliable indicator of pain and can be interpreted from a distance.Taking into consideration that pain generally generates spontaneous facial behavior,these facial expressions could be used to detect the presence of pain. In this thesis, weanalyze facial expressions of pain in order to address pain estimation. First, we presenta thorough analysis of the problem by comparing numerous common CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) architectures, such as MobileNet, GoogleNet, ResNeXt-50, ResNet18, and DenseNet-161. We employ these networks in two unique modes: standalone and feature extraction. In standalone mode, models (i.e., networks) are utilized to directly estimate pain. In feature extractor mode, "values" from the middle layer are extracted and fed into classifiers like Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Random Forest Regression (RFR).CNNs have achieved significant results in image classification and have achievedgreat success. The effectiveness of Transformers in computer vision has been demonstrated through recent studies. Transformer-based architectures were proposed in the second section of this thesis. Two distinct Transformer-based frameworks were presented to address two distinct pain issues: pain detection (pain vs no pain) and thedistinction between genuine and posed pain. The innovative architecture for binaryidentification of facial pain is based on data-efficient image transformers (Deit). Twodatasets, UNBC-McMaster shoulder pain and BioVid heat pain, were used to fine-tuneand assess the trained model. The suggested architecture is built on Vision Transformers for the detection of genuine and simulated pain from facial expressions (ViT). Todistinguish between Genuine and Posed Pain, the model must pay particular attentionto the subtle changes in facial expressions over time. The employed approach takes intoaccount the sequential aspect and captures the variations in facial expressions. Experiments on the publicly accessible BioVid Heat Pain Database demonstrate the efficacy of our strategy

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.
In title on June 2009 MIT Commencement Exercises program, "[mu]" appear as lower case Greek letter. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-86).
Photon-pair sources based on spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) in a nonlinear crystal waveguide have been shown to be significantly more efficient than those in a bulk crystal. To utilize waveguide sources in quantum information processing (QIP) applications, it is highly desirable to integrate additional functionality such as pump sources and modulators at the waveguide-chip level for compactness, reliability, and ease of operation. As a first step we develop a waveguide SPDC source with integrated single-mode polarization-maintaining (PM) fibers in this thesis work, and demonstrate the efficient generation of photon pairs at 1316 nm in a type-II phasematched Rb-indiffused waveguide in periodically poled KTiOPO4 (PPKTP). We perform the flux and spectrum characterization of our integrated waveguide source, and obtain a pair production rate of 2 x 107/s/mW in a 1.08-nm bandwidth. The measurement results are in good agreement with a theoretical model that takes into account the transversal momentum imparted on the phase matching function by the waveguide. With narrowband filtering and a pump power, we achieve a Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum-interference visibility of 98.2% after subtraction of accidental coincidences, representing the highest reported value for a waveguide-based photon-pair source. The photon-pairs generated by our PPKTP waveguide are shown to be highly indistinguishable, in terms their spectra and spatial modes. Therefore the fiber-coupled waveguide source is particularly suitable for long-distance quantum communication protocols such as fiber-based quantum key distribution (QKD).
by Tian Zhong.
S.M.

One fundamental task in robotics is random bin-picking, where it is important to be able to detect an object in a bin and estimate its pose to plan the motion of a robotic arm. For this purpose, this thesis work aimed to investigate and evaluate algorithms for 6D pose estimation when the object was given by a CAD model. The scene was given by a point cloud illustrating a partial 3D view of the bin with multiple instances of the object. Two algorithms were thus implemented and evaluated. The first algorithm was an approach based on Point Pair Features, and the second was Fast Global Registration. For evaluation, four different CAD models were used to create synthetic data with ground truth annotations. It was concluded that the Point Pair Feature approach provided a robust localization of objects and can be used for bin-picking. The algorithm appears to be able to handle different types of objects, however, with small limitations when the object has flat surfaces and weak texture or many similar details. The disadvantage with the algorithm was the execution time. Fast Global Registration, on the other hand, did not provide a robust localization of objects and is thus not a good solution for bin-picking.

Contexte : Les patients recevant une pose d’implants dentaires ressentent une douleur procédurale faible à modérée pendant la chirurgie malgré une anesthésie locale et un analgésique préopératoire. Des affects négatifs sont également associés à cette douleur. Durant les jours suivants, la douleur se poursuit et est soulagée par des analgésiques. Il est donc important de réduire cette douleur périopératoire persistante, l’expérience émotionnelle négative qui l’accompagne et la consommation d’analgésiques, par une approche non pharmacologique. En ce sens, la musique peut les réduire chez diverses populations cliniques, mais à notre connaissance, son efficacité n’a pas été étudiée dans le contexte d’implantologie dentaire. Objectif : Ce projet de recherche visait à comparer les effets de l’écoute de musique à celle d’un livre audio (groupe contrôle) dans le cadre d’une pose d’implants dentaires, sur la douleur pendant la chirurgie et les affects associés, ainsi que la douleur et la consommation d’analgésiques au cours des jours suivants la chirurgie. Méthodologie : Vingt-huit patients ont été recrutés et répartis de manière aléatoire dans le groupe musique ou contrôle (livre audio). En fonction du groupe qui leur avait été assigné, chaque participant a choisi parmi sept options de musique ou de livre audio. Des mesures autorapportées ont été utilisées pour la douleur, les affects associés et la consommation d’analgésiques, avant et après la chirurgie, et au cours des sept jours postopératoires. Résultats : La douleur ressentie pendant la chirurgie était significativement moindre pour les participants qui écoutaient de la musique pendant la chirurgie que pour ceux qui écoutaient un livre audio. Cependant, il n’y avait pas de différences significatives entre les groupes pour la douleur et pour la consommation d’analgésiques durant les jours postopératoires. En ce qui concerne les affects négatifs, les participants ayant écouté de la musique en ressentaient significativement moins que ceux ayant écouté un livre audio. Conclusion : L’écoute de musique permet de réduire la douleur procédurale et ses affects négatifs lors d’une chirurgie de pose d’implants dentaires. Ainsi, elle pourrait être utilisée dans d’autres contextes cliniques comme approche analgésique non pharmacologique simple, abordable et adjuvante aux traitements pharmacologiques existant.
Background: Patients receiving dental implants placement experience mild to moderate procedural pain during surgery, despite local anesthesia and intake of a preoperative analgesic. There are also negative affects associated with this pain. During the following days, the pain continues and is treated with analgesics. Therefore, it is important to reduce this persisting perioperative pain, the negative emotional experience that accompanies it as well as consumption of analgesics with a non-pharmacological approach. In this sense, music can reduce them in various clinical populations, but to our knowledge, its effectiveness has not been studied in the context of dental implantology. Objective: The purpose of this research project was to compare the effects of listening to music and listening to an audiobook (control group) in the context of dental implant surgery on pain during surgery and associated affects, as well as pain and analgesics consumption in the days following surgery. Methodology: Twenty-eight patients were recruited and randomly assigned to the music or control (audiobook) group. Based on their assigned group, each participant chose from seven music or audiobook options. Self-reported measures were used for pain and associated affects, before and after surgery, and during the seven postoperative days. Results: Pain experienced during surgery was significantly lower for participants who listened to music during surgery than for those who listened to an audiobook. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in either pain or analgesics use during the postoperative days. Participants who listened to music felt signicantly fewer negative affects than those who listened to audiobooks. Conclusion: Listening to music reduces procedural pain and its negative affects during dental implant placement surgery. As such, it could be used in other clinical settings as a simple, affordable, non-pharmacological analgesic approach and adjuvant to pharmacological treatments already in place.

In this thesis, we address two graph theoretical problems connected to two different biological problems both related to symbiosis (two organisms live in symbiosis if they have a close and long term interaction). The first problem is related to the size of a minimum cover by "chain subgraphs" of a bipartite graph. A chain graph is a bipartite graph whose nodes can be ordered by neighbourhood inclusion. In biological terms, the size of a minimum cover by chain subgraphs represents the number of genetic factors involved in the phenomenon of Cytoplasmic Incompatibility (CI) induced by some parasitic bacteria in their insect hosts. CI results in the impossibility to give birth to an healthy offspring when an infected male mates with an uninfected female. In the first half of the thesis we address three related problems. One is the enumeration of all the maximal edge induced chain subgraphs of a bipartite graph G, for which we provide a polynomial delay algorithm with a delay of O(n^2m) where n is the number of nodes and m the number of edges of G. Furthermore, we show that (n/2)! and 2^(\sqrt{m} \log m) bound the number of maximal chain subgraphs of G and use them to establish the input-sensitive complexity of the algorithm. The second problem we treat is finding the minimum number of chain subgraphs needed to cover all the edges of a bipartite graph. To solve this NP-hard problem, we provide an exact exponential algorithm which runs in time O^*((2+c)^m), for every c>0, by a procedure which uses our algorithm and an inclusion-exclusion technique (by O^* we denote standard big O notation but omitting polynomial factors). Notice that, since a cover by chain subgraphs is a family of subsets of edges, the existence of an algorithm whose complexity is close to 2^m is not obvious. Indeed, the basic search space would have size 2^(2^m), which corresponds to all families of subsets of edges of a graph on $m$ edges. The third problem is the enumeration of all minimal covers by chain sugbgraphs. We show that it is possible to enumerate all such minimal covers of G in time O([(M+1)|S|]^[\log((M+1)|S|)]) where S is the number of minimal covers of G and M the maximum number of chain graphs in a minimal cover. We then present the relation between the second problem and the computation of the interval order dimension of a bipartite poset. We give an interpretation of our results in the context of poset and interval poset dimension. Indeed, we can compute the interval dimension of a bipartite poset P in O^*((2+c)^p) where p is the number of incomparable pairs of P. Finally, we extend further these results to the problem of computing the poset dimension. By a classical result in poset theory (Trotter "split" operation), we then obtain a procedure which solves this problem in O^*((2+c)^(p/2)). To improve our results on the poset dimension and to perform better than O(\sqrt{2}^p), i.e. the minimum time to run the inclusion-exclusion formula on which these results are based, we introduce an associated graph GCP for each poset, called the graph of critical pairs. In this way we obtain two algorithms, an exponential and a polynomial space one. These algorithms compute the poset dimension in 2^q and O(2.9977 ^q) time respectively where q is the number of critical pairs of P (intuitively, critical pairs are the fundamental incomparable pairs to consider). In the second part of the thesis, we deal with the Reconciliation Model of two phylogenetic trees and the exploration of its optimal solutions space. Phylogenetic tree reconciliation is the approach commonly used to investigate the coevolution of sets of organisms such as hosts and symbionts. Given a phylogenetic tree for each such set, respectively denoted by H and S, together with a mapping phi of the leaves of S to the leaves of H, a reconciliation is a mapping rho of the internal nodes of S to the nodes of H which extends \phi with some constraints. Depending on the mapping of a node and its children, four types of events can be identified: "cospeciation" (when host and symbiont evolve together), "duplication" (when the symbiont evolves into different species but not the host), "loss" (when the host evolves into two new species but not the symbiont, leading to the loss of the symbiont in one of the two new host species) and "host switch" (when the symbiont evolves into two new species with one species remaining with its current host while the other switches, that is jumps to another host species). Given a cost for each kind of event, c_c, c_d, c_l, and c_h respectively, we can assign a total cost to each reconciliation. The set of reconciliations with minimum cost is denoted by Rec(H,P,phi,C), where C = (c_c,c_d,c_l,c_h), and its elements are said to represent "parsimonious" reconciliations. However, their number can be often huge. Without further information, any biological interpretation of the underlying coevolution would require that all the parsimonious reconciliations are enumerated and examined. The latter is however impossible without providing some sort of high level view of the situation. In this thesis, we approached this problem by introducing two equivalence relations to collect similar reconciliations and reduce the optimal solutions set to a smaller set of representatives of these equivalence classes. We introduce as well a new distance among optimal reconciliations DH and we compare it with the distances already present in the literature. We show that we can embed the set of parsimonious reconciliations Rec(H,P,phi,C) into the discrete k dimensional hypercube H^k = {0,1}^k and that DH coincides with the "Hamming Distance" on H^k. Finally, we present a series of results on reconciliations based on the conditions c_c <= c_d and c_l > 0 which lead to prove that a reconciliation is characterized by its set of host switches. The equivalence relations and the distance DH are all based on the host-switch events. We performed experiments on some real datasets and we present some of the results obtained to show the efficacy of the two equivalence relations. We comment these results under the light of the chosen cost vector C. The most outstanding results we obtain is in the case of the dataset related to the parasite Wolbachia where we pass from ~4.08 x 10^{42} parsimonious reconciliations to ~ 1.15 x 10^{3} representatives.
Dans cette thèse, nous abordons deux problèmes de théorie des graphes liés à deux problèmes biologiques de symbiose (deux organismes vivent en symbiose s'ils ont une interaction étroite et à long terme). Le premier problème est lié au phénomène de l'Incompatibilité cytoplasmique (IC) induit par certaines bactéries parasites chez leurs hôtes. L'IC se traduit par l'impossibilité de donner naissance à une progéniture saine lorsqu'un mâle infecté s'accouple avec une femelle non infectée. En termes de graphe ce problème peut s’interpréter comme la recherche d'une couverture minimum par des "sous-graphes des chaînes" d'un graphe biparti. Un graphe des chaînes est un graphe biparti dont les nœuds peuvent être ordonnés selon leur voisinage. En terme biologique, la taille minimale représente le nombre de facteurs génétiques impliqués dans le phénomène de l'IC. Dans la première moitié de la thèse, nous abordons trois problèmes connexes à ce modèle de la théorie des graphes. Le premier est l'énumération de tous les graphes des chaînes maximaux arêtes induits d'un graphe biparti G, pour lequel nous fournissons un algorithme en delai polynomial avec un retard de O(n^2m) où n est le nombre de noeuds et m le nombre d'arêtes de G. Dans la même section, nous montrons que (n/2)! et 2^(\sqrt{m}\log m) bornent le nombre de sous-graphes de chaînes maximales de G et nous les utilisons pour établir la complexité "input-sensitive" de notre algorithme. Le deuxième problème que nous traitons est de trouver le nombre minimum de graphes des chaînes nécessaires pour couvrir tous les bords d'un graphe biparti. Pour résoudre ce problème NP-hard, en combinant notre algorithme avec la technique d'inclusion-exclusion, nous fournissons un algorithme exponentiel exact en O^*((2+c)^m), pour chaque c > 0 (par O^* on entend la notation O standard mais en omettant les facteurs polynomiaux). Le troisième problème est l'énumération de toutes les couvertures minimales par des sous-graphes des chaînes. Nous montrons qu'il est possible d'énumérer toutes les couvertures minimales de G en temps O([(M + 1) |S|] ^ [\ log ((M + 1) |S|)]) où S est le nombre de couvertures minimales de G et M le nombre maximum des sous-graphes des chaînes dans une couverture minimale. Nous présentons ensuite la relation entre le second problème et le calcul de la dimension intervallaire d'un poset biparti. Nous donnons une interprétation de nos résultats dans le contexte de la dimension d'ordre et la dimension intervallaire. En effet, nous pouvons calculer la dimension intervallaire d'un poset biparti P en O^*((2+ c)^p) où p est le nombre de de paires incomparables de P. Enfin, nous étendons ces résultats au problème du calcul de la dimension d'ordre. Par un résultat classique en théorie des ordres (l'opération "split" de Trotter), nous obtenons alors une procédure qui résout ce problème dans O^*((2+ c)^(p/2)). Pour améliorer nos résultats sur la dimension d'ordre et faire mieux que O(\sqrt{2}^p), i.e. le temps minimum pour exécuter la formule d'inclusion-exclusion sur laquelle ces résultats sont basés, pour chaque poset nous introduisons un graphe associé GCP, dit "graphe des paires critiques". De cette façon, nous obtenons deux algorithmes, un en espace exponentiel et un en espace polynomial. Ces algorithmes calculent la dimension d'ordre en temps 2^q et O(2.9977^q) respectivement où q est le nombre de paires critiques de P (intuitivement, les paires critiques sont les paires incomparables fondamentales à considérer). Dans la deuxième partie de la thèse, nous traitons du modèle de réconciliation des arbres phylogénétiques et de l'exploration de l'espace de solutions optimales de ces réconciliations. La réconciliation d'arbre phylogénétique est l'approche couramment utilisée pour étudier la coévolution d'ensembles d'organismes tels que les hôtes et les symbiotes. Cette approche consiste à une fonction de l'arbre phylogénétique des symbiotes P sur celui de les hôtes H en respectant quelques contraintes. Selon la function, quatre types d'événements peuvent être identifiés: "cospéciation" (quand l'hôte et le symbiont évoluent ensemble), "duplication" (quand le symbiont évolue en différentes espèces mais pas l'hôte), "perte" (lorsque l'hôte évolue en deux nouvelles espèces mais pas le symbiont, entraînant la perte du symbiont chez l'une des deux nouvelles espèces d'hôtes) et "host switch" (lorsque le symbiont évolue en deux nouvelles espèces dont l'une infecte une autre espèce hôte). Compte tenu d'un coût pour chaque type d'événement, c_c, c_d, c_l, et c_h respectivement, nous pouvons affecter un coût total à chaque réconciliation. Les réconciliations avec minimum coût sont dites "parcimonieuses", et l'ensemble des ces réconciliations de coût minimum est noté Rec(H, P, C), où C = (c_c, c_d, c_l, c_h). Le nombre de réconciliations parcimonieuses peut être souvent énorme et, sans autre information, toute interprétation biologique de la coévolution sous-jacente exigerait que tous les rapprochements parcimonieux soient énumérés et examinés. Cela est toutefois impossible sans fournir une sorte de vue de haut niveau de la situation. Dans cette thèse, nous avons abordé ce problème en introduisant deux relations d'équivalence pour mettre ensemble des réconciliations similaires et réduire les solutions optimales à un plus petit ensemble de représentants de ces classes d'équivalence. Nous avons ensuite introduit une nouvelle distance DH parmi les réconciliations optimales et nous la comparons aux distances déjà présentes dans la littérature. Nous montrons que nous pouvons projeter l'ensemble des rapprochements parcimonieux Rec(H, P, C) dans l'hypercube discret H^k = {0,1}^k et que DH coïncide avec la "Distance de Hamming" sur H^k. Dans cette thèse nous présentons une série de résultats sur les réconciliations basées sur les conditions c_c <= c_d et c_l > 0 qui sont raisonnables et conduisent à prouver que l'ensemble des "host switch" d'une réconciliation caractérise celle-ci. Les relations d'équivalence et la distance introduites sont toutes les trois basées sur les événements de "host switch". Nous présentons aussi quelques résultats expérimentaux pour montrer l'efficacité des deux relations d'équivalence et nous rapportons ces résultats au vecteur de coût choisi. Les meilleurs résultats ont été obtenus dans le cas de l'ensemble de données lié au parasite Wolbachia (une bactérie très présente parmi les insectes avec de nombreuses applications dans le contrôle des épidémies et la reproduction des insectes) où nous passons d'un nombre de réconciliations parcimonieuses de ~ 4.08 x 10^{42} réconciliations à ~ 1.15 x 10^{3} représentants.

This multidisciplinary book analyses the contradictory coexistence of consumerism and environmentalism in contemporary Japan. It focuses on the dilemma that the diffusion of the concepts of sustainability and recycling has posed for everyday consumption practices, and on how these concepts have affected, and were affected by, the production and consumption of art. Special attention is paid to the changes in consumption practices and environmental consciousness among the Japanese public that have occurred since the 1990s and in the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters of March 2011.

Prescription Drug Diversion and Pain provides an interdisciplinary overview of medications used to treat chronic pain, and the benefits and risks that are posed by long-term use of opioids. Use of these life-saving medications must be carefully managed to prevent serious side effects, which may include physical dependence, addiction, and even death. In recent years, the risk of these side effects has led to increased attention on the development of alternative treatments for chronic pain. This book not only offers a single, comprehensive source for understanding the specialized nature of the opioid crisis, but also addresses provocative topics including how pain drugs came to be regulated by the US government and the rarely discussed aggressive marketing behind the spread of these drugs. Chapters are written by expert contributors from diverse backgrounds in medicine, psychiatry, pharmacy, nursing, law, and bioethics. Prescription Drug Diversion and Pain is a must-read for healthcare professionals, chronic pain patients and caregivers, policymakers and regulatory officials, drug treatment providers, and those in the pharmaceutical industry seeking to address the current opioid crisis.

Though many are harmless and even beneficial, invertebrates are some of the world’s most feared and dangerous creatures. Guide to Venomous and Medically Important Invertebrates describes the health threats posed by invertebrate groups worldwide, from physical pain and annoyance to disease transmission risk. Featuring clear photographs, distribution maps and descriptions of biological, physical and behavioural characteristics of key groups, this book aids identification of potentially harmful invertebrates. It also summarises personal protection measures to reduce the risk of attack and disease, and provides guidance on treatment. This book will help to protect the health of travellers and serve as a reference for medical personnel working in high-risk areas, as well as those interested in entomology.

Pain signalled by a normal sensory system, nociceptive pain, serves a vital protective function. The peripheral and central nervous somatosensory systems permit rapid localization and identification of the nature of painful stimuli, prior to appropriate action to minimize or avoid potentially tissue damaging events. A reduction or absence of pain resulting from neurological disease emphasizes the importance of this normal protective function of pain. For example, tissue destruction occurs frequently in peripheral nerve diseases which cause severe sensory loss such as leprosy, and in central disorders such as syringomyelia. Neuropathic pain results from damage to somatosensory pathways and serves no protective function. This chapter provides an overview of neuropathic pain, considering its context, clinical features, pathophysiology, and treatment.In the peripheral nervous system, neuropathic pain is caused by conditions affecting small nerve fibres, and in the central nervous system by lesions of the spinothalamic tract and thalamus, and rarely by subcortical and cortical lesions. The clinical feature common to virtually all conditions leading to the development of neuropathic pain is the perception of pain in an area of sensory impairment, an apparently paradoxical situation. The exception is trigeminal neuralgia.Neuropathic pain is heterogeneous clinically, aetiologically, and pathophysiologically. Within a given diagnostic category, whether defined clinically or aetiologically, there are wide variations in reports of pain by patients. This heterogeneity poses one of the greatest challenges in understanding the mechanisms of neuropathic pain. Knowledge of the pathophysiology is an obvious pre-requisite to the development of effective treatments. The goal of a pathophysiologically based understanding of the symptoms and signs of neuropathic pain is, of course, just such a rational and specific approach to treatment. While this is not yet achievable, clinical-pathophysiological correlations have led to some recent advances in treatment.

The resuscitation of the child with burns poses a number of challenges to the anesthesiologist. It is vital that there is a systematic approach to managing the airway, breathing, and circulation. This requires an understanding of the pathophysiology of burn injury. Particular attention must be paid to the timing and technique of securing the airway. Appropriate vascular access and pain management are also of high priority in the burned child.

AbstractWe describe the threats posed by adversarial examples in an image forensic context, highlighting the differences and similarities with respect to other application domains. Particular attention is paid to study the transferability of adversarial examples from a source to a target network and to the creation of attacks suitable to be applied in the physical domain. We also describe some possible countermeasures against adversarial examples and discuss their effectiveness. All the concepts described in the chapter are exemplified with results obtained in some selected image forensics scenarios.

Abstract“Bridged-IPOM” of Leblanc has been introduced in the 1990s [1]. IPOM is still the mainstay of the repair of ventral hernia, but it has not been without limitation. Adhesive bowel obstruction, mesh erosion, enterocutaneous fistula, and chronic pain are due to tight mesh fixations [2]. Extraperitoneal mesh placement offer advantages: the retromuscular positioning of the mesh permits the integration of both sides, providing the repair with superior tensile strength and costly coated mesh is unnecessary. Nevertheless, the laparoscopic extraperitoneal approach continues to pose limitation in available degree of freedom and significant ergonomic challenge to the operating surgeons.

Abstract Benshaul-Tolonen et al. shine a light on two methodological issues impacting a research question that has received much attention recently: whether the provision of menstrual hygiene products reduces schoolgirls’ absenteeism in low-income countries. First, they identify bias in data sources, such as school records and recall data. Second, they show that limiting the focus to menstrual-related absenteeism obscures other threats that menstruation poses to educational attainment, health, and psychosocial well-being. To address these issues, the authors recommend the use of mixed methods, pre-analysis plans, and thoughtful consideration and validation of variables prior to study implementation. They also caution policymakers against overreliance on absenteeism as the sole outcome and overinterpreting results from existing studies that often lack scope and precision. They conclude with a call for more research on the links between menstruation and concentration, learning, self-esteem, and pain management.

Abstract Suffering is so closely aligned with the experience of pain that the words “pain and suffering” are often used in tandem throughout much of the literature and in clinical practice. The problems posed by pain and the overall experience of suffering are commonly described as “whole person” events impacting dimensions of physical, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being. This chapter explores dimensions of suffering for people living with pain and the role of nurses to be fully present and to respond to pain and suffering. Expert nursing care to respond to suffering requires comprehensive patient assessment, use of evidence based pharmacological and integrative therapies, and close collaboration with interdisciplinary colleagues to respond to all of the dimensions of suffering for patients experiencing pain in serious illness and at the end of life.

Abstract Decades ago, research was mainly directed versus the inhibitory control exerted by the brain and brainstem on spinal cord mechanisms. In recent years, focus has been directed at the facilitating mechanisms controlling spinal cord and trigeminal mechanisms in processing noxious input. Important facilitating mechanisms in the lower brainstem have been clarified, using mainly electrophysiological and pharmacological techniques. The major research has been directed towards spinal cord mechanisms. An important issue was raised at the seminar by Barry Sessle, who posed the question of whether the spinal cord and the trigeminal systems are identical in terms of these facilitatory and inhibitory inputs.

The diagnostic and therapeutic challenges posed by headaches during pregnancy include the urgency of ruling out serious vascular or other intracranial pathology and the paucity of useful pharmacological agents that are unlikely to put the mother or fetus at risk. Pregnancy is often a time of reduced migraine attacks, but that is not universal. Nonpharmacological therapy can help migraines in pregnancy, but judicious supplementation with pharmaceutical treatments is reasonable, particularly in severe cases. New types of head pain should raise suspicion for a secondary cause. The workup of headaches in pregnancy is outlined in this chapter, and the best treatment options, including medications believed to be relatively safe for mother and fetus, are discussed.

Human pose estimation is a challenging task due to its structured data sequence nature. Existing methods primarily focus on pair-wise interaction of body joints, which is insufficient for scenarios involving overlapping joints and rapidly changing poses. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel approach, the High-order Directed Transformer (HDFormer), which leverages high-order bone and joint relationships for improved pose estimation. Specifically, HDFormer incorporates both self-attention and high-order attention to formulate a multi-order attention module. This module facilitates first-order "joint-joint", second-order "bone-joint", and high-order "hyperbone-joint" interactions, effectively addressing issues in complex and occlusion-heavy situations. In addition, modern CNN techniques are integrated into the transformer-based architecture, balancing the trade-off between performance and efficiency. HDFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets, requiring only 1/10 of the parameters and significantly lower computational costs. Moreover, HDFormer demonstrates broad real-world applicability, enabling real-time, accurate 3D pose estimation. The source code is in https://github.com/hyer/HDFormer.

The challenges of learning a robust 6D pose function lie in 1) severe occlusion and 2) systematic noises in depth images. Inspired by the success of point-pair features, the goal of this paper is to recover the 6D pose of an object instance segmented from RGB-D images by locally matching pairs of oriented points between the model and camera space. To this end, we propose a novel Bi-directional Correspondence Mapping Network (BiCo-Net) to first generate point clouds guided by a typical pose regression, which can thus incorporate pose-sensitive information to optimize generation of local coordinates and their normal vectors. As pose predictions via geometric computation only rely on one single pair of local oriented points, our BiCo-Net can achieve robustness against sparse and occluded point clouds. An ensemble of redundant pose predictions from locally matching and direct pose regression further refines final pose output against noisy observations. Experimental results on three popularly benchmarking datasets can verify that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially for the more challenging severe occluded scenes. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/BiCo-Net.

In 2021, EsadeEcPol, in collaboration with the "Empieza Por Educar" Foundation (ExE), launched "Menttores", an online educational reinforcement program aimed at students from vulnerable backgrounds in response to the challenges posed by COVID-19. Over 8 weeks, 356 students aged 12-15 from 18 educational centers in Madrid and Catalonia benefited from three weekly tutoring sessions, each 50 minutes long, taught by paid-for, qualified math teachers who passed a rigorous selection and training process. Through a "Randomized Controlled Trial" (RCT), it was shown that the program achieved a significant increase in math grades, reduced the likelihood of repeating the school year, and additionally, fostered the aspirations and commitment of the students.

Objectives. To update the evidence on benefits and harms of cannabinoids and other plant-based compounds to treat sub-acute and chronic pain in adults and adolescents using a living systematic review approach. Data sources. Ovid® MEDLINE®, PsycINFO®, Embase®, the Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS® databases; and reference lists of included studies were searched to April 23, 2023. Review methods. An updated protocol with expanded inclusion criteria (addition of sub-acute [4 to 12 weeks’ duration] pain and adolescents) was posted on the PROSPERO registry. We grouped studies based on their THC to CBD ratio and by product type, i.e. whole-plant (extracted or purified), or synthetic. We conducted random effects meta-analyses and categorized magnitude of benefit (large, moderate, small, or no effect [less than small]). Results. Two new RCTs (n=115 and 15) and two new observational studies (N=2,071) were added for this annual update; no study addressed subacute pain or adolescents. One new RCT compared high and low THC to CBD ratio products versus placebo; the other new RCT evaluated was very small and had methodological limitations. Since the inception of this living review, from 5,228 total abstracts identified, 23 RCTs (N=2,035) and 10 observational studies (N=15,840) assessing different cannabinoids were included; no study evaluated kratom. Studies were primarily short term, and 58 percent enrolled patients with neuropathic pain. Comparators were primarily placebo or usual care. Strength of evidence was low, unless indicated otherwise. Compared with placebo, plant-extracted, comparable ratio THC to CBD oral spray was associated with a small decrease in pain severity (7 RCTs, N=632, 0 to 10 scale, mean difference [MD] −0.54, 95% confidence interval [CI] −0.95 to −0.19, I2=39%; SOE: moderate) and overall function (6 RCTs, N=616, 0 to 10 scale, MD −0.42, 95% CI −0.73 to −0.16, I2=32%; SOE: moderate) versus placebo. There was no effect on study withdrawals due to adverse events. There was a large increased risk of dizziness and sedation, and a moderate increased risk of nausea (dizziness: 6 RCTs, N=866, 31.0% vs. 8.0%, relative risk [RR] 3.57, 95% CI 2.42 to 5.60, I2=0%; sedation: 6 RCTs, N=866, 8.0% vs. 1.2%, RR 5.04, 95% CI 2.10 to 11.89, I2=0%; and nausea: 6 RCTs, N=866, 13% vs. 7.5%, RR 1.79, 95% CI 1.19 to 2.77, I2=0%). Synthetic high-THC to CBD ratio products were associated with a small improvement in pain severity, a moderate increase in sedation, and a large increase in risk of nausea following the addition of one new RCT (pain: 7 RCTs, N=448, 0 to 10 scale, MD −0.95, 95% CI −1.81 to −0.25, I2=60%; sedation: 4 RCTs, N=386, 19% vs. 12%, RR 1.60, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.95, I2=8%; nausea: 3 RCTs, N=353, 11.1% vs. 5.2%, RR 2.22, 95% CI 0.90 to 5.05; I²=0%). There was also moderate SOE for a large increased risk of dizziness (3 RCTs, N=353, 29% vs. 11%, RR 2.52, 95% CI 1.20 to 4.82, I2=41%). Extracted whole-plant high-THC to CBD ratio products (oral) were associated with a large increased risk of study withdrawal due to adverse events (1 RCT, viii 13.9% vs. 5.7%, RR 3.12, 95% CI 1.54 to 6.33) and dizziness (1 RCT, 62.2% vs. 7.5%, RR 8.34, 95% CI 4.53 to 15.34); outcomes assessing benefit were not reported or insufficient. Evidence (including observational studies) on whole-plant cannabis, topical or oral CBD, low-THC to CBD products (2 new RCTs), other cannabinoids, comparisons with active non-cannabis treatments or between cannabis-related products, and impact on use of opioids also remained insufficient. Evidence was not available on important harms such as psychosis, cannabis use disorder, and cognitive effects. Conclusions. Low to moderate strength evidence suggests small improvements in pain (mostly neuropathic), and moderate to large increases in common adverse events (dizziness, sedation, nausea) with high and comparable THC to CBD ratio extracted cannabinoids and synthetic products versus placebo during short-term treatment (1 to 6 months) in adults with chronic pain. Evidence for low-THC to CBD ratio products, whole-plant cannabis, and other comparisons, outcomes, and plant-based compounds was unavailable or insufficient to draw conclusions.

Once the global leader in telecommunication systems and the Internet, over the past two decades the United States has fallen behind global competitors, and in particular China, in mobile communication infrastructure—specifically 5G and Internet of Things (IoT). This national failure, with the socioeconomic and geopolitical tensions that it creates, is not due to a lack of US government investment in the knowledge required for the mobility revolution. Nor is it because of a dearth of domestic demand for the equipment, devices, and applications that can make use of this infrastructure. Rather, the problem is the dereliction of key US-based business corporations to take the lead in making the investments in organizational learning required to generate cutting edge communication-infrastructure products. No company in the United States exemplifies this deficiency more than Cisco Systems, the business corporation founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 that had explosive growth in the 1990s to become the foremost global enterprise-networking equipment producer in the Internet revolution. This paper provides in-depth analysis of Cisco’s organizational failure, attributing it ultimately to the company’s turn from innovation in the last decades of 20th century to financialization in the early decades of the 21st century. Since 2001, Cisco’s top management has chosen to allocate corporate cash to open-market share repurchases— aka stock buybacks—for the purpose of giving manipulative boosts to the company stock price rather than make the investments in organizational learning required to become a world leader in communication-infrastructure equipment for the era of 5G and IoT. From October 2001 through October 2022, Cisco spent $152.3 billion—95 percent of its net income over the period—on stock buybacks for the purpose of propping up its stock price. These funds wasted in pursuit of “maximizing shareholder value” were on top of the $55.5 billion that Cisco paid out to shareholders in dividends, representing an additional 35 percent of net income. In this paper, we trace how Cisco grew from a Silicon Valley startup in 1984 to become, through its innovative products, the world leader in enterprise-networking equipment over the next decade and a half. As the company entered the 21st century, building on its dominance of enterprise-networking, Cisco was positioned to upgrade its technological capabilities to become a major infrastructureequipment vendor to service providers. We analyze how and why, when the Internet boom turned to bust in 2001, the organizational structure that enabled Cisco to dominate enterprise networking posed constraints related to manufacturing and marketing on the company’s growth in the more sophisticated infrastructure-equipment segment. We then document how from 2002 Cisco turned from innovation to financialization, as it used its ample profits to do stock buybacks to prop up its stock price. Finally, we ponder the larger policy implications of Cisco’s turn from innovation to financialization for the competitive position of the US information-and-communication technology (ICT) industry in the global economy.