The altered functional connectivity (FC) in amblyopia has been investigated by many studies, but the specific causality of brain connectivity needs to be explored further to understand the brain activity of amblyopia. We investigated whether the effective connectivity (EC) of children and young adults with amblyopia was altered. The subjects included 16 children and young adults with left eye amblyopia and 17 healthy controls (HCs). The abnormalities between the left/right primary visual cortex (PVC) and the other brain regions were investigated in a voxel-wise manner using the Granger causality analysis (GCA). According to the EC results in the HCs and the distribution of visual pathways, 12 regions of interest (ROIs) were selected to construct an EC network. The alteration of the EC network of the children and young adults with amblyopia was analyzed. In the voxel-wise manner analysis, amblyopia showed significantly decreased EC between the left/right of the PVC and the left middle frontal gyrus/left inferior frontal gyrus compared with the HCs. In the EC network analysis, compared with the HCs, amblyopia showed significantly decreased EC from the left calcarine fissure, posterior cingulate gyrus, left lingual gyrus, right lingual gyrus, and right fusiform gyrus to the right calcarine fissure. Amblyopia also showed significantly decreased EC from the right inferior frontal gyrus and right lingual gyrus to the left superior temporal gyrus compared with the HCs in the EC network analysis. The results may indicate that amblyopia altered the visual feedforward and feedback pathway, and amblyopia may have a greater relevance with the feedback pathway than the feedforward pathway. Amblyopia may also correlate with the feedforward of the third visual pathway.
Conversed analysis method is a method of analying problems from the results to the reasons,which has important application in solving discrete mathematics problems.Heuristic teaching is an active teaching pattern which emphasizes elicitation.This paper combines these two methods and puts forward a conversed and heuristic teaching method of discrete mathematics.Some key problems are also discussed in this paper.
Objective: Recognizing retinal vessel abnormity is vital to early diagnosis of ophthalmological diseases and cardiovascular events. However, segmentation results are highly influenced by elusive vessels, especially in low-contrast background and lesion region. In this work, we present an end-to-end synthetic neural network, containing a symmetric equilibrium generative adversarial network (SEGAN), multi-scale features refine blocks (MSFRB), and attention mechanism (AM) to enhance the performance on vessel segmentation. Method: The proposed network is granted powerful multi-scale representation capability to extract detail information. First, SEGAN constructs a symmetric adversarial architecture, which forces generator to produce more realistic images with local details. Second, MSFRB are devised to prevent high-resolution features from being obscured, thereby merging multi-scale features better. Finally, the AM is employed to encourage the network to concentrate on discriminative features. Results: On public dataset DRIVE, STARE, CHASEDB1, and HRF, we evaluate our network quantitatively and compare it with state-of-the-art works. The ablation experiment shows that SEGAN, MSFRB, and AM both contribute to the desirable performance. Conclusion: The proposed network outperforms the mature methods and effectively functions in elusive vessels segmentation, achieving highest scores in Sensitivity, G-Mean, Precision, and F1-Score while maintaining the top level in other metrics. Significance: The appreciable performance and computational efficiency offer great potential in clinical retinal vessel segmentation application. Meanwhile, the network could be utilized to extract detail information in other biomedical issues
In this paper, numbering scheme and extensible numbering scheme in XML document tree are introduced.An improved extensible numbering scheme is put forward. This approach is used to construct index tree in order to enhance space efficiency and decrease the number of splitting nodes in B+ tree. Finally, query efficiency is studied based on theories and experiments.