Purpose Lower serum vitamin D levels have been associated with an increased risk of aggressive prostate cancer. Among men with localized prostate cancer, especially with low-or intermediate-risk disease, vitamin D may serve as an important biomarker of disease aggression. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between adverse pathology at the time of radical prostatectomy and serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OH D) levels. Methods This cross-sectional study was carried out from 2009 to 2014, nested within a large epidemiologic study of 1,760 healthy controls and men undergoing prostate cancer screening. In total, 190 men underwent radical prostatectomy in the cohort. Adverse pathology was defined as the presence of primary Gleason 4 or any Gleason 5 disease, or extraprostatic extension. Descriptive and multivariate analyses were performed to assess the relationship between 25-OH D and adverse pathology at the time of prostatectomy. Results Eighty-seven men (45.8%) in this cohort demonstrated adverse pathology at radical prostatectomy. The median age in the cohort was 64.0 years (interquartile range, 59.0 to 67.0). On univariate analysis, men with adverse pathology at radical prostatectomy demonstrated lower median serum 25-OH D (22.7 v 27.0 ng/mL, P = .007) compared with their counterparts. On multivariate analysis, controlling for age, serum prostate specific antigen, and abnormal digital rectal examination, serum 25-OH D less than 30 ng/mL was associated with increased odds of adverse pathology (odds ratio, 2.64; 95% CI, 1.25 to 5.59; P = .01). Conclusion Insufficiency/deficiency of serum 25-OH D is associated with increased odds of adverse pathology in men with localized disease undergoing radical prostatectomy. Serum 25-OH D may serve as a useful biomarker in prostate cancer aggressiveness, which deserves continued study. (C) 2016 by American Society of Clinical Oncology

With the rise of modern programming languages like Java that include native support for multi-threading, the issue of concurrency in graphical applications becomes more and more important. Traditional graphical component libraries for Java have always used the threading concepts provided by the language very carefully, telling the programmer that the use of threads in this context is often unnecessarily burdensome and complex. On the other hand, experience gained from systems like Inferno or BeOS shows that the use of concurrency in graphical applications is clearly manageable and leads to a different program design, once you dissociate the application from the limitations of the GUI library. This thesis describes the design of a general architecture that allows for the separation of a program´s user interface from the application logic using thread communication. It enables the use of concurrency in the application code without requiring any degree of thread-safety at the native interface component level.

La reconnaissance faciale est l'une des meilleures modalités biomêtriques pour des applications liées à l'identification ou l'authentification de personnes. En effet, c'est la modalité utilisée par les humains; elle est non intrusive, et socialement bien acceptée. Malheureusement, les visages humains sont semblables et offrent par conséquent une faible distinctivité par rapport à d'autres modalités biométriques, comme par exemple, les empreintes digitales et l'iris. Par ailleurs, lorsqu'il s'agit d'images de texture de visages, les variations intra-classe, dues à des facteurs aussi divers que les changements des conditions d'éclairage mais aussi de pose, sont généralement supérieures aux variations inter-classe, ce qui rend la reconnaissance faciale 2D peu fiable dans des conditions réelles. Récemment, les représentations 3D de visages ont été largement étudiées par la communauté scientifique pour palier les problèmes non résolus dans la reconnaissance faciale 2D, qui sont notamment causés par les changements d'illumination et de pose. Cette thèse est consacrée à la reconnaissance faciale robuste utilisant les données faciales 3D, incluant la reconnaissance de visage 3D, la reconnaissance de visage 3D texturé ainsi que la reconnaissance faciale asymétrique 3D-2D. La reconnaissance faciale 3D, utilisant l'information géométrique 3D représentée sous forme de nuage de points 3D ou d'image de profondeur, est théoriquement non affectée par les changements dans les conditions d'illumination et peut facilement corriger, par l'application d'une approche de recalage rigide comme ICP, les changements de pose. Le principal défi réside dans la représentation, avec précision, de la surface faciale 3D, mais aussi dans le recalage robuste aux changements d'expression faciale. Dans cette thèse, nous concevons une approche efficace et performante pour la reconnaissance de visage 3D. Concernant la description du visage, nous proposons une représentation géométrique basée sur les cartes extended Local Binary Pattern (eLBP), qui décrivent de manière précise les variations de la géométrie locale de la surface faciale 3D; tandis qu'une étape combinant l'appariement local, basé 81FT, aux informations compositionnelles du visage et aux contraintes de configuration permet d'apparier des points caractéristiques, d'un même individu, entre les différentes représentations de son visage. Évaluée sur les bases de données FRGC v2.0 et Gavab DB, l'approche proposée prouve son efficacité. Par ailleurs, contrairement à la plupart des approches nécessitant une étape d'alignement précise et couteuse, notre approche, en raison de l'utilisation de l'appariement local, ne nécessite pas d'enrôlement dans des conditions de pose frontale précise et se contente seulement d'un alignement grossier. Considérant que la plupart des systèmes actuels d'imagerie 3D permettent la capture simultanée de modèles 3D du visage ainsi que de leur texture, une tendance majeure dans la littérature scientifique est d'adopter à la fois la modalité 3D et celle de texture 2D. On fait valoir que l'utilisation conjointe de ces deux types d'informations aboutit généralement à des résultats plus précis et plus robustes que ceux obtenus par l'un des deux séparément. Néanmoins, les deux facteurs clés de la réussite sont la représentation bimodale du visage ainsi que la fusion des résultats obtenus selon chaque modalité. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une représentation bio-inspirée du visage, appelée Cartes de Gradients Orientés (Oriented Gradient Maps: OGMs), qui peut être appliqué à la fois à la modalité 3D et à celle de texture 2D. Les OGMs simulent la réponse des neurones complexes, à l'information de gradient dans un voisinage donné et ont la propriété d'être très distinctifs et robustes aux transformations affines d'illumination et géométriques. [...] / The face is one of the best biometrics for person identification and verification related applications, because it is natural, non-intrusive, and socially weIl accepted. Unfortunately, an human faces are similar to each other and hence offer low distinctiveness as compared with other biometrics, e.g., fingerprints and irises. Furthermore, when employing facial texture images, intra-class variations due to factors as diverse as illumination and pose changes are usually greater than inter-class ones, making 2D face recognition far from reliable in the real condition. Recently, 3D face data have been extensively investigated by the research community to deal with the unsolved issues in 2D face recognition, Le., illumination and pose changes. This Ph.D thesis is dedicated to robust face recognition based on three dimensional data, including only 3D shape based face recognition, textured 3D face recognition as well as asymmetric 3D-2D face recognition. In only 3D shape-based face recognition, since 3D face data, such as facial pointclouds and facial scans, are theoretically insensitive to lighting variations and generally allow easy pose correction using an ICP-based registration step, the key problem mainly lies in how to represent 3D facial surfaces accurately and achieve matching that is robust to facial expression changes. In this thesis, we design an effective and efficient approach in only 3D shape based face recognition. For facial description, we propose a novel geometric representation based on extended Local Binary Pattern (eLBP) depth maps, and it can comprehensively describe local geometry changes of 3D facial surfaces; while a 81FT -based local matching process further improved by facial component and configuration constraints is proposed to associate keypoints between corresponding facial representations of different facial scans belonging to the same subject. Evaluated on the FRGC v2.0 and Gavab databases, the proposed approach proves its effectiveness. Furthermore, due tq the use of local matching, it does not require registration for nearly frontal facial scans and only needs a coarse alignment for the ones with severe pose variations, in contrast to most of the related tasks that are based on a time-consuming fine registration step. Considering that most of the current 3D imaging systems deliver 3D face models along with their aligned texture counterpart, a major trend in the literature is to adopt both the 3D shape and 2D texture based modalities, arguing that the joint use of both clues can generally provides more accurate and robust performance than utilizing only either of the single modality. Two important factors in this issue are facial representation on both types of data as well as result fusion. In this thesis, we propose a biological vision-based facial representation, named Oriented Gradient Maps (OGMs), which can be applied to both facial range and texture images. The OGMs simulate the response of complex neurons to gradient information within a given neighborhood and have properties of being highly distinctive and robust to affine illumination and geometric transformations. The previously proposed matching process is then adopted to calculate similarity measurements between probe and gallery faces. Because the biological vision-based facial representation produces an OGM for each quantized orientation of facial range and texture images, we finally use a score level fusion strategy that optimizes weights by a genetic algorithm in a learning pro cess. The experimental results achieved on the FRGC v2.0 and 3DTEC datasets display the effectiveness of the proposed biological vision-based facial description and the optimized weighted sum fusion. [...]

This dissertation contains a study of the multitext manuscript Codex Holmiensis D 3 based in Material Philology and its focus on the material conditions underlying manuscripts. The aim of the investigation is to describe D 3 in order to increase understanding of its material conditions including content and circumstance of copying, as well as its use and purpose. D 3 contains 14 text works in different genres, for example romances, chronicles, and edifying works. The paper manuscript in the format of a holster book has been dated through its watermarks to around 1487/1488. It was written for the noblewoman Elin Gustavsdotter (Sture). An older manuscript, Codex Holmiensis D 4a, has previously been identified as the exemplar of D 3. These manuscripts are very similar as regards language and content. However, it is shown here that D 4a could not have been the model for D 3 in the case of the romance Flores och Blanzeflor; nor can the manuscript as a whole be a copy of D 4a. There are few traces of use in D 3, but the first work, Herr Ivan Lejonriddaren, has several concluding texts before its final closing. These concluding texts suggest that parts of the work were being read while the rest was being copied. There are also dual quire signatures in this work, implying that the quires were in disarray, possibly because they were in use when the signatures were added. The purpose of D 3 was to educate and provide examples of good and bad behaviour for the nobility. Moreover, there is an owner-epilogue which also stresses courtly ideals and can be linked to the concept of exemplary behaviour. The contents can also be ordered thematically, with first a Carolingian connection, followed by one connected with Ireland and finally one focused on the Christian community. Codicological breaks divide the manuscript into two parts, which leads to the assumption of at least two common exemplars for D 3 and D 4a. An emphasis on the materiality of the manuscript reveals it to be not so much an unwieldy collection of unrelated text witnesses as a book created for a certain person and her time. / <p>Felaktigt ISBN i den tryckta versionen: 978-91-506-2618-6</p>