Objective: Insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) has been suggested to be a prognostic marker for the development of cancer and, more recently, cardiovascular disease. These diseases are closely linked to obesity, but reports of the association of IGF-I with measures of obesity are divergent. In this study, we assessed the association of age-dependent IGF-I standard deviation scores with body mass index (BMI) and intra-abdominal fat accumulation in a large population. Design: A cross-sectional, epidemiological study. Methods: IGF-I levels were measured with an automated chemiluminescence assay system in 6282 patients from the DETECT study. Weight, height, and waist and hip circumference were measured according to the written instructions. Standard deviation scores (SDS), correcting IGF-I levels for age, were calculated and were used for further analyses. Results: An inverse U-shaped association of IGF-I SDS with BMI, waist circumference, and the ratio of waist circumference to height was found. BMI was positively associated with IGF-I SDS in normal weight subjects, and negatively associated in obese subjects. The highest mean IGF-I SDS were seen at a BMI of 22.5–25 kg/m2 in men (+0.08), and at a BMI of 27.5–30 kg/m2 in women (+0.21). Multiple linear regression models, controlling for different diseases, medications and risk conditions, revealed a significant negative association of BMI with IGF-I SDS. BMI contributed most to the additional explained variance to the other health conditions. Conclusions: IGF-I standard deviation scores are decreased in obesity and underweight subjects. These interactions should be taken into account when analyzing the association of IGF-I with diseases and risk conditions.

Objective: IGF1 is associated with metabolic parameters and involved in glucose metabolism. Low-IGF1 has been implicated in the etiology of glucose intolerance and subjects with pathological causes of either low- or high-IGF1 are at risk of diabetes. We hypothesized that both low- and high-IGF1 levels increase the risk of diabetes and aimed to assess the role of IGF1 in the risk of developing diabetes in a large prospective study. Design: An analysis of two prospective cohort studies, the DETECT study and SHIP. Methods: We measured IGF1 levels in 7777 nondiabetic subjects and assessed incident diabetes mellitus during follow-up. Results: There were 464 cases of incident diabetes during 32 229 person-years (time of follow-up in the DETECT study and SHIP: 4.5 and 5 years respectively). There was no heterogeneity between both studies (P>0.4). The hazard ratios (HRs) of incident diabetes in subjects with IGF1 levels below the 10th or above the 90th age- and sex-specific percentile, compared to subjects with intermediate IGF1 levels, were 1.44 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.07–1.94) and 1.55 (95% CI 1.06–2.06) respectively, after multiple adjustment. After further adjustment for metabolic parameters, the HR for low-IGF1 became insignificant. Analysis of IGF1 quintiles revealed a U-shaped association of IGF1 with risk of diabetes. Results remained similar after exclusion of patients with onset of new diabetes within 1 year or with borderline glucose or HbA1c levels at baseline. Conclusions: Subjects with low- or high-IGF1 level are at increased risk of developing diabetes.

Detection of an underwater target with active sonar in shallow waters such as the Baltic sea is a big challenge. This since the sound beams from the sonar will be reflected on the surfaces, sea surface and sea bottom, and the water volume itself which generates reverberation. Reverberation which will be reflected back to the receiver, is strong in intensity which give rise to many false targets in terms of classifying a target in a surveillance area. These false targets are unwanted and a real target might benefit from these miss-classifications in terms of remaining undetected. It is especially hard if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is approaching zero, i.e. the target strength and the reverberation strength are equal in magnitude. The classical approach to a target detection problem is to assign a threshold value to the measurement, and the data point exceeding the threshold is classified as a target. This approach does not hold for low levels of SNR, since a threshold would not have a statistical significance and could lead to neglecting important data. Track-before-detect (TrBD) is a proposed method for low-SNR situations which tracks and detects a target based on unthresholded data. TrBD enables tracking and detecting of weak and/or stealthy targets. Due to the issues with target detection in shallow waters, the hypothesis of this thesis is to investigate the possibility to implement TrBD, and evaluate the performance of it, when applied on a low-SNR target. The TrBD is implemented with a particle filter which is a recursive Bayesian solution to the problem of integrated tracking and detection. The reverberation data was generated by filtering white noise with an Autoregressive filter of order 1. The target is assigned to propagate according to a constant velocity state space model. Two types of TrBD algorithms are implemented, one which is trained on the background and one which is not. The untrained TrBD is able to track and detect the target but only for levels of SNR down to 4dB. Lower SNR leads to the algorithm not being able to distinguish the target signal from the reverberation. The trained TrBD on the other hand, is able to perform very well for levels of SNR down to 0dB, it is able to track and detect the target and neglect the reverberation. For trajectories passing through areas with high reverberation, the target was lost for a short period of time until it could be retracked again. Overall, the TrBD was successfully implemented on the self-generated data and has a good performance for various target trajectories.

Background: Violence against women is a public health issue which can result in physical and psychological illness in women. In Sweden, 23 800 cases of violence against women where the perpetrator was familiar with the women, were reported to the police in 2021. But most cases of violence against women are not reported. Nurses have a responsibility to ask questions about intimate partner violence to women if they suspect that a woman is abused. Aim: The purpose of the study was to explore nurses' conditions to detect women who are exposed to intimate partner violence. Method: The method was a literature review including both qualitative and quantitative articles. Nine articles were analyzed according to Friberg's analysis model. Results: The analysis resulted in two major themes “Organizations factors” and “Personal factors”, with seven sub-themes. The results in this study showed that nurses do not have enough knowledge and education about intimate partner violence or to raise the question about intimate partner violence to women. There is also a lack of time and routines at the workplace that is a barrier for nurses to detect women who are exposed to intimate partner violence. Conclusion: Nurses have a lack of conditions to detect women who are exposed to intimate partner violence. Lack of time, lack of routines and lack of knowledge and education about intimate partner violence are factors that make it difficult for nurses to detect women who are exposed to intimate partner violence. / Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka sjuksköterskors förutsättningar att upptäcka kvinnor som är utsatta för våld i nära relation. Sjuksköterskor har ett ansvar att säkerställa en säker vård och har ett övergripande ansvar för att främja hälsa och lindra lidande. Resultatet i denna studie visade att tillräcklig kunskap och utbildning gällande våld i nära relation saknas bland sjuksköterskor, vilket är en viktig bidragande faktor för att sjuksköterskor ska känna sig trygga med att ställa frågor om våld i nära relation till kvinnor. Studiens resultat belyser även vikten av en god vårdrelation mellan sjuksköterskor och kvinnor för att kvinnor ska våga berätta om sin våldsutsatthet. Våld i nära relation är ett folkhälsoproblem. Kvinnor utsatta för våld i nära relation löper risk att drabbas av sämre fysisk och psykisk hälsa vilket kan leda till stora personliga tragedier för kvinnorna och i förlängningen ökade kostnader för hälso- och sjukvården. Det är vanligt förekommande att kvinnor inte vågar berätta om sin våldsutsatthet för sjuksköterskor. Det är därav av vikt att sjuksköterskor arbetar för att kvinnor utsatta för våld i nära relation upptäcks. Studiens resultat kom från analysen av nio artiklar, med både kvalitativ och kvantitativ metod. Artiklarna analyserades enligt trestegsmodellen av Friberg. Analysen resulterade i två huvudteman och sju underteman.

Objective: Lower levels of anabolic hormones in older age are well documented. Several studies suggested that low insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) or testosterone levels were related to increased mortality. The aim of the present study was to investigate the combined influence of low IGF-I and low testosterone on all-cause mortality in men. Methods and results: From two German prospective cohort studies, the DETECT study and SHIP, 3942 men were available for analyses. During 21,838 person-years of follow-up, 8.4% (n = 330) of men died. Cox model analyses with age as timescale and adjusted for potential confounders revealed that men with levels below the 10th percentile of at least one hormone [hazard ratio (HR) 1.38 (95% confidence-interval (CI) 1.06–1.78), p = 0.02] and two hormones [HR 2.88 (95% CI 1.32–6.29), p < 0.01] showed a higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to men with non-low hormones. The associations became non-significant by using the 20th percentile as cut-off showing that the specificity increased with lower cut-offs for decreased hormone levels. The inclusion of both IGF-I and total testosterone in a mortality prediction model with common risk factors resulted in a significant integrated discrimination improvement of 0.5% (95% CI 0.3–0.7%, p = 0.03). Conclusions: Our results prove that multiple anabolic deficiencies have a higher impact on mortality than a single anabolic deficiency and suggest that assessment of more than one anabolic hormone as a biomarker improve the prediction of all-cause mortality.

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Ekonomisk brottslighet är mer lukrativt jämfört med annan brottslighet som narkotika, häleri och människohandel. Tidiga åtgärder som försvårar att kriminella kan använda företag för brottsliga syften gör att stora kostnader för samhället kan undvikas. En genomgång av litteraturen visade också att det finns stora brister i samarbetet mellan svenska myndigheter för att upptäcka grov ekonomisk brottslighet. Idag uppdagas brotten först ofta efter att en konkurs inletts. I studier har maskininlärningsmodeller prövats för att kunna upptäcka ekonomisk brottslighet och några svenska myndigheter använder maskininlärningsmodeller för att upptäcka brott men mer avancerade metoder används idag av danska myndigheter. Bolagsverket har idag ett omfattande register för bolag i Sverige och denna studie syftar till att undersöka om maskininlärning kan användas för att identifiera misstänkta bolag, genom att använda digitalt inlämnade årsredovisningar och information ur bolagsverkets register för att kunna träna klassificeringsmodeller att identifiera misstänkta bolag. För att träna modellen så har stämningsansökningar inhämtats från Ekobrottsmyndigheten som kunnat kopplas till specifika bolag av de inlämnade årsredovisningar. Principalkomponentanalys används för att visuellt visa på skillnader mellan grupperna misstänkta och icke misstänkta bolag och analyserna visade på ett överlapp mellan grupperna och ingen tydlig klustring av grupperna. Data var obalanserat med 38 misstänkta bolag av totalt 1009 bolag och därför användes översamplingstekniken SMOTE för att skapa mer syntetiskt data och för att öka antalet i gruppen misstänkta. Två maskininlärningsmodeller Random Forest och Stödvektormaskin (SVM) jämfördes i en 10 fold korsvalidering. Där båda uppvisade en recall på runt 0.91 men där Random Forest hade en mycket högre precision och med högre accuracy. Random Forest valdes och tränades på nytt och uppvisades en recall på 0.75 när den testades på osett data bestående av 8 misstänkta av 202 bolag. Ett sänkt tröskelvärde resulterade i en högre recall men med en större antal felklassificerade bolag. Studien visar tydligt problemet med obalans i data och de utmaningar man ställs inför med mindre data. Ett större data hade möjligjort ett strängare urval på brottstyper som hade kunnat ge en mer robust modell som skulle kunna användas av bolagsverket för att lättare kunna identifiera misstänkta bolag i deras register. / Economic crimes are more lucrative compared to other crimes as drugs, selling of stolen gods, trafficing. Early preventions that make it more difficult for criminals to use companies for criminal purposes can reduce large costs for sociaty. A litterature study showed that there are large weaknesses in the collaboration between Swedish authorities to detect serious economic crimes.Today most crimes among companies that commit fraud are found after a company has declared bancruptcy. In studies, machine learning models have been tested to detect economic crimes and some swedish authorites are now using machine learning methods to detect different crimes and more advanced methods are used by the danish authorites. Bolagsverket has a large register of companies in Sweden and the aim of this study is to investigate if machinelearning can be used to detect on annual reports that have been digitaly submited and information in Bolagsverket’s register to be able to train classificationsmodels and identify companies that are suspicious. To be able to train the model lawsuits have been collected from the Swedish Economic Crime Authority that can be connected to specific companies through their digitally submited annual report. Principal component analysis is used to visually show differences between the groups suspect companies and not suspected companies and the analysis show that there is an overlap between the groups and no clear clustering between the groups. Because the dataset was unbalanced with 38 suspicious companies out of 1009 companies the oversampling tecnique SMOTE was used to create more synthethic data and more suspects in the dataset. The two machinelearnings models Random Forest and support vector machine (SVM) was compared in a 10 fold crossvalidation. Both models showed a recall on around 0.91 but Random Forest had a much higher precision with a higher accuracy. Random Forest was chosen and was trained again and showed a recall on 0.75 when it was tested on unseen data with 8 suspects out of 202 companies. Lowering the treshold resulted in a higher recall but with a larger portion of wrongly classfied companies. The study shows clearly the problem with an unbalanced dataset and the challanges with a small dataset. A larger dataset could have made it possible to make a more selective selection of certain crimes that could have resulted in a more robust model that could be used by Bolagsverket to easier identify suspicous companies in their register.

Une nouvelle approche du traitement de l'image, appelée SOM-QE, qui exploite quantization error (QE) des self-organizing maps (SOM) est proposée dans cette thèse. Les SOM produisent des représentations discrètes de faible dimension des données d'entrée de haute dimension. QE est déterminée à partir des résultats du processus d'apprentissage non supervisé du SOM et des données d'entrée. SOM-QE d'une série chronologique d'images peut être utilisé comme indicateur de changements dans la série chronologique. Pour configurer SOM, on détermine la taille de la carte, la distance du voisinage, le rythme d'apprentissage et le nombre d'itérations dans le processus d'apprentissage. La combinaison de ces paramètres, qui donne la valeur la plus faible de QE, est considérée comme le jeu de paramètres optimal et est utilisée pour transformer l'ensemble de données. C'est l'utilisation de l'assouplissement quantitatif. La nouveauté de la technique SOM-QE est quadruple : d'abord dans l'usage. SOM-QE utilise un SOM pour déterminer la QE de différentes images - typiquement, dans un ensemble de données de séries temporelles - contrairement à l'utilisation traditionnelle où différents SOMs sont appliqués sur un ensemble de données. Deuxièmement, la valeur SOM-QE est introduite pour mesurer l'uniformité de l'image. Troisièmement, la valeur SOM-QE devient une étiquette spéciale et unique pour l'image dans l'ensemble de données et quatrièmement, cette étiquette est utilisée pour suivre les changements qui se produisent dans les images suivantes de la même scène. Ainsi, SOM-QE fournit une mesure des variations à l'intérieur de l'image à une instance dans le temps, et lorsqu'il est comparé aux valeurs des images subséquentes de la même scène, il révèle une visualisation transitoire des changements dans la scène à l'étude. Dans cette recherche, l'approche a été appliquée à l'imagerie artificielle, médicale et géographique pour démontrer sa performance. Les scientifiques et les ingénieurs s'intéressent aux changements qui se produisent dans les scènes géographiques d'intérêt, comme la construction de nouveaux bâtiments dans une ville ou le recul des lésions dans les images médicales. La technique SOM-QE offre un nouveau moyen de détection automatique de la croissance dans les espaces urbains ou de la progression des maladies, fournissant des informations opportunes pour une planification ou un traitement approprié. Dans ce travail, il est démontré que SOM-QE peut capturer de très petits changements dans les images. Les résultats confirment également qu'il est rapide et moins coûteux de faire la distinction entre le contenu modifié et le contenu inchangé dans les grands ensembles de données d'images. La corrélation de Pearson a confirmé qu'il y avait des corrélations statistiquement significatives entre les valeurs SOM-QE et les données réelles de vérité de terrain. Sur le plan de l'évaluation, cette technique a donné de meilleurs résultats que les autres approches existantes. Ce travail est important car il introduit une nouvelle façon d'envisager la détection rapide et automatique des changements, même lorsqu'il s'agit de petits changements locaux dans les images. Il introduit également une nouvelle méthode de détermination de QE, et les données qu'il génère peuvent être utilisées pour prédire les changements dans un ensemble de données de séries chronologiques. / A new approach for image processing, dubbed SOM-QE, that exploits the quantization error (QE) from self-organizing maps (SOM) is proposed in this thesis. SOM produce low-dimensional discrete representations of high-dimensional input data. QE is determined from the results of the unsupervised learning process of SOM and the input data. SOM-QE from a time-series of images can be used as an indicator of changes in the time series. To set-up SOM, a map size, the neighbourhood distance, the learning rate and the number of iterations in the learning process are determined. The combination of these parameters that gives the lowest value of QE, is taken to be the optimal parameter set and it is used to transform the dataset. This has been the use of QE. The novelty in SOM-QE technique is fourfold: first, in the usage. SOM-QE employs a SOM to determine QE for different images - typically, in a time series dataset - unlike the traditional usage where different SOMs are applied on one dataset. Secondly, the SOM-QE value is introduced as a measure of uniformity within the image. Thirdly, the SOM-QE value becomes a special, unique label for the image within the dataset and fourthly, this label is used to track changes that occur in subsequent images of the same scene. Thus, SOM-QE provides a measure of variations within the image at an instance in time, and when compared with the values from subsequent images of the same scene, it reveals a transient visualization of changes in the scene of study. In this research the approach was applied to artificial, medical and geographic imagery to demonstrate its performance. Changes that occur in geographic scenes of interest, such as new buildings being put up in a city or lesions receding in medical images are of interest to scientists and engineers. The SOM-QE technique provides a new way for automatic detection of growth in urban spaces or the progressions of diseases, giving timely information for appropriate planning or treatment. In this work, it is demonstrated that SOM-QE can capture very small changes in images. Results also confirm it to be fast and less computationally expensive in discriminating between changed and unchanged contents in large image datasets. Pearson's correlation confirmed that there was statistically significant correlations between SOM-QE values and the actual ground truth data. On evaluation, this technique performed better compared to other existing approaches. This work is important as it introduces a new way of looking at fast, automatic change detection even when dealing with small local changes within images. It also introduces a new method of determining QE, and the data it generates can be used to predict changes in a time series dataset.

Modern radar technology relies heavily on digital signal processing. As radar technology pushes the boundaries of miniaturization, computational systems must be developed to support the processing demand. One particular application for small radar technology is in modern drone systems. Many drone applications are currently inhibited by safety concerns of autonomous vehicles navigating shared airspace. Research in radar based Detect and Avoid (DAA) attempts to address these concerns by using radar to detect nearby aircraft and choosing an alternative flight path. Implementation of radar on small Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV), however, requires a lightweight and power efficient design. Likewise, the radar processing system must also be small and efficient. This thesis presents the design of the processing system for a small Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) phased array radar. The radar and processing is designed to be light-weight and low-power in order to fly onboard a UAV less than 25 kg in weight. The radar algorithms for this design include a parallelized Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), cross correlation, and beamforming. Target detection algorithms are also implemented. All of the computation is performed in real-time on a Xilinx Zynq 7010 System on Chip (SoC) processor utilizing both FPGA and CPU resources. The radar system (excluding antennas) has dimensions of 2.25 x 4 x 1.5 in3, weighs 120 g, and consumes 8 W of power of which the processing system occupies 2.6 W. The processing system performs over 652 million arithmetic operations per second and is capable of performing the full processing in real-time. The radar has also been tested in several scenarios both airborne on small UAVs as well as on the ground. Small UAVs have been detected to ranges of 350 m and larger aircraft up to 800 m. This thesis will describe the radar design architecture, the custom designed radar hardware, the FPGA based processing implementations, and conclude with an evaluation of the system's effectiveness and performance.

For unmanned aircraft systems to gain full access to the National Airspace System (NAS), they must have the capability to detect and avoid other aircraft. This research focuses on the development of a detect-and-avoid (DAA) system for small unmanned aircraft systems. To safely avoid another aircraft, an unmanned aircraft must detect the intruder aircraft with ample time and distance. Two analytical methods for finding the minimum detection range needed are described. The first method, time-based geometric velocity vectors (TGVV), includes the bank-angle dynamics of the ownship while the second, geometric velocity vectors (GVV), assumes an instantaneous bank-angle maneuver. The solution using the first method must be found numerically, while the second has a closed-form analytical solution. These methods are compared to two existing methods. Results show the time-based geometric velocity vectors approach is precise, and the geometric velocity vectors approach is a good approximation under many conditions. The DAA problem requires the use of a robust target detection and tracking algorithm for tracking multiple maneuvering aircraft in the presence of noisy, cluttered, and missed measurements. Additionally these algorithms needs to be able to detect overtaking intruders, which has been resolved by using multiple radar sensors around the aircraft. To achieve these goals the formulation of a nonlinear extension to R-RANSAC has been performed, known as extended recursive-RANSAC (ER-RANSAC). The primary modifications needed for this ER-RANSAC implementation include the use of an EKF, nonlinear inlier functions, and the Gauss-Newton method for model hypothesis and generation. A fully functional DAA system includes target detection and tracking, collision detection, and collision avoidance. In this research we demonstrate the integration of each of the DAA-system subcomponents into fully functional simulation and hardware implementations using a ground-based radar setup. This integration resulted in various modifications of the radar DSP, collision detection, and collision avoidance algorithms, to improve the performance of the fully integrated DAA system. Using these subcomponents we present flight results of a complete ground-based radar DAA system, using actual radar hardware.