Tree growth is an important indicator of forest health and can reflect changes in forest structure. Traditional tree growth estimates use easy-to-measure parameters, including tree height, diameter at breast height, and crown diameter, obtained via forest in situ measurements, which are labor intensive and time consuming. Some new technologies measure the diameter of trees at different positions to monitor the growth trend of trees, but it is difficult to take into account the growth changes at different tree levels. The combination of terrestrial laser scanning and quantitative structure modeling can accurately estimate tree structural parameters nondestructively and has the potential to estimate tree growth from different tree levels. In this context, this paper estimates tree growth from stem-, crown-, and branch-level attributes observed by terrestrial laser scanning. Specifically, tree height, diameter at breast height, stem volume, crown diameter, crown volume, and first-order branch volume were used to estimate the growth of 55-year-old larch trees in Saihanba of China, at the stem, crown, and branch levels. The experimental results showed that tree growth is mainly reflected in the growth of the crown, i.e., the growth of branches. Compared to one-dimensional parameter growth (tree height, diameter at breast height, or crown diameter), three-dimensional parameter growth (crown, stem, and first-order branch volumes) was more obvious, in which the absolute growth of the first-order branch volume is close to the stem volume. Thus, it is necessary to estimate tree growth at different levels for accurate forest inventory.

Automatic detection of life threatening abnormal beats in electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is of importance in many healthcare applications. The ECG beat signal variations in both shape and time impose great challenges to automatic detection tasks. To address those challenges and for high accuracy automatic detection, we present here a two stage abnormal beats detection algorithm. Normal and abnormal beat types are represented by templates which are selected from training data using clustering. Multiple templates for each beat type well represent the distribution of the data and allow nonlinearity of the discrimination. Critical features are extracted for both templates and incoming beat signals in discrete wavelet transform domain. The template matching is carried out using time invariant dynamic time warping (DTW). For those the DTW distance cannot provide sharp discrimination, an additional stage of verification is invoked to further check among those types having small distance with the incoming beat, based on ECG wave's time interval features. The algorithm is tested on a large data set (23 records containing 28114 normal beats and 4633 abnormal beats) and achieves an accuracy of 97.24%.

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BackgroundGastrointestinal (GI) function can be a significant problem in critically ill patients and is associated with detrimental outcomes. The administration of opioids for pain reduction is thought to contribute to GI dysfunction. We tested whether nalbuphine, a mixed agonist/antagonist opioid modulator, can promote GI recovery in postoperative critical patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) and compared it with fentanyl, a selective mu opioid receptor (MOR) agonist.MethodsThis is a multicenter, single-blind, randomized controlled trial to investigate whether nalbuphine improves the GI recovery in ICU patients after surgery, and compared it with fentanyl. The primary outcome was the time to first defecation. Secondary outcomes included the use of sedatives, enemas or laxatives, the acute gastrointestinal injury (AGI) grade, the incidence of vomiting, and the lengths of ICU and hospital stays.ResultsWe randomized 436 patients, and a total of 369 patients were included in the modified intention-to-treat population (mITT) (185 to the nalbuphine group and 184 to the fentanyl group). The baseline demographic characteristics of the two groups were comparable after randomization. There was no significant difference in the time to defecation between the two groups [hazard ratio (HR) 0.94, 95% CI 0.74–1.19, p = 0.62]. There was no significant difference in the secondary outcomes between the two groups.ConclusionWe found no evidence that nalbuphine administration can improve the GI function in postoperative critical patients admitted to the ICU compared with fentanyl. However, the CI was wide and we could not exclude the clinically important difference.