Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common type of inflammation of the thyroid gland, and accurate diagnosis of Hashimoto's thyroiditis would be helpful to better manage the disease process and predict thyroid failure. Most of the published computer-based techniques that use ultrasound thyroid images for Hashimoto's thyroiditis diagnosis are limited by lack of procedure standardization because individual investigators use various initial ultrasound settings. This article presents a computer-aided diagnostic technique that uses grayscale features and classifiers to provide a more objective and reproducible classification of normal and Hashimoto's thyroiditis-affected cases. In this paradigm, we extracted grayscale features based on entropy, Gabor wavelet, moments, image texture, and higher order spectra from the 100 normal and 100 Hashimoto's thyroiditis-affected ultrasound thyroid images. Significant features were selected using t-test. The resulting feature vectors were used to build the following three classifiers using tenfold stratified cross validation technique: support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and radial basis probabilistic neural network. Our results show that a combination of 12 features coupled with support vector machine classifier with the polynomial kernel of order 1 and linear kernel gives the highest accuracy of 80%, sensitivity of 76%, specificity of 84%, and positive predictive value of 83.3% for the detection of Hashimoto's thyroiditis. The proposed computer-aided diagnostic system uses novel features that have not yet been explored for Hashimoto's thyroiditis diagnosis. Even though the accuracy is only 80%, the presented preliminary results are encouraging to warrant analysis of more such powerful features on larger databases.

IntroductionThis paper concerns the analysis of the features obtained from thyroid ultrasound images in left and right transverse and longitudinal sections. In the image analysis, the thyroid lobe is treated as a texture for healthy subjects and patients with Hashimoto’s disease. The applied methods of analysis and image processing were profiled to obtain 10 features of the image. Then, their significance in the classification was shown.MaterialIn this study, the examined group consisted of 29 healthy subjects aged 18 to 60 and 65 patients with Hashimoto's disease. For each subject, four ultrasound images were taken. They were all in transverse and longitudinal sections of the right and left lobe of the thyroid, which gave 376 images in total.Method10 different features obtained from each ultrasound image were suggested. The analyzed thyroid lobe was marked automatically or manually with a rectangular element.ResultsThe analysis of 10 features and the creation for each one of them their own decision tree configuration resulted in distinguishing 3 most significant features. The results of the quality of classification show accuracy above 94% for a non-trimmed decision tree.

IntroductionThe term “dyspepsia” comes from the Greek words “dys’ and ‘peptin”, which maen “ill digestion” or indigestion, although this set of symptoms in the adult clinic has little to do with the digestion or absorption process, and refers more to ailments related to the upper section of the gastrointestinal tract.AimAssessment of the frequency of functional dyspepsia diagnosis, the characteristics of the group and an attempt to identify the accompanying symptoms, assessment of histological lesions and an attempt to answer question about the efficiency of anti-secretory and eradication therapy.Material and methodsThe study involved patients reporting for gastrofiberscopic examination due to dyspeptic ailments. A total of 230 patients were examined, including 140 women and 90 men, above 18 years of age. They underwent endoscopic examination, and a selected group with functional dyspepsia (FD), analysed using the ‘Gast’ questionnaire, underwent eradication therapy or proton pump inhibitors. Statistical analysis involved χ2 and Fischer’s test.ResultsThe study involved 230 individuals with dyspeptic disorders. The largest age group was 46–60 years. These patients reported due to their ailments mostly in autumn and winter. The differentiated group with FD included 53 patients (23% of the clinical population). 69.8% of the FD group was infected with Helicobacter pylori (with 81.2% of the whole population, respectively). Individuals with FD reported improvement more often after being administered drugs to decrease gastric secretion, more often declared post-elementary education and suffered from non-gastric ailments yet still described their state of health as good. No positive therapeutic effect of eradication was noticed during the 6-month observation.ConclusionsDue to the very high ratio of subjects with functional dyspepsia, also observed in the study sample, and the influence of civilization progress, we should expect increasing frequency of occurrence of this problem.

AbstractThis article analyzes the grounds and possibility to induce and develop reshoring activities in the luxury goods sector. The premise of this analysis is the contemporary redefinition of the luxury goods sector, which relates to the increasing volume of goods marketed as luxuries. In this paper, we examine whether reshoring can develop in a similar manner on the respective tiers of the luxury ladder in the luxury fashion, automotive, and jewelry industries. Both premises and examples of reshoring in the luxury goods sector are conceptually analyzed and empirically illustrated.

The literature on sanctions often neglects the role of domestic firms in sender states, although sanctions only have a real economic effect when senders’ firms reduce their activities on the target's market. In contrast, sanctions avoidance and increasing investments in the target country (the observed behaviour of many companies facing the EU sanctions against Russia imposed in 2014) mitigate the impact of these restrictive measures. While sanctions increase the political risk for companies, they also offer economic opportunities—and previous studies could not settle the debate on which factor prevails. By evaluating responses from British, French, German, Italian and Polish enterprises to an online survey distributed in 2017, we analyse at the firm level how sanction‐torn companies adjust to new political orders and what drives their strategic decisions. We find evidence that resource dependency induces strategies that challenge sanction policies: in particular, non‐fungible assets in the target country incentivise companies to further increase their engagement. These defiance strategies diminish the real economic effect of sanctions and generate a new economic equilibrium, which has negative long‐term implications on the choice set of policymakers to further pursue the imposition of sanctions and which even outlasts the lifting of these restrictive measures.