The most significant factor to consider during private information transmission through the internet (i.e., insecure channel) is security. So, to keep this data from unauthorized access during transmission, steganography is used. Steganography is the scheme of securing sensitive information by concealing it within carriers such as digital images, videos, audio, text, etc. Current image steganography methods work as follows; it assigns cover image then embeds the secret message within it by pixels' modifications, creating the resultant stego-image. These modifications allow steganalysis algorithms to detect the embedded secret message. So, a coverless data hiding concept is proposed to solve this problem. Coverless does not mean that the secret message will be transmitted without using a cover file, or the cover file can be discarded. Instead, the secret message will be embedded by generating a cover file or a secret message mapping. In this paper, a novel, highly robust coverless image steganography method based on optical mark recognition (OMR) and rule-based machine learning (RBML) is proposed.INDEX TERMS Coverless information hiding, optical mark recognition (OMR), rule-based machine learning (RBML), image steganography.

The human immune system consists of a highly intelligent network of billions of independent, self-organized cells that interact with each other. Machine learning (ML) is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that automatically processes huge amounts of image data. Immunotherapies have revolutionized the treatment of blood cancer. Specifically, one such therapy involves engineering immune cells to express chimeric antigen receptors (CAR), which combine tumor antigen specificity with immune cell activation in a single receptor. To improve their efficacy and expand their applicability to solid tumors, scientists optimize different CARs with different modifications. However, predicting and ranking the efficacy of different "off-the-shelf" immune products (e.g., CAR or Bispecific T-cell Engager [BiTE]) and selection of clinical responders are challenging in clinical practice. Meanwhile, identifying the optimal CAR construct for a researcher to further develop a potential clinical application is limited by the current, time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive conventional tools used to evaluate efficacy. Particularly, more than 30 years of immunological synapse (IS) research data demonstrate that T cell efficacy is not only controlled by the specificity and avidity of the tumor antigen and T cell interaction, but also it depends on a collective process, involving multiple adhesion and regulatory molecules, as well as tumor microenvironment, spatially and temporally organized at the IS formed by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) and natural killer (NK) cells. The optimal function of cytotoxic lymphocytes (including CTL and NK) depends on IS quality. Recognizing the inadequacy of conventional tools and the importance of IS in immune cell functions, we investigate a new strategy for assessing CAR-T efficacy by quantifying CAR IS quality using the glass-support planar lipid bilayer system combined with ML-based data analysis. Previous studies in our group show that CAR-T IS quality correlates with antitumor activities in vitro and in vivo. However, current manually quantified IS quality data analysis is time-consuming and labor-intensive with low accuracy, reproducibility, and repeatability. In this study, we develop a novel ML-based method to quantify thousands of CAR cell IS images with enhanced accuracy and speed. Specifically, we used artificial neural networks (ANN) to incorporate object detection into segmentation. The proposed ANN model extracts the most useful information to differentiate different IS datasets. The network output is flexible and produces bounding boxes, instance segmentation, contour outlines (borders), intensities of the borders, and segmentations without borders. Based on requirements, one or a combination of this information is used in statistical analysis. The ML-based automated algorithm quantified CAR-T IS data correlates with the clinical responder and non-responder treated with Kappa-CAR-T cells directly from patients. The results suggest that CAR cell IS quality can be used as a potential composite biomarker and correlates with antitumor activities in patients, which is sufficiently discriminative to further test the CAR IS quality as a clinical biomarker to predict response to CAR immunotherapy in cancer. For translational research, the method developed here can also provide guidelines for designing and optimizing numerous CAR constructs for potential clinical development. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00881920.

No abstract

There is a long history of interest in modeling Poisson regression in different fields of study. The focus of this work is on handling the issues that occur after modeling the count data. For the prediction and analysis of count data, it is valuable to study the factors that influence the performance of the model and the decision based on the analysis of that model. In regression analysis, multicollinearity and influential observations separately and jointly affect the model estimation and inferences. In this article, we focused on multicollinearity and influential observations simultaneously. To evaluate the reliability and quality of regression estimates and to overcome the problems in model fitting, we proposed new diagnostic methods based on Sherman–Morrison Woodbury (SMW) theorem to detect the influential observations using approximate deletion formulas for the Poisson regression model with the Liu estimator. A Monte Carlo method is done for the assessment of the proposed diagnostic methods. Real data are also considered for the evaluation of the proposed methods. Results show the superiority of the proposed diagnostic methods in detecting unusual observations in the presence of multicollinearity compared to the traditional maximum likelihood estimation method.