No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract-Estimating crowd density may be a good solution for control management, maintaining the crowd safety, or prevention of riot and high risk activities. This paper presents a computational fast and simple method for estimating crowd density based on histogram model classification. The histogram model here is based on the proposed Improved Uniform Local Binary Pattern features. Two main advantages of using this improved version of the local binary pattern are that the pattern features are now intensity invariant as well as rotational invariant. Our proposed method also uses less number of features which makes it faster without sacrificing the overall performance. It has been shown that this method is robust in areas with very low, low, and medium crowd densities. Performance and comparisons with the original local binary pattern method are demonstrated in experimental results.

Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) has been introduced as one of the critical genetic factors in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in microRNA binding sites, known as miRSNPs, are a class of common variants in the 3′ untranslated regions of genes targeted by miRNAs. miRSNPs unbalance gene expression by disrupting the binding regions of microRNAs. In this study, we intended to evaluate the association of two miRSNPs with the risk of RA development and its clinical features. We studied 120 Iranian patients with RA and 125 non-RA subjects as controls. The genotypes and alleles of rs1053005 and rs1053023 in each individual were assessed by the high-resolution melting method. The distribution of STAT3 variants did not differ markedly in RA patients compared to healthy controls. Stratification analysis revealed that rs1053005 was linked with a higher concentration of C-reactive protein and an increased erythrocyte sedimentation rate, two indicators of inflammation and disease activity in RA patients. The rs1053023 variant was correlated with higher levels of creatinine as an indicator of renal involvement. Our data demonstrate an association between STAT3 variants and clinical characteristics of RA, such as disease activity and probably kidney impairment.  However, we did not observe a significant relationship between the two targeted variants and a predisposition to RA.