Current Developments in Digital Quantitative Volume Estimation for the Optimisation of Dietary Assessment

Abstract

Obesity is a global health problem with wide-reaching economic and social implications. Nutrition surveillance systems are essential to understanding and addressing poor dietary practices. However, diets are incredibly diverse across populations and an accurate diagnosis of individualized nutritional issues is challenging. Current tools used in dietary assessment are cumbersome for users, and are only able to provide approximations of dietary information. Given the need for technological innovation, this paper reviews various novel digital methods for food volume estimation and explores the potential for adopting such technology in the Southeast Asian context. We discuss the current approaches to dietary assessment, as well as the potential opportunities that digital health can offer to the field. Recent advances in optics, computer vision and deep learning show promise in advancing the field of quantitative dietary assessment. The ease of access to the internet and the availability of smartphones with integrated cameras have expanded the toolsets available, and there is potential for automated food volume estimation to be developed and integrated as part of a digital dietary assessment tool. Such a tool may enable public health institutions to be able to gather an effective nutritional insight and combat the rising rates of obesity in the region.

Early Antibiotic Exposure Is Not Detrimental to Therapeutic Effect from Immunotherapy in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

“…The survival plateau from locoregional and systemic therapies has stimulated the development of novel pharmacological strategies for the treatment of HCC and in particular the rise to prominence of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). Monoclonal antibodies against programmed cell death-1 receptor/ligand (PD-1/PD-L1) and the cytotoxic T-cell lymphocyte-associated antigen-4 are capable of inducing tumor immune rejection [4]. However, inhibition of neither of these targets alone is sufficient to translate into significant survival benefit in patients with HCC [5], a finding that has paved the way for the development of immunotherapy combinations such as atezolizumab and bevacizumab, the only regimen associated with an improvement in patient’s survival compared to standard of care sorafenib [6].…”

A Dietary Assessment Training Course Path: The Italian IV SCAI Study on Children Food Consumption

“…The rationale behind the experience here described is that a community of professionals specialized in dietary data collection and management will allow for building a permanent surveillance system in the short term and may reduce costs, to arrange a training re-training system to maintain the specialization and to prepare the turnover within the community. Such a training system should be constantly updated on the technological tools for collecting food consumption data currently developed, especially, but not limited to, web-based and smartphone-based applications [as an example, see (13,14)].…”

Feasibility Study of an Automated Carbohydrate Estimation System Using Thai Food Images in Comparison With Estimation by Dietitians

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“…Moreover, methods to validate estimation accuracy among previous studies vary greatly. Three recently published review articles on imagebased dietary assessment indicate a great variety of accuracy measurement procedures (31)(32)(33).…”