Purpose: The Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC) open data commons was launched to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to help address the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to quantify longitudinal representativeness of the demographic characteristics of the primary imaging dataset compared to the United States general population (US Census) and COVID-19 positive case counts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Approach: The Jensen Shannon distance (JSD) was used to longitudinally measure the similarity of the distribution of (1) all unique patients in the MIDRC data to the 2020 US Census and (2) all unique COVID-19 positive patients in the MIDRC data to the case counts reported by the CDC. The distributions were evaluated in the demographic categories of age at index, sex, race, ethnicity, and the intersection of race and ethnicity. Results: Representativeness the MIDRC data by ethnicity and the intersection of race and ethnicity was impacted by the percentage of CDC case counts for which data in these categories is not reported. The distributions by sex and race have retained their level of repres
Using "Analyze Results" at the Web of Science, one can directly generate overlays onto global journal maps of science. The maps are based on the 10,000+ journals contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science and Social Science Citation Indices (2011). The disciplinary diversity of the retrieval is measured in terms of Rao-Stirling's "quadratic entropy." Since this indicator of interdisciplinarity is normalized between zero and one, the interdisciplinarity can be compared among document sets and across years, cited or citing. The colors used for the overlays are based on Blondel et al.'s (2008) community-finding algorithms operating on the relations journals included in JCRs. The results can be exported from VOSViewer with different options such as proportional labels, heat maps, or cluster density maps. The maps can also be web-started and/or animated (e.g., using PowerPoint). The "citing" dimension of the aggregated journal-journal citation matrix was found to provide a more comprehensive description than the matrix based on the cited archive. The relations between local and global maps and their different functions in studying the sciences in terms of journal lit
We introduce a novel methodology for mapping academic institutions based on their journal publication profiles. We believe that journals in which researchers from academic institutions publish their works can be considered as useful identifiers for representing the relationships between these institutions and establishing comparisons. However, when academic journals are used for research output representation, distinctions must be introduced between them, based on their value as institution descriptors. This leads us to the use of journal weights attached to the institution identifiers. Since a journal in which researchers from a large proportion of institutions published their papers may be a bad indicator of similarity between two academic institutions, it seems reasonable to weight it in accordance with how frequently researchers from different institutions published their papers in this journal. Cluster analysis can then be applied to group the academic institutions, and dendrograms can be provided to illustrate groups of institutions following agglomerative hierarchical clustering. In order to test this methodology, we use a sample of Spanish universities as a case study. We f
Recent advancements in large language model(LLM) performance on medical multiple choice question (MCQ) benchmarks have stimulated interest from healthcare providers and patients globally. Particularly in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) facing acute physician shortages and lack of specialists, LLMs offer a potentially scalable pathway to enhance healthcare access and reduce costs. However, their effectiveness in the Global South, especially across the African continent, remains to be established. In this work, we introduce AfriMed-QA, the first large scale Pan-African English multi-specialty medical Question-Answering (QA) dataset, 15,000 questions (open and closed-ended) sourced from over 60 medical schools across 16 countries, covering 32 medical specialties. We further evaluate 30 LLMs across multiple axes including correctness and demographic bias. Our findings show significant performance variation across specialties and geographies, MCQ performance clearly lags USMLE (MedQA). We find that biomedical LLMs underperform general models and smaller edge-friendly LLMs struggle to achieve a passing score. Interestingly, human evaluations show a consistent consumer preference
The generative plagiarism detection task at PAN 2025 aims at identifying automatically generated textual plagiarism in scientific articles and aligning them with their respective sources. We created a novel large-scale dataset of automatically generated plagiarism using three large language models: Llama, DeepSeek-R1, and Mistral. In this task overview paper, we outline the creation of this dataset, summarize and compare the results of all participants and four baselines, and evaluate the results on the last plagiarism detection task from PAN 2015 in order to interpret the robustness of the proposed approaches. We found that the current iteration does not invite a large variety of approaches as naive semantic similarity approaches based on embedding vectors provide promising results of up to 0.8 recall and 0.5 precision. In contrast, most of these approaches underperform significantly on the 2015 dataset, indicating a lack in generalizability.
This paper introduces two multilingual government themed corpora in various South African languages. The corpora were collected by gathering the South African Government newspaper (Vuk'uzenzele), as well as South African government speeches (ZA-gov-multilingual), that are translated into all 11 South African official languages. The corpora can be used for a myriad of downstream NLP tasks. The corpora were created to allow researchers to study the language used in South African government publications, with a focus on understanding how South African government officials communicate with their constituents. In this paper we highlight the process of gathering, cleaning and making available the corpora. We create parallel sentence corpora for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tasks using Language-Agnostic Sentence Representations (LASER) embeddings. With these aligned sentences we then provide NMT benchmarks for 9 indigenous languages by fine-tuning a massively multilingual pre-trained language model.
Dyads of journals related by citations can agglomerate into specialties through the mechanism of triadic closure. Using the Journal Citation Reports 2011, 2012, and 2013, we analyze triad formation as indicators of integration (specialty growth) and disintegration (restructuring). The strongest integration is found among the large journals that report on studies in different scientific specialties, such as PLoS ONE, Nature Communications, Nature, and Science. This tendency towards large-scale integration has not yet stabilized. Using the Islands algorithm, we also distinguish 51 local maxima of integration. We zoom into the cited articles that carry the integration for: (i) a new development within high-energy physics and (ii) an emerging interface between the journals Applied Mathematical Modeling and the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology. In the first case, integration is brought about by a specific communication reaching across specialty boundaries, whereas in the second, the dyad of journals indicates an emerging interface between specialties. These results suggest that integration picks up substantive developments at the specialty level. An advantage o
Publication patterns of 79 forest scientists awarded major international forestry prizes during 1990-2010 were compared with the journal classification and ranking promoted as part of the 'Excellence in Research for Australia' (ERA) by the Australian Research Council. The data revealed that these scientists exhibited an elite publication performance during the decade before and two decades following their first major award. An analysis of their 1703 articles in 431 journals revealed substantial differences between the journal choices of these elite scientists and the ERA classification and ranking of journals. Implications from these findings are that additional cross-classifications should be added for many journals, and there should be an adjustment to the ranking of several journals relevant to the ERA Field of Research classified as 0705 Forestry Sciences.
A number of journal classification systems have been developed in bibliometrics since the launch of the Citation Indices by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in the 1960s. These systems are used to normalize citation counts with respect to field-specific citation patterns. The best known system is the so-called "Web-of-Science Subject Categories" (WCs). In other systems papers are classified by algorithmic solutions. Using the Journal Citation Reports 2014 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index (n of journals = 11,149), we examine options for developing a new system based on journal classifications into subject categories using aggregated journal-journal citation data. Combining routines in VOSviewer and Pajek, a tree-like classification is developed. At each level one can generate a map of science for all the journals subsumed under a category. Nine major fields are distinguished at the top level. Further decomposition of the social sciences is pursued for the sake of example with a focus on journals in information science (LIS) and science studies (STS). The new classification system improves on alternative options by avoiding the problem
Access to diverse, well-annotated medical images with interactive learning tools is fundamental for training practitioners in medicine and related fields to improve their diagnostic skills and understanding of anatomical structures. While medical atlases are valuable, they are often impractical due to their size and lack of interactivity, whereas online image search may provide mislabeled or incomplete material. To address this, we propose MIRAGE, a multimodal medical text and image retrieval and generation system that allows users to find and generate clinically relevant images from trustworthy sources by mapping both text and images to a shared latent space, enabling semantically meaningful queries. The system is based on a fine-tuned medical version of CLIP (MedICaT-ROCO), trained with the ROCO dataset, obtained from PubMed Central. MIRAGE allows users to give prompts to retrieve images, generate synthetic ones through a medical diffusion model (Prompt2MedImage) and receive enriched descriptions from a large language model (Dolly-v2-3b). It also supports a dual search option, enabling the visual comparison of different medical conditions. A key advantage of the system is that it
The medical commissioning is an important step to bring a particle gantry into clinical operation for tumour treatments. This involves the parametrization and characterization of all relevant systems including the beam delivery, the patient table, the imaging systems and the connection to all required software components. This article is limited to necessary tasks for the beam delivery system of a pencil beam scanning system. Usually the commissioning starts with the characterization of the unscanned beam and the calibration of the beam energy. The following steps are the parametrization of the scanning system, the commissioning of the beam position monitoring system and characterization of the spot size, all requiring precisions better than 1 mm. The commissioning effort for these tasks depends also on the gantry topology. Finally, the calibration of the dose measurement system ensures that any dose distribution can be delivered with an absolute precision better than 1%.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that set in in the middle of the semester, most of the IITs (and other institutions from across India and the world) switched to an online mode for completing the semester. Since then, many different institutions from across the world have been discussing ways and means to make online education effective, via various means, such as webinars, talks and short workshops. However, a general observation has been that there is a lack of data on online education, particularly in the Indian context. Anticipating this, we decided to conduct a pan-IIT survey on online education and compiled two sets of questionnaires (one each for faculty members and students) in discussion with the members of the pan-IIT group on Online Pedagogy (https://www.paniit-onlinepedagogy-researchgroup.net/), that has been formed for conducting research on the broad area of online education. The current survey has been steered by IIT Dharwad and IIT Jammu along with the members of the pan-IIT group on online pedagogy. The survey data was collected from 5th May 2020 to 25th May 2020. We received about 11,890 and 840 responses from students and faculty members, respectively. About 82% and
The linguistic diversity across the African continent presents different challenges and opportunities for machine translation. This study explores the effects of data augmentation techniques in improving translation systems in low-resource African languages. We focus on two data augmentation techniques: sentence concatenation with back translation and switch-out, applying them across six African languages. Our experiments show significant improvements in machine translation performance, with a minimum increase of 25\% in BLEU score across all six languages. We provide a comprehensive analysis and highlight the potential of these techniques to improve machine translation systems for low-resource languages, contributing to the development of more robust translation systems for under-resourced languages.
The Pan-STARRS Data Processing System is responsible for the steps needed to downloaded, archive, and process all images obtained by the Pan-STARRS telescopes, including real-time detection of transient sources such as supernovae and moving objects including potentially hazardous asteroids. With a nightly data volume of up to 4 terabytes and an archive of over 4 petabytes of raw imagery, Pan-STARRS is solidly in the realm of Big Data astronomy. The full data processing system consists of several subsystems covering the wide range of necessary capabilities. This article describes the Image Processing Pipeline and its connections to both the summit data systems and the outward-facing systems downstream. The latter include the Moving Object Processing System (MOPS) & the public database: the Published Science Products Subsystem (PSPS).
We studied the COVID-19 pandemic evolution in selected African countries. For each country considered, we modeled simultaneously the data of the active, recovered and death cases. In this study, we used a year of data since the first cases were reported. We estimated the time-dependent basic reproduction numbers, $R_0$, and the fractions of infected but unaffected populations, to offer insights into containment and vaccine strategies in African countries. We found that $R_0\leq 4$ at the start of the pandemic but has since fallen to $R_0 \sim 1$. The unaffected fractions of the populations studied vary between $1-10$\% of the recovered cases.
This paper discusses how distribution matching losses, such as those used in CycleGAN, when used to synthesize medical images can lead to mis-diagnosis of medical conditions. It seems appealing to use these new image synthesis methods for translating images from a source to a target domain because they can produce high quality images and some even do not require paired data. However, the basis of how these image translation models work is through matching the translation output to the distribution of the target domain. This can cause an issue when the data provided in the target domain has an over or under representation of some classes (e.g. healthy or sick). When the output of an algorithm is a transformed image there are uncertainties whether all known and unknown class labels have been preserved or changed. Therefore, we recommend that these translated images should not be used for direct interpretation (e.g. by doctors) because they may lead to misdiagnosis of patients based on hallucinated image features by an algorithm that matches a distribution. However there are many recent papers that seem as though this is the goal.
Medical image classification has been widely adopted in medical image analysis. However, due to the difficulty of collecting and labeling data in the medical area, medical image datasets are usually highly-imbalanced. To address this problem, previous works utilized class samples as prior for re-weighting or re-sampling but the feature representation is usually still not discriminative enough. In this paper, we adopt the contrastive learning to tackle the long-tailed medical imbalance problem. Specifically, we first propose the category prototype and adversarial proto-instance to generate representative contrastive pairs. Then, the prototype recalibration strategy is proposed to address the highly imbalanced data distribution. Finally, a unified proto-loss is designed to train our framework. The overall framework, namely as Prototype-aware Contrastive learning (ProCo), is unified as a single-stage pipeline in an end-to-end manner to alleviate the imbalanced problem in medical image classification, which is also a distinct progress than existing works as they follow the traditional two-stage pipeline. Extensive experiments on two highly-imbalanced medical image classification datase
Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
The advent of international wideband communication by optical fibre has produced a revolution in communications and the use of the internet. Many African countries are now connected to undersea fibre linking them to other African countries and to other continents. Previously international communication was by microwave links through geostationary satellites. These are becoming redundant in some countries as optical fibre takes over, as this provides 1000 times the bandwidth of the satellite links. In the 1970's and 1980's some two dozen large (30 m diameter class) antennas were built in various African countries to provide the satellite links. Twenty six are currently known in 19 countries. As these antennas become redundant, the possibility exists to convert them for radio astronomy at a cost of roughly one tenth that of a new antenna of similar size. HartRAO, SKA Africa and the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST) have started exploring this possibility with some of the African countries.
Deep learning algorithms produces state-of-the-art results for different machine learning and computer vision tasks. To perform well on a given task, these algorithms require large dataset for training. However, deep learning algorithms lack generalization and suffer from over-fitting whenever trained on small dataset, especially when one is dealing with medical images. For supervised image analysis in medical imaging, having image data along with their corresponding annotated ground-truths is costly as well as time consuming since annotations of the data is done by medical experts manually. In this paper, we propose a new Generative Adversarial Network for Medical Imaging (MI-GAN). The MI-GAN generates synthetic medical images and their segmented masks, which can then be used for the application of supervised analysis of medical images. Particularly, we present MI-GAN for synthesis of retinal images. The proposed method generates precise segmented images better than the existing techniques. The proposed model achieves a dice coefficient of 0.837 on STARE dataset and 0.832 on DRIVE dataset which is state-of-the-art performance on both the datasets.