RESUMO
Gastrointestinal endoscopy has been identified as an important tool for cancer diagnosis and therapy, particularly for treating patients with early gastric cancer (EGC). It is well known that the quality of gastroscope images is a prerequisite for achieving a high detection rate of gastrointestinal lesions. Owing to manual operation of gastroscope detection, in practice, it possibly introduces motion blur and produces low-quality gastroscope images during the imaging process. Hence, the quality assessment of gastroscope images is the key process in the detection of gastrointestinal endoscopy. In this study, we first present a novel gastroscope image motion blur (GIMB) database that includes 1,050 images generated by imposing 15 distortion levels of motion blur on 70 lossless images and the associated subjective scores produced with the manual operation of 15 viewers. Then, we design a new artificial intelligence (AI)-based gastroscope image quality evaluator (GIQE) that leverages the newly proposed semi-full combination subspace to learn multiple kinds of human visual system (HVS) inspired features for providing objective quality scores. The results of experiments conducted on the GIMB database confirm that the proposed GIQE showed more effective performance compared with its state-of-the-art peers.
RESUMO
BACKGROUND: This study aims to compare the performance of the recently developed Chinese (city) tariff of the EQ-5D-3L against the UK, US, Japanese and Korean tariffs in a general rural population in China. METHODS: From November 2015 to September 2016, 12,085 permanent residents aged 45-69 from 257 villages randomly selected from Hua County, Henan Province, China, were interviewed using EQ-5D-3L, and a one-on-one questionnaire investigation was used to collect data on factors associated with HRQOL. The health utility scores were calculated using the UK, US, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (city) tariffs. The agreement, known-groups validity and sensitivity of these five tariffs were evaluated. Transition scores for pairs of observed EQ-5D-3L health states were calculated and compared. RESULTS: The Korean tariff yielded the highest mean health utility score (0.963), followed by the Chinese (city) (0.948), US (0.943), UK (0.930) and Japanese (0.921) tariffs, but the differences in the scores of any two tariffs did not exceed the MCID. The Chinese (city) tariff showed higher ICC values (ICCs> 0.89, 95% CI:0.755-0.964) and narrower limits of agreement (0.099-0.167) than the Korean tariff [(ICCs> 0.71, 95% CI:0.451-0.955); (0.146-0.253)]. The Chinese (city) tariff had a higher relative efficiency and effect size statistics in 10 out of 11 variables as compared to the UK, US and Japanese tariffs. The Chinese (city) tariff (0.215) was associated with moderate mean absolute transition scores compared with the UK (0.342), US (0.230), Japanese (0.149) and Korean (0.189) tariffs for 1485 observed pairs of the EQ-5D-3L health states. CONCLUSIONS: Health utility scores derived from the five tariffs differed. The Chinese (city) tariff was the most suitable of these tariffs and was without obvious weakness. We recommend adopting the Chinese (city) tariff when applying EQ-5D-3L to assess quality of life among the elderly in China's agricultural region with socio-economic status similar to Hua County. Results of this study had provided a crucial basis for health surveys, health promotion projects, health intervention trials, and health economic evaluation taking HRQOL as a target in rural areas of China.