Macula is the most vital part of retina where the central vision is formed and any damage to macula could result in severe visual impairment or even blindness. The group of diseases that affects macula are collectively known as maculopathy and the symptoms of maculopathy usually appear in late stages when it becomes very difficult to completely recover the subject’s lost vision. There are many retinal imaging techniques which are used to visualize human retina but optical coherence tomography (OCT) is the most widely used technique nowadays because it can show early symptoms of maculopathy by capturing retinal cross-sectional regions. Many researchers have worked on extracting retinal information from OCT images. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no literature available that provides a complete suite for the extraction and identification of retinal layers along with the fluid segments for the diagnosis as well as grading of maculopathy as per clinical standards. This thesis presents a robust framework that first extract and characterize up to nine retinal layers along with retinal fluids from OCT volumetric scans irrespective of their quality or acquisition machinery. Then, it utilizes the extracted retinal information for the diagnosis and grading of maculopathy. Furthermore, the proposed framework uses the segmented layers for the reconstruction of 3D retinal surfaces as well as for the 3D modeling of human retina. To extract retinal layers, the novel structure tensor graph search (STGS) framework has been proposed. STGS first computes coherent tensors which highlights the layer variations and then using those variations, it traces the layers iteratively by decomposing a tensor with maximum coherency into an undirected graph. After extracting the layers, the retinal fluids are automatically extracted through the proposed TU-Net architecture. TU-Net is a hybrid architecture consisting of three convolutional neural networks namely TU-Net-1, TU-Net-2 and TU-Net-3. TU-Net-1 extracts retinal fluids from the candidate scan through semantic segmentation, TU-Net-2 takes the extracted fluid map and identify intra-retinal and subretinal fluids along with measuring their respective volume. TU-Net-3 is responsible for diagnosing and grading maculopathy as per the clinical standards. Furthermore, the proposed framework utilizes the extracted layers for generating a highly detailed 3D presentation of retina through BowyerWatson based Delaunay triangulation algorithm. The proposed framework has been validated on publicly available Duke datasets (containing cumulative of 42,281 scans from 439 subjects), Biomedical Image and Signal Analysis dataset (containing 4,260 scans of 51 subjects), Zhang dataset (containing cumulative of 109,309 OCT scans) and local Amanat dataset (containing 372 scans of 9 subjects). The proposed framework achieved the mean accuracy of up to 94.62% for accurately extracting nine retinal layers, achieved the mean dice coefficient of 0.906 for accurately extracting the retinal fluids, achieved the accuracy of 98.75% for correctly identifying intra-retinal and sub-retinal fluids and achieved the accuracy of up to 93.42% for grading maculopathy as per clinical standards. Moreover, the proposed framework has been compared with other state of the art solutions on different publicly available datasets where it significantly outperformed them in extracting retinal layers, retinal fluids as well as in diagnosing maculopathy.
يتناول هذا البحث التوظيف اللوني في شعر الشاعر مهدي النُهيْريّ اعتماداً على منهج البحث الوصفي التحليلي الذي يقوم على استنطاق اللون ومواضعه في قصائد النُهيْريّ، ومحاولة استنطاق النصوص الشعرية التي تحمل ألفاظ الألوان وبيان دلالاتها، وقد جاء البحث موزعا على خلاصة البحث، ومقدمة البحث، ونبذة عن حياة الشاعر، وتعريف موجز للّون لغة واصطلاحا، ثم خلفية البحث التي هي مادة البحث الرئيسة وقد اقتصر البحث على دراسة الألوان الرئيسية في المجموعة الشعرية(المحلى بـ هل)، يتلوها خاتمة بالنتائج التي توصل إليها البحث مع قائمة بالمصادر والمراجع. ولتحقيق أهداف الدراسة فقد استخدم الباحث المنهج الوصفي التحليلي، وتوصلت الدراسة إلى مجموعة من النتائج أهمها: مثَّل اللون تصويراً جمالياً امتزج مع نصه الشعري. واستعمل الشاعر التقنية البصرية اللونية كأداة في إنتاج النص الإبداعي الشعري بحرفية وفنية متقنتين، فكان الرسام الشاعر والعكس صحيح.
Communication plays a very important role in the management of an educational institution. It is the soul of an organization. An institution cannot be run without proper communication. The purpose of the study was to investigate the role of heads of teaching departments in the promotion of communication at postgraduate level. The population of the study consisted of all heads and teachers in universities and postgraduate colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. For this purpose, eight universities and eight postgraduate colleges were randomly selected by the researcher as a sample. The sample consisted of 441 (148 heads and 293 teachers) respondents. A questionnaire consisted of 27 items was utilized for data collection. Mean, t-test, and One-Way ANOVA were used for data analysis. The role of heads of teaching departments was positive in all aspects of communication. Type of institute of the heads did not differentiate the two groups of heads in their opinions about their role in the promotion of communication. Insignificant difference was found between the views of heads of natural and social sciences departments about their role in the promotion of communication. A significant difference was found between heads and teachers’ views regarding the role of heads in the promotion of communication. Insignificant difference was observed between the views of universities and postgraduate colleges’ teachers, teachers from natural and social sciences departments, and between male and female teachers about the role of heads in the promotion of communication. Insignificant difference was found among the views of heads by age, qualification, experience as a chairperson, and total length of service in the present department regarding their role in the promotion of communication. Teachers were not differentiated by qualification, designation, age and experience in their views. It viis concluded that heads of teaching departments play positive role in the promotion of communication at postgraduate level. Demographic characteristics of the heads, i-e, age, qualification, total length of service in the present department, experience as a chairperson, type of institute and nature of department do not affect their role in the promotion of communication. This is also evident from the views of teachers that heads promote communication in their respective institutions. To make heads more effective in the process of communication, a course of communication skills may be arranged for newly inducted as well as for those heads who are already working as heads of teaching departments. For this purpose communication training institute may be established in every university. For the development of language proficiency of the heads and teachers, a language laboratory may be established in every institution of higher education.