Search results for: medical devices.

Authors: Abdulrahman S. Abduljalil, Zhibin Yu, Artur J. Jaworski, Lei Shi

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In a travelling wave thermoacoustic device, the regenerator sandwiched between a pair of (hot and cold) heat exchangers constitutes the so-called thermoacoustic core, where the thermoacoustic energy conversion from heat to acoustic power takes place. The temperature gradient along the regenerator caused by the two heat exchangers excites and maintains the acoustic wave in the resonator. The devices are called travelling wave thermoacoustic systems because the phase angle difference between the pressure and velocity oscillation is close to zero in the regenerator. This paper presents the construction and testing of a thermoacoustic engine equipped with a ceramic regenerator, made from a ceramic material that is usually used as catalyst substrate in vehicles- exhaust systems, with fine square channels (900 cells per square inch). The testing includes the onset temperature difference (minimum temperature difference required to start the acoustic oscillation in an engine), the acoustic power output, thermal efficiency and the temperature profile along the regenerator.

Keywords: Regenerator, Temperature gradient, Thermoacoustic, Travelling-wave.

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Authors: C. Hönnscheidt, R. Krull

Abstract:

Oxidative stress makes up common incidents in eukaryotic metabolism. The presence of diverse components disturbing the equilibrium during oxygen metabolism increases oxidative damage unspecifically in living cells. Body´s own ubiquinone (Q10) seems to be a promising drug in defending the heightened appearance of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Though, its lipophilic properties require a new strategy in drug formulation to overcome their low bioavailability. Consequently, the manufacture of heterogeneous nanodispersions is in focus for medical applications. The composition of conventional nanodispersions is made up of a drug-consisting core and a surfactive agent, also named as surfactant. Long-termed encapsulation of the surfactive components into tissues might be the consequence of the use during medical therapeutics. The potential of provoking side-effects is given by their nonbiodegradable properties. Further improvements during fabrication process use the incorporation of biodegradable components such as modified γ-polyglutamic acid which decreases the potential of prospective side-effects.

Keywords: Biopolymers, γ-Polyglutamic acid, Oxidative stress, Ubiquinone.

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Authors: S. O. Adeosun, O. I. Sekunowo, O. P. Gbenebor, W. A. Ayoola, A. O. Odunade, T. A. Idowu

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Sand cast samples of the as-received 66/34Mg-Al alloy were first homogenized at 4900C and then divided into three groups on which annealing, normalising and artificial ageing were respectively carried out. Thermal ageing of the samples involved treatment at 5000C, soaked for 4 hours and quenched in water at ambient temperature followed by tempering at 2000C for 2 hours. Test specimens were subjected to microstructure and mechanical analyses and the results compared. Precipitation of significant volume of stable Mg17Al12 crystals in the aged specimen’s matrix conferred superior mechanical characteristics compared with the annealed, normalized and as-cast specimens. The ultimate tensile strength was 93.4MPa with micro-hardness of 64.9HRC and impact energy (toughness) of 4.05J. In particular, its Young modulus was 10.4GPa which compared well with that of cortical (trabecule) bone’s modulus that varies from 12-17GPa.

Keywords: Mg-Al alloy, artificial ageing, medical implant, cortical bone, mechanical properties.

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Authors: D. Tedesco, G. Feletti, P. Trucco

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The present study aims to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) to support operational decisions in Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems regarding the assignment of medical emergency requests to Emergency Departments (ED). This problem is called “hospital selection” and concerns the definition of policies for the selection of the ED to which patients who require further treatment are transported by ambulance. The employed research methodology consists of a first phase of review of the technical-scientific literature concerning DSSs to support the EMS management and, in particular, the hospital selection decision. From the literature analysis, it emerged that current studies mainly focused on the EMS phases related to the ambulance service and consider a process that ends when the ambulance is available after completing a mission. Therefore, all the ED-related issues are excluded and considered as part of a separate process. Indeed, the most studied hospital selection policy turned out to be proximity, thus allowing to minimize the travelling time and to free-up the ambulance in the shortest possible time. The purpose of the present study consists in developing an optimization model for assigning medical emergency requests to the EDs also considering the expected time performance in the subsequent phases of the process, such as the case mix, the expected service throughput times, and the operational capacity of different EDs in hospitals. To this end, a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model was created to compare different hospital selection policies. The model was implemented with the AnyLogic software and finally validated on a realistic case. The hospital selection policy that returned the best results was the minimization of the Time To Provider (TTP), considered as the time from the beginning of the ambulance journey to the ED at the beginning of the clinical evaluation by the doctor. Finally, two approaches were further compared: a static approach, based on a retrospective estimation of the TTP, and a dynamic approach, focused on a predictive estimation of the TTP which is determined with a constantly updated Winters forecasting model. Findings reveal that considering the minimization of TTP is the best hospital selection policy. It allows to significantly reducing service throughput times in the ED with a negligible increase in travel time. Furthermore, an immediate view of the saturation state of the ED is produced and the case mix present in the ED structures (i.e., the different triage codes) is considered, as different severity codes correspond to different service throughput times. Besides, the use of a predictive approach is certainly more reliable in terms on TTP estimation, than a retrospective approach. These considerations can support decision-makers in introducing different hospital selection policies to enhance EMSs performance.

Keywords: Emergency medical services, hospital selection, discrete event simulation, forecast model.

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Authors: Vinod Tejwani, Bhavik Suthar

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The paper presents and energy management strategy for a Fuel Cell, Ultracapacitor, Battery hybrid energy storage. The fuel cell hybrid power system is devised basically for emergency power requirements and transient load applications. The power density of an Ultracapacitor is extremely high and for a battery, it is subtle. For a fuel cell, the value of power density is medium. The energy density of these three stockpiling gadgets is contrarily about the power density, i.e. for the batteries it is most noteworthy and for the Ultracapacitor, it is least. Again the fuel cell has medium energy density. The proposed Energy Management System (EMS) is trying to rationalize these parameters viz. the energy density and power density. The working of the fuel cell, Ultracapacitor and batteries are controlled in a coordinated environment in a way to optimize the energy usage and at the same time to get benefits of power and energy density from their inherent characteristics. MATLAB/ Simulink® based test bench is created by using different DC-DC converters for all energy storage devices and an inverter is modeled to supply the time varying load. The results provided by the EMS are highly satisfactory that proves its adaptability.

Keywords: Energy Management System (EMS) Fuel Cell, Ultracapacitor, Battery, Hybrid Energy Storage.

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Authors: Muhammad Akmal Chaudhary

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The out-of-band impedance environment is considered to be of paramount importance in engineering the in-band impedance environment. Presenting the frequency independent and constant outof- band impedances across the wide modulation bandwidth is extremely important for reliable device characterization for future wireless systems. This paper presents an out-of-band impedance optimization scheme based on simultaneous engineering of significant baseband components IF1 (twice the modulation frequency) and IF2 (four times the modulation frequency) and higher baseband components such as IF3 (six times the modulation frequency) and IF4 (eight times the modulation frequency) to engineer the in-band impedance environment. The investigations were carried out on a 10W GaN HEMT device driven to deliver a peak envelope power of approximately 40.5dBm under modulated excitation. The presentation of frequency independent baseband impedances to all the significant baseband components whilst maintaining the optimum termination for fundamental tones as well as reactive termination for 2nd harmonic under class-J mode of operation has outlined separate optimum impedances for best intermodulation (IM) linearity.

Keywords: Active load-pull, baseband, device characterisation, waveform measurements.

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Authors: Sajid Abbas, Joon Pyo Hong, Jung-Ryun Lee, Seungryong Cho

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Computed tomography and laminography are heavily investigated in a compressive sensing based image reconstruction framework to reduce the dose to the patients as well as to the radiosensitive devices such as multilayer microelectronic circuit boards. Nowadays researchers are actively working on optimizing the compressive sensing based iterative image reconstruction algorithm to obtain better quality images. However, the effects of the sampled data’s properties on reconstructed the image’s quality, particularly in an insufficient sampled data conditions have not been explored in computed laminography. In this paper, we investigated the effects of two data properties i.e. sampling density and data incoherence on the reconstructed image obtained by conventional computed laminography and a recently proposed method called spherical sinusoidal scanning scheme. We have found that in a compressive sensing based image reconstruction framework, the image quality mainly depends upon the data incoherence when the data is uniformly sampled.

Keywords: Computed tomography, Computed laminography, Compressive sending, Low-dose.

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Authors: R. Asokan, A. M. Natarajan

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Mobile adhoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile devices which form a communication network with no preexisting wiring or infrastructure. Multiple routing protocols have been developed for MANETs. As MANETs gain popularity, their need to support real time applications is growing as well. Such applications have stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements such as throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy. Due to dynamic topology and bandwidth constraint supporting QoS is a challenging task. QoS aware routing is an important building block for QoS support. The primary goal of the QoS aware protocol is to determine the path from source to destination that satisfies the QoS requirements. This paper proposes a new energy and delay aware protocol called energy and delay aware TORA (EDTORA) based on extension of Temporally Ordered Routing Protocol (TORA).Energy and delay verifications of query packet have been done in each node. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has a higher performance than TORA in terms of network lifetime, packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay.

Keywords: EDTORA, Mobile Adhoc Networks, QoS, Routing, TORA

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Authors: Mussa I. Mgwatu, Reuben R. M. Kainkwa

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Wind is among the potential energy resources which can be harnessed to generate wind energy for conversion into electrical power. Due to the variability of wind speed with time and height, it becomes difficult to predict the generated wind energy more optimally. In this paper, an attempt is made to establish a probabilistic model fitting the wind speed data recorded at Makambako site in Tanzania. Wind speeds and direction were respectively measured using anemometer (type AN1) and wind Vane (type WD1) both supplied by Delta-T-Devices at a measurement height of 2 m. Wind speeds were then extrapolated for the height of 10 m using power law equation with an exponent of 0.47. Data were analysed using MINITAB statistical software to show the variability of wind speeds with time and height, and to determine the underlying probability model of the extrapolated wind speed data. The results show that wind speeds at Makambako site vary cyclically over time; and they conform to the Weibull probability distribution. From these results, Weibull probability density function can be used to predict the wind energy.

Keywords: Probabilistic models, wind speed, wind energy

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Authors: B. G. Sheeparamatti, J. S. Kadadevarmath

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Microcantilevers are the basic MEMS devices, which can be used as sensors, actuators and electronics can be easily built into them. The detection principle of microcantilever sensors is based on the measurement of change in cantilever deflection or change in its resonance frequency. The objective of this work is to explore the analogies between mechanical and electrical equivalent of microcantilever beams. Normally scientists and engineers working in MEMS use expensive software like CoventorWare, IntelliSuite, ANSYS/Multiphysics etc. This paper indicates the need of developing electrical equivalent of the MEMS structure and with that, one can have a better insight on important parameters, and their interrelation of the MEMS structure. In this work, considering the mechanical model of microcantilever, equivalent electrical circuit is drawn and using force-voltage analogy, it is analyzed with circuit simulation software. By doing so, one can gain access to powerful set of intellectual tools that have been developed for understanding electrical circuits Later the analysis is performed using ANSYS/Multiphysics - software based on finite element method (FEM). It is observed that both mechanical and electrical domain results for a rectangular microcantlevers are in agreement with each other.

Keywords: Electrical equivalent circuit analogy, FEM analysis, micro cantilevers, micro sensors.

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Authors: Ollie Hall, Salma ElSayed

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Affective adaptation is a creative way for game designers to add an extra layer of engagement to their productions. When player’s emotions are an explicit factor in mechanics design, endless possibilities for imaginative gameplay emerge. Whilst gaining popularity, existing affective game research mostly runs controlled experiments in restrictive settings and rely on one or more specialist devices for measuring player’s emotional state. These conditions albeit effective, are not necessarily realistic. Moreover, the simplified narrative and intrusive wearables may not be suitable for players. This exploratory study investigates delivering an immersive affective experience in the wild with minimal requirements, in an attempt for the average developer to reach the average player. A puzzle game is created with rich narrative and creative mechanics. It employs both explicit and implicit adaptation and only requires a web camera. Participants played the game on their own machines in various settings. Whilst it was rated feasible, very engaging and enjoyable, it remains questionable whether a fully immersive experience was delivered due to the limited sample size.

Keywords: affective games, dynamic adaptation, emotion recognition, game design

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Authors: He Ronghui, Ma Guoqing, Wang Chunlei, Fang Lan

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This paper focuses on wormhole attacks detection in wireless sensor networks. The wormhole attack is particularly challenging to deal with since the adversary does not need to compromise any nodes and can use laptops or other wireless devices to send the packets on a low latency channel. This paper introduces an easy and effective method to detect and locate the wormholes: Since beacon nodes are assumed to know their coordinates, the straight line distance between each pair of them can be calculated and then compared with the corresponding hop distance, which in this paper equals hop counts × node-s transmission range R. Dramatic difference may emerge because of an existing wormhole. Our detection mechanism is based on this. The approximate location of the wormhole can also be derived in further steps based on this information. To the best of our knowledge, our method is much easier than other wormhole detecting schemes which also use beacon nodes, and to those have special requirements on each nodes (e.g., GPS receivers or tightly synchronized clocks or directional antennas), ours is more economical. Simulation results show that the algorithm is successful in detecting and locating wormholes when the density of beacon nodes reaches 0.008 per m2.

Keywords: Beacon node, wireless sensor network, worm hole attack.

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Authors: Mallikarjuna Rao Gundavarapu, Ch. Mallikarjuna Rao, K. Anuradha Bai

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Real Time Video Tracking is a challenging task for computing professionals. The performance of video tracking techniques is greatly affected by background detection and elimination process. Local regions of the image frame contain vital information of background and foreground. However, pixel-level processing of local regions consumes a good amount of computational time and memory space by traditional approaches. In our approach we have explored the concurrent computational ability of General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPU) to address this problem. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with adaptive weighted kernels is used for detecting the background. The weights of the kernel are influenced by local regions and are updated by inter-frame variations of these corresponding regions. The proposed system has been tested with GPU devices such as GeForce GTX 280, GeForce GTX 280 and Quadro K2000. The results are encouraging with maximum speed up 10X compared to sequential approach.

Keywords: Connected components, Embrace threads, Local weighted kernel, Structuring element.

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Authors: J. Lin, T. C. Kuo, C. -Y. Gau, K. C. Liu, Y. J. Huang, J. D. Yu, Y. W. Lin

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A multi-agent type robot for disaster response in calamity scene is proposed in this paper. The proposed grouped rescue robots can perform cooperative reconnaissance and surveillance to achieve a given rescue mission. The multi-agent rescue of dual set robot consists of one master set and three slave units. The research for this rescue robot system is going to detect at harmful environment where human is unreachable, such as the building is infected with virus or the factory has hazardous liquid in effluent. As a dual set robot, with Bluetooth and communication network, the master set can connect with slave units and send information back to computer by wireless and monitor. Therefore, rescuer can be informed the real-time information in a calamity area. Furthermore, each slave robot is able to obstacle avoidance by ultrasonic sensors, and encodes distance and location by compass. The master robot can integrate every devices information to increase the efficiency of prospected and research unknown area.

Keywords: Designing of multi-agent rescue robot, development and basic experiments of master-slave type rescue robots.

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Authors: Josef Wolfartsberger, Michael Heiml, Georg Schwarz, Sabrina Egger

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Growing individualization and higher numbers of variants in industrial assembly products raise the complexity of manufacturing processes. Technical assistance systems considering both procedural and human factors allow for an increase in product quality and a decrease in required learning times by supporting workers with precise working instructions. Due to varying needs of workers, the presentation of working instructions leads to several challenges. This paper presents an approach for a multi-modal visualization application to support assembly work of complex parts. Our approach is integrated within an interconnected assistance system network and supports the presentation of cloud-streamed textual instructions, images, videos, 3D animations and audio files along with multi-modal user interaction, customizable UI, multi-platform support (e.g. tablet-PC, TV screen, smartphone or Augmented Reality devices), automated text translation and speech synthesis. The worker benefits from more accessible and up-to-date instructions presented in an easy-to-read way.

Keywords: Assembly, assistive technologies, augmented reality, manufacturing, visualization.

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Authors: Hamed Rajabi, Naser Nematbakhsh, Naser Movahediniya

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IP multicasting is a key technology for many existing and emerging applications on the Internet. Furthermore, with increasing popularity of wireless devices and mobile equipment, it is necessary to determine the best way to provide this service in a wireless environment. IETF Mobile IP, that provides mobility for hosts in IP networks, proposes two approaches for mobile multicasting, namely, remote subscription (MIP-RS) and bi-directional tunneling (MIP-BT). In MIP-RS, a mobile host re-subscribes to the multicast groups each time it moves to a new foreign network. MIP-RS suffers from serious packet losses while mobile host handoff occurs. In MIP-BT, mobile hosts send and receive multicast packets by way of their home agents (HAs), using Mobile IP tunnels. Therefore, it suffers from inefficient routing and wastage of system resources. In this paper, we propose a protocol called Mobile Multicast support using Old Foreign Agent (MMOFA) for Mobile Hosts. MMOFA is derived from MIP-RS and with the assistance of Mobile host's Old foreign agent, routes the missing datagrams due to handoff in adjacent network via tunneling. Also, we studied the performance of the proposed protocol by simulation under ns-2.27. The results demonstrate that MMOFA has optimal routing efficiency and low delivery cost, as compared to other approaches.

Keywords: Mobile Multicast, Mobile IP, MMOFA, NS-2. 27.

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Authors: González A. Julio, Ramírez L. Leonardo, Puerta A. Gabriel

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Telemedicine services use a large amount of data, most of which are diagnostic images in Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Health Level Seven (HL7) formats. Metadata is generated from each related image to support their identification. This study presents the use of decision trees for the optimization of information search processes for diagnostic images, hosted on the cloud server. To analyze the performance in the server, the following quality of service (QoS) metrics are evaluated: delay, bandwidth, jitter, latency and throughput in five test scenarios for a total of 26 experiments during the loading and downloading of DICOM images, hosted by the telemedicine group server of the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, Bogotá, Colombia. By applying decision trees as a data mining technique and comparing it with the sequential search, it was possible to evaluate the search times of diagnostic images in the server. The results show that by using the metadata in decision trees, the search times are substantially improved, the computational resources are optimized and the request management of the telemedicine image service is improved. Based on the experiments carried out, search efficiency increased by 45% in relation to the sequential search, given that, when downloading a diagnostic image, false positives are avoided in management and acquisition processes of said information. It is concluded that, for the diagnostic images services in telemedicine, the technique of decision trees guarantees the accessibility and robustness in the acquisition and manipulation of medical images, in improvement of the diagnoses and medical procedures in patients.

Keywords: Cloud storage, decision trees, diagnostic image, search, telemedicine.

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Authors: Mohammad Amin Safi, Mahmud Ashrafizaadeh, Amir Ali Ashrafizaadeh

Abstract:

A highly optimized implementation of binary mixture diffusion with no initial bulk velocity on graphics processors is presented. The lattice Boltzmann model is employed for simulating the binary diffusion of oxygen and nitrogen into each other with different initial concentration distributions. Simulations have been performed using the latest proposed lattice Boltzmann model that satisfies both the indifferentiability principle and the H-theorem for multi-component gas mixtures. Contemporary numerical optimization techniques such as memory alignment and increasing the multiprocessor occupancy are exploited along with some novel optimization strategies to enhance the computational performance on graphics processors using the C for CUDA programming language. Speedup of more than two orders of magnitude over single-core processors is achieved on a variety of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) devices ranging from conventional graphics cards to advanced, high-end GPUs, while the numerical results are in excellent agreement with the available analytical and numerical data in the literature.

Keywords: Lattice Boltzmann model, Graphical processing unit, Binary mixture diffusion, 2D flow simulations, Optimized algorithm.

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Authors: R. Sinthavalai, N. Memongkol, N. Patthanaprechawong, J. Viriyanantavong, C. Choosuk

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In Thailand, the practice of pre-hospital Emergency Medical Service (EMS) in each area reveals the different growth rates and effectiveness of the practices. Those can be found as the diverse quality and quantity. To shorten the learning curve prior to speed-up the practices in other areas, story telling and lessons learnt from the effective practices are valued as meaningful knowledge. To this paper, it was to ascertain the factors, lessons learnt and best practices that have impact as contributing to the success of prehospital EMS system. Those were formulized as model prior to speedup the practice in other areas. To develop the model, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), which is widely recognized as a framework for organizational quality assessment and improvement, was chosen as the discussion framework. Remarkably, this study was based on the consideration of knowledge capture; however it was not to complete the loop of knowledge activities. Nevertheless, it was to highlight the recognition of knowledge capture, which is the initiation of knowledge management.

Keywords: Emergency Medical Service, Modeling, MBNQA, Thailand.

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Authors: Nuha Omran Abokhdair, Azizah Bt Abdul Manaf

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Reversible watermarking is a special branch of image watermarking, that is able to recover the original image after extracting the watermark from the image. In this paper, an adaptive prediction-based reversible watermarking scheme is presented, in order to increase the payload capacity of MRI medical images. The scheme divides the image into two parts, Region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-Interest (RONI). Two bits are embedded in each embeddable pixel of RONI and one bit is embedded in each embeddable pixel of ROI. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to achieve high embedding capacity. This is mainly caused by two reasons. First, the pixels that were excluded from data embedding due to overflow/underflow are used for data embedding. Second, large location map that need to be added to watermark data as overhead is eliminated and thus lower data embedding capacity is prevented. Moreover, the scheme provides good visual quality to the watermarked image.

Keywords: Medical image watermarking, reversible watermarking, Difference Expansion, Prediction-Error Expansion.

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Authors: R. Tandlich, S. Hoossein, K. A. Tagwira, M. M. Marais, T. A. Ludwig, R. P. Chidziva, M. N. Munodawafa, W. M. Wrench

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Response to the public health-related emergencies is analysed here for a rural university in South Africa. The structure of the designated emergency plan covers all the phases of the disaster management cycle. The plan contains elements of the vulnerability model and the technocratic model of emergency management. The response structures are vertically and horizontally integrated, while the planning contains elements of scenario-based and functional planning. The available number of medical professionals at the Rhodes University, along with the medical insurance rates, makes the staff and students potentially more medically vulnerable than the South African population. The main improvements of the emergency management are required in the tornado response and the information dissemination during health emergencies. The latter should involve the increased use of social media and e-mails, following the Taylor model of communication. Infrastructure must be improved in the telecommunication sector in the face of unpredictable electricity outages.

Keywords: Public health, Rural university, Taylor model of communication.

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Authors: Aakash Subramanian, Vansh Pal Singh Makh, Abhijit Mitra

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A new digital transceiver circuit for asynchronous frame detection is proposed where both the transmitter and receiver contain all digital components, thereby avoiding possible use of conventional devices like monostable multivibrators with unstable external components such as resistances and capacitances. The proposed receiver circuit, in particular, uses a combinational logic block yielding an output which changes its state as soon as the start bit of a new frame is detected. This, in turn, helps in generating an efficient receiver sampling clock. A data latching circuit is also used in the receiver to latch the recovered data bits in any new frame. The proposed receiver structure is also extended from 4- bit information to any general n data bits within a frame with a common expression for the output of the combinational logic block. Performance of the proposed hardware design is evaluated in terms of time delay, reliability and robustness in comparison with the standard schemes using monostable multivibrators. It is observed from hardware implementation that the proposed circuit achieves almost 33 percent speed up over any conventional circuit.

Keywords: Asynchronous Communication, Digital Detector, Combinational logic output, Sampling clock generator, Hardwareimplementation.

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Authors: Vijay Janyani, Trevor M. Benson, Ana Vukovic

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A time-domain numerical model within the framework of transmission line modeling (TLM) is developed to simulate electromagnetic pulse propagation inside multiple microcavities forming photonic crystal (PhC) structures. The model developed is quite general and is capable of simulating complex electromagnetic problems accurately. The field quantities can be mapped onto a passive electrical circuit equivalent what ensures that TLM is provably stable and conservative at a local level. Furthermore, the circuit representation allows a high level of hybridization of TLM with other techniques and lumped circuit models of components and devices. A photonic crystal structure formed by rods (or blocks) of high-permittivity dieletric material embedded in a low-dielectric background medium is simulated as an example. The model developed gives vital spatio-temporal information about the signal, and also gives spectral information over a wide frequency range in a single run. The model has wide applications in microwave communication systems, optical waveguides and electromagnetic materials simulations.

Keywords: Computational Electromagnetics, Numerical Simulation, Transmission Line Modeling.

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Authors: Wei-Jong Yang, Wei-Hau Du, Pau-Choo Chang, Jar-Ferr Yang, Pi-Hsia Hung

Abstract:

The demands of smart visual thing recognition in various devices have been increased rapidly for daily smart production, living and learning systems in recent years. This paper proposed a visual thing recognition system, which combines binary scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), bag of words model (BoW), and support vector machine (SVM) by using color information. Since the traditional SIFT features and SVM classifiers only use the gray information, color information is still an important feature for visual thing recognition. With color-based SIFT features and SVM, we can discard unreliable matching pairs and increase the robustness of matching tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed object recognition system with color-assistant SIFT SVM classifier achieves higher recognition rate than that with the traditional gray SIFT and SVM classification in various situations.

Keywords: Color moments, visual thing recognition system, SIFT, color SIFT.

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Authors: Ghassan A. Abed, Samir I. Badrawi

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The advancement in wireless technology with the wide use of mobile devices have drawn the attention of the research and technological communities towards wireless environments, such as Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs), and mobile systems and ad-hoc networks. Unfortunately, wired and wireless networks are expressively different in terms of link reliability, bandwidth, and time of propagation delay and by adapting new solutions for these enhanced telecommunications, superior quality, efficiency, and opportunities will be provided where wireless communications were otherwise unfeasible. Some researchers define 4G as a significant improvement of 3G, where current cellular network’s issues will be solved and data transfer will play a more significant role. For others, 4G unifies cellular and wireless local area networks, and introduces new routing techniques, efficient solutions for sharing dedicated frequency bands, and an increased mobility and bandwidth capacity. This paper discusses the possible solutions and enhancements probabilities that proposed to improve the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) over different wireless networks and also the paper investigated each approach in term of advantages and disadvantages.

Keywords: TCP, Wireless Networks, Cellular Systems, WLAN.

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Authors: Rajesh Mehra, Bharti Thakur

Abstract:

In this paper, an Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter has been designed and simulated on an Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). The implementation is based on Multiply Add and Accumulate (MAC) algorithm which uses multiply operations for design implementation. Parallel Pipelined structure is used to implement the proposed IIR Filter taking optimal advantage of the look up table of target device. The designed filter has been synthesized on Digital Signal Processor (DSP) slice based FPGA to perform multiplier function of MAC unit. The DSP slices are useful to enhance the speed performance. The proposed design is simulated with Matlab, synthesized with Xilinx Synthesis Tool, and implemented on FPGA devices. The Virtex 5 FPGA based design can operate at an estimated frequency of 81.5 MHz as compared to 40.5 MHz in case of Spartan 3 ADSP based design. The Virtex 5 based implementation also consumes less slices and slice flip flops of target FPGA in comparison to Spartan 3 ADSP based implementation to provide cost effective solution for signal processing applications.

Keywords: Butterworth, DSP, IIR, MAC, FPGA.

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Authors: Ming-Ta Yang, Jyh-Cherng Gu, Chun-Wei Huang, Jin-Lung Guan

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Time base maintenance (TBM) is conventionally applied by the power utilities to maintain circuit breakers (CBs), transformers, bus bars and cables, which may result in under maintenance or over maintenance. As information and communication technology (ICT) industry develops, the maintenance policies of many power utilities have gradually changed from TBM to condition base maintenance (CBM) to improve system operating efficiency, operation cost and power supply reliability. This paper discusses the feasibility of using intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) to construct a CB CBM management platform. CBs in power substations can be monitored using IEDs with additional logic configuration and wire connections. The CB monitoring data can be sent through intranet to a control center and be analyzed and integrated by the Elipse Power Studio software. Finally, a human-machine interface (HMI) of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system can be designed to construct a CBM management platform to provide maintenance decision information for the maintenance personnel, management personnel and CB manufacturers.

Keywords: Circuit breaker, Condition base maintenance, Intelligent electronic device, Time base maintenance, SCADA.

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Authors: Gabriela Lindemann, Danilo Schmidt, Thomas Schrader, Dietmar Keune

Abstract:

The amount and heterogeneity of data in biomedical research, notably in interdisciplinary fields, requires new methods for the collection, presentation and analysis of information. Important data from laboratory experiments as well as patient trials are available but come out of distributed resources. The Charité - University Hospital Berlin has established together with the German Research Foundation (DFG) a new information service centre for kidney diseases and transplantation (Open European Nephrology Science Centre - OpEN.SC). Beside a collaborative aspect to create new research groups every single partner or institution of this science information centre making his own data available is allowed to search the whole data pool of the various involved centres. A core task is the implementation of a non-restricting open data structure for the various different data sources. We decided to use a modern RDF model and in a first phase transformed original data coming from the web-based Electronic Patient Record database TBase©.

Keywords: Medical databases, Resource Description Framework (RDF), metadata repository.

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Authors: Vladimir Veremey

Abstract:

The paper describes the design and simulation of dual-polarization antennas that use the resonance and radiating properties of the H₀₀ mode of metal open waveguides. The proposed antennas are formed by two orthogonal slots in a finite conducting ground plane. The slots are backed by metal screens connected to the ground plane forming open waveguides. It has been shown that the antenna designs can be efficiently used in mm-wave bands. The antenna single mode operational bandwidth is higher than 10%. The antenna designs are very simple and low-cost. They allow flush installation and can be efficiently used in various communication and remote sensing devices on fast moving carriers. Mutual coupling between antennas of the proposed design is very low. Thus, multiple antenna structures with proposed antennas can be efficiently employed in multi-band and in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems.

Keywords: Antenna, antenna arrays, multiple-input-multiple-output, MIMO, millimeter wave bands, slot antenna, flush installation, directivity, open waveguide, conformal antennas.

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Authors: Cristina G. Dascalu, Elena Mihaela Carausu, Daniela Manuc

Abstract:

The medical studies often require different methods for parameters selection, as a second step of processing, after the database-s designing and filling with information. One common task is the selection of fields that act as risk factors using wellknown methods, in order to find the most relevant risk factors and to establish a possible hierarchy between them. Different methods are available in this purpose, one of the most known being the binary logistic regression. We will present the mathematical principles of this method and a practical example of using it in the analysis of the influence of 10 different psychiatric diagnostics over 4 different types of offences (in a database made from 289 psychiatric patients involved in different types of offences). Finally, we will make some observations about the relation between the risk factors hierarchy established through binary logistic regression and the individual risks, as well as the results of Chi-squared test. We will show that the hierarchy built using the binary logistic regression doesn-t agree with the direct order of risk factors, even if it was naturally to assume this hypothesis as being always true.

Keywords: Databases, risk factors, binary logisticregression, hierarchy.

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