End-to-End 2D Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Lung Nodule Identification and Abnormal Detection in Cloud

The extent of the peril associated with cancer can be perceived from the lack of treatment, ineffective early diagnosis techniques, and most importantly its fatality rate. Globally, cancer is the second leading cause of death and among over a hundred types of cancer; lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer as well as the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Anyhow, an accurate lung cancer diagnosis in a timely manner can elevate the likelihood of survival by a noticeable margin and medical imaging is a prevalent manner of cancer diagnosis since it is easily accessible to people around the globe. Nonetheless, this is not eminently efficacious considering human inspection of medical images can yield a high false positive rate. Ineffective and inefficient diagnosis is a crucial reason for such a high mortality rate for this malady. However, the conspicuous advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence have stimulated the development of exceedingly precise diagnosis systems. The development and performance of these systems rely prominently on the data that is used to train these systems. A standard problem witnessed in publicly available medical image datasets is the severe imbalance of data between different classes. This grave imbalance of data can make a deep learning model biased towards the dominant class and unable to generalize. This study aims to present an end-to-end convolutional neural network that can accurately differentiate lung nodules from non-nodules and reduce the false positive rate to a bare minimum. To tackle the problem of data imbalance, we oversampled the data by transforming available images in the minority class. The average false positive rate in the proposed method is a mere 1.5 percent. However, the average false negative rate is 31.76 percent. The proposed neural network has 68.66 percent sensitivity and 98.42 percent specificity.     

ProbExplorer: Uncertainty‐guided Exploration and Editing of Probabilistic Medical Image Segmentation

In this paper, we develop an interactive analysis and visualization tool for probabilistic segmentation results in medical imaging. We provide a systematic approach to analyze, interact and highlight regions of segmentation uncertainty. We introduce a set of visual analysis widgets integrating different approaches to analyze multivariate probabilistic field data with direct volume rendering. We demonstrate the user's ability to identify suspicious regions (e.g. tumors) and correct the misclassification results using a novel uncertainty‐based segmentation editing technique. We evaluate our system and demonstrate its usefulness in the context of static and time‐varying medical imaging datasets.     

An adaptive job scheduling scheme for mesh-connected multicomputers

Allocating submeshes to jobs in mesh-connected multicomputers in an FCFS fashion leads to poor system performance because a large job at the head of the waiting queue can prevent the allocation of free submeshes to other smaller waiting jobs. However, serving jobs aggressively out-of-order can lead to excessive waiting delays for large jobs located at the head of the waiting queue. In this paper, we show that the ability of the job scheduling algorithm to bypass the head of the waiting queue should increase with the load, and we propose a scheduling scheme that can bypass the waiting queue head in a load-dependent adaptive fashion. Also, giving priority to large jobs because they are more difficult to accommodate is investigated. The performance of the proposed scheme has been compared to that of FCFS, aggressive out-of-order scheduling, and other previous job scheduling schemes. Extensive simulation results based on synthetic workloads and real workload traces indicate that our scheduling strategy is a good strategy when both average and maximum job waiting delays are considered. In particular, it is substantially superior to FCFS in terms of mean turnaround times, and to aggressive out-of-order scheduling in terms of maximum waiting delays.     

Robust adaptive fuzzy logic power system stabilizer

This paper introduces a robust adaptive fuzzy controller as a power system stabilizer (RFPSS) used to damp inter-area modes of oscillation following disturbances in power systems. In contrast to the IEEE standard multi-band power system stabilizer (MB-PSS), robust adaptive fuzzy-based stabilizers are more efficient because they cope with oscillations at different operating points. The proposed controller adopts a dynamic inversion approach. Since feedback linearization is practically imperfect, components that ensure robust and adaptive performance are included in the control law to compensate for modelling errors and achieve acceptable tracking errors. Two fuzzy systems are implemented. The first system models the nominal values of the system’s nonlinearities. The second system is an adaptive one that compensates for modelling errors. A feedback linearization-based control law is implemented using the identified model. The gains of the controller are tuned via a particle swarm optimization routine to ensure system stability and minimum sum of the squares of the speed deviations. A bench-mark problem of a 4-machine 2-area power system is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller and to show its superiority over other conventional stabilizers used in the literature.     

Interactive smart battery storage for a PV and wind hybrid energy management control based on conservative power theory

This paper presents interactive smart battery-based storage (BBS) for wind generator (WG) and photovoltaic (PV) systems. The BBS is composed of an asymmetric cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter (ACMI) with staircase modulation. The structure is parallel to the WG and PV systems, allowing the ACMI to have a reduction in power losses compared to the usual solution for storage connected at the DC-link of the converter for WG or PV systems. Moreover, the BBS is embedded with a decision algorithm running real-time energy costs, plus a battery state-of-charge manager and power quality capabilities, making the described system in this paper very interactive, smart and multifunctional. The paper describes how BBS interacts with the WG and PV and how its performance is improved. Experimental results are presented showing the efficacy of this BBS for renewable energy applications.     

A model to measure QoE for virtual personal assistant

Until now the virtual assistants (like Siri, Google Now and Cortana) have primarily been confined to voice input and output only. Is there a justification for voice only confinement or can we enhance the user experience by adding a visual output? We hypothesized that providing a higher level of visual/auditory immersion would enhance the quality of user experience. In order to test this hypothesis, we first developed 4 variants of virtual assistant, each with a different audio/visual level of immersion. Developed virtual assistant systems were the following; audio only, audio and 2D visual display, audio and 3D visual display and audio and immersive 3D visual display. We developed a plan for usability testing of all 4 variants. The usability testing was conducted with 30 subjects against eight (8) dependent variables included presence, involvement, attention, reliability, dependency, easiness, satisfaction and expectations. Each subject rated these dependent variables based on a scale of 1–5, 5 being the highest value. The raw data collected from usability testing was then analyzed through several tools in order to determine the factors contributing towards the quality of experience for each of the 4 variants. The significant factors were then used develop a model that measures the quality of user experience. It was found that each variant had a different set of significant variables. Hence, in order to rate each system there is a need to develop a scale that is dependent upon the unique set of variables for the respective variant. Furthermore, it was found that variant 4 scored the highest rate for Quality of Experience (QoE). Lastly several other qualitative conclusions were also drawn from this research that will guide future work in the field of virtual assistants.     

Nonlinear robust state feedback control system design for nonlinear uncertain systems

This paper presents a systematic approach to the design of a nonlinear robust dynamic state feedback controller for nonlinear uncertain systems using copies of the plant nonlinearities. The technique is based on the use of integral quadratic constraints and minimax linear quadratic regulator control, and uses a structured uncertainty representation. The approach combines a linear state feedback guaranteed cost controller and copies of the plant nonlinearities to form a robust nonlinear controller with a novel control architecture. A nonlinear state feedback controller is designed for a synchronous machine using the proposed method. The design provides improved stability and transient response in the presence of uncertainty and nonlinearity in the system and also provides a guaranteed bound on the cost function. An automatic voltage regulator to track reference terminal voltage is also provided by a state feedback equivalent robust nonlinear proportional integral controller. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simultaneous speckle reduction and contrast enhancement for ultrasound images: Wavelet versus Laplacian pyramid

Speckle can be described as random multiplicative noise. It hampers the perception and extraction of fine details in the image. Speckle reduction techniques are applied to ultrasound images in order to reduce the noise level and improve the visual quality for better diagnoses. It is also used as preliminary treatment before segmentation and classification. Several methods have been proposed for speckle reduction in ultrasound images. Multiscale contrast enhancement has proven to be very efficient for x-ray images. A recent study by Dippel et al. doing a comparison, contrast enhancement of radiographs (x-ray and mammography), between the Laplacian pyramid and the wavelet one proves that the Laplacian pyramid method gives a better result than the wavelet one; the filtering aspect was not taken into account. In ultrasound images a strong contrast variation exists which is different from x-ray and mammography. In this paper a wavelet pyramid with simultaneous speckle reduction and contrast enhancement was applied for the first time on ultrasound images with the area of interest and compared to a Laplacian enhancement pyramid. The optimum choice of wavelet bases for ultrasound images is investigated in this study. In order to realize a fair comparison, the same nonlinear modification in both multiscale schemes is used. The comparison proves that the wavelet pyramid gives a much better result than the Laplacian one for simultaneous speckle reduction and contrast enhancement of ultrasound images. The text was submitted by the author in English. Ali Samir Saad, 1964. 1996 PhD in image processing, Polytechnics School of the Engineering University of Nantes, France. 1993 Masters in Electronics. 1990 Masters in Digital Image Processing, Institute of Computer Sciences and Communication University of Rennes, France. 1989 BS in Electrical Engineering, University of Saint-Etienne. Academy of Lyon, France. 1996–2000 Research associate at the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging. Baylor, Houston, Texas. Assistant professor at King Saud University, Dept. of Biomedical Technology. Area of research in medical image processing and analysis, 23 publications, member of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. Marquis Who’s Who in the World; Cambridge Blue Book 2006.     

Flexible and Autonomous Integrated System for Characterizing Metal Oxide Gas Sensor Response in Dynamic Environment

Characterization and calibration of gas sensor is a complex problem due to the dynamic behavior of gases and the limitations of current technology. This article reports a flexible, robust, and autonomous integrated system that is able to perform characterization on metal oxide-based gas sensors in dynamic environments. The system controls the concentration and flow of the relevant gases into the gas chamber and simultaneously measuring the sensor response. This feature allows the characterization of the sensor under continuous dynamic flow of gases similar to conditions on a robot or flow pipes. Several experiments have been performed on the system using hydrogen sulfide. The results provide information on the general characteristics of the sensor as well as its sensitivity. The noise levels were studied with different reference voltages. Overall, the results verify that the system is reliable and able to produce repeatable measurements.     

Query-based learning for aerospace applications

Models of real-world applications often include a large number of parameters with a wide dynamic range, which contributes to the difficulties of neural network training. Creating the training data set for such applications becomes costly, if not impossible. In order to overcome the challenge, one can employ an active learning technique known as query-based learning (QBL) to add performance-critical data to the training set during the learning phase, thereby efficiently improving the overall learning/generalization. The performance-critical data can be obtained using an inverse mapping called network inversion (discrete network inversion and continuous network inversion) followed by oracle query. This paper investigates the use of both inversion techniques for QBL learning, and introduces an original heuristic to select the inversion target values for continuous network inversion method. Efficiency and generalization was further enhanced by employing node decoupled extended Kalman filter (NDEKF) training and a causality index (CI) as a means to reduce the input search dimensionality. The benefits of the overall QBL approach are experimentally demonstrated in two aerospace applications: a classification problem with large input space and a control distribution problem.