Motion Deblurring of Faces

International Journal of Computer Vision - Face analysis lies at the heart of computer vision with remarkable progress in the past decades. Face recognition and tracking are tackled by building...     

Anonymization of longitudinal electronic medical records

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems have enabled healthcare providers to collect detailed patient information from the primary care domain. At the same time, longitudinal data from EMRs are increasingly combined with biorepositories to generate personalized clinical decision support protocols. Emerging policies encourage investigators to disseminate such data in a deidentified form for reuse and collaboration, but organizations are hesitant to do so because they fear such actions will jeopardize patient privacy. In particular, there are concerns that residual demographic and clinical features could be exploited for reidentification purposes. Various approaches have been developed to anonymize clinical data, but they neglect temporal information and are, thus, insufficient for emerging biomedical research paradigms. This paper proposes a novel approach to share patient-specific longitudinal data that offers robust privacy guarantees, while preserving data utility for many biomedical investigations. Our approach aggregates temporal and diagnostic information using heuristics inspired from sequence alignment and clustering methods. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate anonymized data that permit effective biomedical analysis using several patient cohorts derived from the EMR system of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.     

A heterogeneous dynamic model for the simulation and optimisation of the steam methane reforming reactor

In the current paper the dynamic behaviour of an industrial heterogeneous catalytic packed-bed reactor for the steam reforming of methane is examined. The model consists of a set of partial differential equations describing the physico-chemical processes that take place both in solid and gas phases accounting for diffusional limitations within the catalyst particles. The model was validated against literature data, while the heat provided to the reactor wall was optimised in terms of the optimal H₂ yield using a quadratic wall temperature profile. The values of the physico-chemical properties were adjusted to the severe operating conditions (high pressures and temperatures) of the reactor accounting for multicomponent gas mixture properties. It is shown that the 2-phase reactor concept along with the optimised wall temperature profile capture very well the dynamic conversion, the temperature and the partial pressure profiles both at bed and at particle level.     

Effect of in‐season calcium applications on cell wall physicochemical properties of nectarine fruit (Prunus persica var. nectarina Ait. Maxim) after harvest or cold storage

Pre‐harvest calcium sprays with calcium chloride or with a commercial chelated calcium form at equivalent calcium rate were applied in nectarine trees at weekly intervals beginning 4 or 8 weeks before harvest, respectively. The fruits were harvested at commercial maturity stage and cold stored (0 °C, 95% RH) for 0, 2, 4 and 6 weeks, prior to their ripening at room temperature (20 °C) for 1 and 5 days. The interrelations between calcium content (total, cell wall and pectin‐bound), cell wall components (polyuronide, neutral sugar and cellulose content) and tissue firmness of the nectarine fruits were examined. The two strategies (four or eight calcium sprays) were equally effective at increasing the fruit calcium content. Calcium increased by 14–25% in the peel and by 8–11% in the flesh, whereas cell wall calcium increased by 7–17% in calcium‐sprayed compared to non‐sprayed fruits after harvest. Cell wall and pectin calcium increased with the increase of storage time both in sprayed and non‐sprayed fruits without a corresponding increase of total calcium and uronic acid content, indicating the formation of more sites for calcium binding as storage period increased. Neutral sugar and cellulose content remained unaffected by the application of calcium sprays. Copyright © 2006 Society of Chemical Industry     

Optimal placement of wind turbines in a wind park using Monte Carlo simulation

In the present study, a novel procedure is introduced for the optimal placement and arrangement of wind turbines in a wind park. In this approach a statistical and mathematical method is used, which is called ‘Monte Carlo simulation method’. The optimization is made by the mean of maximum energy production and minimum cost installation criteria. As a test case, a square site is subdivided into 100 square cells that can be possible turbine locations and as a result, the program presents us the optimal arrangement of the wind turbines in the wind park, based on the Monte Carlo simulation method. The results of this study are compared to the results of previous studies that handle the same issue.