A Secure Grid Medical Data Manager Interfaced to the gLite Middleware

The medical community is producing and manipulating a tremendous volume of digital data for which computerized archiving, processing and analysis is needed. Grid infrastructures are promising for dealing with challenges arising in computerized medicine but the manipulation of medical data on such infrastructures faces both the problem of interconnecting medical information systems to Grid middlewares and of preserving patients’ privacy in a wide and distributed multi-user system. These constraints are often limiting the use of Grids for manipulating sensitive medical data. This paper describes our design of a medical data management system taking advantage of the advanced gLite data management services, developed in the context of the EGEE project, to fulfill the stringent needs of the medical community. It ensures medical data protection through strict data access control, anonymization and encryption. The multi-level access control provides the flexibility needed for implementing complex medical use-cases. Data anonymization prevents the exposure of most sensitive data to unauthorized users, and data encryption guarantees data protection even when it is stored at remote sites. Moreover, the developed prototype provides a Grid storage resource manager (SRM) interface to standard medical DICOM servers thereby enabling transparent access to medical data without interfering with medical practice.     

Trajectory reconstruction with uncertainty estimation using mosaic registration

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the 3D trajectory and associated uncertainty of an underwater autonomous vehicle from a set of images of the seabed taken by an onboard camera. The presented algorithms resort to the use of video mosaics and build upon previous work on image registration and visual pose estimation. The pose estimation is accomplished in two steps. Firstly, a video mosaic is created automatically, covering a region of interest of the seabed. Then, after associating a 3D referential for the mosaic, the estimation of the camera position from a new view of the scene becomes possible.

The main contribution of this paper lies on the assessment of the performance of the 3D pose algorithms. In order to do this, an image sequence with available ground-truth is used for precise error measuring. A first-order error propagation analysis is presented, relating the uncertainty in the location of the match points with the uncertainty in the pose parameters. The importance of predicting the estimate uncertainty is emphasized by the fact that it can be used for comparing algorithms and for the on-line monitoring of the vehicle trajectory reconstruction quality.

Several iterative and non-iterative pose estimation methods are discussed, differing both on the criteria being minimized and on the required information about the camera intrinsic parameters. This information ranges from the full knowledge of the parameters, to the case where they are estimated using self-calibration from an image sequence under pure rotation. The implemented pose algorithms are compared for the accuracy and estimate covariance.     

Locally perceiving hard global constraints in multi-agent scheduling

We propose how to model enterprise facilities (like factories, warehouses, etc.) in a multi-product production/distribution network, capacity management at those facilities, and scheduling agents which act as enterprise managers, taking decisions that affect the available capacity. A coordination mechanism through which scheduling agents can locally perceive hard global temporal constraints is also proposed.     

Holistic context models for visual recognition

A novel framework to context modeling based on the probability of co-occurrence of objects and scenes is proposed. The modeling is quite simple, and builds upon the availability of robust appearance classifiers. Images are represented by their posterior probabilities with respect to a set of contextual models, built upon the bag-of-features image representation, through two layers of probabilistic modeling. The first layer represents the image in a semantic space, where each dimension encodes an appearance-based posterior probability with respect to a concept. Due to the inherent ambiguity of classifying image patches, this representation suffers from a certain amount of contextual noise. The second layer enables robust inference in the presence of this noise by modeling the distribution of each concept in the semantic space. A thorough and systematic experimental evaluation of the proposed context modeling is presented. It is shown that it captures the contextual “gist” of natural images. Scene classification experiments show that contextual classifiers outperform their appearance-based counterparts, irrespective of the precise choice and accuracy of the latter. The effectiveness of the proposed approach to context modeling is further demonstrated through a comparison to existing approaches on scene classification and image retrieval, on benchmark data sets. In all cases, the proposed approach achieves superior results.     

Quantitative analysis of pore patterns on rat prostate nuclei using spatial statistics methods

Spatial statistics methods have been used to analyse the nuclear pore pattern in rat ventral prostate nuclei isolated from adult animals. The observed results show that: (1) pores on prostate nuclear membranes are not randomly distributed; (2) the data sets obtained from different micrographs are consistent with the same statistical model thus suggesting the existence of a typical pore distribution.     

Strawberries from integrated pest management and organic farming: Phenolic composition and antioxidant properties

Consumer awareness, pesticide and fertilizer contaminations and environmental concerns have resulted in significant demand for organically grown farm produce. Consumption of berries has become popular among health-conscious consumers due to the high levels of valuable antioxidants, such as anthocyanins and other phenolic compounds. The present study evaluated the influence that organic farming (OF) and integrated pest management (IPM) practise exert on the total phenolic content in 22 strawberry samples from four varieties. Postharvest performance of OF and IPM strawberries grown in the same area in the centre of Portugal and harvested at the same maturity stage were compared. Chemical profiles (phenolic compounds) were determined with the aid of HPLC-DAD/MS. Total phenolic content was higher for OF strawberry extracts. This study showed that the main differences in bioactive phytochemicals between organically and IPM grown strawberries concerned their anthocyanin levels. Organically grown strawberries were significantly higher in antioxidant activity than were the IPM strawberries, as measured by DPPH and FRAP assays.     

Mechanical alloying and field assisted hot pressing of nanocrystalline B2-NiAl intermetallic compound

Abstract

Ordered B2-NiAl intermetallic compound powder was successfully synthesised by mechanical alloying after 20 h in an attritor mill, starting from elemental Ni and Al powders and without subsequent heat treatment. NiAl powder obtained was homogenous and had a nanocrystalline microstructure. It was consolidated by field assisted hot pressing (FAHP), in a novel configuration with a Gleeble 3800 thermomechanical simulator. The powder was also processed by hot isostatic pressing (HIP) in order to compare both methods. The consolidation was successful by both methods obtaining above 98% of NiAl theoretical density (5·86 g cm^?3). The results showed that the consolidation process by FAHP technique is effective and uniform throughout the sample as indicated by homogenous hardness values, obtaining microstructure and properties similar to those obtained with HIP technique, with certain advantages over it. The achieved room temperature yield strength of 850 MPa and fracture strain 26–28% corresponds to the bulk values of NiAl intermetallic.     

Time and space for segmenting personal photo sets

Multimedia Tools and Applications - A personal collection of photos shows large variability in the depicted items, making difficult a fully automated solution to cope with sensory and semantic...