Long-term self-intravenous "drinking" in the rat.

Results of a series of experiments show that male Wistar albino rats, when water was available only by intravenous self-injection, learned to rehydrate by pressing a lever even after desalivation and for periods up to 90 days. It appears that hydromineral regulation was occurring about a new, lower set point for body fluid content which was necessary for the onset and maintenance of intravenous "drinking." The regulatory nature of the operant was confirmed by appropriate modulation of operant rate to amount of reinforcement per leverpress and in tonicity of self-injected fluid. There seemed to be some "motivational deficits," and these Ss did not respond for intravenous water as the oral controls did when challenged with traditional intra- and extracellular thirst stimuli. More complex stimuli (e.g., heat and salty food) led to compensatory responding. While interoceptors alone seemed capable of eliciting the defense of a homeostatic hydromineral balance, the control over the operant was less precise than for normal oral drinking. (57 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Regularised analytical constant modulus algorithm for space–time coded systems

Space–time coding is an effective approach to increase the data rate and capacity of a wireless communication system that employs multiple transmit and multiple receive antennas. It involves coding techniques that are designed for multiple transmit antennas. We apply the analytical constant modulus algorithm (ACMA) for blind channel estimation (no use of training sequences) of space–time coded systems and explore the constant modulus (CM) constraints of the transmitted space–time codes (STCs). A regularised scheme that gives good performance in Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise environments is proposed. Computer simulation results in both single-user and multiuser cases show the improvement in error performance.     

Evaluating renewable carbon sources as substrates for single cell oil production by Cunninghamella echinulata and Mortierella isabellina

The biochemical behavior (biomass production, accumulation of total lipid, substrate uptake, fatty acid composition of fungal oil) of two oleaginous Mucorales strains, namely Mortierella isabellina ATHUM 2935 and Cunninghamella echinulata ATHUM 4411, was studied when the aforementioned microorganisms were cultivated on xylose, raw glycerol and glucose under nitrogen-limited conditions. Significant differences in the process of lipid accumulation as related to the carbon sources used were observed for both microorganisms. These differences were attributed to the different metabolic pathways involved in the assimilation of the above substrates. Therefore, the various carbon sources were channeled, at different extent, to storage lipid or to lipid-free biomass formation. Although glucose containing media favored the production of mycelial mass (15 g L^?1 of total biomass in the case of C. echinulata and 27 g L^?1 in the case of M. isabellina), the accumulated lipid in dry matter was 46.0% for C. echinulata and 44.6% for M. isabellina. Lipid accumulation was induced on xylose containing media (M. isabellina accumulated 65.5% and C. echinulata 57.7% of lipid, wt wt^?1, in dry mycelial mass). In these conditions, lipids of C. echinulata contained significant quantities of γ-linolenic acid (GLA). This fungus, when cultivated on xylose, produced 6.7 g L^?1 of single cell oil and 1119 mg L^?1 of GLA. Finally, the growth of both C. echinulata and M. isabellina on raw glycerol resulted in lower yields in terms of both biomass and oil produced than the growth on xylose.     

Hardware Architectures for the Efficient Implementation of Multi-Service Broadband Access and Multimedia Home Networks

In multimedia applications, the stringent requirements for balancing transmission capacity, flexible service provisioning and cost reduction lead the manufactures to provide highly integrated System-on Chip (SoC) solutions. This paper analyzes the application of high-bandwidth-networking SoCs to improve on the cost efficiency of multimedia service distribution in home networks. We present a case study, where we utilize the inherent protocol processing capabilities and high bandwidth interfaces of a modern network processor, scaled down to match the performance targets and low cost requirements of the home networking environment. An efficient, low cost Residential Gateway architecture results by mapping the home services onto the processing and memory blocks of this SoC. This revised version was published online in September 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A recurrent neural network architecture to model physical activity energy expenditure in older people

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - Through the quantification of physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE), health care monitoring has the potential to stimulate vital and healthy ageing,...     

Improved Izhikevich neurons for spiking neural networks

Spiking neural networks constitute a modern neural network paradigm that overlaps machine learning and computational neurosciences. Spiking neural networks use neuron models that possess a great degree of biological realism. The most realistic model of the neuron is the one created by Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. However, the Hodgkin–Huxley model, while accurate, is computationally very inefficient. Eugene Izhikevich created a simplified neuron model based on the Hodgkin–Huxley equations. This model has better computational efficiency than the original proposed by Hodgkin and Huxley, and yet it can successfully reproduce all known firing patterns. However, there are not many articles dealing with implementations of this model for a functional neural network. This study presents a spiking neural network architecture that utilizes improved Izhikevich neurons with the purpose of evaluating its speed and efficiency. Since the field of spiking neural networks has reinvigorated the interest in biological plausibility, biological realism was an additional goal. The network is tested on the correct classification of logic gates (including XOR) and on the iris dataset. Results and possible improvements are also discussed.     

A fully automated scheme for mammographic segmentation and classification based on breast density and asymmetry

This paper presents a fully automated segmentation and classification scheme for mammograms, based on breast density estimation and detection of asymmetry. First, image preprocessing and segmentation techniques are applied, including a breast boundary extraction algorithm and an improved version of a pectoral muscle segmentation scheme. Features for breast density categorization are extracted, including a new fractal dimension-related feature, and support vector machines (SVMs) are employed for classification, achieving accuracy of up to 85.7%. Most of these properties are used to extract a new set of statistical features for each breast; the differences among these feature values from the two images of each pair of mammograms are used to detect breast asymmetry, using an one-class SVM classifier, which resulted in a success rate of 84.47%. This composite methodology has been applied to the miniMIAS database, consisting of 322 (MLO) mammograms -including 15 asymmetric pairs of images-, obtained via a (noisy) digitization procedure. The results were evaluated by expert radiologists and are very promising, showing equal or higher success rates compared to other related works, despite the fact that some of them used only selected portions of this specific mammographic database. In contrast, our methodology is applied to the complete miniMIAS database and it exhibits the reliability that is normally required for clinical use in CAD systems.     

Visual Focus of Attention in Non-calibrated Environments using Gaze Estimation

Estimating the focus of attention of a person highly depends on her/his gaze directionality. Here, we propose a new method for estimating visual focus of attention using head rotation, as well as fuzzy fusion of head rotation and eye gaze estimates, in a fully automatic manner, without the need for any special hardware or a priori knowledge regarding the user, the environment or the setup. Instead, we propose a system aimed at functioning under unpretending conditions, only with the usage of simple hardware, like a normal web-camera. Our system is aimed at functioning in a human-computer interaction environment, considering a person is facing a monitor with a camera adjusted on top. To this aim, we propose in this paper two novel techniques, based on local and appearance information, estimating head rotation, and we adaptively fuse them in a common framework. The system is able to recognize head rotational movement, under translational movements of the user towards any direction, without any knowledge or a-priori estimate of the user’s distance from the camera or camera intrinsic parameters.     

QoS handover management for multimedia LEO satellite networks

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems gained considerable interest towards the end of the previous decade by virtue of some of the appealing features that are endowed with, such as low propagation delay and the ability to communicate with handheld terminals. However, after the limited commercial success of the first networks of this kind, future satellite networks are now conceived as complementary rather than competitive to terrestrial networks. In this paper, we focus on one of the most influential factors in system performance, that is, the handover of a call. First, we provide a succinct review of the handover strategies that have been proposed in the literature. Then we propose two different satellite handover techniques for broadband LEO satellite systems that capitalize upon the satellite diversity that a system may provide. The proposed schemes cater for multimedia traffic and are based on the queuing of handover requests. Moreover, a deallocation scheme is also proposed according to which capacity reservation requests are countermanded when the capacity that they strive to reserve is unlikely to be used. Simulation studies further document and confirm the positive characteristics of the proposed handover schemes.