Volumetric quantification of atherosclerotic plaque in CT considering partial volume effect

Coronary artery calcification (CAC) is quantified based on a computed tomography (CT) scan image. A calcified region is identified. Modified expectation maximization (MEM) of a statistical model for the calcified and background material is used to estimate the partial calcium content of the voxels. The algorithm limits the region over which MEM is performed. By using MEM, the statistical properties of the model are iteratively updated based on the calculated resultant calcium distribution from the previous iteration. The estimated statistical properties are used to generate a map of the partial calcium content in the calcified region. The volume of calcium in the calcified region is determined based on the map. The experimental results on a cardiac phantom, scanned 90 times using 15 different protocols, demonstrate that the proposed method is less sensitive to partial volume effect and noise, with average error of 9.5% (standard deviation (SD) of 5-7mm(3)) compared with 67% (SD of 3-20mm(3)) for conventional techniques. The high reproducibility of the proposed method for 35 patients, scanned twice using the same protocol at a minimum interval of 10 min, shows that the method provides 2-3 times lower interscan variation than conventional techniques.     

Study of flow field,heat transfer,and entropy generation of nanofluid turbulent natural convection in an enclosure utilizing the computational fluid dynamics‐artificial neural network hybrid method

In this study, the turbulent natural convection of Ag‐water nanofluid in a tall, inclined enclosure has been investigated. The main objective of this study is finding the optimized angle of the enclosure with operational boundary condition in cooling from ceiling utilizing the computational fluid dynamics‐artificial neural network (CFD‐ANN) hybrid method, which has not been noticed in previous studies. To achieve this, we proposed two approaches. First, the simulations have been done with a deviation angle of 0 to 90° by using water and Ag‐water nanofluid. And second, a new prediction approach is proposed based on radial basis function artificial neural networks (RBF‐ANN) to predict the mean Nusselt number and entropy generation with the variation of Rayleigh numbers, deviation angles, and volume fractions as inputs. The results from the first approach indicate that the Rayleigh number has a considerable function in the determination of optimized angle. The results from the second approach, which used the first approach simulation results as training data set, could predict the mean Nusselt number and entropy generation with 1.4577e^?022 and 1.552e^?015 mean square error, respectively. Moreover, a new set of data for Rayleigh numbers, deviation angles, and volume fractions were used to test the performance of the prediction model, which shows promising and superior prospects for RBF‐ANN.