Abstract: Breast cancer detection techniques have been reported
to aid radiologists in analyzing mammograms. We note that most
techniques are performed on uncompressed digital mammograms.
Mammogram images are huge in size necessitating the use of
compression to reduce storage/transmission requirements. In this
paper, we present an algorithm for the detection of
microcalcifications in the JPEG2000 domain. The algorithm is based
on the statistical properties of the wavelet transform that the
JPEG2000 coder employs. Simulation results were carried out at
different compression ratios. The sensitivity of this algorithm ranges
from 92% with a false positive rate of 4.7 down to 66% with a false
positive rate of 2.1 using lossless compression and lossy compression
at a compression ratio of 100:1, respectively.
Abstract: It is known that the heart interacts with and adapts to its venous and arterial loading conditions. Various experimental studies and modeling approaches have been developed to investigate the underlying mechanisms. This paper presents a model of the left ventricle derived based on nonlinear stress-length myocardial characteristics integrated over truncated ellipsoidal geometry, and second-order dynamic mechanism for the excitation-contraction coupling system. The results of the model presented here describe the effects of the viscoelastic damping element of the electromechanical coupling system on the hemodynamic response. Different heart rates are considered to study the pacing effects on the performance of the left-ventricle against constant preload and afterload conditions under various damping conditions. The results indicate that the pacing process of the left ventricle has to take into account, among other things, the viscoelastic damping conditions of the myofilament excitation-contraction process. The effects of left ventricular dimensions on the hemdynamic response have been examined. These effects are found to be different at different viscoelastic and pacing conditions.
Abstract: With the extensive inclusion of document, especially
text, in the business systems, data mining does not cover the full
scope of Business Intelligence. Data mining cannot deliver its impact
on extracting useful details from the large collection of unstructured
and semi-structured written materials based on natural languages.
The most pressing issue is to draw the potential business intelligence
from text. In order to gain competitive advantages for the business, it
is necessary to develop the new powerful tool, text mining, to expand
the scope of business intelligence.
In this paper, we will work out the strong points of text mining in
extracting business intelligence from huge amount of textual
information sources within business systems. We will apply text
mining to each stage of Business Intelligence systems to prove that
text mining is the powerful tool to expand the scope of BI. After
reviewing basic definitions and some related technologies, we will
discuss the relationship and the benefits of these to text mining. Some
examples and applications of text mining will also be given. The
motivation behind is to develop new approach to effective and
efficient textual information analysis. Thus we can expand the scope
of Business Intelligence using the powerful tool, text mining.
Abstract: A. niger XP isolated from Vietnam produces very low amount of acidic phytase with optimal pH at 2.5 and 5.5. The phytase production of this strain was successfully improved through gene cloning and expression. A 1.4 - kb DNA fragment containing the coding region of the phyA gene was amplified by PCR and inserted into the expression vector pPICZαA with a signal peptide α- factor, under the control of AOX1 promoter. The recombined plasmid was transformed into the host strain P. pastoris KM71H and X33 by electroporation. Both host strains could efficiently express and secret phytase. The multicopy strains were screened for over expression of phytase. All the selected multicopy strains of P. pastoris X33 were examined for phytase activity, the maximum phytase yield of 1329 IU/ml was obtained after 4 days of incubation in medium BMM. The recombinant protein with MW of 97.4 KW showed to be the only one protein secreted in the culture broth. Multicopy transformant P. pastoris X33 supposed to be potential candidate for producing the commercial preparation of phytase.
Abstract: This study presents the numerical simulation of
optimum pin-fin heat sink with air impinging cooling by using
Taguchi method. 9 L ( 4 3 ) orthogonal array is selected as a plan for
the four design-parameters with three levels. The governing
equations are discretized by using the
control-volume-based-finite-difference method with a power-law
scheme on the non-uniform staggered grid. We solved the coupling of
the velocity and the pressure terms of momentum equations using
SIMPLEC algorithm. We employ the k −ε two-equations
turbulence model to describe the turbulent behavior. The parameters
studied include fin height H (35mm-45mm), inter-fin spacing a , b ,
and c (2 mm-6.4 mm), and Reynolds number ( Re = 10000- 25000).
The objective of this study is to examine the effects of the fin
spacings and fin height on the thermal resistance and to find the
optimum group by using the Taguchi method. We found that the fin
spacings from the center to the edge of the heat sink gradually
extended, and the longer the fin’s height the better the results. The
optimum group is 3 1 2 3 H a b c . In addition, the effects of parameters are
ranked by importance as a , H , c , and b .
Abstract: Sustainability in rural production system can only be achieved if it can suitably satisfy the local requirement as well as the outside demand with the changing time. With the increased pressure from the food sector in a globalised world, the agrarian economy
needs to re-organise its cultivable land system to be compatible with new management practices as well as the multiple needs of various stakeholders and the changing resource scenario. An attempt has been made to transform this problem into a multi-objective decisionmaking problem considering various objectives, resource constraints and conditional constraints. An interactive fuzzy multi-objective
programming approach has been used for such a purpose taking a
case study in Indian context to demonstrate the validity of the method.
Abstract: Fatigue tests of specimen-s with numerous holes are
presented. The tests were made up till fatigue cracks have been
created on both sides of the hole. Their extension was stopping with
pressed plastic deformation at the mouth of the detected crack. It is
shown that the moments of occurrence of cracks on holes are
stochastically dependent. This dependence has positive and negative
correlation relations. Shown that the positive correlation is formed
across of the applied force, while negative one – along it. The
negative relationship extends over a greater distance. The
mathematical model of dependence area formation is represented as
well as the estimating of model parameters. The positive correlation
of fatigue cracks origination can be considered as an extension of one
main crack. With negative correlation the first crack locates the place
of its origin, leading to the appearance of multiple cracks; do not
merge with each other.
Abstract: Deployment of pneumatic muscles in various
industrial applications is still in its early days, considering the relative
newness of these components. The field of robotics holds particular
future potential for pneumatic muscles, especially in view of their
specific behaviour known as compliance. The paper presents and
discusses an innovative constructive solution for a gripper system
mountable on an industrial robot, based on actuation by a linear
pneumatic muscle and transmission of motion by gear and rack
mechanism. The structural, operational and constructive models of
the new gripper are presented, along with some of the experimental
results obtained subsequently to the testing of a prototype. Further
presented are two control variants of the gripper system, one by
means of a 3/2-way fast-switching solenoid valve, the other by means
of a proportional pressure regulator. Advantages and disadvantages
are discussed for both variants.
Abstract: In this study, an optimization of supersonic air-to-air ejector is carried out by a recently developed single-objective genetic algorithm based on adaption of sequence of individuals. Adaptation of sequence is based on Shape-based distance of individuals and embedded micro-genetic algorithm. The optimal sequence found defines the succession of CFD-aimed objective calculation within each generation of regular micro-genetic algorithm. A spring-based deformation mutates the computational grid starting the initial individualvia adapted population in the optimized sequence. Selection of a generation initial individual is knowledge-based. A direct comparison of the newly defined and standard micro-genetic algorithm is carried out for supersonic air-to-air ejector. The only objective is to minimize the loose of total stagnation pressure in the ejector. The result is that sequence-adopted micro-genetic algorithm can provide comparative results to standard algorithm but in significantly lower number of overall CFD iteration steps.
Abstract: Discharges in hydrogen, ignited by wire explosion, with current amplitude up to 1.5 MA were investigated. Channel diameter oscillations were observed on the photostreaks. Voltage and current curves correlated with the photostreaks. At initial gas pressure of 5-35 MPa the oscillation period was proportional to square root of atomic number of the initiating wire material. These oscillations were associated with aligned magnetic and gas-kinetic pressures. At initial pressure of 80-160 MPa acoustic pressure fluctuations on the discharge chamber wall were increased up to 150 MPa and there were the growth of voltage fluctuations on the discharge gap up to 3 kV simultaneously with it. In some experiments it was observed abrupt increase in the oscillation amplitude, which can be caused by the resonance of the acoustic oscillations in discharge chamber volume and the oscillations connected with alignment of the gaskinetic pressure and the magnetic pressure, as far as frequencies of these oscillations are close to each other in accordance with the estimates and the experimental data. Resonance of different type oscillations can produce energy density increasing in the discharge channel. Thus, the appropriate initial conditions in the experiment allow to increase the energy density in the discharge channel
Abstract: In this work, Experimental tie-line results and
solubility (binodal) curves were obtained for the ternary systems
(water + acetic acid + methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK)), (water +
lactic acid+ methyl isobutyl ketone) at T = 294.15K and atmospheric
pressure. The consistency of the values of the experimental tie-lines
was determined through the Othmer-Tobias and Hands correlations.
For the extraction effectiveness of solvents, the distribution and
selectivity curves were plotted. In addition, these experimental tieline
data were also correlated with NRTL model. The interaction
parameters for the NRTL model were retrieved from the obtained
experimental results by means of a combination of the homotopy
method and the genetic algorithms.
Abstract: The study examines the determinants of corporate cash holding of non-financial quoted firms in Nigeria using a sample of fifty four non-financial quoted firms listed on the Nigeria Stock Exchange for the period 1995-2009. Data were sourced from the Annual reports of the sampled firms and analyzed using Generalized Method of Moments(GMM). The study finds evidence supportive of a target adjustment model and that firms can not instantaneously adjust towards the target cash level owing to the fact that adjustment cost being costly,. Also, the result shows significant negative relationship between cash holdings and firm size, net working capital, return on asset and bank relationship and positive relationship with growth opportunities, leverage, inventories, account receivables and financial distress. Furthermore, there is no significant relationship between cash holdings and cash flow. In Nigerian setting, most of the variables that are relevant for explaining cash holdings in the Developed countries are found by this study to be relevant also in Nigeria.
Abstract: Hydrodesulfurization (HDS) of dibenzothiophene
(DBT) in a high pressure batch reactor was done at 320 °C on
CoMoS/Al2O3-B2O3 (4, 10, and 16 wt. % of Boria) using nhexadecane
as solvent, dimethyldisulfide (DMDS) in tetradecane as
sulfur agent, and stirring at 1000 rpm. The effects of boria were
investigated by using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Temperature
programmed desorption (TPD) of ammonia, and Brunauer-Emmet-
Teller (BET) experiments. The results showed that the catalyst
prepared with low boria content (4 wt. %) had HDS activity (in
pseudo first order kinetic constant basis) value ~1.45 times higher to
that of CoMoS/Al2O3 catalyst.
Abstract: Remarkable changes, like the progress in the ability to understand others' minds, can be identified in several socio-cognitive dimensions between age four and seven. Recently, the parenting attitudes have been considerate as one of the potential extrinsic modifiers of these important developmental aspects. The aim of present study is to explore the relationship among authoritarian parenting attitudes and individual differences in Theory of Mind performance. The study included ninety-two Costarrican preschoolers. Six False-belief tasks, an Advanced Theory of Mind test and the Parenting Attitudes Inventory were used. The results demonstrate that participants with high and low Authoritarian Parenting Received differ in their performance on First and Second Order False-belief tasks, but not in Advanced Theory of Mind tasks. Theoretical considerations about possible explanations regarding these results are discussed and methodological limitations are considered to shed light over future directions.
Abstract: The scientific achievements coming from molecular
biology depend greatly on the capability of computational
applications to analyze the laboratorial results. A comprehensive
analysis of an experiment requires typically the simultaneous study
of the obtained dataset with data that is available in several distinct
public databases. Nevertheless, developing a centralized access to
these distributed databases rises up a set of challenges such as: what
is the best integration strategy, how to solve nomenclature clashes,
how to solve database overlapping data and how to deal with huge
datasets. In this paper we present GeNS, a system that uses a simple and yet innovative approach to address several biological data integration issues. Compared with existing systems, the main
advantages of GeNS are related to its maintenance simplicity and to its coverage and scalability, in terms of number of supported
databases and data types. To support our claims we present the current use of GeNS in two concrete applications. GeNS currently contains more than 140 million of biological relations and it can be
publicly downloaded or remotely access through SOAP web services.
Abstract: A talking head system (THS) is presented to animate
the face of a speaking 3D avatar in such a way that it realistically
pronounces the given Korean text. The proposed system consists of
SAPI compliant text-to-speech (TTS) engine and MPEG-4 compliant
face animation generator. The input to the THS is a unicode text that is
to be spoken with synchronized lip shape. The TTS engine generates a
phoneme sequence with their duration and audio data. The TTS
applies the coarticulation rules to the phoneme sequence and sends a
mouth animation sequence to the face modeler. The proposed THS can
make more natural lip sync and facial expression by using the face
animation generator than those using the conventional visemes only.
The experimental results show that our system has great potential for
the implementation of talking head for Korean text.
Abstract: In this paper, a novel associative memory model will be proposed and applied to memory retrievals based on the conventional continuous time model. The conventional model presents memory capacity is very low and retrieval process easily converges to an equilibrium state which is very different from the stored patterns. Genetic Algorithms is well-known with the capability of global optimal search escaping local optimum on progress to reach a global optimum. Based on the well-known idea of Genetic Algorithms, this work proposes a heuristic rule to make a mutation when the state of the network is trapped in a spurious memory. The proposal heuristic associative memory show the stored capacity does not depend on the number of stored patterns and the retrieval ability is up to ~ 1.
Abstract: The research on two-wheeled inverted pendulum (TWIP) mobile robots or commonly known as balancing robots have gained momentum over the last decade in a number of robotic laboratories around the world. This paper describes the hardware design of such a robot. The objective of the design is to develop a TWIP mobile robot as well as MATLAB interfacing configuration to be used as flexible platform comprises of embedded unstable linear plant intended for research and teaching purposes. Issues such as selection of actuators and sensors, signal processing units, MATLAB Real Time Workshop coding, modeling and control scheme will be addressed and discussed. The system is then tested using a wellknown state feedback controller to verify its functionality.
Abstract: The kinetics of palm oil catalytic cracking over
aluminum containing mesoporous silica Al-MCM-41 (5% Al) was
investigated in a batch autoclave reactor at the temperatures range of
573 – 673 K. The catalyst was prepared by using sol-gel technique
and has been characterized by nitrogen adsorption and x-ray
diffraction methods. Surface area of 1276 m2/g with average pore
diameter of 2.54 nm and pore volume of 0.811 cm3/g was obtained.
The experimental catalytic cracking runs were conducted using 50 g
of oil and 1 g of catalyst. The reaction pressure was recorded at
different time intervals and the data were analyzed using Levenberg-
Marquardt (LM) algorithm using polymath software. The results
show that the reaction order was found to be -1.5 and activation
energy of 3200 J/gmol.
Abstract: The steady incompressible flow has been solved in cylindrical coordinates in both vapour region and wick structure. The governing equations in vapour region are continuity, Navier-Stokes and energy equations. These equations have been solved using SIMPLE algorithm. For study of parameters variation on heat pipe operation, a benchmark has been chosen and the effect of changing one parameter has been analyzed when the others have been fixed.