Automatic Relevance Determination for multi-way models

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mørup, Morten; Hansen, Lars Kai

2009-01-01

of components of data within the Tucker and CP structure. For the Tucker and CP model the approach performs better than heuristics such as the Bayesian Information Criterion, Akaikes Information Criterion, DIFFIT and the numerical convex hull (NumConvHull) while operating only at the cost of estimating...... is available for download at www.erpwavelab.org....

Precision about the automatic emotional brain.

Science.gov (United States)

Vuilleumier, Patrik

2015-01-01

The question of automaticity in emotion processing has been debated under different perspectives in recent years. Satisfying answers to this issue will require a better definition of automaticity in terms of relevant behavioral phenomena, ecological conditions of occurrence, and a more precise mechanistic account of the underlying neural circuits.

Determination of uranium and plutonium in PFBR MOX fuel using automatic potentiometric titrator

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kelkar, Anoop; Meena, D.L.; Singh, Mamta; Kapoor, Y.S.; Pabale, Sagar; Fulzele, Ajit; Das, D.K.; Behere, P.G.; Afzal, Mohd

2014-01-01

Present paper describes the automatic potentiometric method for the determination of uranium and plutonium in less complexing H 2 SO 4 with scaling down the reagent volumes 15-20 ml in order to minimize the waste generation

An Automatic Indirect Immunofluorescence Cell Segmentation System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yung-Kuan Chan

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Indirect immunofluorescence (IIF with HEp-2 cells has been used for the detection of antinuclear autoantibodies (ANA in systemic autoimmune diseases. The ANA testing allows us to scan a broad range of autoantibody entities and to describe them by distinct fluorescence patterns. Automatic inspection for fluorescence patterns in an IIF image can assist physicians, without relevant experience, in making correct diagnosis. How to segment the cells from an IIF image is essential in developing an automatic inspection system for ANA testing. This paper focuses on the cell detection and segmentation; an efficient method is proposed for automatically detecting the cells with fluorescence pattern in an IIF image. Cell culture is a process in which cells grow under control. Cell counting technology plays an important role in measuring the cell density in a culture tank. Moreover, assessing medium suitability, determining population doubling times, and monitoring cell growth in cultures all require a means of quantifying cell population. The proposed method also can be used to count the cells from an image taken under a fluorescence microscope.

Relevant or determinant: Importance in certified sustainable food consumption

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Dam, van Y.K.; Trijp, van J.C.M.

2013-01-01

Perceived relevance and determinance are two distinct constructs, underlying the overall concept of attribute importance. The present study proposes a survey based measure of attribute determinance. Based on construal level theory it is argued and empirically shown that actual choices of certified

A relevance vector machine technique for the automatic detection of clustered microcalcifications (Honorable Mention Poster Award)

Science.gov (United States)

Wei, Liyang; Yang, Yongyi; Nishikawa, Robert M.

2005-04-01

Microcalcification (MC) clusters in mammograms can be important early signs of breast cancer in women. Accurate detection of MC clusters is an important but challenging problem. In this paper, we propose the use of a recently developed machine learning technique -- relevance vector machine (RVM) -- for automatic detection of MCs in digitized mammograms. RVM is based on Bayesian estimation theory, and as a feature it can yield a decision function that depends on only a very small number of so-called relevance vectors. We formulate MC detection as a supervised-learning problem, and use RVM to classify if an MC object is present or not at each location in a mammogram image. MC clusters are then identified by grouping the detected MC objects. The proposed method is tested using a database of 141 clinical mammograms, and compared with a support vector machine (SVM) classifier which we developed previously. The detection performance is evaluated using the free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curves. It is demonstrated that the RVM classifier matches closely with the SVM classifier in detection performance, and does so with a much sparser kernel representation than the SVM classifier. Consequently, the RVM classifier greatly reduces the computational complexity, making it more suitable for real-time processing of MC clusters in mammograms.

Automatic summarization of soccer highlights using audio-visual descriptors.

Science.gov (United States)

Raventós, A; Quijada, R; Torres, Luis; Tarrés, Francesc

2015-01-01

Automatic summarization generation of sports video content has been object of great interest for many years. Although semantic descriptions techniques have been proposed, many of the approaches still rely on low-level video descriptors that render quite limited results due to the complexity of the problem and to the low capability of the descriptors to represent semantic content. In this paper, a new approach for automatic highlights summarization generation of soccer videos using audio-visual descriptors is presented. The approach is based on the segmentation of the video sequence into shots that will be further analyzed to determine its relevance and interest. Of special interest in the approach is the use of the audio information that provides additional robustness to the overall performance of the summarization system. For every video shot a set of low and mid level audio-visual descriptors are computed and lately adequately combined in order to obtain different relevance measures based on empirical knowledge rules. The final summary is generated by selecting those shots with highest interest according to the specifications of the user and the results of relevance measures. A variety of results are presented with real soccer video sequences that prove the validity of the approach.

Radio-controlled automatic gas meter-reading system; Releve automatique de compteur par radio

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yasui, M. [Osaka Gas Co., Ltd (Japan); Ishikawa, K.; Fujiwara, J. [Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. (Japan); Ichihashi, T. [Toho Gas Co., Ltd. (Japan)

2000-07-01

In Japan, an automatic gas meter-reading system is in operation, also incorporating the functions of monitoring for abnormalities in gas use and remote-controlled emergency gas supply shutoff. This system has been realized by linking microcomputer-controlled gas meters(It's called 'Intelligent gas mater') equipped with automatic shutoff mechanism to the gas utility company operation center via communication lines. While the present system uses cable communication lines, we of Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd., Osaka Gas Co., Ltd. and Toho Gas Co., Ltd., have jointly developed a new system based on radio communication. This paper introduces this new system. While radio-controlled meter-reading systems are used in many countries around the world solely for automatic meter reading, our recently developed system is also capable of monitoring for abnormalities in gas use and remote-controlled emergency gas supply shutoff, thanks to its almost real-time two-way communication function. The new system can serve for a period of ten years without recharging. It is also characterized by its applicability as different systems according to purposes: 1) conventional automatic meter-reading system (terminal network control unit or T-NCU), 2) large-scale radio-controlled meter-reading system, and 3) portable terminal-type radio-controlled meter-reading system. (authors)

Automatic Determination of Fiber-Length Distribution in Composite Material Using 3D CT Data

Science.gov (United States)

Teßmann, Matthias; Mohr, Stephan; Gayetskyy, Svitlana; Haßler, Ulf; Hanke, Randolf; Greiner, Günther

2010-12-01

Determining fiber length distribution in fiber reinforced polymer components is a crucial step in quality assurance, since fiber length has a strong influence on overall strength, stiffness, and stability of the material. The approximate fiber length distribution is usually determined early in the development process, as conventional methods require a destruction of the sample component. In this paper, a novel, automatic, and nondestructive approach for the determination of fiber length distribution in fiber reinforced polymers is presented. For this purpose, high-resolution computed tomography is used as imaging method together with subsequent image analysis for evaluation. The image analysis consists of an iterative process where single fibers are detected automatically in each iteration step after having applied image enhancement algorithms. Subsequently, a model-based approach is used together with a priori information in order to guide a fiber tracing and segmentation process. Thereby, the length of the segmented fibers can be calculated and a length distribution can be deduced. The performance and the robustness of the segmentation method is demonstrated by applying it to artificially generated test data and selected real components.

The temporal-relevance temporal-uncertainty model of prospective duration judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Zakay, Dan

2015-12-15

A model aimed at explaining prospective duration judgments in real life settings (as well as in the laboratory) is presented. The model is based on the assumption that situational meaning is continuously being extracted by humans' perceptual and cognitive information processing systems. Time is one of the important dimensions of situational meaning. Based on the situational meaning, a value for Temporal Relevance is set. Temporal Relevance reflects the importance of temporal aspects for enabling adaptive behavior in a specific moment in time. When Temporal Relevance is above a certain threshold a prospective duration judgment process is evoked automatically. In addition, a search for relevant temporal information is taking place and its outcomes determine the level of Temporal Uncertainty which reflects the degree of knowledge one has regarding temporal aspects of the task to be performed. The levels of Temporal Relevance and Temporal Uncertainty determine the amount of attentional resources allocated for timing by the executive system. The merit of the model is in connecting timing processes with the ongoing general information processing stream. The model rests on findings in various domains which indicate that cognitive-relevance and self-relevance are powerful determinants of resource allocation policy. The feasibility of the model is demonstrated by analyzing various temporal phenomena. Suggestions for further empirical validation of the model are presented. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automatic determination of the size of elliptical nanoparticles from AFM images

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sedlář, Jiří; Zitová, Barbara; Kopeček, Jaromír; Flusser, Jan; Todorciuc, Tatiana; Kratochvílová, Irena

2013-01-01

The objective of this work was to develop an accurate method for automatic determination of the size of elliptical nanoparticles from atomic force microscopy (AFM) images that would yield results consistent with results of manual measurements by experts. The proposed method was applied on phenylpyridyldiketopyrrolopyrrole (PPDP), a granular organic material with a wide scale of application and highly sensitive particle-size properties. A PPDP layer consists of similarly sized elliptical particles (c. 100 nm × 50 nm) and its properties can be estimated from the average length and width of the particles. The developed method is based on segmentation of salient particles by the watershed transform and approximation of their shapes by ellipses computed by image moments; it estimates the lengths and widths of the particles by the major and minor axes, respectively, of the corresponding ellipses. Its results proved to be consistent with results of manual measurements by a trained expert. The comparison showed that the developed method could be used in practice for precise automatic measurement of PPDP particles in AFM images

Automatic Determination of Fiber-Length Distribution in Composite Material Using 3D CT Data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Günther Greiner

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Determining fiber length distribution in fiber reinforced polymer components is a crucial step in quality assurance, since fiber length has a strong influence on overall strength, stiffness, and stability of the material. The approximate fiber length distribution is usually determined early in the development process, as conventional methods require a destruction of the sample component. In this paper, a novel, automatic, and nondestructive approach for the determination of fiber length distribution in fiber reinforced polymers is presented. For this purpose, high-resolution computed tomography is used as imaging method together with subsequent image analysis for evaluation. The image analysis consists of an iterative process where single fibers are detected automatically in each iteration step after having applied image enhancement algorithms. Subsequently, a model-based approach is used together with a priori information in order to guide a fiber tracing and segmentation process. Thereby, the length of the segmented fibers can be calculated and a length distribution can be deduced. The performance and the robustness of the segmentation method is demonstrated by applying it to artificially generated test data and selected real components.

Profiling School Shooters: Automatic Text-Based Analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yair eNeuman

2015-06-01

Full Text Available School shooters present a challenge to both forensic psychiatry and law enforcement agencies. The relatively small number of school shooters, their various charateristics, and the lack of in-depth analysis of all of the shooters prior to the shooting add complexity to our understanding of this problem. In this short paper, we introduce a new methodology for automatically profiling school shooters. The methodology involves automatic analysis of texts and the production of several measures relevant for the identification of the shooters. Comparing texts written by six school shooters to 6056 texts written by a comparison group of male subjects, we found that the shooters' texts scored significantly higher on the Narcissistic Personality dimension as well as on the Humilated and Revengeful dimensions. Using a ranking/priorization procedure, similar to the one used for the automatic identification of sexual predators, we provide support for the validity and relevance of the proposed methodology.

Determination of boron as boric acid by automatic potentiometric titration

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Midgley, D.

1988-06-01

Boron in PWR primary coolant and related waters may be determined as boric acid by titration with sodium hydroxide, using a glass electrode as a pH indicator. With a modern automatic titrator, the analysis is quick, convenient, accurate and precise. In the titration of 8 mg B (e.g. 4 ml of 2000 mg 1 -1 solution), no significant bias was observed and relative standard deviations were about 0.25%. With 0.8 g B, a bias of about 2% appears, although this could be reduced by restandardizing the titrant, but the relative standard deviation was still -1 B, depending on the stage of the fuel cycle. (author)

Porosity determination on pyrocarbon by means of automatic quantitative image analysis

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Koizlik, K.; Uhlenbruck, U.; Delle, W.; Hoven, H.; Nickel, H.

1976-05-01

For a long time, the quantitative image analysis is well known as a method for quantifying the results of material investigation basing on ceramography. The development of the automatic image analyzers has made it a fast and elegant procedure for evaluation. Since 1975, it is used in IRW to determine easily and routinely the macroporosity and by this the density of the pyrocarbon coatings of nuclear fuel particles. This report describes the definition of measuring parameters, the measuring procedure, the mathematical calculations, and first experimental and mathematical results.

Automatic colorimetric determination of low concentrations of sulphate for measuring sulphur dioxide in ambient air

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Persson, G A

1966-01-01

An automatic colorimetric method for the determination of low concentrations of sulphate (0-10 microgram/ml) using the thoron indicator is described. Total amounts of sulphate as small as 0.3 micrograms can be determined. The sulphate is precipitated with barium perchlorate and the excess of barium is indicated with 1-(o-arsenophenylazo)-2-naphthol-3-6-disulfonic acid(thoron). The procedure is worked out primarily for the determination of sulphur dioxide in air after absorption in diluted hydrogen peroxide.

Great SEP events and space weather: 2. Automatic determination of the solar energetic particle spectrum

Science.gov (United States)

Applbaum, David; Dorman, Lev; Pustil'Nik, Lev; Sternlieb, Abraham; Zagnetko, Alexander; Zukerman, Igor

In Applbaum et al. (2010) it was described how the "SEP-Search" program works automat-ically, determining on the basis of on-line one-minute NM data the beginning of a great SEP event. The "SEP-Search" next uses one-minute data in order to check whether or not the observed increase reflects the beginning of a real great SEP event. If yes, the program "SEP-Research/Spectrum" automatically starts to work on line. We consider two variants: 1) quiet period (no change in cut-off rigidity), 2) disturbed period (characterized with possible changing of cut-off rigidity). We describe the method of determining the spectrum of SEP in the 1st vari-ant (for this we need data for at least two components with different coupling functions). For the 2nd variant we need data for at least three components with different coupling functions. We show that for these purposes one can use data of the total intensity and some different mul-tiplicities, but that it is better to use data from two or three NM with different cut-off rigidities. We describe in detail the algorithms of the program "SEP-Research/Spectrum." We show how this program worked on examples of some historical great SEP events. The work of NM on Mt. Hermon is supported by Israel (Tel Aviv University and ISA) -Italian (UNIRoma-Tre and IFSI-CNR) collaboration.

A Compositional Relevance Model for Adaptive Information Retrieval

Science.gov (United States)

Mathe, Nathalie; Chen, James; Lu, Henry, Jr. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

There is a growing need for rapid and effective access to information in large electronic documentation systems. Access can be facilitated if information relevant in the current problem solving context can be automatically supplied to the user. This includes information relevant to particular user profiles, tasks being performed, and problems being solved. However most of this knowledge on contextual relevance is not found within the contents of documents, and current hypermedia tools do not provide any easy mechanism to let users add this knowledge to their documents. We propose a compositional relevance network to automatically acquire the context in which previous information was found relevant. The model records information on the relevance of references based on user feedback for specific queries and contexts. It also generalizes such information to derive relevant references for similar queries and contexts. This model lets users filter information by context of relevance, build personalized views of documents over time, and share their views with other users. It also applies to any type of multimedia information. Compared to other approaches, it is less costly and doesn't require any a priori statistical computation, nor an extended training period. It is currently being implemented into the Computer Integrated Documentation system which enables integration of various technical documents in a hypertext framework.

CERPI and CEREL, two computer codes for the automatic identification and determination of gamma emitters in thermal-neutron-activated samples

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Giannini, M.; Oliva, P.R.; Ramorino, M.C.

1979-01-01

A computer code that automatically analyzes gamma-ray spectra obtained with Ge(Li) detectors is described. The program contains such features as automatic peak location and fitting, determination of peak energies and intensities, nuclide identification, and calculation of masses and errors. Finally, the results obtained with this computer code for a lunar sample are reported and briefly discussed

Task relevance modulates successful retrieval effects during explicit and implicit memory tests.

Science.gov (United States)

Elman, Jeremy A; Shimamura, Arthur P

2011-05-01

The successful retrieval effect refers to greater activation for items identified as old compared to those identified as new. This effect is particularly apparent in the ventral posterior parietal cortex (vPPC), though its functional properties remain unclear. In two experiments, we assessed the activation for old and new items during explicit and implicit tests of memory. In Experiment 1, significant effects were observed during explicit recognition performance and during an implicit lexical decision task. In both tasks, determining mnemonic status provides relevant information to task goals. Experiment 2 included a second implicit task in which determining mnemonic status was not relevant (color discrimination task). In this case, vPPC activation did not distinguish between old and new items. These findings suggest that automatic or implicit processes can drive retrieval-related activation in the vPPC, though such processes are gated by stimulus relevancy and task goals. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

CERPI and CEREL, two computer codes for the automatic identification and determination of gamma emitters in thermal neutron activated samples

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Giannini, M.; Oliva, P.R.; Ramorino, C.

1978-01-01

A description is given of a computer code which automatically analyses gamma-ray spectra obtained with Ge(Li) detectors. The program contains features as automatic peak location and fitting, determination of peak energies and intensities, nuclide identification and calculation of masses and errors. Finally the results obtained with our computer code for a lunar sample are reported and briefly discussed

Automatic Threshold Determination for a Local Approach of Change Detection in Long-Term Signal Recordings

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David Hewson

2007-01-01

Full Text Available CUSUM (cumulative sum is a well-known method that can be used to detect changes in a signal when the parameters of this signal are known. This paper presents an adaptation of the CUSUM-based change detection algorithms to long-term signal recordings where the various hypotheses contained in the signal are unknown. The starting point of the work was the dynamic cumulative sum (DCS algorithm, previously developed for application to long-term electromyography (EMG recordings. DCS has been improved in two ways. The first was a new procedure to estimate the distribution parameters to ensure the respect of the detectability property. The second was the definition of two separate, automatically determined thresholds. One of them (lower threshold acted to stop the estimation process, the other one (upper threshold was applied to the detection function. The automatic determination of the thresholds was based on the Kullback-Leibler distance which gives information about the distance between the detected segments (events. Tests on simulated data demonstrated the efficiency of these improvements of the DCS algorithm.

Automatic determination of moisture content in biofuels based on NIR-measurements; Automatisk fukthaltsbestaemning av biobraenslen med NIR-metoden

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Berg, Magnus; Wiklund, Sven Erik [AaF-Process AB, Stockholm (Sweden); Karlsson, Mikael; Tryzell, Robert [Bestwood AB, Sundbyberg (Sweden)

2005-07-01

The determination of moisture content of biofuel is of large importance for the energy sector. The used methods for moisture determination are based on fuels samples taken from the bulk followed by drying and weighing. To be able to instead determine the moisture content based on a method with good accuracy and with a short response time would be a large improvement. Both for the fuel sampling and the following analysis there are Swedish standards but concerning the fuel sampling the standards are often not followed. The main reason is the difficulties to sample fuel samples from different depth from a delivery. This is one of the reasons that some plants have installed mechanical samplers but the investment cost for these is relatively high. The aim of this project was to investigate the use of the NIR-method for automatic moisture determination in biofuels. Within the project the NIR-method was used to determine the moisture content on withdrawn fuel samples, in addition the possibility to integrate the NIR-method in an automatic sampling system is also described. A large number of samples, in total over 200 samples, have been evaluated with the NIR-method and compared with the reference method, oven drying and gravimetric determination of moisture content. That the NIR-method can be used to determine moisture content in a number of well defined materials have previously been shown. In this report it has moreover been shown that the method can be used under the conditions at the fuel delivery station and for a large spectrum of biofuels. The accuracy that can be achieved with the NIR-method is in the same magnitude as the standard method, i.e. the reference method used for the measurements. Altogether this shows that the NIR-method is an interesting alternative for integration in an automatic measurement system for determination of fuel moisture content in biofuels. To be able to use the NIR-method for automatic determination of fuel moisture content at the

Automatic Sex Determination of Skulls Based on a Statistical Shape Model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Li Luo

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Sex determination from skeletons is an important research subject in forensic medicine. Previous skeletal sex assessments are through subjective visual analysis by anthropologists or metric analysis of sexually dimorphic features. In this work, we present an automatic sex determination method for 3D digital skulls, in which a statistical shape model for skulls is constructed, which projects the high-dimensional skull data into a low-dimensional shape space, and Fisher discriminant analysis is used to classify skulls in the shape space. This method combines the advantages of metrical and morphological methods. It is easy to use without professional qualification and tedious manual measurement. With a group of Chinese skulls including 127 males and 81 females, we choose 92 males and 58 females to establish the discriminant model and validate the model with the other skulls. The correct rate is 95.7% and 91.4% for females and males, respectively. Leave-one-out test also shows that the method has a high accuracy.

Accurate and precise determination of small quantity uranium by means of automatic potentiometric titration

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Liu Quanwei; Luo Zhongyan; Zhu Haiqiao; Wu Jizong

2007-01-01

For high radioactivity level of dissolved solution of spent fuel and the solution of uranium product, radioactive hazard must be considered and reduced as low as possible during accurate determination of uranium. In this work automatic potentiometric titration was applied and the sample only 10 mg of uranium contained was taken in order to reduce the harm of analyzer suffered from the radioactivity. RSD<0.06%, at the same time the result can be corrected for more reliable and accurate measurement. The determination method can effectively reduce the harm of analyzer suffered from the radioactivity, and meets the requirement of reliable accurate measurement of uranium. (authors)

Automatized determination of U, Am and Pu; Automatisierte Bestimmung von U, Am und Pu

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Schumacher, C. [Forschungszentrum Juelich (Germany). Geschaeftsbereich S; FH Aachen, Campus Juelich (Germany); Zoriy, M. [Forschungszentrum Juelich (Germany). Geschaeftsbereich S; Scherer, U.W. [FH Aachen, Campus Juelich (Germany)

2015-07-01

This work describes the implementation of automatized separation methods for the determination of uranium, and simultaneous determination of americium and plutonium, respectively, in water samples by alpha ray spectrometry. Either method should be a procedure suitable for low-level determinations in routine analysis. Starting from proven methods for determination of actinides in urine samples by using TRISKEM DGA resins ''normal'' (n) or ''branched'' (b) it was investigated whether they could be applied to water samples when using the self-constructed automated column system Multi TSM. Selected separation methods were applied to deionized water and tap water samples. Suitability of the methods even in the presence of larger amounts of solutes was tested by investigating water samples taken from several ponds. Finally, the method was qualified by determination of a water sample from an interlaboratory comparison to analyze americium and plutonium. Radiochemical yields were determined by addition of respective tracer radionuclides before sample preparation.

Culture, attribution and automaticity: a social cognitive neuroscience view.

Science.gov (United States)

Mason, Malia F; Morris, Michael W

2010-06-01

A fundamental challenge facing social perceivers is identifying the cause underlying other people's behavior. Evidence indicates that East Asian perceivers are more likely than Western perceivers to reference the social context when attributing a cause to a target person's actions. One outstanding question is whether this reflects a culture's influence on automatic or on controlled components of causal attribution. After reviewing behavioral evidence that culture can shape automatic mental processes as well as controlled reasoning, we discuss the evidence in favor of cultural differences in automatic and controlled components of causal attribution more specifically. We contend that insights emerging from social cognitive neuroscience research can inform this debate. After introducing an attribution framework popular among social neuroscientists, we consider findings relevant to the automaticity of attribution, before speculating how one could use a social neuroscience approach to clarify whether culture affects automatic, controlled or both types of attribution processes.

Automatic methods for processing track-detector data at the PAVICOM facility

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Aleksandrov, A.B.; Goncharova, L.A.; Polukhina, N.G.; Fejnberg, E.L.; Davydov, D.A.; Publichenko, P.A.; Roganova, T.M.

2007-01-01

New automatic methods essentially simplify and hasten the data treatment of tracking detectors. It allows handling big data files and appreciably improves their statistics; this fact predetermines an elaboration of new experiments, which suppose to use large volume targets, emulsive and solid-state large square tracking detectors. Thereupon the problem of training competent physicists able to work on modern automatic equipment is very relevant. About ten Moscow students working in LPI at PAVICOM facility master new methods every year. Most of the students working in high-energy physics take the print only about archaic hand methods of data handling from tracking detectors. In 2005 on the base of the PAVICOM facility and physics training of the MSU a new educational work for determination of the energy of neutrons passing through nuclear emulsion, which lets students acquire a base habit of data handling from tracking detectors using an automatic facility, was prepared; it can be included in the training process for students of any physical faculty. Specialists mastering methods of an automatic handling by the simple and obvious example of tracking detectors will be able to use their knowledge in various areas of science and techniques. The organization of upper division courses is a new additional aspect of using the PAVICOM facility described in an earlier paper [4

Satellite single-axis attitude determination based on Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast signals

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Kaixing; Sun, Xiucong; Huang, Hai; Wang, Xinsheng; Ren, Guangwei

2017-10-01

The space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) is a new technology for air traffic management. The satellite equipped with spaceborne ADS-B system receives the broadcast signals from aircraft and transfers the message to ground stations, so as to extend the coverage area of terrestrial-based ADS-B. In this work, a novel satellite single-axis attitude determination solution based on the ADS-B receiving system is proposed. This solution utilizes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurement of the broadcast signals from aircraft to determine the boresight orientation of the ADS-B receiving antenna fixed on the satellite. The basic principle of this solution is described. The feasibility study of this new attitude determination solution is implemented, including the link budget and the access analysis. On this basis, the nonlinear least squares estimation based on the Levenberg-Marquardt method is applied to estimate the single-axis orientation. A full digital simulation has been carried out to verify the effectiveness and performance of this solution. Finally, the corresponding results are processed and presented minutely.

Determination of photoformation rates and scavenging rate constants of hydroxyl radicals in natural waters using an automatic light irradiation and injection system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nakatani, Nobutake; Hashimoto, Norichika; Shindo, Hirotaka; Yamamoto, Masatoshi; Kikkawa, Megumi; Sakugawa, Hiroshi

2007-01-01

Photoformation rates and scavenging rate constants of hydroxyl radicals (·OH) in natural water samples were determined by an automatic determination system. After addition of benzene as a chemical probe to a water sample in a reaction cell, light irradiation and injection of irradiated water samples into an HPLC as a function of time were performed automatically. Phenol produced by the reaction between ·OH and the benzene added to the water sample was determined to quantify the ·OH formation rate. The rate constants of ·OH formation from the photolysis of nitrate ions, nitrite ions and hydrogen peroxide were comparable with those obtained in previous studies. The percent of expected ·OH photoformation rate from added nitrate ion were high in drinking water (97.4%) and river water (99.3%). On the other hand, the low percent (65.0%) was observed in seawater due to the reaction of ·OH with the high concentrations of chloride and bromide ions. For the automatic system, the coefficient of variance for the determination of the ·OH formation rate was less than 5.0%, which is smaller than that in the previous report. When the complete time sequence of analytical cycle was 40 min for one sample, the detection limit of the photoformation rate and the sample throughput were 8 x 10 -13 M s -1 and 20 samples per day, respectively. The automatic system successfully determined the photoformation rates and scavenging rate constants of ·OH in commercial drinking water and the major source and sink of ·OH were identified as nitrate and bicarbonate ions, respectively

Process and device for automatically surveying complex installations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pekrul, P.J.; Thiele, A.W.

1976-01-01

A description is given of a process for automatically analysing separate signal processing channels in real time, one channel per signal, in a facility with significant background noise in signals varying in time and coming from transducers at selected points for the continuous monitoring of the operating conditions of the various components of the installation. The signals are intended to determine potential breakdowns, determine conclusions as to the severity of these potential breakdowns and indicate to an operator the measures to be taken in consequence. The feature of this process is that it comprises the automatic and successive selection of each channel for the purpose of spectral analysis, the automatic processing of the signal of each selected channel to show energy spectrum density data at pre-determined frequencies, the automatic comparison of the energy spectrum density data of each channel with pre-determined sets of limits varying with the frequency, and the automatic indication to the operator of the condition of the various components of the installation associated to each channel and the measures to be taken depending on the set of limits [fr

Automatisms: bridging clinical neurology with criminal law.

Science.gov (United States)

Rolnick, Joshua; Parvizi, Josef

2011-03-01

The law, like neurology, grapples with the relationship between disease states and behavior. Sometimes, the two disciplines share the same terminology, such as automatism. In law, the "automatism defense" is a claim that action was involuntary or performed while unconscious. Someone charged with a serious crime can acknowledge committing the act and yet may go free if, relying on the expert testimony of clinicians, the court determines that the act of crime was committed in a state of automatism. In this review, we explore the relationship between the use of automatism in the legal and clinical literature. We close by addressing several issues raised by the automatism defense: semantic ambiguity surrounding the term automatism, the presence or absence of consciousness during automatisms, and the methodological obstacles that have hindered the study of cognition during automatisms. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Using Confidence Interval-Based Estimation of Relevance to Select Social-Cognitive Determinants for Behavior Change Interventions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rik Crutzen

2017-07-01

Full Text Available When developing an intervention aimed at behavior change, one of the crucial steps in the development process is to select the most relevant social-cognitive determinants. These determinants can be seen as the buttons one needs to push to establish behavior change. Insight into these determinants is needed to select behavior change methods (i.e., general behavior change techniques that are applied in an intervention in the development process. Therefore, a study on determinants is often conducted as formative research in the intervention development process. Ideally, all relevant determinants identified in such a study are addressed by an intervention. However, when developing a behavior change intervention, there are limits in terms of, for example, resources available for intervention development and the amount of content that participants of an intervention can be exposed to. Hence, it is important to select those determinants that are most relevant to the target behavior as these determinants should be addressed in an intervention. The aim of the current paper is to introduce a novel approach to select the most relevant social-cognitive determinants and use them in intervention development. This approach is based on visualization of confidence intervals for the means and correlation coefficients for all determinants simultaneously. This visualization facilitates comparison, which is necessary when making selections. By means of a case study on the determinants of using a high dose of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (commonly known as ecstasy, we illustrate this approach. We provide a freely available tool to facilitate the analyses needed in this approach.

Using Confidence Interval-Based Estimation of Relevance to Select Social-Cognitive Determinants for Behavior Change Interventions.

Science.gov (United States)

Crutzen, Rik; Peters, Gjalt-Jorn Ygram; Noijen, Judith

2017-01-01

When developing an intervention aimed at behavior change, one of the crucial steps in the development process is to select the most relevant social-cognitive determinants. These determinants can be seen as the buttons one needs to push to establish behavior change. Insight into these determinants is needed to select behavior change methods (i.e., general behavior change techniques that are applied in an intervention) in the development process. Therefore, a study on determinants is often conducted as formative research in the intervention development process. Ideally, all relevant determinants identified in such a study are addressed by an intervention. However, when developing a behavior change intervention, there are limits in terms of, for example, resources available for intervention development and the amount of content that participants of an intervention can be exposed to. Hence, it is important to select those determinants that are most relevant to the target behavior as these determinants should be addressed in an intervention. The aim of the current paper is to introduce a novel approach to select the most relevant social-cognitive determinants and use them in intervention development. This approach is based on visualization of confidence intervals for the means and correlation coefficients for all determinants simultaneously. This visualization facilitates comparison, which is necessary when making selections. By means of a case study on the determinants of using a high dose of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (commonly known as ecstasy), we illustrate this approach. We provide a freely available tool to facilitate the analyses needed in this approach.

Automatic evaluation isn't that crude! Moderation of masked affective priming by type of valence

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wentura, D.; Degner, J.

2010-01-01

In two experiments, the automatic processing of evaluative information was investigated using a masked affective priming paradigm, varying valence (positive vs. negative) and relevance (other-relevant traits vs. possessor-relevant traits; Peeters, 1983) of prime and target stimuli. It was found that

Determination of the relevant market as a criterion of assessment of concentration effects in the practice of antitrust authorities

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daria Kostecka-Jurczyk

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Determining the relevant market is the first and the most important step in antimonopoly proceedings due to the fact that the market position of an enterprise is always determined from the relevant market perspective. In respect of mergers, establishing the relevant market is essential in analysing whether the aim of the concentration is to distort and limit competition on the market. The author of the article focuses on describing methods for determining the relevant market applied by antimonopoly authorities.

Automatic determination of pathological voice transformation coefficients for TDPDOLA using neural network

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Belgacem, H.; Cherif, A.

2011-01-01

One of the biggest challenges in vocal transformation with TD-PSOLA technique is the selection of modified parameters that will make a successful speech resynthesis. The best selection methods are by using human ratters. This study focuses on automatic determination of the pathological voice transformation coefficients using an Artificial Neural Network this way by comparing the results to the previous manual work. Four characterizied parameters (RATA-PLP, Jitter, Shimmer and RAP) were chosen. The system is developed with supervised training, consists of recognition (neural network) for synthesis (TD-PSOLA). The experimental results show that the parameter sets selected by the proposed system can be successfully used to resynthesize and demonstrating that our system can assist in vocal of pathological voice's transformation.

Bayesian CP Factorization of Incomplete Tensors with Automatic Rank Determination.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Qibin; Zhang, Liqing; Cichocki, Andrzej

2015-09-01

CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor factorization of incomplete data is a powerful technique for tensor completion through explicitly capturing the multilinear latent factors. The existing CP algorithms require the tensor rank to be manually specified, however, the determination of tensor rank remains a challenging problem especially for CP rank . In addition, existing approaches do not take into account uncertainty information of latent factors, as well as missing entries. To address these issues, we formulate CP factorization using a hierarchical probabilistic model and employ a fully Bayesian treatment by incorporating a sparsity-inducing prior over multiple latent factors and the appropriate hyperpriors over all hyperparameters, resulting in automatic rank determination. To learn the model, we develop an efficient deterministic Bayesian inference algorithm, which scales linearly with data size. Our method is characterized as a tuning parameter-free approach, which can effectively infer underlying multilinear factors with a low-rank constraint, while also providing predictive distributions over missing entries. Extensive simulations on synthetic data illustrate the intrinsic capability of our method to recover the ground-truth of CP rank and prevent the overfitting problem, even when a large amount of entries are missing. Moreover, the results from real-world applications, including image inpainting and facial image synthesis, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for both tensor factorization and tensor completion in terms of predictive performance.

Automatic Algorithm for the Determination of the Anderson-wilkins Acuteness Score In Patients With St Elevation Myocardial Infarction

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fakhri, Yama; Sejersten, Maria; Schoos, Mikkel Malby

2016-01-01

using 50 ECGs. Each ECG lead (except aVR) was manually scored according to AW-score by two independent experts (Exp1 and Exp2) and automatically by our designed algorithm (auto-score). An adjudicated manual score (Adj-score) was determined between Exp1 and Exp2. The inter-rater reliabilities (IRRs...

Automatic plasma control in magnetic traps

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Samojlenko, Y.; Chuyanov, V.

1984-01-01

Hot plasma is essentially in thermodynamic non-steady state. Automatic plasma control basically means monitoring deviations from steady state and producing a suitable magnetic or electric field which brings the plasma back to its original state. Briefly described are two systems of automatic plasma control: control with a magnetic field using a negative impedance circuit, and control using an electric field. It appears that systems of automatic plasma stabilization will be an indispensable component of the fusion reactor and its possibilities will in many ways determine the reactor economy. (Ha)

On the relevance of spectral features for instrument classification

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Andreas Brinch; Sigurdsson, Sigurdur; Hansen, Lars Kai

2007-01-01

Automatic knowledge extraction from music signals is a key component for most music organization and music information retrieval systems. In this paper, we consider the problem of instrument modelling and instrument classification from the rough audio data. Existing systems for automatic instrument...... classification operate normally on a relatively large number of features, from which those related to the spectrum of the audio signal are particularly relevant. In this paper, we confront two different models about the spectral characterization of musical instruments. The first assumes a constant envelope...

Automatic affective appraisal of sexual penetration stimuli in women with vaginismus or dyspareunia.

Science.gov (United States)

Huijding, Jorg; Borg, Charmaine; Weijmar-Schultz, Willibrord; de Jong, Peter J

2011-03-01

Current psychological views are that negative appraisals of sexual stimuli lie at the core of sexual dysfunctions. It is important to differentiate between deliberate appraisals and more automatic appraisals, as research has shown that the former are most relevant to controllable behaviors, and the latter are most relevant to reflexive behaviors. Accordingly, it can be hypothesized that in women with vaginismus, the persistent difficulty to allow vaginal entry is due to global negative automatic affective appraisals that trigger reflexive pelvic floor muscle contraction at the prospect of penetration. To test whether sexual penetration pictures elicited global negative automatic affective appraisals in women with vaginismus or dyspareunia and to examine whether deliberate appraisals and automatic appraisals differed between the two patient groups. Women with persistent vaginismus (N = 24), dyspareunia (N = 23), or no sexual complaints (N = 30) completed a pictorial Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST), and then made a global affective assessment of the EAST stimuli using visual analogue scales (VAS). The EAST assessed global automatic affective appraisals of sexual penetration stimuli, while the VAS assessed global deliberate affective appraisals of these stimuli. Automatic affective appraisals of sexual penetration stimuli tended to be positive, independent of the presence of sexual complaints. Deliberate appraisals of the same stimuli were significantly more negative in the women with vaginismus than in the dyspareunia group and control group, while the latter two groups did not differ in their appraisals. Unexpectedly, deliberate appraisals seemed to be most important in vaginismus, whereas dyspareunia did not seem to implicate negative deliberate or automatic affective appraisals. These findings dispute the view that global automatic affect lies at the core of vaginismus and indicate that a useful element in therapeutic interventions may be the modification of

Automatic medical image annotation and keyword-based image retrieval using relevance feedback.

Science.gov (United States)

Ko, Byoung Chul; Lee, JiHyeon; Nam, Jae-Yeal

2012-08-01

This paper presents novel multiple keywords annotation for medical images, keyword-based medical image retrieval, and relevance feedback method for image retrieval for enhancing image retrieval performance. For semantic keyword annotation, this study proposes a novel medical image classification method combining local wavelet-based center symmetric-local binary patterns with random forests. For keyword-based image retrieval, our retrieval system use the confidence score that is assigned to each annotated keyword by combining probabilities of random forests with predefined body relation graph. To overcome the limitation of keyword-based image retrieval, we combine our image retrieval system with relevance feedback mechanism based on visual feature and pattern classifier. Compared with other annotation and relevance feedback algorithms, the proposed method shows both improved annotation performance and accurate retrieval results.

Determinants of dermal exposure relevant for exposure modelling in regulatory risk assessment.

Science.gov (United States)

Marquart, J; Brouwer, D H; Gijsbers, J H J; Links, I H M; Warren, N; van Hemmen, J J

2003-11-01

Risk assessment of chemicals requires assessment of the exposure levels of workers. In the absence of adequate specific measured data, models are often used to estimate exposure levels. For dermal exposure only a few models exist, which are not validated externally. In the scope of a large European research programme, an analysis of potential dermal exposure determinants was made based on the available studies and models and on the expert judgement of the authors of this publication. Only a few potential determinants appear to have been studied in depth. Several studies have included clusters of determinants into vaguely defined parameters, such as 'task' or 'cleaning and maintenance of clothing'. Other studies include several highly correlated parameters, such as 'amount of product handled', 'duration of task' and 'area treated', and separation of these parameters to study their individual influence is not possible. However, based on the available information, a number of determinants could clearly be defined as proven or highly plausible determinants of dermal exposure in one or more exposure situation. This information was combined with expert judgement on the scientific plausibility of the influence of parameters that have not been extensively studied and on the possibilities to gather relevant information during a risk assessment process. The result of this effort is a list of determinants relevant for dermal exposure models in the scope of regulatory risk assessment. The determinants have been divided into the major categories 'substance and product characteristics', 'task done by the worker', 'process technique and equipment', 'exposure control measures', 'worker characteristics and habits' and 'area and situation'. To account for the complex nature of the dermal exposure processes, a further subdivision was made into the three major processes 'direct contact', 'surface contact' and 'deposition'.

Automatic NAA. Saturation activities

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Westphal, G.P.; Grass, F.; Kuhnert, M.

2008-01-01

A system for Automatic NAA is based on a list of specific saturation activities determined for one irradiation position at a given neutron flux and a single detector geometry. Originally compiled from measurements of standard reference materials, the list may be extended also by the calculation of saturation activities from k 0 and Q 0 factors, and f and α values of the irradiation position. A systematic improvement of the SRM approach is currently being performed by pseudo-cyclic activation analysis, to reduce counting errors. From these measurements, the list of saturation activities is recalculated in an automatic procedure. (author)

An automatic system for acidity determination based on sequential injection titration and the monosegmented flow approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Kozak, Joanna; Wójtowicz, Marzena; Gawenda, Nadzieja; Kościelniak, Paweł

2011-06-15

An automatic sequential injection system, combining monosegmented flow analysis, sequential injection analysis and sequential injection titration is proposed for acidity determination. The system enables controllable sample dilution and generation of standards of required concentration in a monosegmented sequential injection manner, sequential injection titration of the prepared solutions, data collecting, and handling. It has been tested on spectrophotometric determination of acetic, citric and phosphoric acids with sodium hydroxide used as a titrant and phenolphthalein or thymolphthalein (in the case of phosphoric acid determination) as indicators. Accuracy better than |4.4|% (RE) and repeatability better than 2.9% (RSD) have been obtained. It has been applied to the determination of total acidity in vinegars and various soft drinks. The system provides low sample (less than 0.3 mL) consumption. On average, analysis of a sample takes several minutes. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Modelling the adoption of automatic milking systems in Noord-Holland

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Floridi, M.; Bartolini, F.; Peerlings, J.H.M.; Polman, N.B.P.; Viaggi, D.

2013-01-01

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the business and industry development process in agriculture. One of the most relevant innovations in dairy farms is the robotisation of the milking process through the adoption of Automatic Milking Systems (AMS). The purpose

Determining the relative importance of figures in journal articles to find representative images

Science.gov (United States)

Müller, Henning; Foncubierta-Rodríguez, Antonio; Lin, Chang; Eggel, Ivan

2013-03-01

When physicians are searching for articles in the medical literature, images of the articles can help determining relevance of the article content for a specific information need. The visual image representation can be an advantage in effectiveness (quality of found articles) and also in efficiency (speed of determining relevance or irrelevance) as many articles can likely be excluded much quicker by looking at a few representative images. In domains such as medical information retrieval, allowing to determine relevance quickly and accurately is an important criterion. This becomes even more important when small interfaces are used as it is frequently the case on mobile phones and tablets to access scientific data whenever information needs arise. In scientific articles many figures are used and particularly in the biomedical literature only a subset may be relevant for determining the relevance of a specific article to an information need. In many cases clinical images can be seen as more important for visual appearance than graphs or histograms that require looking at the context for interpretation. To get a clearer idea of image relevance in articles, a user test with a physician was performed who classified images of biomedical research articles into categories of importance that can subsequently be used to evaluate algorithms that automatically select images as representative examples. The manual sorting of images of 50 journal articles of BioMedCentral with each containing more than 8 figures by importance also allows to derive several rules that determine how to choose images and how to develop algorithms for choosing the most representative images of specific texts. This article describes the user tests and can be a first important step to evaluate automatic tools to select representative images for representing articles and potentially also images in other contexts, for example when representing patient records or other medical concepts when selecting

Automatic and strategic processes in advertising effects

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Grunert, Klaus G.

1996-01-01

, the retrieval of information, and provide a heuristic for brand evaluation. Strategic processes govern learning and inference formation. T relative importance of both types of processes will depend on product involvement. The distinction of these two types of processes leads to some conclusions which...... are at variance with current notions about advertising effects. For example, the att span problem will be relevant only for strategic processes, not for automatic processes, a certain amount of learning can occur with very little conscious effort, and advertising's effect on brand evaluation may be more stable......Two kinds of cognitive processes can be distinguished: Automatic processes, which are mostly subconscious, are learned and changed very slowly, and are not subject to the capacity limitations of working memory, and strategic processes, which are conscious, are subject to capacity limitations...

Artificial Intelligence In Automatic Target Recognizers: Technology And Timelines

Science.gov (United States)

Gilmore, John F.

1984-12-01

The recognition of targets in thermal imagery has been a problem exhaustively analyzed in its current localized dimension. This paper discusses the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automatic target recognition, a concept capable of expanding current ATR efforts into a new globalized dimension. Deficiencies of current automatic target recognition systems are reviewed in terms of system shortcomings. Areas of artificial intelligence which show the most promise in improving ATR performance are analyzed, and a timeline is formed in light of how near (as well as far) term artificial intelligence applications may exist. Current research in the area of high level expert vision systems is reviewed and the possible utilization of artificial intelligence architectures to improve low level image processing functions is also discussed. Additional application areas of relevance to solving the problem of automatic target recognition utilizing both high and low level processing are also explored.

Cost-benefit analysis of the ATM automatic deposit service

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ivica Županović

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Bankers and other financial experts have analyzed the value of automated teller machines (ATM in terms of growing consumer demand, rising costs of technology development, decreasing profitability and market share. This paper presents a step-by-step cost-benefit analysis of the ATM automatic deposit service. The first step is to determine user attitudes towards using ATM automatic deposit service by using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM. The second step is to determine location priorities for ATMs that provide automatic deposit services using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP model. The results of the previous steps enable a highly efficient application of cost-benefit analysis for evaluating costs and benefits of automatic deposit services. To understand fully the proposed procedure outside of theoretical terms, a real-world application of a case study is conducted.

Automatic cell cloning assay for determining the clonogenic capacity of cancer and cancer stem-like cells.

Science.gov (United States)

Fedr, Radek; Pernicová, Zuzana; Slabáková, Eva; Straková, Nicol; Bouchal, Jan; Grepl, Michal; Kozubík, Alois; Souček, Karel

2013-05-01

The clonogenic assay is a well-established in vitro method for testing the survival and proliferative capability of cells. It can be used to determine the cytotoxic effects of various treatments including chemotherapeutics and ionizing radiation. However, this approach can also characterize cells with different phenotypes and biological properties, such as stem cells or cancer stem cells. In this study, we implemented a faster and more precise method for assessing the cloning efficiency of cancer stem-like cells that were characterized and separated using a high-speed cell sorter. Cell plating onto a microplate using an automatic cell deposition unit was performed in a single-cell or dilution rank mode by the fluorescence-activated cell sorting method. We tested the new automatic cell-cloning assay (ACCA) on selected cancer cell lines and compared it with the manual approach. The obtained results were also compared with the results of the limiting dilution assay for different cell lines. We applied the ACCA to analyze the cloning capacity of different subpopulations of prostate and colon cancer cells based on the expression of the characteristic markers of stem (CD44 and CD133) and cancer stem cells (TROP-2, CD49f, and CD44). Our results revealed that the novel ACCA is a straightforward approach for determining the clonogenic capacity of cancer stem-like cells identified in both cell lines and patient samples. Copyright © 2013 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry.

Comparison of automatic and visual methods used for image segmentation in Endodontics: a microCT study.

Science.gov (United States)

Queiroz, Polyane Mazucatto; Rovaris, Karla; Santaella, Gustavo Machado; Haiter-Neto, Francisco; Freitas, Deborah Queiroz

2017-01-01

To calculate root canal volume and surface area in microCT images, an image segmentation by selecting threshold values is required, which can be determined by visual or automatic methods. Visual determination is influenced by the operator's visual acuity, while the automatic method is done entirely by computer algorithms. To compare between visual and automatic segmentation, and to determine the influence of the operator's visual acuity on the reproducibility of root canal volume and area measurements. Images from 31 extracted human anterior teeth were scanned with a μCT scanner. Three experienced examiners performed visual image segmentation, and threshold values were recorded. Automatic segmentation was done using the "Automatic Threshold Tool" available in the dedicated software provided by the scanner's manufacturer. Volume and area measurements were performed using the threshold values determined both visually and automatically. The paired Student's t-test showed no significant difference between visual and automatic segmentation methods regarding root canal volume measurements (p=0.93) and root canal surface (p=0.79). Although visual and automatic segmentation methods can be used to determine the threshold and calculate root canal volume and surface, the automatic method may be the most suitable for ensuring the reproducibility of threshold determination.

Beyond behaviorism: on the automaticity of higher mental processes.

Science.gov (United States)

Bargh, J A; Ferguson, M J

2000-11-01

The first 100 years of experimental psychology were dominated by 2 major schools of thought: behaviorism and cognitive science. Here the authors consider the common philosophical commitment to determinism by both schools, and how the radical behaviorists' thesis of the determined nature of higher mental processes is being pursued today in social cognition research on automaticity. In harmony with "dual process" models in contemporary cognitive science, which equate determined processes with those that are automatic and which require no intervening conscious choice or guidance, as opposed to "controlled" processes which do, the social cognition research on the automaticity of higher mental processes provides compelling evidence for the determinism of those processes. This research has revealed that social interaction, evaluation and judgment, and the operation of internal goal structures can all proceed without the intervention of conscious acts of will and guidance of the process.

SU-F-T-345: Quasi-Dead Beams: Clinical Relevance and Implications for Automatic Planning

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Price, R; Veltchev, I; Lin, T; Gleason, R; Ma, C [Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA (United States)

2016-06-15

Purpose: Beam direction selection for fixed-beam IMRT planning is typically a manual process. Severe dose-volume limits on critical structures in the thorax often result in atypical selection of beam directions as compared to other body sites. This work demonstrates the potential consequences as well as clinical relevance. Methods: 21 thoracic cases treated with 5–7 beam directions, 6 cases including non-coplanar arrangements, with fractional doses of 150–411cGy were analyzed. Endpoints included per-beam modulation scaling factor (MSF), variation from equal weighting, and delivery QA passing rate. Results: During analysis of patient-specific delivery QA a sub-standard passing rate was found for a single 5-field plan (90.48% of pixels evaluated passing 3% dose, 3mm DTA). During investigation it was found that a single beam demonstrated a MSF of 34.7 and contributed only 2.7% to the mean dose of the target. In addition, the variation from equal weighting for this beam was 17.3% absolute resulting in another beam with a MSF of 4.6 contributing 41.9% to the mean dose to the target; a variation of 21.9% from equal weighting. The average MSF for the remaining 20 cases was 4.0 (SD 1.8) with an average absolute deviation of 2.8% from equal weighting (SD 3.1%). Conclusion: Optimization in commercial treatment planning systems typically results in relatively equally weighted beams. Extreme variation from this can result in excessively high MSFs (very small segments) and potential decreases in agreement between planned and delivered dose distributions. In addition, the resultant beam may contribute minimal dose to the target (quasi-dead beam); a byproduct being increased treatment time and associated localization uncertainties. Potential ramifications exist for automatic planning algorithms should they allow for user-defined beam directions. Additionally, these quasi-dead beams may be embedded in the libraries for model-based systems potentially resulting in inefficient

Automatic age and gaze estimation under uncontrolled conditions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Alnajar, F.

2016-01-01

Can the computer learn a person’s age just from analyzing facial images obtained by a simple webcam? If so, you can automatically determine if a person has the right age to buy beer (shops), to use a credit card (retail), and can enter bars (entertainment). Can the computer automatically recognize

Solar Powered Automatic Shrimp Feeding System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dindo T. Ani

2015-12-01

Full Text Available - Automatic system has brought many revolutions in the existing technologies. One among the technologies, which has greater developments, is the solar powered automatic shrimp feeding system. For instance, the solar power which is a renewable energy can be an alternative solution to energy crisis and basically reducing man power by using it in an automatic manner. The researchers believe an automatic shrimp feeding system may help solve problems on manual feeding operations. The project study aimed to design and develop a solar powered automatic shrimp feeding system. It specifically sought to prepare the design specifications of the project, to determine the methods of fabrication and assembly, and to test the response time of the automatic shrimp feeding system. The researchers designed and developed an automatic system which utilizes a 10 hour timer to be set in intervals preferred by the user and will undergo a continuous process. The magnetic contactor acts as a switch connected to the 10 hour timer which controls the activation or termination of electrical loads and powered by means of a solar panel outputting electrical power, and a rechargeable battery in electrical communication with the solar panel for storing the power. By undergoing through series of testing, the components of the modified system were proven functional and were operating within the desired output. It was recommended that the timer to be used should be tested to avoid malfunction and achieve the fully automatic system and that the system may be improved to handle changes in scope of the project.

Optoacoustic temperature determination and automatic coagulation control in rabbits

Science.gov (United States)

Schlott, Kerstin; Koinzer, Stefan; Ptaszynski, Lars; Luft, Susanne; Baade, Alex; Bever, Marco; Roider, Johann; Birngruber, Reginald; Brinkmann, Ralf

2011-03-01

Retinal laser photocoagulation is an established treatment method for many retinal diseases like macula edema or diabetic retinopathy. The selection of the laser parameters is so far based on post treatment evaluation of the lesion size and strength. Due to local pigment variations in the fundus and individual transmission the same laser parameters often lead to an overtreatment. Optoacoustic allows a non invasive monitoring of the retinal temperature increase during retinal laser irradiation by measuring the temperature dependent pressure amplitudes, which are induced by short probe laser pulses. A 75 ns/ 523 nm Nd:YLF was used as a probe laser at a repetition rate of 1 kHz, and a cw / 532 nm treatment laser for heating. A contact lens was modified with a ring-shaped ultrasonic transducer to detect the pressure waves at the cornea. Temperatures were collected for irradiations leading to soft or invisible lesions. Based on this data the threshold for denaturation was found. By analyzing the initial temperature increase, the further temperature development during irradiation could be predicted. An algorithm was found to calculate the irradiation time, which is needed for a soft lesion formation, from the temperature curve. By this it was possible to provide a real-time dosimetry by automatically switching off the treatment laser after the calculated irradiation time. Automatically controlled coagulations appear softer and more uniformly.

Automatic Control of the Concrete Mixture Homogeneity in Cycling Mixers

Science.gov (United States)

Anatoly Fedorovich, Tikhonov; Drozdov, Anatoly

2018-03-01

The article describes the factors affecting the concrete mixture quality related to the moisture content of aggregates, since the effectiveness of the concrete mixture production is largely determined by the availability of quality management tools at all stages of the technological process. It is established that the unaccounted moisture of aggregates adversely affects the concrete mixture homogeneity and, accordingly, the strength of building structures. A new control method and the automatic control system of the concrete mixture homogeneity in the technological process of mixing components have been proposed, since the tasks of providing a concrete mixture are performed by the automatic control system of processing kneading-and-mixing machinery with operational automatic control of homogeneity. Theoretical underpinnings of the control of the mixture homogeneity are presented, which are related to a change in the frequency of vibrodynamic vibrations of the mixer body. The structure of the technical means of the automatic control system for regulating the supply of water is determined depending on the change in the concrete mixture homogeneity during the continuous mixing of components. The following technical means for establishing automatic control have been chosen: vibro-acoustic sensors, remote terminal units, electropneumatic control actuators, etc. To identify the quality indicator of automatic control, the system offers a structure flowchart with transfer functions that determine the ACS operation in transient dynamic mode.

Fostering Personal Meaning and Self-Relevance: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Internalization

Science.gov (United States)

Vansteenkiste, Maarten; Aelterman, Nathalie; De Muynck, Gert-Jan; Haerens, Leen; Patall, Erika; Reeve, Johnmarshall

2018-01-01

Central to self-determination theory (SDT) is the notion that autonomously motivated learning relates to greater learning benefits. While learners' intrinsic motivation has received substantial attention, learners also display volitional learning when they come to endorse the personal meaning or self-relevance of the learning task. In Part I of…

An automatic method to determine cutoff frequency based on image power spectrum

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Beis, J.S.; Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Center, British Columbia; Celler, A.; Barney, J.S.

1995-01-01

The authors present an algorithm for automatically choosing filter cutoff frequency (F c ) using the power spectrum of the projections. The method is based on the assumption that the expectation of the image power spectrum is the sum of the expectation of the blurred object power spectrum (dominant at low frequencies) plus a constant value due to Poisson noise. By considering the discrete components of the noise-dominated high-frequency spectrum as a Gaussian distribution N(μ,σ), the Student t-test determines F c as the highest frequency for which the image frequency components are unlikely to be drawn from N (μ,σ). The method is general and can be applied to any filter. In this work, the authors tested the approach using the Metz restoration filter on simulated, phantom, and patient data with good results. Quantitative performance of the technique was evaluated by plotting recovery coefficient (RC) versus NMSE of reconstructed images

Determinants of Judgments of Explanatory Power: Credibility, Generality, and Statistical Relevance

Science.gov (United States)

Colombo, Matteo; Bucher, Leandra; Sprenger, Jan

2017-01-01

Explanation is a central concept in human psychology. Drawing upon philosophical theories of explanation, psychologists have recently begun to examine the relationship between explanation, probability and causality. Our study advances this growing literature at the intersection of psychology and philosophy of science by systematically investigating how judgments of explanatory power are affected by (i) the prior credibility of an explanatory hypothesis, (ii) the causal framing of the hypothesis, (iii) the perceived generalizability of the explanation, and (iv) the relation of statistical relevance between hypothesis and evidence. Collectively, the results of our five experiments support the hypothesis that the prior credibility of a causal explanation plays a central role in explanatory reasoning: first, because of the presence of strong main effects on judgments of explanatory power, and second, because of the gate-keeping role it has for other factors. Highly credible explanations are not susceptible to causal framing effects, but they are sensitive to the effects of normatively relevant factors: the generalizability of an explanation, and its statistical relevance for the evidence. These results advance current literature in the philosophy and psychology of explanation in three ways. First, they yield a more nuanced understanding of the determinants of judgments of explanatory power, and the interaction between these factors. Second, they show the close relationship between prior beliefs and explanatory power. Third, they elucidate the nature of abductive reasoning. PMID:28928679

Automatic Query Generation and Query Relevance Measurement for Unsupervised Language Model Adaptation of Speech Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Suzuki Motoyuki

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract We are developing a method of Web-based unsupervised language model adaptation for recognition of spoken documents. The proposed method chooses keywords from the preliminary recognition result and retrieves Web documents using the chosen keywords. A problem is that the selected keywords tend to contain misrecognized words. The proposed method introduces two new ideas for avoiding the effects of keywords derived from misrecognized words. The first idea is to compose multiple queries from selected keyword candidates so that the misrecognized words and correct words do not fall into one query. The second idea is that the number of Web documents downloaded for each query is determined according to the "query relevance." Combining these two ideas, we can alleviate bad effect of misrecognized keywords by decreasing the number of downloaded Web documents from queries that contain misrecognized keywords. Finally, we examine a method of determining the number of iterative adaptations based on the recognition likelihood. Experiments have shown that the proposed stopping criterion can determine almost the optimum number of iterations. In the final experiment, the word accuracy without adaptation (55.29% was improved to 60.38%, which was 1.13 point better than the result of the conventional unsupervised adaptation method (59.25%.

Automatic Query Generation and Query Relevance Measurement for Unsupervised Language Model Adaptation of Speech Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Akinori Ito

2009-01-01

Full Text Available We are developing a method of Web-based unsupervised language model adaptation for recognition of spoken documents. The proposed method chooses keywords from the preliminary recognition result and retrieves Web documents using the chosen keywords. A problem is that the selected keywords tend to contain misrecognized words. The proposed method introduces two new ideas for avoiding the effects of keywords derived from misrecognized words. The first idea is to compose multiple queries from selected keyword candidates so that the misrecognized words and correct words do not fall into one query. The second idea is that the number of Web documents downloaded for each query is determined according to the “query relevance.” Combining these two ideas, we can alleviate bad effect of misrecognized keywords by decreasing the number of downloaded Web documents from queries that contain misrecognized keywords. Finally, we examine a method of determining the number of iterative adaptations based on the recognition likelihood. Experiments have shown that the proposed stopping criterion can determine almost the optimum number of iterations. In the final experiment, the word accuracy without adaptation (55.29% was improved to 60.38%, which was 1.13 point better than the result of the conventional unsupervised adaptation method (59.25%.

ANA, automatic natural learning of a semantic network

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Enguehard, Chantal

1992-01-01

The objective of this research thesis is the automatic extraction of terminology and the study of its automatic structuring in order to produce a semantic network. Such an operation is applied to text corpus representing knowledge on a specific field in order to select the relevant technical vocabulary regarding this field. Thus, the author developed a method and a software for the automatic acquisition of terminology items. The author first gives an overview of systems and methods of document indexing and of thesaurus elaboration, and a brief presentation of the state-of-the-art of learning. Then, he discusses some drawbacks of computer systems of natural language processing which are using large knowledge sources such as grammars and dictionaries. After a presentation of the adopted approach and of some hypotheses, the author defines objects and operators which are necessary for an easier data handling, presents the knowledge acquisition process, and finally precisely describes the system computerization. Some results are assessed and discussed, and limitations and perspectives are commented [fr

A semi-automatic annotation tool for cooking video

Science.gov (United States)

Bianco, Simone; Ciocca, Gianluigi; Napoletano, Paolo; Schettini, Raimondo; Margherita, Roberto; Marini, Gianluca; Gianforme, Giorgio; Pantaleo, Giuseppe

2013-03-01

In order to create a cooking assistant application to guide the users in the preparation of the dishes relevant to their profile diets and food preferences, it is necessary to accurately annotate the video recipes, identifying and tracking the foods of the cook. These videos present particular annotation challenges such as frequent occlusions, food appearance changes, etc. Manually annotate the videos is a time-consuming, tedious and error-prone task. Fully automatic tools that integrate computer vision algorithms to extract and identify the elements of interest are not error free, and false positive and false negative detections need to be corrected in a post-processing stage. We present an interactive, semi-automatic tool for the annotation of cooking videos that integrates computer vision techniques under the supervision of the user. The annotation accuracy is increased with respect to completely automatic tools and the human effort is reduced with respect to completely manual ones. The performance and usability of the proposed tool are evaluated on the basis of the time and effort required to annotate the same video sequences.

Variational group-PCA for intrinsic dimensionality determination in fMRI data

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hinrich, Jesper Løve; Nielsen, Søren Føns Vind; Madsen, Kristoffer Hougaard

2016-01-01

. Furthermore, in an fMRI-context it is not fully understood how information from multiple subjects should best be incorporated when applying dimensionality reduction. We propose a Bayesian group principal component analysis (Group-BPCA) model with an automatic relevance determination (ARD) prior to determine...... on the spatial maps are shared, leads to pruning components, but provide better generalization in two of three scenarios. We show that the right level of subject variability is highly dependent on the chosen validation scheme....

MadEvent: automatic event generation with MadGraph

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Maltoni, Fabio; Stelzer, Tim

2003-01-01

We present a new multi-channel integration method and its implementation in the multi-purpose event generator MadEvent, which is based on MadGraph. Given a process, MadGraph automatically identifies all the relevant subprocesses, generates both the amplitudes and the mappings needed for an efficient integration over the phase space, and passes them to MadEvent. As a result, a process-specific, stand-alone code is produced that allows the user to calculate cross sections and produce unweighted events in a standard output format. Several examples are given for processes that are relevant for physics studies at present and forthcoming colliders. (author)

Automatic guidance of attention during real-world visual search.

Science.gov (United States)

Seidl-Rathkopf, Katharina N; Turk-Browne, Nicholas B; Kastner, Sabine

2015-08-01

Looking for objects in cluttered natural environments is a frequent task in everyday life. This process can be difficult, because the features, locations, and times of appearance of relevant objects often are not known in advance. Thus, a mechanism by which attention is automatically biased toward information that is potentially relevant may be helpful. We tested for such a mechanism across five experiments by engaging participants in real-world visual search and then assessing attentional capture for information that was related to the search set but was otherwise irrelevant. Isolated objects captured attention while preparing to search for objects from the same category embedded in a scene, as revealed by lower detection performance (Experiment 1A). This capture effect was driven by a central processing bottleneck rather than the withdrawal of spatial attention (Experiment 1B), occurred automatically even in a secondary task (Experiment 2A), and reflected enhancement of matching information rather than suppression of nonmatching information (Experiment 2B). Finally, attentional capture extended to objects that were semantically associated with the target category (Experiment 3). We conclude that attention is efficiently drawn towards a wide range of information that may be relevant for an upcoming real-world visual search. This mechanism may be adaptive, allowing us to find information useful for our behavioral goals in the face of uncertainty.

Automatic guidance of attention during real-world visual search

Science.gov (United States)

Seidl-Rathkopf, Katharina N.; Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.; Kastner, Sabine

2015-01-01

Looking for objects in cluttered natural environments is a frequent task in everyday life. This process can be difficult, as the features, locations, and times of appearance of relevant objects are often not known in advance. A mechanism by which attention is automatically biased toward information that is potentially relevant may thus be helpful. Here we tested for such a mechanism across five experiments by engaging participants in real-world visual search and then assessing attentional capture for information that was related to the search set but was otherwise irrelevant. Isolated objects captured attention while preparing to search for objects from the same category embedded in a scene, as revealed by lower detection performance (Experiment 1A). This capture effect was driven by a central processing bottleneck rather than the withdrawal of spatial attention (Experiment 1B), occurred automatically even in a secondary task (Experiment 2A), and reflected enhancement of matching information rather than suppression of non-matching information (Experiment 2B). Finally, attentional capture extended to objects that were semantically associated with the target category (Experiment 3). We conclude that attention is efficiently drawn towards a wide range of information that may be relevant for an upcoming real-world visual search. This mechanism may be adaptive, allowing us to find information useful for our behavioral goals in the face of uncertainty. PMID:25898897

Automatic Imitation

Science.gov (United States)

Heyes, Cecilia

2011-01-01

"Automatic imitation" is a type of stimulus-response compatibility effect in which the topographical features of task-irrelevant action stimuli facilitate similar, and interfere with dissimilar, responses. This article reviews behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on automatic imitation, asking in what sense it is "automatic"…

Automatic dam concrete placing system; Dam concrete dasetsu sagyo no jidoka system

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yoneda, Y; Hori, Y; Nakayama, T; Yoshihara, K; Hironaka, T [Okumura Corp., Osaka (Japan)

1994-11-15

An automatic concrete placing system was developed for concrete dam construction. This system consists of the following five subsystems: a wireless data transmission system, an automatic dam concrete mixing system, a consistency determination system, an automatic dam concrete loading and transporting system, and a remote concrete bucket opening and closing system. The system includes the following features: mixing amount by mixing ratio and mixing intervals can be instructed from a concrete placing site by using a wireless handy terminal; concrete is mixed automatically in a batcher plant; a transfer car is started, and concrete is charged into a bucket automatically; the mixed concrete is determined of its properties automatically; labor cost can be reduced, the work efficiency improved, and the safety enhanced; and the system introduction has resulted in unattended operation from the aggregate draw-out to a bunker line, manpower saving of five persons, and reduction in cycle time by 10%. 11 figs., 2 tabs.

10 CFR Appendix J1 to Subpart B of... - Uniform Test Method for Measuring the Energy Consumption of Automatic and Semi-Automatic Clothes...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 10 Energy 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Uniform Test Method for Measuring the Energy Consumption... Energy Consumption of Automatic and Semi-Automatic Clothes Washers The provisions of this appendix J1... means for determining the energy consumption of a clothes washer with an adaptive control system...

Automatic Detection of Inactive Solar Cell Cracks in Electroluminescence Images

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Spataru, Sergiu; Hacke, Peter; Sera, Dezso

2017-01-01

We propose an algorithm for automatic determination of the electroluminescence (EL) signal threshold level corresponding to inactive solar cell cracks, resulting from their disconnection from the electrical circuit of the cell. The method enables automatic quantification of the cell crack size...

Automatic path proposal computation for CT-guided percutaneous liver biopsy.

Science.gov (United States)

Helck, A; Schumann, C; Aumann, J; Thierfelder, K; Strobl, F F; Braunagel, M; Niethammer, M; Clevert, D A; Hoffmann, R T; Reiser, M; Sandner, T; Trumm, C

2016-12-01

To evaluate feasibility of automatic software-based path proposals for CT-guided percutaneous biopsies. Thirty-three patients (60 [Formula: see text] 12 years) referred for CT-guided biopsy of focal liver lesions were consecutively included. Pre-interventional CT and dedicated software (FraunhoferMeVis Pathfinder) were used for (semi)automatic segmentation of relevant structures. The software subsequently generated three path proposals in downward quality for CT-guided biopsy. Proposed needle paths were compared with consensus proposal of two experts (comparable, less suitable, not feasible). In case of comparable results, equivalent approach to software-based path proposal was used. Quality of segmentation process was evaluated (Likert scale, 1 [Formula: see text] best, 6 [Formula: see text] worst), and time for processing was registered. All biopsies were performed successfully without complications. In 91 % one of the three automatic path proposals was rated comparable to experts' proposal. None of the first proposals was rated not feasible, and 76 % were rated comparable to the experts' proposal. 7 % automatic path proposals were rated not feasible, all being second choice ([Formula: see text]) or third choice ([Formula: see text]). In 79 %, segmentation at least was good. Average total time for establishing automatic path proposal was 42 [Formula: see text] 9 s. Automatic software-based path proposal for CT-guided liver biopsies in the majority provides path proposals that are easy to establish and comparable to experts' insertion trajectories.

Dynamic Anthropometry – Deffning Protocols for Automatic Body Measurement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Slavenka Petrak

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The paper presents the research on possibilities of protocol development for automatic computer-based determination of measurements on a 3D body model in defined dynamic positions. Initially, two dynamic body positions were defined for the research on dimensional changes of targeted body lengths and surface segments during body movement from basic static position into a selected dynamic body position. The assumption was that during body movement, specifi c length and surface dimensions would change significantly from the aspect of clothing construction and functionality of a garment model. 3D body scanning of a female test sample was performed in basic static and two defined dynamic positions. 3D body models were processed and measurement points were defined as a starting point for the determination of characteristic body measurements. The protocol for automatic computer measurement was defined for every dynamic body position by the systematic set of activities based on determined measurement points. The verification of developed protocols was performed by automatic determination of defined measurements on the test sample and by comparing the results with the conventional manual measurement.

Automatic Detection of Inactive Solar Cell Cracks in Electroluminescence Images

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Spataru, Sergiu; Hacke, Peter; Sera, Dezso

2017-01-01

We propose an algorithm for automatic determination of the electroluminescence (EL) signal threshold level corresponding to inactive solar cell cracks, resulting from their disconnection from the electrical circuit of the cell. The method enables automatic quantification of the cell crack size an...

Automatic evidence retrieval for systematic reviews.

Science.gov (United States)

Choong, Miew Keen; Galgani, Filippo; Dunn, Adam G; Tsafnat, Guy

2014-10-01

Snowballing involves recursively pursuing relevant references cited in the retrieved literature and adding them to the search results. Snowballing is an alternative approach to discover additional evidence that was not retrieved through conventional search. Snowballing's effectiveness makes it best practice in systematic reviews despite being time-consuming and tedious. Our goal was to evaluate an automatic method for citation snowballing's capacity to identify and retrieve the full text and/or abstracts of cited articles. Using 20 review articles that contained 949 citations to journal or conference articles, we manually searched Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) and identified 78.0% (740/949) of the cited articles that were present in the database. We compared the performance of the automatic citation snowballing method against the results of this manual search, measuring precision, recall, and F1 score. The automatic method was able to correctly identify 633 (as proportion of included citations: recall=66.7%, F1 score=79.3%; as proportion of citations in MAS: recall=85.5%, F1 score=91.2%) of citations with high precision (97.7%), and retrieved the full text or abstract for 490 (recall=82.9%, precision=92.1%, F1 score=87.3%) of the 633 correctly retrieved citations. The proposed method for automatic citation snowballing is accurate and is capable of obtaining the full texts or abstracts for a substantial proportion of the scholarly citations in review articles. By automating the process of citation snowballing, it may be possible to reduce the time and effort of common evidence surveillance tasks such as keeping trial registries up to date and conducting systematic reviews.

Particle discrimination by an automatic scanner for nuclear emulsion plates

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Heinecke, W.; Fischer, B.E.

1976-01-01

An automatic scanner for nuclear emulsion plates has been improved by adding particle discrimination. By determination of the mean luminosity of tracks in darkfield illumination in addition to the track length a clear discrimination has been obtained, at least for lighter particles. The scanning speed of the original automatic scanner has not been reduced. The scanner works up to 200 times faster than a human scanner. Besides the particle discrimination the determination of the mean track luminosity led to a lower perturbation sensitivity with respect to a high background of accidentally developed silvergrains, scratches in emulsion etc. The reproducibility of the results obtained by the automatic scanner is better than 5%. (Auth.)

Solitary waves in morphogenesis: Determination fronts as strain-cued strain transformations among automatous cells

Science.gov (United States)

Cox, Brian N.; Landis, Chad M.

2018-02-01

We present a simple theory of a strain pulse propagating as a solitary wave through a continuous two-dimensional population of cells. A critical strain is assumed to trigger a strain transformation, while, simultaneously, cells move as automata to tend to restore a preferred cell density. We consider systems in which the strain transformation is a shape change, a burst of proliferation, or the commencement of growth (which changes the shape of the population sheet), and demonstrate isomorphism among these cases. Numerical and analytical solutions describe a strain pulse whose height does not depend on how the strain disturbance was first launched, or the rate at which the strain transformation is achieved, or the rate constant in the rule for the restorative cell motion. The strain pulse is therefore very stable, surviving the imposition of strong perturbations: it would serve well as a timing signal in development. The automatous wave formulation is simple, with few model parameters. A strong case exists for the presence of a strain pulse during amelogenesis. Quantitative analysis reveals a simple relationship between the velocity of the leading edge of the pulse in amelogenesis and the known speed of migration of ameloblast cells. This result and energy arguments support the depiction of wave motion as an automatous cell response to strain, rather than as a response to an elastic energy gradient. The theory may also contribute to understanding the determination front in somitogenesis, moving fronts of convergent-extension transformation, and mitotic wavefronts in the syncytial drosophila embryo.

[Development of an automatic pneumatic tourniquet system that determines pressures in synchrony with systolic blood pressure].

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Hongyun; Li, Kaiyuan; Zhang, Zhengbo; Guo, Junyan; Wang, Weidong

2012-11-01

The correlation coefficients between arterial occlusion pressure and systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, limb circumference, body mass etc were obtained through healthy volunteer experiments, in which tourniquet were applied on upper/lower extremities. The prediction equations were derived from the data of experiments by multiple regression analysis. Based on the microprocessor C8051F340, a new pneumatic tourniquet system that can determine tourniquet pressure in synchrony with systolic blood pressure was developed and verified the function and stability of designed system. Results showed that the pneumatic tourniquet which automatically adjusts occlusion pressure in accordance with systolic blood pressure could stop the flow of blood to get a bloodless field.

Automatic welding of stainless steel tubing

Science.gov (United States)

Clautice, W. E.

1978-01-01

The use of automatic welding for making girth welds in stainless steel tubing was investigated as well as the reduction in fabrication costs resulting from the elimination of radiographic inspection. Test methodology, materials, and techniques are discussed, and data sheets for individual tests are included. Process variables studied include welding amperes, revolutions per minute, and shielding gas flow. Strip chart recordings, as a definitive method of insuring weld quality, are studied. Test results, determined by both radiographic and visual inspection, are presented and indicate that once optimum welding procedures for specific sizes of tubing are established, and the welding machine operations are certified, then the automatic tube welding process produces good quality welds repeatedly, with a high degree of reliability. Revised specifications for welding tubing using the automatic process and weld visual inspection requirements at the Kennedy Space Center are enumerated.

Automatic classification of journalistic documents on the Internet1

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elias OLIVEIRA

Full Text Available Abstract Online journalism is increasing every day. There are many news agencies, newspapers, and magazines using digital publication in the global network. Documents published online are available to users, who use search engines to find them. In order to deliver documents that are relevant to the search, they must be indexed and classified. Due to the vast number of documents published online every day, a lot of research has been carried out to find ways to facilitate automatic document classification. The objective of the present study is to describe an experimental approach for the automatic classification of journalistic documents published on the Internet using the Vector Space Model for document representation. The model was tested based on a real journalism database, using algorithms that have been widely reported in the literature. This article also describes the metrics used to assess the performance of these algorithms and their required configurations. The results obtained show the efficiency of the method used and justify further research to find ways to facilitate the automatic classification of documents.

The Limits to Relevance

Science.gov (United States)

Averill, M.; Briggle, A.

2006-12-01

Science policy and knowledge production lately have taken a pragmatic turn. Funding agencies increasingly are requiring scientists to explain the relevance of their work to society. This stems in part from mounting critiques of the "linear model" of knowledge production in which scientists operating according to their own interests or disciplinary standards are presumed to automatically produce knowledge that is of relevance outside of their narrow communities. Many contend that funded scientific research should be linked more directly to societal goals, which implies a shift in the kind of research that will be funded. While both authors support the concept of useful science, we question the exact meaning of "relevance" and the wisdom of allowing it to control research agendas. We hope to contribute to the conversation by thinking more critically about the meaning and limits of the term "relevance" and the trade-offs implicit in a narrow utilitarian approach. The paper will consider which interests tend to be privileged by an emphasis on relevance and address issues such as whose goals ought to be pursued and why, and who gets to decide. We will consider how relevance, narrowly construed, may actually limit the ultimate utility of scientific research. The paper also will reflect on the worthiness of research goals themselves and their relationship to a broader view of what it means to be human and to live in society. Just as there is more to being human than the pragmatic demands of daily life, there is more at issue with knowledge production than finding the most efficient ways to satisfy consumer preferences or fix near-term policy problems. We will conclude by calling for a balanced approach to funding research that addresses society's most pressing needs but also supports innovative research with less immediately apparent application.

Automatic coding of online collaboration protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Erkens, Gijsbert; Janssen, J.J.H.M.

2006-01-01

An automatic coding procedure is described to determine the communicative functions of messages in chat discussions. Five main communicative functions are distinguished: argumentative (indicating a line of argumentation or reasoning), responsive (e.g., confirmations, denials, and answers),

Automatic LOD selection

OpenAIRE

Forsman, Isabelle

2017-01-01

In this paper a method to automatically generate transition distances for LOD, improving image stability and performance is presented. Three different methods were tested all measuring the change between two level of details using the spatial frequency. The methods were implemented as an optional pre-processing step in order to determine the transition distances from multiple view directions. During run-time both view direction based selection and the furthest distance for each direction was ...

An innovative method for automatic determination of time of arrival for Lamb waves excited by impact events

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Junxiao; Parvasi, Seyed Mohammad; Ho, Siu Chun Michael; Patil, Devendra; Ge, Maochen; Li, Hongnan; Song, Gangbing

2017-05-01

Lamb waves have great potential as a diagnostic tool in the application of structural health monitoring. Propagation properties of Lamb waves are affected by the state of the structure that the waves are traveling upon. Thus Lamb waves can carry information about the structure as they travel across a structure. However, the dispersive, multimodal and attenuation characteristics of Lamb waves make it difficult to determine the time of arrival of Lamb waves. To deal with these characteristics, an innovative method to automatically determine the time of arrival for impact-induced Lamb waves without human intervention is proposed in this paper. Lead zirconate titanate sensors mounted on the surface of an aluminum plate were used to measure the Lamb waves excited by an impact. The time of arrival was determined based on wavelet decomposition, Hilbert transform and statistics (Grubbs’ test and maximum likelihood estimation). Both of numerical analysis and physical measurements have verified the accuracy of this method for impacts on an aluminum plate.

Kernel-Based Relevance Analysis with Enhanced Interpretability for Detection of Brain Activity Patterns

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andres M. Alvarez-Meza

2017-10-01

Full Text Available We introduce Enhanced Kernel-based Relevance Analysis (EKRA that aims to support the automatic identification of brain activity patterns using electroencephalographic recordings. EKRA is a data-driven strategy that incorporates two kernel functions to take advantage of the available joint information, associating neural responses to a given stimulus condition. Regarding this, a Centered Kernel Alignment functional is adjusted to learning the linear projection that best discriminates the input feature set, optimizing the required free parameters automatically. Our approach is carried out in two scenarios: (i feature selection by computing a relevance vector from extracted neural features to facilitating the physiological interpretation of a given brain activity task, and (ii enhanced feature selection to perform an additional transformation of relevant features aiming to improve the overall identification accuracy. Accordingly, we provide an alternative feature relevance analysis strategy that allows improving the system performance while favoring the data interpretability. For the validation purpose, EKRA is tested in two well-known tasks of brain activity: motor imagery discrimination and epileptic seizure detection. The obtained results show that the EKRA approach estimates a relevant representation space extracted from the provided supervised information, emphasizing the salient input features. As a result, our proposal outperforms the state-of-the-art methods regarding brain activity discrimination accuracy with the benefit of enhanced physiological interpretation about the task at hand.

Automatic Affective Appraisal of Sexual Penetration Stimuli in Women with Vaginismus or Dyspareunia

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huijding, Jorg; Borg, Charmaine; Weijmar-Schultz, Willibrord; de Jong, Peter J.

Introduction. Current psychological views are that negative appraisals of sexual stimuli lie at the core of sexual dysfunctions. It is important to differentiate between deliberate appraisals and more automatic appraisals, as research has shown that the former are most relevant to controllable

Individuals with fear of blushing explicitly and automatically associate blushing with social costs

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Glashouwer, K.A.; de Jong, P.J.; Dijk, C.; Buwalda, F.M.

2011-01-01

To explain fear of blushing, it has been proposed that individuals with fear of blushing overestimate the social costs of their blushing. Current information-processing models emphasize the relevance of differentiating between more automatic and more explicit cognitions, as both types of cognitions

Individuals with Fear of Blushing Explicitly and Automatically Associate Blushing with Social Costs

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Glashouwer, Klaske A.; de Jong, Peter J.; Dijk, Corine; Buwalda, Femke M.

2011-01-01

To explain fear of blushing, it has been proposed that individuals with fear of blushing overestimate the social costs of their blushing. Current information-processing models emphasize the relevance of differentiating between more automatic and more explicit cognitions, as both types of cognitions

Determination of vanadium(V) by direct automatic potentiometric titration with EDTA using a chemically modified electrode as a potentiometric sensor.

Science.gov (United States)

Quintar, S E; Santagata, J P; Cortinez, V A

2005-10-15

A chemically modified electrode (CME) was prepared and studied as a potentiometric sensor for the end-point detection in the automatic titration of vanadium(V) with EDTA. The CME was constructed with a paste prepared by mixing spectral-grade graphite powder, Nujol oil and N-2-naphthoyl-N-p-tolylhydroxamic acid (NTHA). Buffer systems, pH effects and the concentration range were studied. Interference ions were separated by applying a liquid-liquid extraction procedure. The CME did not require any special conditioning before using. The electrode was constructed with very inexpensive materials and was easily made. It could be continuously used, at least two months without removing the paste. Automatic potentiometric titration curves were obtained for V(V) within 5 x 10(-5) to 2 x 10(-3)M with acceptable accuracy and precision. The developed method was applied to V(V) determination in alloys for hip prosthesis.

Testing the idea of privileged awareness of self-relevant information.

Science.gov (United States)

Stein, Timo; Siebold, Alisha; van Zoest, Wieske

2016-03-01

Self-relevant information is prioritized in processing. Some have suggested the mechanism driving this advantage is akin to the automatic prioritization of physically salient stimuli in information processing (Humphreys & Sui, 2015). Here we investigate whether self-relevant information is prioritized for awareness under continuous flash suppression (CFS), as has been found for physical salience. Gabor patches with different orientations were first associated with the labels You or Other. Participants were more accurate in matching the self-relevant association, replicating previous findings of self-prioritization. However, breakthrough into awareness from CFS did not differ between self- and other-associated Gabors. These findings demonstrate that self-relevant information has no privileged access to awareness. Rather than modulating the initial visual processes that precede and lead to awareness, the advantage of self-relevant information may better be characterized as prioritization at later processing stages. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Automatic Synthesis of Robust and Optimal Controllers

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Cassez, Franck; Jessen, Jan Jacob; Larsen, Kim Guldstrand

2009-01-01

In this paper, we show how to apply recent tools for the automatic synthesis of robust and near-optimal controllers for a real industrial case study. We show how to use three different classes of models and their supporting existing tools, Uppaal-TiGA for synthesis, phaver for verification......, and Simulink for simulation, in a complementary way. We believe that this case study shows that our tools have reached a level of maturity that allows us to tackle interesting and relevant industrial control problems....

A new uranium automatic analyzer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xia Buyun; Zhu Yaokun; Wang Bin; Cong Peiyuan; Zhang Lan

1993-01-01

A new uranium automatic analyzer based on the flow injection analysis (FIA) principle has been developed. It consists of a multichannel peristaltic pump, an injection valve, a photometric detector, a single-chip microprocessor system and electronic circuit. The new designed multifunctional auto-injection valve can automatically change the injection volume of the sample and the channels so that the determination ranges and items can easily be changed. It also can make the instrument vary the FIA operation modes that it has functions of a universal instrument. A chromatographic column with extractant-containing resin was installed in the manifold of the analyzer for the concentration and separation of trace uranium. The 2-(5-bromo-2-pyridylazo)-5-diethyl-aminophenol (Br-PADAP) was used as colour reagent. Uranium was determined in the aqueous solution by adding cetyl-pyridium bromide (CPB). The uranium in the solution in the range 0.02-500 mg · L -1 can be directly determined without any pretreatment. A sample throughput rate of 30-90 h -1 and reproducibility of 1-2% were obtained. The analyzer has been satisfactorily applied to the laboratory and the plant

Dissociating Working Memory Updating and Automatic Updating: The Reference-Back Paradigm

Science.gov (United States)

Rac-Lubashevsky, Rachel; Kessler, Yoav

2016-01-01

Working memory (WM) updating is a controlled process through which relevant information in the environment is selected to enter the gate to WM and substitute its contents. We suggest that there is also an automatic form of updating, which influences performance in many tasks and is primarily manifested in reaction time sequential effects. The goal…

Analysis of the oscillation causes in automatic controller of reactor power

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Aleksakov, A.N.; Nikolaev, E.V.; Podlazov, L.N.

1991-01-01

Conditions for occurence of oscillations in automatic controller of reactor power are determined. Graphic-analytical method for calculating the stability of non-linear system, which enables one to reveal the most important factors determining the stability, is used. The practical results of the analysis are obtained for the system of local automatic comtrollers, used in the RBMK reactors. A simple method providing for the required stability margin, is suggested

Visual Benefits in Apparent Motion Displays: Automatically Driven Spatial and Temporal Anticipation Are Partially Dissociated.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Merle-Marie Ahrens

Full Text Available Many behaviourally relevant sensory events such as motion stimuli and speech have an intrinsic spatio-temporal structure. This will engage intentional and most likely unintentional (automatic prediction mechanisms enhancing the perception of upcoming stimuli in the event stream. Here we sought to probe the anticipatory processes that are automatically driven by rhythmic input streams in terms of their spatial and temporal components. To this end, we employed an apparent visual motion paradigm testing the effects of pre-target motion on lateralized visual target discrimination. The motion stimuli either moved towards or away from peripheral target positions (valid vs. invalid spatial motion cueing at a rhythmic or arrhythmic pace (valid vs. invalid temporal motion cueing. Crucially, we emphasized automatic motion-induced anticipatory processes by rendering the motion stimuli non-predictive of upcoming target position (by design and task-irrelevant (by instruction, and by creating instead endogenous (orthogonal expectations using symbolic cueing. Our data revealed that the apparent motion cues automatically engaged both spatial and temporal anticipatory processes, but that these processes were dissociated. We further found evidence for lateralisation of anticipatory temporal but not spatial processes. This indicates that distinct mechanisms may drive automatic spatial and temporal extrapolation of upcoming events from rhythmic event streams. This contrasts with previous findings that instead suggest an interaction between spatial and temporal attention processes when endogenously driven. Our results further highlight the need for isolating intentional from unintentional processes for better understanding the various anticipatory mechanisms engaged in processing behaviourally relevant stimuli with predictable spatio-temporal structure such as motion and speech.

Method for automatic control rod operation using rule-based control

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kinoshita, Mitsuo; Yamada, Naoyuki; Kiguchi, Takashi

1988-01-01

An automatic control rod operation method using rule-based control is proposed. Its features are as follows: (1) a production system to recognize plant events, determine control actions and realize fast inference (fast selection of a suitable production rule), (2) use of the fuzzy control technique to determine quantitative control variables. The method's performance was evaluated by simulation tests on automatic control rod operation at a BWR plant start-up. The results were as follows; (1) The performance which is related to stabilization of controlled variables and time required for reactor start-up, was superior to that of other methods such as PID control and program control methods, (2) the process time to select and interpret the suitable production rule, which was the same as required for event recognition or determination of control action, was short (below 1 s) enough for real time control. The results showed that the method is effective for automatic control rod operation. (author)

Robot-assisted automatic ultrasound calibration.

Science.gov (United States)

Aalamifar, Fereshteh; Cheng, Alexis; Kim, Younsu; Hu, Xiao; Zhang, Haichong K; Guo, Xiaoyu; Boctor, Emad M

2016-10-01

Ultrasound (US) calibration is the process of determining the unknown transformation from a coordinate frame such as the robot's tooltip to the US image frame and is a necessary task for any robotic or tracked US system. US calibration requires submillimeter-range accuracy for most applications, but it is a time-consuming and repetitive task. We provide a new framework for automatic US calibration with robot assistance and without the need for temporal calibration. US calibration based on active echo (AE) phantom was previously proposed, and its superiority over conventional cross-wire phantom-based calibration was shown. In this work, we use AE to guide the robotic arm motion through the process of data collection; we combine the capability of the AE point to localize itself in the frame of the US image with the automatic motion of the robotic arm to provide a framework for calibrating the arm to the US image automatically. We demonstrated the efficacy of the automated method compared to the manual method through experiments. To highlight the necessity of frequent ultrasound calibration, it is demonstrated that the calibration precision changed from 1.67 to 3.20 mm if the data collection is not repeated after a dismounting/mounting of the probe holder. In a large data set experiment, similar reconstruction precision of automatic and manual data collection was observed, while the time was reduced by 58 %. In addition, we compared ten automatic calibrations with ten manual ones, each performed in 15 min, and showed that all the automatic ones could converge in the case of setting the initial matrix as identity, while this was not achieved by manual data sets. Given the same initial matrix, the repeatability of the automatic was [0.46, 0.34, 0.80, 0.47] versus [0.42, 0.51, 0.98, 1.15] mm in the manual case for the US image four corners. The submillimeter accuracy requirement of US calibration makes frequent data collections unavoidable. We proposed an automated

Historical maintenance relevant information road-map for a self-learning maintenance prediction procedural approach

Science.gov (United States)

Morales, Francisco J.; Reyes, Antonio; Cáceres, Noelia; Romero, Luis M.; Benitez, Francisco G.; Morgado, Joao; Duarte, Emanuel; Martins, Teresa

2017-09-01

A large percentage of transport infrastructures are composed of linear assets, such as roads and rail tracks. The large social and economic relevance of these constructions force the stakeholders to ensure a prolonged health/durability. Even though, inevitable malfunctioning, breaking down, and out-of-service periods arise randomly during the life cycle of the infrastructure. Predictive maintenance techniques tend to diminish the appearance of unpredicted failures and the execution of needed corrective interventions, envisaging the adequate interventions to be conducted before failures show up. This communication presents: i) A procedural approach, to be conducted, in order to collect the relevant information regarding the evolving state condition of the assets involved in all maintenance interventions; this reported and stored information constitutes a rich historical data base to train Machine Learning algorithms in order to generate reliable predictions of the interventions to be carried out in further time scenarios. ii) A schematic flow chart of the automatic learning procedure. iii) Self-learning rules from automatic learning from false positive/negatives. The description, testing, automatic learning approach and the outcomes of a pilot case are presented; finally some conclusions are outlined regarding the methodology proposed for improving the self-learning predictive capability.

Automatic differentiation bibliography

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Corliss, G.F. [comp.

1992-07-01

This is a bibliography of work related to automatic differentiation. Automatic differentiation is a technique for the fast, accurate propagation of derivative values using the chain rule. It is neither symbolic nor numeric. Automatic differentiation is a fundamental tool for scientific computation, with applications in optimization, nonlinear equations, nonlinear least squares approximation, stiff ordinary differential equation, partial differential equations, continuation methods, and sensitivity analysis. This report is an updated version of the bibliography which originally appeared in Automatic Differentiation of Algorithms: Theory, Implementation, and Application.

Automatic detection of esophageal pressure events. Is there an alternative to rule-based criteria?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kruse-Andersen, S; Rütz, K; Kolberg, Jens Godsk

1995-01-01

of relevant pressure peaks at the various recording levels. Until now, this selection has been performed entirely by rule-based systems, requiring each pressure deflection to fit within predefined rigid numerical limits in order to be detected. However, due to great variations in the shapes of the pressure...... curves generated by muscular contractions, rule-based criteria do not always select the pressure events most relevant for further analysis. We have therefore been searching for a new concept for automatic event recognition. The present study describes a new system, based on the method of neurocomputing.......79-0.99 and accuracies of 0.89-0.98, depending on the recording level within the esophageal lumen. The neural networks often recognized peaks that clearly represented true contractions but that had been rejected by a rule-based system. We conclude that neural networks have potentials for automatic detections...

Beyond arousal and valence: the importance of the biological versus social relevance of emotional stimuli

OpenAIRE

Sakaki, Michiko; Niki, N.; Mather, M.

2012-01-01

The present study addressed the hypothesis that emotional stimuli relevant to survival or reproduction (biologically emotional stimuli) automatically affect cognitive processing (e.g., attention, memory), while those relevant to social life (socially emotional stimuli) require elaborative processing to modulate attention and memory. Results of our behavioral studies showed that (1) biologically emotional images hold attention more strongly than do socially emotional images, (2) memory for bio...

The AMIDA automatic content linking device: Just-in-time document retrieval in meetings

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Popescu-Belis, A.; Boertjes, E.M.; Kilgour, J.; Poller, P.; Castronovo, S.; Wilson, T.; Jaimes, A.; Carletta, J.

2008-01-01

The AMIDA Automatic Content Linking Device (ACLD) is a just-in-time document retrieval system for meeting environments. The ACLD listens to a meeting and displays information about the documents from the group's history that are most relevant to what is being said. Participants can view an outline

PASSENGER TRAFFIC MOVEMENT MODELLING BY THE CELLULAR-AUTOMAT APPROACH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

T. Mikhaylovskaya

2009-01-01

Full Text Available The mathematical model of passenger traffic movement developed on the basis of the cellular-automat approach is considered. The program realization of the cellular-automat model of pedastrians streams movement in pedestrian subways at presence of obstacles, at subway structure narrowing is presented. The optimum distances between the obstacles and the angle of subway structure narrowing providing pedastrians stream safe movement and traffic congestion occurance are determined.

Identifying relevant group of miRNAs in cancer using fuzzy mutual information.

Science.gov (United States)

Pal, Jayanta Kumar; Ray, Shubhra Sankar; Pal, Sankar K

2016-04-01

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) act as a major biomarker of cancer. All miRNAs in human body are not equally important for cancer identification. We propose a methodology, called FMIMS, which automatically selects the most relevant miRNAs for a particular type of cancer. In FMIMS, miRNAs are initially grouped by using a SVM-based algorithm; then the group with highest relevance is determined and the miRNAs in that group are finally ranked for selection according to their redundancy. Fuzzy mutual information is used in computing the relevance of a group and the redundancy of miRNAs within it. Superiority of the most relevant group to all others, in deciding normal or cancer, is demonstrated on breast, renal, colorectal, lung, melanoma and prostate data. The merit of FMIMS as compared to several existing methods is established. While 12 out of 15 selected miRNAs by FMIMS corroborate with those of biological investigations, three of them viz., "hsa-miR-519," "hsa-miR-431" and "hsa-miR-320c" are possible novel predictions for renal cancer, lung cancer and melanoma, respectively. The selected miRNAs are found to be involved in disease-specific pathways by targeting various genes. The method is also able to detect the responsible miRNAs even at the primary stage of cancer. The related code is available at http://www.jayanta.droppages.com/FMIMS.html .

Automatic Lamp and Fan Control Based on Microcontroller

Science.gov (United States)

Widyaningrum, V. T.; Pramudita, Y. D.

2018-01-01

In general, automation can be described as a process following pre-determined sequential steps with a little or without any human exertion. Automation is provided with the use of various sensors suitable to observe the production processes, actuators and different techniques and devices. In this research, the automation system developed is an automatic lamp and an automatic fan on the smart home. Both of these systems will be processed using an Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller. A microcontroller is used to obtain values of physical conditions through sensors connected to it. In the automatic lamp system required sensors to detect the light of the LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) sensor. While the automatic fan system required sensors to detect the temperature of the DHT11 sensor. In tests that have been done lamps and fans can work properly. The lamp can turn on automatically when the light begins to darken, and the lamp can also turn off automatically when the light begins to bright again. In addition, it can concluded also that the readings of LDR sensors are placed outside the room is different from the readings of LDR sensors placed in the room. This is because the light intensity received by the existing LDR sensor in the room is blocked by the wall of the house or by other objects. Then for the fan, it can also turn on automatically when the temperature is greater than 25°C, and the fan speed can also be adjusted. The fan may also turn off automatically when the temperature is less than equal to 25°C.

Automatic Construction by Contour Crafting Technology

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohammad Reza Khorramshahi

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Contour Crafting is a novel technology in construction industry based on 3D printing that uses robotics to construct free form building structures by repeatedly laying down layers of material such as concrete. It is actually an approach to scale up automatic fabrication from building small industrial parts to constructing buildings. However, there are little information about contour crafting (CC in current use; present paper aims to describe the operational steps of creating a whole building by the machine reviewing relevant literature. Furthermore, it will represent the advantages of CC usage compared to traditional construction methods, as well as its applicability in construction industry.

Group Dynamics in Automatic Imitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Gleibs, Ilka H; Wilson, Neil; Reddy, Geetha; Catmur, Caroline

Imitation-matching the configural body movements of another individual-plays a crucial part in social interaction. We investigated whether automatic imitation is not only influenced by who we imitate (ingroup vs. outgroup member) but also by the nature of an expected interaction situation (competitive vs. cooperative). In line with assumptions from Social Identity Theory), we predicted that both social group membership and the expected situation impact on the level of automatic imitation. We adopted a 2 (group membership target: ingroup, outgroup) x 2 (situation: cooperative, competitive) design. The dependent variable was the degree to which participants imitated the target in a reaction time automatic imitation task. 99 female students from two British Universities participated. We found a significant two-way interaction on the imitation effect. When interacting in expectation of cooperation, imitation was stronger for an ingroup target compared to an outgroup target. However, this was not the case in the competitive condition where imitation did not differ between ingroup and outgroup target. This demonstrates that the goal structure of an expected interaction will determine the extent to which intergroup relations influence imitation, supporting a social identity approach.

A Machine Vision System for Automatically Grading Hardwood Lumber - (Proceedings)

Science.gov (United States)

Richard W. Conners; Tai-Hoon Cho; Chong T. Ng; Thomas H. Drayer; Joe G. Tront; Philip A. Araman; Robert L. Brisbon

1990-01-01

Any automatic system for grading hardwood lumber can conceptually be divided into two components. One of these is a machine vision system for locating and identifying grading defects. The other is an automatic grading program that accepts as input the output of the machine vision system and, based on these data, determines the grade of a board. The progress that has...

Automatic approach to deriving fuzzy slope positions

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Liang-Jun; Zhu, A.-Xing; Qin, Cheng-Zhi; Liu, Jun-Zhi

2018-03-01

Fuzzy characterization of slope positions is important for geographic modeling. Most of the existing fuzzy classification-based methods for fuzzy characterization require extensive user intervention in data preparation and parameter setting, which is tedious and time-consuming. This paper presents an automatic approach to overcoming these limitations in the prototype-based inference method for deriving fuzzy membership value (or similarity) to slope positions. The key contribution is a procedure for finding the typical locations and setting the fuzzy inference parameters for each slope position type. Instead of being determined totally by users in the prototype-based inference method, in the proposed approach the typical locations and fuzzy inference parameters for each slope position type are automatically determined by a rule set based on prior domain knowledge and the frequency distributions of topographic attributes. Furthermore, the preparation of topographic attributes (e.g., slope gradient, curvature, and relative position index) is automated, so the proposed automatic approach has only one necessary input, i.e., the gridded digital elevation model of the study area. All compute-intensive algorithms in the proposed approach were speeded up by parallel computing. Two study cases were provided to demonstrate that this approach can properly, conveniently and quickly derive the fuzzy slope positions.

Automatic control system of the PIG ion source for the U-400 cyclotron

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kutner, V.B.; Subbotin, V.G.; Sukhov, A.M.; Tretyakov, Y.P.; Fefilov, B.V.; Kasyanov, A.A.; Rybin, V.M.

1990-01-01

An automatic control system is described for the multiply charged ion source of the U-400 cyclotron based on CAMAC apparatus and microprocessor controllers. The system allows the automatic tuning of the ion source to the necessary regime, including the automatic start-up of discharge, determination of the necessary parameters of sputtering, and the automatic search for a maximum beam current for given discharge parameters. The system performs the tuning of the ion source to the quasioptimal regime in 10--15 min with up to 5% deviation from the preset parameters. It is possible to stabilize the beam current within 3% using the automatic correction of the discharge regime

New automatic radiation monitoring network in Slovenia

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cindro, M.; Vokal Nemec, B.

2006-01-01

The Slovenian Nuclear Safety Administration gathers all on-line dose rate data measured by the various automatic networks operating throughout the territory of Slovenia. With the help of the PHARE financing program and in close cooperation with the Environmental agency of RS the upgrade of the existing network begun in 2005 and was finished in March 2006. The upgrade provided new measuring sites with all relevant data needed in case of a radiological accident. Even bigger improvement was made in the area of data presentation and analysis, which was the main shortcoming of the old system. (author)

Early maladaptive schemas and social anxiety in adolescents: the mediating role of anxious automatic thoughts.

Science.gov (United States)

Calvete, Esther; Orue, Izaskun; Hankin, Benjamin L

2013-04-01

Cognitive models state that cognitions are organized hierarchically, so that the underlying schemas affect behavior via more automatic, superficial cognitive processes. This study aimed to demonstrate that early maladaptive schemas predict anxious automatic thoughts, and to show that such automatic thoughts act as mediators between schemas and prospective changes in social anxiety symptoms. The study also examined an alternative reverse model in which schemas acted as mediators between automatic thoughts and social anxiety. A total of 1052 adolescents (499 girls and 553 boys; M(age)=13.43; SD(age)=1.29) completed measures of early maladaptive schemas, socially anxious automatic thoughts, and social anxiety symptoms at Times 1, 2, and 3. The results revealed bidirectional longitudinal relationships among schemas and automatic thoughts that were consistent in content (e.g., the disconnection/rejection schemas and automatic thoughts of negative self-concept). Furthermore, the automatic thoughts of anticipatory negative evaluation by others at Time 2 mediated the relationship between the other-directedness schemas at Time 1 and social anxiety symptoms at Time 3. These findings are consistent with hierarchical cognitive models of social anxiety given that deeper schemas predict more surface-level thoughts. They also support that these more surface-level thoughts contribute to perpetuating schemas. Finally, results show that early maladaptive schemas of the other-directedness domain play a relevant role in the development and maintenance of social anxiety. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Toward automatic phenotyping of retinal images from genetically determined mono- and dizygotic twins using amplitude modulation-frequency modulation methods

Science.gov (United States)

Soliz, P.; Davis, B.; Murray, V.; Pattichis, M.; Barriga, S.; Russell, S.

2010-03-01

This paper presents an image processing technique for automatically categorize age-related macular degeneration (AMD) phenotypes from retinal images. Ultimately, an automated approach will be much more precise and consistent in phenotyping of retinal diseases, such as AMD. We have applied the automated phenotyping to retina images from a cohort of mono- and dizygotic twins. The application of this technology will allow one to perform more quantitative studies that will lead to a better understanding of the genetic and environmental factors associated with diseases such as AMD. A method for classifying retinal images based on features derived from the application of amplitude-modulation frequency-modulation (AM-FM) methods is presented. Retinal images from identical and fraternal twins who presented with AMD were processed to determine whether AM-FM could be used to differentiate between the two types of twins. Results of the automatic classifier agreed with the findings of other researchers in explaining the variation of the disease between the related twins. AM-FM features classified 72% of the twins correctly. Visual grading found that genetics could explain between 46% and 71% of the variance.

Automatic Fiscal Stabilizers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Narcis Eduard Mitu

2013-11-01

Full Text Available Policies or institutions (built into an economic system that automatically tend to dampen economic cycle fluctuations in income, employment, etc., without direct government intervention. For example, in boom times, progressive income tax automatically reduces money supply as incomes and spendings rise. Similarly, in recessionary times, payment of unemployment benefits injects more money in the system and stimulates demand. Also called automatic stabilizers or built-in stabilizers.

Automatic physical inference with information maximizing neural networks

Science.gov (United States)

Charnock, Tom; Lavaux, Guilhem; Wandelt, Benjamin D.

2018-04-01

Compressing large data sets to a manageable number of summaries that are informative about the underlying parameters vastly simplifies both frequentist and Bayesian inference. When only simulations are available, these summaries are typically chosen heuristically, so they may inadvertently miss important information. We introduce a simulation-based machine learning technique that trains artificial neural networks to find nonlinear functionals of data that maximize Fisher information: information maximizing neural networks (IMNNs). In test cases where the posterior can be derived exactly, likelihood-free inference based on automatically derived IMNN summaries produces nearly exact posteriors, showing that these summaries are good approximations to sufficient statistics. In a series of numerical examples of increasing complexity and astrophysical relevance we show that IMNNs are robustly capable of automatically finding optimal, nonlinear summaries of the data even in cases where linear compression fails: inferring the variance of Gaussian signal in the presence of noise, inferring cosmological parameters from mock simulations of the Lyman-α forest in quasar spectra, and inferring frequency-domain parameters from LISA-like detections of gravitational waveforms. In this final case, the IMNN summary outperforms linear data compression by avoiding the introduction of spurious likelihood maxima. We anticipate that the automatic physical inference method described in this paper will be essential to obtain both accurate and precise cosmological parameter estimates from complex and large astronomical data sets, including those from LSST and Euclid.

Fully automatized apparatus for determining speed of sound for liquids in the temperature and pressure interval (283.15–343.15) K and (0.1–95) MPa

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yebra, Francisco; Troncoso, Jacobo; Romaní, Luis

2017-01-01

Highlights: • An apparatus for measuring speed of sound of liquids is described. • Pressure and temperature control is fully automatized. • Uncertainty of the measurements is estimated in 0.1%. • Comparison with literature data confirms the reliability of the methodology. - Abstract: An instrument for determining the speed of sound as a function of temperature and pressure for liquids is described. It was totally automatized: pressure and temperature values are controlled and time of flight of the ultrasonic wave data were acquired using a digital system which automatically made all required actions. The instrument calibration was made only at atmospheric pressure using high quality data of water and methanol. For higher pressures, the calibration parameters were predicted using a model for the high pressure cell, through finite-element calculations (FEM), in order to realistically determine the changes in the cell induced by the compression. Uncertainties in pressure and temperature were 20 mK and 0.1 MPa, respectively and in speed of sound it was estimated to be about 0.1%. The speeds of sound for water, methanol, hexane, heptane, octane, toluene, ethanol and 1-propanol were determined in the temperature and pressure ranges (283.15–343.15) K and (0.1–95) MPa. Comparison with literature data reveals the high reliability of the experimental procedure.

Automatic location of disruption times in JET

Science.gov (United States)

Moreno, R.; Vega, J.; Murari, A.

2014-11-01

The loss of stability and confinement in tokamak plasmas can induce critical events known as disruptions. Disruptions produce strong electromagnetic forces and thermal loads which can damage fundamental components of the devices. Determining the disruption time is extremely important for various disruption studies: theoretical models, physics-driven models, or disruption predictors. In JET, during the experimental campaigns with the JET-C (Carbon Fiber Composite) wall, a common criterion to determine the disruption time consisted of locating the time of the thermal quench. However, with the metallic ITER-like wall (JET-ILW), this criterion is usually not valid. Several thermal quenches may occur previous to the current quench but the temperature recovers. Therefore, a new criterion has to be defined. A possibility is to use the start of the current quench as disruption time. This work describes the implementation of an automatic data processing method to estimate the disruption time according to this new definition. This automatic determination allows both reducing human efforts to locate the disruption times and standardizing the estimates (with the benefit of being less vulnerable to human errors).

Automatic location of disruption times in JET.

Science.gov (United States)

Moreno, R; Vega, J; Murari, A

2014-11-01

The loss of stability and confinement in tokamak plasmas can induce critical events known as disruptions. Disruptions produce strong electromagnetic forces and thermal loads which can damage fundamental components of the devices. Determining the disruption time is extremely important for various disruption studies: theoretical models, physics-driven models, or disruption predictors. In JET, during the experimental campaigns with the JET-C (Carbon Fiber Composite) wall, a common criterion to determine the disruption time consisted of locating the time of the thermal quench. However, with the metallic ITER-like wall (JET-ILW), this criterion is usually not valid. Several thermal quenches may occur previous to the current quench but the temperature recovers. Therefore, a new criterion has to be defined. A possibility is to use the start of the current quench as disruption time. This work describes the implementation of an automatic data processing method to estimate the disruption time according to this new definition. This automatic determination allows both reducing human efforts to locate the disruption times and standardizing the estimates (with the benefit of being less vulnerable to human errors).

An optical biosensing film for biochemical oxygen demand determination in seawater with an automatic flow sampling system

Science.gov (United States)

Xin, Lingling; Wang, Xudong; Guo, Guangmei; Wang, Xiaoru; Chen, Xi

2007-09-01

An on-line roboticized apparatus, including an optical biosensing film with an automatic flow sampling system, has been developed for biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) determination of seawater. The sensing film employed in the apparatus consisted of an organically modified silicate (ORMOSIL) film embedded with tri(4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline) ruthenium(II) perchlorate. Three species of microorganism cultivated from seawater were immobilized in an ORMOSIL-polyvinyl alcohol matrix. Possible factors affecting BOD determination were studied, including sampling frequency, temperature, pH and sodium chloride concentration. Based on measurements of the linear fluctuant coefficients and the reproducibility of its response to seawater, the BOD apparatus showed the advantages of high veracity and short response time. Generally, the linear fluctuant coefficient (R2) in the BOD range 0.2-40 mg l-1 was 0.9945 when using a glucose/glutamate (GGA) BOD standard solution. A reproducible response for the BOD sensing film of within ±2.8% could be obtained in the 2 mg l-1 GGA solution. The BOD apparatus was applied to the BOD determination of seawater, and the values estimated by this biosensing apparatus correlated well with those determined by the conventional 5 day BOD (BOD5) test.

Towards Automatic Decentralized Control Structure Selection

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

for decentralized control is determined automatically, and the resulting decentralized control structure is automatically tuned using standard techniques. Dynamic simulation of the resulting process system gives immediate feedback to the process design engineer regarding practical operability of the process......A subtask in integration of design and control of chemical processes is the selection of a control structure. Automating the selection of the control structure enables sequential integration of process and controld esign. As soon as the process is specified or computed, a structure....... The control structure selection problem is formulated as a special MILP employing cost coefficients which are computed using Parseval's theorem combined with RGA and IMC concepts. This approach enables selection and tuning of large-scale plant-wide decentralized controllers through efficient combination...

Towards Automatic Decentralized Control Structure Selection

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, John Bagterp; Jørgensen, Sten Bay

2000-01-01

for decentralized control is determined automatically, and the resulting decentralized control structure is automatically tuned using standard techniques. Dynamic simulation of the resulting process system gives immediate feedback to the process design engineer regarding practical operability of the process......A subtask in integration of design and control of chemical processes is the selection of a control structure. Automating the selection of the control structure enables sequential integration of process and control design. As soon as the process is specified or computed, a structure....... The control structure selection problem is formulated as a special MILP employing cost coefficients which are computed using Parseval's theorem combined with RGA and IMC concepts. This approach enables selection and tuning of large-scale plant-wide decentralized controllers through efficient combination...

Automatic Detect and Trace of Solar Filaments

Science.gov (United States)

Fang, Cheng; Chen, P. F.; Tang, Yu-hua; Hao, Qi; Guo, Yang

We developed a series of methods to automatically detect and trace solar filaments in solar Hα images. The programs are able to not only recognize filaments and determine their properties, such as the position, the area and other relevant parameters, but also to trace the daily evolution of the filaments. For solar full disk Hα images, the method consists of three parts: first, preprocessing is applied to correct the original images; second, the Canny edge-detection method is used to detect the filaments; third, filament properties are recognized through the morphological operators. For each Hα filament and its barb features, we introduced the unweighted undirected graph concept and adopted Dijkstra shortest-path algorithm to recognize the filament spine; then, using polarity inversion line shift method for measuring the polarities in both sides of the filament to determine the filament axis chirality; finally, employing connected components labeling method to identify the barbs and calculating the angle between each barb and spine to indicate the barb chirality. Our algorithms are applied to the observations from varied observatories, including the Optical & Near Infrared Solar Eruption Tracer (ONSET) in Nanjing University, Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) and Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). The programs are demonstrated to be effective and efficient. We used our method to automatically process and analyze 3470 images obtained by MLSO from January 1998 to December 2009, and a butterfly diagram of filaments is obtained. It shows that the latitudinal migration of solar filaments has three trends in the Solar Cycle 23: The drift velocity was fast from 1998 to the solar maximum; after the solar maximum, it became relatively slow and after 2006, the migration became divergent, signifying the solar minimum. About 60% filaments with the latitudes larger than 50 degree migrate towards the Polar Regions with relatively high velocities, and the latitudinal migrating

Simple and efficient machine learning frameworks for identifying protein-protein interaction relevant articles and experimental methods used to study the interactions.

Science.gov (United States)

Agarwal, Shashank; Liu, Feifan; Yu, Hong

2011-10-03

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) is an important biomedical phenomenon. Automatically detecting PPI-relevant articles and identifying methods that are used to study PPI are important text mining tasks. In this study, we have explored domain independent features to develop two open source machine learning frameworks. One performs binary classification to determine whether the given article is PPI relevant or not, named "Simple Classifier", and the other one maps the PPI relevant articles with corresponding interaction method nodes in a standardized PSI-MI (Proteomics Standards Initiative-Molecular Interactions) ontology, named "OntoNorm". We evaluated our system in the context of BioCreative challenge competition using the standardized data set. Our systems are amongst the top systems reported by the organizers, attaining 60.8% F1-score for identifying relevant documents, and 52.3% F1-score for mapping articles to interaction method ontology. Our results show that domain-independent machine learning frameworks can perform competitively well at the tasks of detecting PPI relevant articles and identifying the methods that were used to study the interaction in such articles. Simple Classifier is available at http://sourceforge.net/p/simpleclassify/home/ and OntoNorm at http://sourceforge.net/p/ontonorm/home/.

A Machine Vision System for Automatically Grading Hardwood Lumber - (Industrial Metrology)

Science.gov (United States)

Richard W. Conners; Tai-Hoon Cho; Chong T. Ng; Thomas T. Drayer; Philip A. Araman; Robert L. Brisbon

1992-01-01

Any automatic system for grading hardwood lumber can conceptually be divided into two components. One of these is a machine vision system for locating and identifying grading defects. The other is an automatic grading program that accepts as input the output of the machine vision system and, based on these data, determines the grade of a board. The progress that has...

Automatic Sieve-Shaker for Determining Soil Aggregate Stability and Dimensional Distribution Using a Vertical Oscillation System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosario Dell’Aquila

Full Text Available The soil aggregate stability is determined generally by sifting the soil samples in water using a sieve-shaker (wet sieving. The Author has developed an original model of automatic sieve-shaker using a vertical oscillation system to the aim of an its possible use to determine the soil aggregate stability and dimensional distribution. The purpose of this note is to describe the construction and performance of the prototype currently used in the Laboratory for the Soil Structure Study of the ISAFOM – CNR. The proposed sieve-shaker, with the introduction of some innovations (protected by Italy Patent 0001332102, realizes the submersion and levelling of the soil samples using a lifter to support the containers with the water. With 6 workplaces it allows to process simultaneously up to 6 soil samples according to different test cycles. By means of the control panel it is possible to set up various determinations with the stroke of 3 cm and the oscillation frequency from 4 up to 80 oscillations per minute. The performance of the proposed sieve-shaker was verified with a technical test to verify the performance of the 6 workplaces to oscillation speed increasing up to 60 oscillations per minute and an agronomic test. The results have been submitted to analysis of variance considering the plots of the field from which have been taken the samples for repetitions and the six workplaces of the proposed sieve-shaker for experimental theses. The differences between the various workplaces have not been significant. This demonstrates that the behavior of the various workplaces is uniform. The dispersion in water at constant shaking time and increasing oscillation speed has evidenced a very significant inverse relation between the index of aggregate stability in water (IASW and number of oscillations per minute. This result demonstrates a constant performance of the proposed sieve-shaker to varying of the oscillation speed. The agnonomic test has demonstrated

Automatic Sieve-Shaker for Determining Soil Aggregate Stability and Dimensional Distribution Using a Vertical Oscillation System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosario Dell’Aquila

2007-12-01

Full Text Available The soil aggregate stability is determined generally by sifting the soil samples in water using a sieve-shaker (wet sieving. The Author has developed an original model of automatic sieve-shaker using a vertical oscillation system to the aim of an its possible use to determine the soil aggregate stability and dimensional distribution. The purpose of this note is to describe the construction and performance of the prototype currently used in the Laboratory for the Soil Structure Study of the ISAFOM – CNR. The proposed sieve-shaker, with the introduction of some innovations (protected by Italy Patent 0001332102, realizes the submersion and levelling of the soil samples using a lifter to support the containers with the water. With 6 workplaces it allows to process simultaneously up to 6 soil samples according to different test cycles. By means of the control panel it is possible to set up various determinations with the stroke of 3 cm and the oscillation frequency from 4 up to 80 oscillations per minute. The performance of the proposed sieve-shaker was verified with a technical test to verify the performance of the 6 workplaces to oscillation speed increasing up to 60 oscillations per minute and an agronomic test. The results have been submitted to analysis of variance considering the plots of the field from which have been taken the samples for repetitions and the six workplaces of the proposed sieve-shaker for experimental theses. The differences between the various workplaces have not been significant. This demonstrates that the behavior of the various workplaces is uniform. The dispersion in water at constant shaking time and increasing oscillation speed has evidenced a very significant inverse relation between the index of aggregate stability in water (IASW and number of oscillations per minute. This result demonstrates a constant performance of the proposed sieve-shaker to varying of the oscillation speed. The agnonomic test has demonstrated

Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferreira, Mario B; Garcia-Marques, Leonel; Sherman, Steven J; Sherman, Jeffrey W

2006-11-01

The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K. E. Stanovich & R. F. West, 2000) has been primarily a matter of assumption with a scarcity of direct empirical findings supporting it. The present authors use the process dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) to provide convergent evidence validating a dual-process perspective to judgment under uncertainty based on the independent contributions of heuristic and rule-based reasoning. Process dissociations based on experimental manipulation of variables were derived from the most relevant theoretical properties typically used to contrast the two forms of reasoning. These include processing goals (Experiment 1), cognitive resources (Experiment 2), priming (Experiment 3), and formal training (Experiment 4); the results consistently support the author's perspective. They conclude that judgment under uncertainty is neither an automatic nor a controlled process but that it reflects both processes, with each making independent contributions.

Automatic Detection of Terminology Evolution

Science.gov (United States)

Tahmasebi, Nina

As archives contain documents that span over a long period of time, the language used to create these documents and the language used for querying the archive can differ. This difference is due to evolution in both terminology and semantics and will cause a significant number of relevant documents being omitted. A static solution is to use query expansion based on explicit knowledge banks such as thesauri or ontologies. However as we are able to archive resources with more varied terminology, it will be infeasible to use only explicit knowledge for this purpose. There exist only few or no thesauri covering very domain specific terminologies or slang as used in blogs etc. In this Ph.D. thesis we focus on automatically detecting terminology evolution in a completely unsupervised manner as described in this technical paper.

On a program manifold's stability of one contour automatic control systems

Science.gov (United States)

Zumatov, S. S.

2017-12-01

Methodology of analysis of stability is expounded to the one contour systems automatic control feedback in the presence of non-linearities. The methodology is based on the use of the simplest mathematical models of the nonlinear controllable systems. Stability of program manifolds of one contour automatic control systems is investigated. The sufficient conditions of program manifold's absolute stability of one contour automatic control systems are obtained. The Hurwitz's angle of absolute stability was determined. The sufficient conditions of program manifold's absolute stability of control systems by the course of plane in the mode of autopilot are obtained by means Lyapunov's second method.

Automatic determination of brain perfusion index for measurement of cerebral blood flow using spectral analysis and {sup 99m}Tc-HMPAO

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Takasawa, Masashi [Division of Strokology, Department of Internal Medicine and Therapeutics, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-2, Yamadaoka, Suita City, Osaka, 565-0871 (Japan); Department of Nuclear Medicine, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka (Japan); Murase, Kenya; Kawamata, Minoru [Department of Allied Health Sciences, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka (Japan); Oku, Naohiko; Imaizumi, Masao; Osaki, Yasuhiro; Paul, Asit K. [Department of Nuclear Medicine, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka (Japan); Yoshikawa, Takuya; Kitagawa, Kazuo; Matsumoto, Masayasu; Hori, Masatsugu [Division of Strokology, Department of Internal Medicine and Therapeutics, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-2, Yamadaoka, Suita City, Osaka, 565-0871 (Japan)

2002-11-01

Cerebral blood flow (CBF) can be non-invasively quantified using the brain perfusion index (BPI), determined from radionuclide angiographic data generated by technetium-99m hexamethylpropylene amine oxime ({sup 99m}Tc-HMPAO). We previously reported the use of a spectral analysis (SA) method using {sup 99m}Tc-HMPAO to calculate the BPI. In this report, we demonstrate an automatic method for determining the optimal BPI value and compare the optimal BPI values with the absolute CBF values measured using H{sub 2}{sup 15}O positron emission tomography (PET). Bilateral cerebral hemispheres of 11 patients with various brain diseases were examined using {sup 99m}Tc-HMPAO. In the automatic SA procedure, the radioactivity curve for the aortic arch (C{sub a}) was shifted by 0-10 s. The radioactivity curve for the brain (C{sub b}) was estimated using the shifted C{sub a}, and the error value between the actually measured and the estimated C{sub b} (Err) was calculated. When the Err was at a minimum, the BPI value was defined as optimal BPI. The difference in BPI from the optimal BPI was calculated as vertical stroke BPI - optimal BPI vertical stroke / optimal BPI x 100 (%). In all participants, an H{sub 2}{sup 15}O PET examination was also performed, and the BPI values were compared with the absolute CBF values measured using H{sub 2}{sup 15}O PET (mCBF{sup PET}). The difference between BPI and the optimal BPI increased significantly from 4.87%{+-}1.69% to 18.38%{+-}3.93% (mean{+-}SD) when the Err value increased. The optimal BPI value (y) was well correlated with the mCBF{sup PET} value (x) (y=0.21x-0.0075, r=0.800). Our results suggest that this automatic SA method provides an accurate estimate of BPI that can be used for the quantification of CBF using {sup 99m}Tc-HMPAO SA. (orig.)

AUTOMATIC MULTILEVEL IMAGE SEGMENTATION BASED ON FUZZY REASONING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Liang Tang

2011-05-01

Full Text Available An automatic multilevel image segmentation method based on sup-star fuzzy reasoning (SSFR is presented. Using the well-known sup-star fuzzy reasoning technique, the proposed algorithm combines the global statistical information implied in the histogram with the local information represented by the fuzzy sets of gray-levels, and aggregates all the gray-levels into several classes characterized by the local maximum values of the histogram. The presented method has the merits of determining the number of the segmentation classes automatically, and avoiding to calculating thresholds of segmentation. Emulating and real image segmentation experiments demonstrate that the SSFR is effective.

2011 International Conference in Electrics, Communication and Automatic Control Proceedings

CERN Document Server

2012-01-01

This two-volume set contains the very latest, cutting-edge material in electrics, communication and automatic control. As a vital field of research that is highly relevant to current developments in a number of technological domains, the subjects it covers include micro-electronics and integrated circuit control, signal processing technology, next-generation network infrastructure, wireless communication and scientific instruments. The aim of the International Conference in Electrics, Communication and Automatic Control, held in Chongqing, China, in June 2011 was to provide a valuable inclusive platform for researchers, engineers, academicians and industrial professionals from all over the world to share their research results with fellow scientists in the sector. The call for papers netted well over 600 submissions, of which 224 were selected for presentation. This fully peer-reviewed collection of papers from the conference can be viewed as a single-source compendium of the latest trends and techniques in t...

Determining the number of clusters for kernelized fuzzy C-means algorithms for automatic medical image segmentation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

E.A. Zanaty

2012-03-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we determine the suitable validity criterion of kernelized fuzzy C-means and kernelized fuzzy C-means with spatial constraints for automatic segmentation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI. For that; the original Euclidean distance in the FCM is replaced by a Gaussian radial basis function classifier (GRBF and the corresponding algorithms of FCM methods are derived. The derived algorithms are called as the kernelized fuzzy C-means (KFCM and kernelized fuzzy C-means with spatial constraints (SKFCM. These methods are implemented on eighteen indexes as validation to determine whether indexes are capable to acquire the optimal clusters number. The performance of segmentation is estimated by applying these methods independently on several datasets to prove which method can give good results and with which indexes. Our test spans various indexes covering the classical and the rather more recent indexes that have enjoyed noticeable success in that field. These indexes are evaluated and compared by applying them on various test images, including synthetic images corrupted with noise of varying levels, and simulated volumetric MRI datasets. Comparative analysis is also presented to show whether the validity index indicates the optimal clustering for our datasets.

Semi-Automatic Removal of Foreground Stars from Images of Galaxies

Science.gov (United States)

Frei, Zsolt

1996-07-01

A new procedure, designed to remove foreground stars from galaxy proviles is presented here. Although several programs exist for stellar and faint object photometry, none of them treat star removal from the images very carefully. I present my attempt to develop such a system, and briefly compare the performance of my software to one of the well-known stellar photometry packages, DAOPhot (Stetson 1987). Major steps in my procedure are: (1) automatic construction of an empirical 2D point spread function from well separated stars that are situated off the galaxy; (2) automatic identification of those peaks that are likely to be foreground stars, scaling the PSF and removing these stars, and patching residuals (in the automatically determined smallest possible area where residuals are truly significant); and (3) cosmetic fix of remaining degradations in the image. The algorithm and software presented here is significantly better for automatic removal of foreground stars from images of galaxies than DAOPhot or similar packages, since: (a) the most suitable stars are selected automatically from the image for the PSF fit; (b) after star-removal an intelligent and automatic procedure removes any possible residuals; (c) unlimited number of images can be cleaned in one run without any user interaction whatsoever. (SECTION: Computing and Data Analysis)

Finding weak points automatically

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Archinger, P.; Wassenberg, M.

1999-01-01

Operators of nuclear power stations have to carry out material tests at selected components by regular intervalls. Therefore a full automaticated test, which achieves a clearly higher reproducibility, compared to part automaticated variations, would provide a solution. In addition the full automaticated test reduces the dose of radiation for the test person. (orig.) [de

Automatic termination of a protective action

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Heil, P.H.

1986-01-01

Subcommittee 6 of NPEC is responsible for the development of IEEE Standard 603. The adequacy of requirements concerning control and termination of protective actions was raised during the balloting of IEEE Standard 603-1980. In essence, the concern dealt with the requirement for deliberate operator action to return the system to normal. It was questioned if control actions such as automatic termination of system operation were allowed. Changes in the standard were made to clarify that there was a distinction between control (including termination) and return to normal and also state that automatic control may be required. Additionally, an action item was identified in the forward of IEEE Standard 603-1980 to determine if any additional changes were needed. The purpose of the paper is to present the results of this additional work

Comparison of manual and semi-automatic measuring techniques in MSCT scans of patients with lymphoma: a multicentre study

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Hoeink, A.J.; Wessling, J.; Schuelke, C.; Kohlhase, N.; Wassenaar, L.; Heindel, W.; Buerke, B. [University Hospital Muenster, Department of Clinical Radiology, Muenster (Germany); Koch, R. [University of Muenster, Institute of Biostatistics and Clinical Research (IBKF), Muenster (Germany); Mesters, R.M. [University Hospital Muenster, Department of Haematology and Oncology, Muenster (Germany); D' Anastasi, M.; Graser, A.; Karpitschka, M. [University Hospital Muenchen (LMU), Institute of Clinical Radiology, Muenchen (Germany); Fabel, M.; Wulff, A. [University Hospital Kiel, Department of Clinical Radiology, Kiel (Germany); Pinto dos Santos, D. [University Hospital Mainz, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Mainz (Germany); Kiessling, A. [University Hospital Marburg, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Marburg (Germany); Dicken, V.; Bornemann, L. [Institute of Medical Imaging Computing, Fraunhofer MeVis, Bremen (Germany)

2014-11-15

Multicentre evaluation of the precision of semi-automatic 2D/3D measurements in comparison to manual, linear measurements of lymph nodes regarding their inter-observer variability in multi-slice CT (MSCT) of patients with lymphoma. MSCT data of 63 patients were interpreted before and after chemotherapy by one/tworadiologists in five university hospitals. In 307 lymph nodes, short (SAD)/long (LAD) axis diameter and WHO area were determined manually and semi-automatically. Volume was solely calculated semi-automatically. To determine the precision of the individual parameters, a mean was calculated for every lymph node/parameter. Deviation of the measured parameters from this mean was evaluated separately. Statistical analysis entailed intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Median relative deviations of semi-automatic parameters were smaller than deviations of manually assessed parameters, e.g. semi-automatic SAD 5.3 vs. manual 6.5 %. Median variations among different study sites were smaller if the measurement was conducted semi-automatically, e. g. manual LAD 5.7/4.2 % vs. semi-automatic 3.4/3.4 %. Semi-automatic volumetry was superior to the other parameters (2.8 %). Semi-automatic determination of different lymph node parameters is (compared to manually assessed parameters) associated with a slightly greater precision and a marginally lower inter-observer variability. These results are with regard to the increasing mobility of patients among different medical centres and in relation to the quality management of multicentre trials of importance. (orig.)

The automatic component of habit in health behavior: habit as cue-contingent automaticity.

Science.gov (United States)

Orbell, Sheina; Verplanken, Bas

2010-07-01

Habit might be usefully characterized as a form of automaticity that involves the association of a cue and a response. Three studies examined habitual automaticity in regard to different aspects of the cue-response relationship characteristic of unhealthy and healthy habits. In each study, habitual automaticity was assessed by the Self-Report Habit Index (SRHI). In Study 1 SRHI scores correlated with attentional bias to smoking cues in a Stroop task. Study 2 examined the ability of a habit cue to elicit an unwanted habit response. In a prospective field study, habitual automaticity in relation to smoking when drinking alcohol in a licensed public house (pub) predicted the likelihood of cigarette-related action slips 2 months later after smoking in pubs had become illegal. In Study 3 experimental group participants formed an implementation intention to floss in response to a specified situational cue. Habitual automaticity of dental flossing was rapidly enhanced compared to controls. The studies provided three different demonstrations of the importance of cues in the automatic operation of habits. Habitual automaticity assessed by the SRHI captured aspects of a habit that go beyond mere frequency or consistency of the behavior. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.

Automaticity of phasic alertness: Evidence for a three-component model of visual cueing.

Science.gov (United States)

Lin, Zhicheng; Lu, Zhong-Lin

2016-10-01

The automaticity of phasic alertness is investigated using the attention network test. Results show that the cueing effect from the alerting cue-double cue-is strongly enhanced by the task relevance of visual cues, as determined by the informativeness of the orienting cue-single cue-that is being mixed (80 % vs. 50 % valid in predicting where the target will appear). Counterintuitively, the cueing effect from the alerting cue can be negatively affected by its visibility, such that masking the cue from awareness can reveal a cueing effect that is otherwise absent when the cue is visible. Evidently, then, top-down influences-in the form of contextual relevance and cue awareness-can have opposite influences on the cueing effect from the alerting cue. These findings lead us to the view that a visual cue can engage three components of attention-orienting, alerting, and inhibition-to determine the behavioral cueing effect. We propose that phasic alertness, particularly in the form of specific response readiness, is regulated by both internal, top-down expectation and external, bottom-up stimulus properties. In contrast to some existing views, we advance the perspective that phasic alertness is strongly tied to temporal orienting, attentional capture, and spatial orienting. Finally, we discuss how translating attention research to clinical applications would benefit from an improved ability to measure attention. To this end, controlling the degree of intraindividual variability in the attentional components and improving the precision of the measurement tools may prove vital.

Automatics adjusment on private pension fund for Asian Mathematics Conferences

Science.gov (United States)

Purwadi, J.

2017-10-01

This paper discussed about how the automatic adjustment mechanism in the pension fund with defined benefits in case conditions beyond assumptions - assumptions that have been determined. Automatic adjustment referred to in this experiment is intended to anticipate changes in economic and demographic conditions. The method discuss in this paper are indexing life expectancy. In this paper discussed about how the methods on private pension fund and how’s the impact of the change of life expectancy on benefit.

Four-Channel Biosignal Analysis and Feature Extraction for Automatic Emotion Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Jonghwa; André, Elisabeth

This paper investigates the potential of physiological signals as a reliable channel for automatic recognition of user's emotial state. For the emotion recognition, little attention has been paid so far to physiological signals compared to audio-visual emotion channels such as facial expression or speech. All essential stages of automatic recognition system using biosignals are discussed, from recording physiological dataset up to feature-based multiclass classification. Four-channel biosensors are used to measure electromyogram, electrocardiogram, skin conductivity and respiration changes. A wide range of physiological features from various analysis domains, including time/frequency, entropy, geometric analysis, subband spectra, multiscale entropy, etc., is proposed in order to search the best emotion-relevant features and to correlate them with emotional states. The best features extracted are specified in detail and their effectiveness is proven by emotion recognition results.

Automatic micropart assembly of 3-Dimensional structure by vision based control

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wang, Lidai; Kim, Seung Min

2008-01-01

We propose a vision control strategy to perform automatic microassembly tasks in three-dimension (3-D) and develop relevant control software: specifically, using a 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic workstation to control a passive microgripper to automatically grasp a designated micropart from the chip, pivot the micropart, and then move the micropart to be vertically inserted into a designated slot on the chip. In the proposed control strategy, the whole microassembly task is divided into two subtasks, micro-grasping and micro-joining, in sequence. To guarantee the success of microassembly and manipulation accuracy, two different two-stage feedback motion strategies, the pattern matching and auto-focus method are employed, with the use of vision-based control system and the vision control software developed. Experiments conducted demonstrate the efficiency and validity of the proposed control strategy

Automatic micropart assembly of 3-Dimensional structure by vision based control

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Wang, Lidai [University of Toronto, Toronto (Canada); Kim, Seung Min [Korean Intellectual Property Office, Daejeon (Korea, Republic of)

2008-12-15

We propose a vision control strategy to perform automatic microassembly tasks in three-dimension (3-D) and develop relevant control software: specifically, using a 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic workstation to control a passive microgripper to automatically grasp a designated micropart from the chip, pivot the micropart, and then move the micropart to be vertically inserted into a designated slot on the chip. In the proposed control strategy, the whole microassembly task is divided into two subtasks, micro-grasping and micro-joining, in sequence. To guarantee the success of microassembly and manipulation accuracy, two different two-stage feedback motion strategies, the pattern matching and auto-focus method are employed, with the use of vision-based control system and the vision control software developed. Experiments conducted demonstrate the efficiency and validity of the proposed control strategy

Modelling the adoption of automatic milking systems in Noord-Holland

OpenAIRE

Matteo Floridi; Fabio Bartolini; Jack Peerlings; Nico Polman; Davide Viaggi

2013-01-01

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the business and industry development process in agriculture. One of the most relevant innovations in dairy farms is the robotisation of the milking process through the adoption of Automatic Milking Systems (AMS). The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of selected Common Agricultural Policy measures on the adoption of AMS in dairy farms. The model developed is a dynamic farm-household model that is able to si...

Automatically Determining Scale Within Unstructured Point Clouds

Science.gov (United States)

Kadamen, Jayren; Sithole, George

2016-06-01

Three dimensional models obtained from imagery have an arbitrary scale and therefore have to be scaled. Automatically scaling these models requires the detection of objects in these models which can be computationally intensive. Real-time object detection may pose problems for applications such as indoor navigation. This investigation poses the idea that relational cues, specifically height ratios, within indoor environments may offer an easier means to obtain scales for models created using imagery. The investigation aimed to show two things, (a) that the size of objects, especially the height off ground is consistent within an environment, and (b) that based on this consistency, objects can be identified and their general size used to scale a model. To test the idea a hypothesis is first tested on a terrestrial lidar scan of an indoor environment. Later as a proof of concept the same test is applied to a model created using imagery. The most notable finding was that the detection of objects can be more readily done by studying the ratio between the dimensions of objects that have their dimensions defined by human physiology. For example the dimensions of desks and chairs are related to the height of an average person. In the test, the difference between generalised and actual dimensions of objects were assessed. A maximum difference of 3.96% (2.93cm) was observed from automated scaling. By analysing the ratio between the heights (distance from the floor) of the tops of objects in a room, identification was also achieved.

Automatic detection of AutoPEEP during controlled mechanical ventilation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nguyen Quang-Thang

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Dynamic hyperinflation, hereafter called AutoPEEP (auto-positive end expiratory pressure with some slight language abuse, is a frequent deleterious phenomenon in patients undergoing mechanical ventilation. Although not readily quantifiable, AutoPEEP can be recognized on the expiratory portion of the flow waveform. If expiratory flow does not return to zero before the next inspiration, AutoPEEP is present. This simple detection however requires the eye of an expert clinician at the patient’s bedside. An automatic detection of AutoPEEP should be helpful to optimize care. Methods In this paper, a platform for automatic detection of AutoPEEP based on the flow signal available on most of recent mechanical ventilators is introduced. The detection algorithms are developed on the basis of robust non-parametric hypothesis testings that require no prior information on the signal distribution. In particular, two detectors are proposed: one is based on SNT (Signal Norm Testing and the other is an extension of SNT in the sequential framework. The performance assessment was carried out on a respiratory system analog and ex-vivo on various retrospectively acquired patient curves. Results The experiment results have shown that the proposed algorithm provides relevant AutoPEEP detection on both simulated and real data. The analysis of clinical data has shown that the proposed detectors can be used to automatically detect AutoPEEP with an accuracy of 93% and a recall (sensitivity of 90%. Conclusions The proposed platform provides an automatic early detection of AutoPEEP. Such functionality can be integrated in the currently used mechanical ventilator for continuous monitoring of the patient-ventilator interface and, therefore, alleviate the clinician task.

Automatic α-spectrometry using surface barrier detectors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Czarwinski, R.; Loessner, V.; Klucke, H.; Krause, J.

1984-01-01

A measurement system has been developed for the routine determination of transuranics in biosamples by α-spectrometry. It employs high-resolution surface-barrier detectors and can be operated automatically by means of an integrated CAMAC system. For 241 Am, the minimum detectable activity is 2.4 x 10 -3 Bq. (author)

Semi-automatic long-term acoustic surveying

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andreassen, Tórur; Surlykke, Annemarie; Hallam, John

2014-01-01

Increasing concern about decline in biodiversity has created a demand for population surveys. Acoustic monitoring is an efficient non-invasive method, which may be deployed for surveys of animals as diverse as insects, birds, and bats. Long-term unmanned automatic monitoring may provide unique...... to determine bat behavior and correct for the bias toward loud bats inherent in acoustic surveying....

Automatic Carbon Dioxide-Methane Gas Sensor Based on the Solubility of Gases in Water

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Raúl O. Cadena-Pereda

2012-08-01

Full Text Available Biogas methane content is a relevant variable in anaerobic digestion processing where knowledge of process kinetics or an early indicator of digester failure is needed. The contribution of this work is the development of a novel, simple and low cost automatic carbon dioxide-methane gas sensor based on the solubility of gases in water as the precursor of a sensor for biogas quality monitoring. The device described in this work was used for determining the composition of binary mixtures, such as carbon dioxide-methane, in the range of 0–100%. The design and implementation of a digital signal processor and control system into a low-cost Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA platform has permitted the successful application of data acquisition, data distribution and digital data processing, making the construction of a standalone carbon dioxide-methane gas sensor possible.

Automatic carbon dioxide-methane gas sensor based on the solubility of gases in water.

Science.gov (United States)

Cadena-Pereda, Raúl O; Rivera-Muñoz, Eric M; Herrera-Ruiz, Gilberto; Gomez-Melendez, Domingo J; Anaya-Rivera, Ely K

2012-01-01

Biogas methane content is a relevant variable in anaerobic digestion processing where knowledge of process kinetics or an early indicator of digester failure is needed. The contribution of this work is the development of a novel, simple and low cost automatic carbon dioxide-methane gas sensor based on the solubility of gases in water as the precursor of a sensor for biogas quality monitoring. The device described in this work was used for determining the composition of binary mixtures, such as carbon dioxide-methane, in the range of 0-100%. The design and implementation of a digital signal processor and control system into a low-cost Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform has permitted the successful application of data acquisition, data distribution and digital data processing, making the construction of a standalone carbon dioxide-methane gas sensor possible.

Microprocessor controlled system for automatic and semi-automatic syntheses of radiopharmaceuticals

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ruth, T.J.; Adam, M.J.; Morris, D.; Jivan, S.

1986-01-01

A computer based system has been constructed to control the automatic synthesis of 2-deoxy-2-( 18 F)fluoro-D-glucose and is also being used in the development of an automatic synthesis of L-6-( 18 F)fluorodopa. (author)

Automatic design of optical systems by digital computer

Science.gov (United States)

Casad, T. A.; Schmidt, L. F.

1967-01-01

Computer program uses geometrical optical techniques and a least squares optimization method employing computing equipment for the automatic design of optical systems. It evaluates changes in various optical parameters, provides comprehensive ray-tracing, and generally determines the acceptability of the optical system characteristics.

Optical Automatic Car Identification (OACI) Field Test Program

Science.gov (United States)

1976-05-01

The results of the Optical Automatic Car Identification (OACI) tests at Chicago conducted from August 16 to September 4, 1975 are presented. The main purpose of this test was to determine the suitability of optics as a principle of operation for an a...

Automatic referral to cardiac rehabilitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Fischer, Jane P

2008-01-01

The pervasive negative impact of cardiovascular disease in the United States is well documented. Although advances have been made, the campaign to reduce the occurrence, progression, and mortality continues. Determining evidence-based data is only half the battle. Implementing new and updated clinical guidelines into daily practice is a challenging task. Cardiac rehabilitation is an example of a proven intervention whose benefit is hindered through erratic implementation. The American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation (AACVPR), the American College of Cardiology (ACC), and the American Heart Association (AHA) have responded to this problem by publishing the AACVPR/ACC/AHA 2007 Performance Measures on Cardiac Rehabilitation for Referral to and Delivery of Cardiac Rehabilitation/Secondary Prevention Services. This new national guideline recommends automatic referral to cardiac rehabilitation for every eligible patient (performance measure A-1). This article offers guidance for the initiation of an automatic referral system, including individualizing your protocol with regard to electronic or paper-based order entry structures.

Automatic Camera Control

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Burelli, Paolo; Preuss, Mike

2014-01-01

Automatically generating computer animations is a challenging and complex problem with applications in games and film production. In this paper, we investigate howto translate a shot list for a virtual scene into a series of virtual camera configurations — i.e automatically controlling the virtual...

Using the Characteristics of Documents, Users and Tasks to Predict the Situational Relevance of Health Web Documents

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Melinda Oroszlányová

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Relevance is usually estimated by search engines using document content, disregarding the user behind the search and the characteristics of the task. In this work, we look at relevance as framed in a situational context, calling it situational relevance, and analyze whether it is possible to predict it using documents, users and tasks characteristics. Using an existing dataset composed of health web documents, relevance judgments for information needs, user and task characteristics, we build a multivariate prediction model for situational relevance. Our model has an accuracy of 77.17%. Our findings provide insights into features that could improve the estimation of relevance by search engines, helping to conciliate the systemic and situational views of relevance. In a near future we will work on the automatic assessment of document, user and task characteristics.

TU-H-CAMPUS-JeP1-02: Fully Automatic Verification of Automatically Contoured Normal Tissues in the Head and Neck

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

McCarroll, R [UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX (United States); UT Health Science Center, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Houston, TX (United States); Beadle, B; Yang, J; Zhang, L; Kisling, K; Balter, P; Stingo, F; Nelson, C; Followill, D; Court, L [UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX (United States); Mejia, M [University of Santo Tomas Hospital, Manila, Metro Manila (Philippines)

2016-06-15

Purpose: To investigate and validate the use of an independent deformable-based contouring algorithm for automatic verification of auto-contoured structures in the head and neck towards fully automated treatment planning. Methods: Two independent automatic contouring algorithms [(1) Eclipse’s Smart Segmentation followed by pixel-wise majority voting, (2) an in-house multi-atlas based method] were used to create contours of 6 normal structures of 10 head-and-neck patients. After rating by a radiation oncologist, the higher performing algorithm was selected as the primary contouring method, the other used for automatic verification of the primary. To determine the ability of the verification algorithm to detect incorrect contours, contours from the primary method were shifted from 0.5 to 2cm. Using a logit model the structure-specific minimum detectable shift was identified. The models were then applied to a set of twenty different patients and the sensitivity and specificity of the models verified. Results: Per physician rating, the multi-atlas method (4.8/5 point scale, with 3 rated as generally acceptable for planning purposes) was selected as primary and the Eclipse-based method (3.5/5) for verification. Mean distance to agreement and true positive rate were selected as covariates in an optimized logit model. These models, when applied to a group of twenty different patients, indicated that shifts could be detected at 0.5cm (brain), 0.75cm (mandible, cord), 1cm (brainstem, cochlea), or 1.25cm (parotid), with sensitivity and specificity greater than 0.95. If sensitivity and specificity constraints are reduced to 0.9, detectable shifts of mandible and brainstem were reduced by 0.25cm. These shifts represent additional safety margins which might be considered if auto-contours are used for automatic treatment planning without physician review. Conclusion: Automatically contoured structures can be automatically verified. This fully automated process could be used to

Automatic Segmentation of Vessels in In-Vivo Ultrasound Scans

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Tamimi-Sarnikowski, Philip; Brink-Kjær, Andreas; Moshavegh, Ramin

2017-01-01

presents a fully automatic segmentation algorithm, for robustly segmenting the vessel lumen in longitudinal B-mode ultrasound images. The automatic segmentation is performed using a combination of B-mode and power Doppler images. The proposed algorithm includes a series of preprocessing steps, and performs......Ultrasound has become highly popular to monitor atherosclerosis, by scanning the carotid artery. The screening involves measuring the thickness of the vessel wall and diameter of the lumen. An automatic segmentation of the vessel lumen, can enable the determination of lumen diameter. This paper...... a vessel segmentation by use of the marker-controlled watershed transform. The ultrasound images used in the study were acquired using the bk3000 ultrasound scanner (BK Ultrasound, Herlev, Denmark) with two transducers ”8L2 Linear” and ”10L2w Wide Linear” (BK Ultrasound, Herlev, Denmark). The algorithm...

Determination of aortic compliance from magnetic resonance images using an automatic active contour model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Krug, Roland; Boese, Jan M; Schad, Lothar R

2003-01-01

The possibility of monitoring changes in aortic elasticity in humans has important applications for clinical trials because it estimates the efficacy of plaque-reducing therapies. The elasticity is usually quantified by compliance measurements. Therefore, the relative temporal change in the vessel cross-sectional area throughout the cardiac cycle has to be determined. In this work we determined and compared the compliance between three magnetic resonance (MR) methods (FLASH, TrueFISP and pulse-wave). Since manual outlining of the aortic wall area is a very time-consuming process and depends on an operator's variability, an algorithm for the automatic segmentation of the artery wall from MR images through the entire heart cycle is presented. The reliable detection of the artery cross-sectional area over the whole heart cycle was possible with a relative error of about 1%. Optimizing the temporal resolution to 60 ms we obtained a relative error in compliance of about 7% from TrueFISP (1.0 x 1.0 x 10 mm 3 , signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) > 12) and FLASH (0.7 x 0.7 x 10 mm 3 , SNR > 12) measurements in volunteers. Pulse-wave measurements yielded an error of more than 9%. In a study of ten volunteers, a compliance between C = 3 x 10 -5 Pa -1 and C = 8 x 10 -5 Pa -1 was determined, depending on age. The results of the TrueFISP and the pulse-wave measurements agreed very well with one another (confidence interval of 1 x 10 -5 Pa -1 ) while the results of the FLASH method more clearly deviated from the TrueFISP and pulse-wave (confidence interval of more than 2 x 10 -5 Pa -1 )

An Automatic High Efficient Method for Dish Concentrator Alignment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yong Wang

2014-01-01

for the alignment of faceted solar dish concentrator. The isosceles triangle configuration of facet’s footholds determines a fixed relation between light spot displacements and foothold movements, which allows an automatic determination of the amount of adjustments. Tests on a 25 kW Stirling Energy System dish concentrator verify the feasibility, accuracy, and efficiency of our method.

Motor automaticity in Parkinson’s disease

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Tao; Hallett, Mark; Chan, Piu

2017-01-01

Bradykinesia is the most important feature contributing to motor difficulties in Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, the pathophysiology underlying bradykinesia is not fully understood. One important aspect is that PD patients have difficulty in performing learned motor skills automatically, but this problem has been generally overlooked. Here we review motor automaticity associated motor deficits in PD, such as reduced arm swing, decreased stride length, freezing of gait, micrographia and reduced facial expression. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed some neural mechanisms underlying impaired motor automaticity in PD, including less efficient neural coding of movement, failure to shift automated motor skills to the sensorimotor striatum, instability of the automatic mode within the striatum, and use of attentional control and/or compensatory efforts to execute movements usually performed automatically in healthy people. PD patients lose previously acquired automatic skills due to their impaired sensorimotor striatum, and have difficulty in acquiring new automatic skills or restoring lost motor skills. More investigations on the pathophysiology of motor automaticity, the effect of L-dopa or surgical treatments on automaticity, and the potential role of using measures of automaticity in early diagnosis of PD would be valuable. PMID:26102020

Fully automatic registration and segmentation of first-pass myocardial perfusion MR image sequences.

Science.gov (United States)

Gupta, Vikas; Hendriks, Emile A; Milles, Julien; van der Geest, Rob J; Jerosch-Herold, Michael; Reiber, Johan H C; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn P F

2010-11-01

Derivation of diagnostically relevant parameters from first-pass myocardial perfusion magnetic resonance images involves the tedious and time-consuming manual segmentation of the myocardium in a large number of images. To reduce the manual interaction and expedite the perfusion analysis, we propose an automatic registration and segmentation method for the derivation of perfusion linked parameters. A complete automation was accomplished by first registering misaligned images using a method based on independent component analysis, and then using the registered data to automatically segment the myocardium with active appearance models. We used 18 perfusion studies (100 images per study) for validation in which the automatically obtained (AO) contours were compared with expert drawn contours on the basis of point-to-curve error, Dice index, and relative perfusion upslope in the myocardium. Visual inspection revealed successful segmentation in 15 out of 18 studies. Comparison of the AO contours with expert drawn contours yielded 2.23 ± 0.53 mm and 0.91 ± 0.02 as point-to-curve error and Dice index, respectively. The average difference between manually and automatically obtained relative upslope parameters was found to be statistically insignificant (P = .37). Moreover, the analysis time per slice was reduced from 20 minutes (manual) to 1.5 minutes (automatic). We proposed an automatic method that significantly reduced the time required for analysis of first-pass cardiac magnetic resonance perfusion images. The robustness and accuracy of the proposed method were demonstrated by the high spatial correspondence and statistically insignificant difference in perfusion parameters, when AO contours were compared with expert drawn contours. Copyright © 2010 AUR. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dissociation between controlled and automatic processes in the behavioral variant of fronto-temporal dementia.

Science.gov (United States)

Collette, Fabienne; Van der Linden, Martial; Salmon, Eric

2010-01-01

A decline of cognitive functioning affecting several cognitive domains was frequently reported in patients with frontotemporal dementia. We were interested in determining if these deficits can be interpreted as reflecting an impairment of controlled cognitive processes by using an assessment tool specifically developed to explore the distinction between automatic and controlled processes, namely the process dissociation procedure (PDP) developed by Jacoby. The PDP was applied to a word stem completion task to determine the contribution of automatic and controlled processes to episodic memory performance and was administered to a group of 12 patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD) and 20 control subjects (CS). Bv-FTD patients obtained a lower performance than CS for the estimates of controlled processes, but no group differences was observed for estimates of automatic processes. The between-groups comparison of the estimates of controlled and automatic processes showed a larger contribution of automatic processes to performance in bv-FTD, while a slightly more important contribution of controlled processes was observed in control subjects. These results are clearly indicative of an alteration of controlled memory processes in bv-FTD.

Self-esteem modulates automatic attentional responses to self-relevant stimuli: evidence from event-related brain potentials

OpenAIRE

Chen, Jie; Shui, Qing; Zhong, Yiping

2015-01-01

Previous studies have widely shown that self-esteem modulates the attention bias towards social rejection or emotion-related information. However, little is known about the influences of self-esteem on attention bias towards self-relevant stimuli. We aimed to investigate neural correlates that underlie the modulation effect of self-esteem on self-relevant processing. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded for subjects’ own names and close others’ names (the names of their friends) while...

SU-E-J-16: Automatic Image Contrast Enhancement Based On Automatic Parameter Optimization for Radiation Therapy Setup Verification

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Qiu, J; Li, H. Harlod; Zhang, T; Yang, D; Ma, F

2015-01-01

Purpose: In RT patient setup 2D images, tissues often cannot be seen well due to the lack of image contrast. Contrast enhancement features provided by image reviewing software, e.g. Mosaiq and ARIA, require manual selection of the image processing filters and parameters thus inefficient and cannot be automated. In this work, we developed a novel method to automatically enhance the 2D RT image contrast to allow automatic verification of patient daily setups as a prerequisite step of automatic patient safety assurance. Methods: The new method is based on contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and high-pass filtering algorithms. The most important innovation is to automatically select the optimal parameters by optimizing the image contrast. The image processing procedure includes the following steps: 1) background and noise removal, 2) hi-pass filtering by subtracting the Gaussian smoothed Result, and 3) histogram equalization using CLAHE algorithm. Three parameters were determined through an iterative optimization which was based on the interior-point constrained optimization algorithm: the Gaussian smoothing weighting factor, the CLAHE algorithm block size and clip limiting parameters. The goal of the optimization is to maximize the entropy of the processed Result. Results: A total 42 RT images were processed. The results were visually evaluated by RT physicians and physicists. About 48% of the images processed by the new method were ranked as excellent. In comparison, only 29% and 18% of the images processed by the basic CLAHE algorithm and by the basic window level adjustment process, were ranked as excellent. Conclusion: This new image contrast enhancement method is robust and automatic, and is able to significantly outperform the basic CLAHE algorithm and the manual window-level adjustment process that are currently used in clinical 2D image review software tools

SU-E-J-16: Automatic Image Contrast Enhancement Based On Automatic Parameter Optimization for Radiation Therapy Setup Verification

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Qiu, J [Taishan Medical University, Taian, Shandong (China); Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO (United States); Li, H. Harlod; Zhang, T; Yang, D [Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO (United States); Ma, F [Taishan Medical University, Taian, Shandong (China)

2015-06-15

Purpose: In RT patient setup 2D images, tissues often cannot be seen well due to the lack of image contrast. Contrast enhancement features provided by image reviewing software, e.g. Mosaiq and ARIA, require manual selection of the image processing filters and parameters thus inefficient and cannot be automated. In this work, we developed a novel method to automatically enhance the 2D RT image contrast to allow automatic verification of patient daily setups as a prerequisite step of automatic patient safety assurance. Methods: The new method is based on contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and high-pass filtering algorithms. The most important innovation is to automatically select the optimal parameters by optimizing the image contrast. The image processing procedure includes the following steps: 1) background and noise removal, 2) hi-pass filtering by subtracting the Gaussian smoothed Result, and 3) histogram equalization using CLAHE algorithm. Three parameters were determined through an iterative optimization which was based on the interior-point constrained optimization algorithm: the Gaussian smoothing weighting factor, the CLAHE algorithm block size and clip limiting parameters. The goal of the optimization is to maximize the entropy of the processed Result. Results: A total 42 RT images were processed. The results were visually evaluated by RT physicians and physicists. About 48% of the images processed by the new method were ranked as excellent. In comparison, only 29% and 18% of the images processed by the basic CLAHE algorithm and by the basic window level adjustment process, were ranked as excellent. Conclusion: This new image contrast enhancement method is robust and automatic, and is able to significantly outperform the basic CLAHE algorithm and the manual window-level adjustment process that are currently used in clinical 2D image review software tools.

Automatic web site authoring with SiteGuide

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Boer, V.; Hollink, V.; van Someren, M.W.; Kłopotek, M.A.; Przepiórkowski, A.; Wierzchoń, S.T.; Trojanowski, K.

2009-01-01

An important step in the design process for a web site is to determine which information is to be included and how the information should be organized on the web site’s pages. In this paper we describe ’SiteGuide’, a tool that automatically produces an information architecture for a web site that a

A First Step toward the Automatic Understanding of Social Touch for Naturalistic Human–Robot Interaction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Jung, Merel Madeleine; Poel, Mannes; Reidsma, Dennis; Heylen, Dirk K.J.

2017-01-01

Social robots should be able to automatically understand and respond to human touch. The meaning of touch does not only depend on the form of touch but also on the context in which the touch takes place. To gain more insight into the factors that are relevant to interpret the meaning of touch within

Relevance of genetically determined host factors to the prognosis of meningococcal disease.

Science.gov (United States)

Domingo, P; Muñiz-Diaz, E; Baraldès, M A; Arilla, M; Barquet, N; Pericas, R; Juárez, C; Madoz, P; Vázquez, G

2004-08-01

To assess the relevance of genetically determined host factors for the prognosis of meningococcal disease, Fc gamma receptor IIA (FcgammaRIIA), the tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) gene promoter region, and plasminogen-activator-inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) gene polymorphisms were studied in 145 patients with meningococcal disease and in 290 healthy controls matched by sex. Distribution of FcgammaRIIA, TNF-alpha, and PAI-1 alleles was not significantly different between patients and controls. Patients with the FcgammaRIIA-R/R 131 allotype scored > or =1 point in the Barcelona prognostic system more frequently than patients with other allotypes (odds ratio, 18.6; 95% confidence interval, 7.1-49.0, PFc gamma receptor IIA polymorphism was associated with markers of disease severity, but TNF-alpha and PAI-1 polymorphisms were not.

A User-Centered Approach to Adaptive Hypertext Based on an Information Relevance Model

Science.gov (United States)

Mathe, Nathalie; Chen, James

1994-01-01

Rapid and effective to information in large electronic documentation systems can be facilitated if information relevant in an individual user's content can be automatically supplied to this user. However most of this knowledge on contextual relevance is not found within the contents of documents, it is rather established incrementally by users during information access. We propose a new model for interactively learning contextual relevance during information retrieval, and incrementally adapting retrieved information to individual user profiles. The model, called a relevance network, records the relevance of references based on user feedback for specific queries and user profiles. It also generalizes such knowledge to later derive relevant references for similar queries and profiles. The relevance network lets users filter information by context of relevance. Compared to other approaches, it does not require any prior knowledge nor training. More importantly, our approach to adaptivity is user-centered. It facilitates acceptance and understanding by users by giving them shared control over the adaptation without disturbing their primary task. Users easily control when to adapt and when to use the adapted system. Lastly, the model is independent of the particular application used to access information, and supports sharing of adaptations among users.

Automatic Shadow Detection and Removal from a Single Image.

Science.gov (United States)

Khan, Salman H; Bennamoun, Mohammed; Sohel, Ferdous; Togneri, Roberto

2016-03-01

We present a framework to automatically detect and remove shadows in real world scenes from a single image. Previous works on shadow detection put a lot of effort in designing shadow variant and invariant hand-crafted features. In contrast, our framework automatically learns the most relevant features in a supervised manner using multiple convolutional deep neural networks (ConvNets). The features are learned at the super-pixel level and along the dominant boundaries in the image. The predicted posteriors based on the learned features are fed to a conditional random field model to generate smooth shadow masks. Using the detected shadow masks, we propose a Bayesian formulation to accurately extract shadow matte and subsequently remove shadows. The Bayesian formulation is based on a novel model which accurately models the shadow generation process in the umbra and penumbra regions. The model parameters are efficiently estimated using an iterative optimization procedure. Our proposed framework consistently performed better than the state-of-the-art on all major shadow databases collected under a variety of conditions.

Identifying relevant feature-action associations for grasping unmodelled objects

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Thomsen, Mikkel Tang; Kraft, Dirk; Krüger, Norbert

2015-01-01

content. The method is provided with a large and structured set of visual features, motivated by the visual hierarchy in primates and finds relevant feature action associations automatically. We apply our method in a simulated environment on three different object sets for the case of grasp affordance...... learning. For box objects, we achieve a 0.90 success probability, 0.80 for round objects and up to 0.75 for open objects, when presented with novel objects. In this work, we in particular demonstrate the effect of choosing appropriate feature representations. We demonstrate a significant performance...

Improving the local wavenumber method by automatic DEXP transformation

Science.gov (United States)

Abbas, Mahmoud Ahmed; Fedi, Maurizio; Florio, Giovanni

2014-12-01

In this paper we present a new method for source parameter estimation, based on the local wavenumber function. We make use of the stable properties of the Depth from EXtreme Points (DEXP) method, in which the depth to the source is determined at the extreme points of the field scaled with a power-law of the altitude. Thus the method results particularly suited to deal with local wavenumber of high-order, as it is able to overcome its known instability caused by the use of high-order derivatives. The DEXP transformation enjoys a relevant feature when applied to the local wavenumber function: the scaling-law is in fact independent of the structural index. So, differently from the DEXP transformation applied directly to potential fields, the Local Wavenumber DEXP transformation is fully automatic and may be implemented as a very fast imaging method, mapping every kind of source at the correct depth. Also the simultaneous presence of sources with different homogeneity degree can be easily and correctly treated. The method was applied to synthetic and real examples from Bulgaria and Italy and the results agree well with known information about the causative sources.

Automatic Photoelectric Telescope Service

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Genet, R.M.; Boyd, L.J.; Kissell, K.E.; Crawford, D.L.; Hall, D.S.; BDM Corp., McLean, VA; Kitt Peak National Observatory, Tucson, AZ; Dyer Observatory, Nashville, TN)

1987-01-01

Automatic observatories have the potential of gathering sizable amounts of high-quality astronomical data at low cost. The Automatic Photoelectric Telescope Service (APT Service) has realized this potential and is routinely making photometric observations of a large number of variable stars. However, without observers to provide on-site monitoring, it was necessary to incorporate special quality checks into the operation of the APT Service at its multiple automatic telescope installation on Mount Hopkins. 18 references

Automatic imitation: A meta-analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Cracco, Emiel; Bardi, Lara; Desmet, Charlotte; Genschow, Oliver; Rigoni, Davide; De Coster, Lize; Radkova, Ina; Deschrijver, Eliane; Brass, Marcel

2018-05-01

Automatic imitation is the finding that movement execution is facilitated by compatible and impeded by incompatible observed movements. In the past 15 years, automatic imitation has been studied to understand the relation between perception and action in social interaction. Although research on this topic started in cognitive science, interest quickly spread to related disciplines such as social psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience. However, important theoretical questions have remained unanswered. Therefore, in the present meta-analysis, we evaluated seven key questions on automatic imitation. The results, based on 161 studies containing 226 experiments, revealed an overall effect size of g z = 0.95, 95% CI [0.88, 1.02]. Moderator analyses identified automatic imitation as a flexible, largely automatic process that is driven by movement and effector compatibility, but is also influenced by spatial compatibility. Automatic imitation was found to be stronger for forced choice tasks than for simple response tasks, for human agents than for nonhuman agents, and for goalless actions than for goal-directed actions. However, it was not modulated by more subtle factors such as animacy beliefs, motion profiles, or visual perspective. Finally, there was no evidence for a relation between automatic imitation and either empathy or autism. Among other things, these findings point toward actor-imitator similarity as a crucial modulator of automatic imitation and challenge the view that imitative tendencies are an indicator of social functioning. The current meta-analysis has important theoretical implications and sheds light on longstanding controversies in the literature on automatic imitation and related domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

An investigation into the relevance of action planning, theory of planned behaviour concepts, and automaticity for fruit intake action control.

Science.gov (United States)

de Bruijn, Gert-Jan; Wiedemann, Amelie; Rhodes, Ryan E

2014-09-01

In the action control framework, intention-behaviour discordance is studied around public health guidelines. Although this framework has been applied to physical activity behaviours, it has only seen very limited attention regarding fruit intake. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate distributions and predictors of fruit intake intention-behaviour discordance. Prospective correlational design. Data were obtained from undergraduate students (n = 413) using validated questionnaires. Variables from the theory of planned behaviour, automaticity, and action planning were assessed at baseline, and fruit intake was assessed 2 weeks later. Data were analysed using discriminant function analyses and analyses of variance. The proportion of unsuccessful intenders ranged from 39.2% to 80.8%. There was a larger proportion of fruit intake intenders amongst those who reported strong automatic fruit intake. Action control was predicted by fruit intake automaticity and affective attitudes, but the strongest predictor was perceived behavioural control. No action planning items were related to fruit intake action control. There is considerable asymmetry in the intention-fruit intake relationship. An application of the action control framework may stimulate debate on the applicability of intention-based models at the public health level. What is already known on this subject? Intention is theorized to be a key construct in fruit intake. Studies in the physical activity domain indicate that nearly half of the people with positive intentions fail to subsequently act. What does this study add? The proportion of unsuccessful intenders ranged from 39.2% to 80.8%. Holding positive intentions is not sufficient to consume fruit at suggested public health guidelines. Perceived behavioural control is the most important predictor of fruit intake action control. © 2013 The British Psychological Society.

Automatic Segmentation of Abdominal Adipose Tissue in MRI

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mosbech, Thomas Hammershaimb; Pilgaard, Kasper; Vaag, Allan

2011-01-01

of intensity in-homogeneities. This effect is estimated by a thin plate spline extended to fit two classes of automatically sampled intensity points in 3D. Adipose tissue pixels are labelled with fuzzy c-means clustering and locally determined thresholds. The visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissue...

Automatic processing of radioimmunological research data on a computer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Korolyuk, I.P.; Gorodenko, A.N.; Gorodenko, S.I.

1979-01-01

A program ''CRITEST'' in the language PL/1 for the EC computer intended for automatic processing of the results of radioimmunological research has been elaborated. The program works in the operation system of the OC EC computer and is performed in the section OC 60 kb. When compiling the program Eitken's modified algorithm was used. The program was clinically approved when determining a number of hormones: CTH, T 4 , T 3 , TSH. The automatic processing of the radioimmunological research data on the computer makes it possible to simplify the labour-consuming analysis and to raise its accuracy

Automatic selection of resting-state networks with functional magnetic resonance imaging

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Silvia Francesca eStorti

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI during a resting-state condition can reveal the co-activation of specific brain regions in distributed networks, called resting-state networks, which are selected by independent component analysis (ICA of the fMRI data. One of the major difficulties with component analysis is the automatic selection of the ICA features related to brain activity. In this study we describe a method designed to automatically select networks of potential functional relevance, specifically, those regions known to be involved in motor function, visual processing, executive functioning, auditory processing, memory, and the default-mode network. To do this, image analysis was based on probabilistic ICA as implemented in FSL software. After decomposition, the optimal number of components was selected by applying a novel algorithm which takes into account, for each component, Pearson's median coefficient of skewness of the spatial maps generated by FSL, followed by clustering, segmentation, and spectral analysis. To evaluate the performance of the approach, we investigated the resting-state networks in 25 subjects. For each subject, three resting-state scans were obtained with a Siemens Allegra 3 T scanner (NYU data set. Comparison of the visually and the automatically identified neuronal networks showed that the algorithm had high accuracy (first scan: 95%, second scan: 95%, third scan: 93% and precision (90%, 90%, 84%. The reproducibility of the networks for visual and automatic selection was very close: it was highly consistent in each subject for the default-mode network (≥ 92% and the occipital network, which includes the medial visual cortical areas (≥ 94%, and consistent for the attention network (≥ 80%, the right and/or left lateralized frontoparietal attention networks, and the temporal-motor network (≥ 80%. The automatic selection method may be used to detect neural networks and reduce subjectivity in ICA

Transient Oscilliations in Mechanical Systems of Automatic Control with Random Parameters

Science.gov (United States)

Royev, B.; Vinokur, A.; Kulikov, G.

2018-04-01

Transient oscillations in mechanical systems of automatic control with random parameters is a relevant but insufficiently studied issue. In this paper, a modified spectral method was applied to investigate the problem. The nature of dynamic processes and the phase portraits are analyzed depending on the amplitude and frequency of external influence. It is evident from the obtained results, that the dynamic phenomena occurring in the systems with random parameters under external influence are complex, and their study requires further investigation.

Automatic indexing, compiling and classification

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Andreewsky, Alexandre; Fluhr, Christian.

1975-06-01

A review of the principles of automatic indexing, is followed by a comparison and summing-up of work by the authors and by a Soviet staff from the Moscou INFORM-ELECTRO Institute. The mathematical and linguistic problems of the automatic building of thesaurus and automatic classification are examined [fr

On a program manifold’s stability of one contour automatic control systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zumatov S. S.

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Methodology of analysis of stability is expounded to the one contour systems automatic control feedback in the presence of non-linearities. The methodology is based on the use of the simplest mathematical models of the nonlinear controllable systems. Stability of program manifolds of one contour automatic control systems is investigated. The sufficient conditions of program manifold’s absolute stability of one contour automatic control systems are obtained. The Hurwitz’s angle of absolute stability was determined. The sufficient conditions of program manifold’s absolute stability of control systems by the course of plane in the mode of autopilot are obtained by means Lyapunov’s second method.

Usage of aids monitoring in automatic braking systems of modern cars

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dembitskyi V.

2016-08-01

Full Text Available Increased safety can be carried out at the expense the installation on vehicles of automatic braking systems, that monitor the traffic situation and the actions of the driver. In this paper considered the advantages and disadvantages of automatic braking systems, were analyzed modern tracking tools that are used in automatic braking systems. Based on the statistical data on accidents, are set the main dangers, that the automatic braking system will be reduced. In order to ensure the accuracy of information conducted research for determination of optimal combination of different sensors that provide an adequate perception of road conditions. The tracking system should be equipped with a combination of sensors, which in the case of detection of an obstacle or dangers of signal is transmitted to the information processing system and decision making. Information from the monitoring system should include data for the identification of the object, its condition, the speed.

SU-F-T-65: AutomaticTreatment Planning for High-Dose Rate (HDR) Brachytherapy with a VaginalCylinder Applicator

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhou, Y; Tan, J; Jiang, S; Albuquerque, K; Jia, X

2016-01-01

Purpose: High dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy treatment planning is conventionally performed in a manual fashion. Yet it is highly desirable to perform computerized automated planning to improve treatment planning efficiency, eliminate human errors, and reduce plan quality variation. The goal of this research is to develop an automatic treatment planning tool for HDR brachytherapy with a cylinder applicator for vaginal cancer. Methods: After inserting the cylinder applicator into the patient, a CT scan was acquired and was loaded to an in-house developed treatment planning software. The cylinder applicator was automatically segmented using image-processing techniques. CTV was generated based on user-specified treatment depth and length. Locations of relevant points (apex point, prescription point, and vaginal surface point), central applicator channel coordinates, and dwell positions were determined according to their geometric relations with the applicator. Dwell time was computed through an inverse optimization process. The planning information was written into DICOM-RT plan and structure files to transfer the automatically generated plan to a commercial treatment planning system for plan verification and delivery. Results: We have tested the system retrospectively in nine patients treated with vaginal cylinder applicator. These cases were selected with different treatment prescriptions, lengths, depths, and cylinder diameters to represent a large patient population. Our system was able to generate treatment plans for these cases with clinically acceptable quality. Computation time varied from 3–6 min. Conclusion: We have developed a system to perform automated treatment planning for HDR brachytherapy with a cylinder applicator. Such a novel system has greatly improved treatment planning efficiency and reduced plan quality variation. It also served as a testbed to demonstrate the feasibility of automatic HDR treatment planning for more complicated cases.

SU-F-T-65: AutomaticTreatment Planning for High-Dose Rate (HDR) Brachytherapy with a VaginalCylinder Applicator

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Zhou, Y; Tan, J; Jiang, S; Albuquerque, K; Jia, X [UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX (United States)

2016-06-15

Purpose: High dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy treatment planning is conventionally performed in a manual fashion. Yet it is highly desirable to perform computerized automated planning to improve treatment planning efficiency, eliminate human errors, and reduce plan quality variation. The goal of this research is to develop an automatic treatment planning tool for HDR brachytherapy with a cylinder applicator for vaginal cancer. Methods: After inserting the cylinder applicator into the patient, a CT scan was acquired and was loaded to an in-house developed treatment planning software. The cylinder applicator was automatically segmented using image-processing techniques. CTV was generated based on user-specified treatment depth and length. Locations of relevant points (apex point, prescription point, and vaginal surface point), central applicator channel coordinates, and dwell positions were determined according to their geometric relations with the applicator. Dwell time was computed through an inverse optimization process. The planning information was written into DICOM-RT plan and structure files to transfer the automatically generated plan to a commercial treatment planning system for plan verification and delivery. Results: We have tested the system retrospectively in nine patients treated with vaginal cylinder applicator. These cases were selected with different treatment prescriptions, lengths, depths, and cylinder diameters to represent a large patient population. Our system was able to generate treatment plans for these cases with clinically acceptable quality. Computation time varied from 3–6 min. Conclusion: We have developed a system to perform automated treatment planning for HDR brachytherapy with a cylinder applicator. Such a novel system has greatly improved treatment planning efficiency and reduced plan quality variation. It also served as a testbed to demonstrate the feasibility of automatic HDR treatment planning for more complicated cases.

Automatic quantitative metallography

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Barcelos, E.J.B.V.; Ambrozio Filho, F.; Cunha, R.C.

1976-01-01

The quantitative determination of metallographic parameters is analysed through the description of Micro-Videomat automatic image analysis system and volumetric percentage of perlite in nodular cast irons, porosity and average grain size in high-density sintered pellets of UO 2 , and grain size of ferritic steel. Techniques adopted are described and results obtained are compared with the corresponding ones by the direct counting process: counting of systematic points (grid) to measure volume and intersections method, by utilizing a circunference of known radius for the average grain size. The adopted technique for nodular cast iron resulted from the small difference of optical reflectivity of graphite and perlite. Porosity evaluation of sintered UO 2 pellets is also analyzed [pt

Automatic and Intentional Number Processing Both Rely on Intact Right Parietal Cortex: A Combined fMRI and Neuronavigated TMS Study

Science.gov (United States)

Cohen Kadosh, Roi; Bien, Nina; Sack, Alexander T.

2012-01-01

Practice and training usually lead to performance increase in a given task. In addition, a shift from intentional toward more automatic processing mechanisms is often observed. It is currently debated whether automatic and intentional processing is subserved by the same or by different mechanism(s), and whether the same or different regions in the brain are recruited. Previous correlational evidence provided by behavioral, neuroimaging, modeling, and neuropsychological studies addressing this question yielded conflicting results. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to compare the causal influence of disrupting either left or right parietal cortex during automatic and intentional numerical processing, as reflected by the size congruity effect and the numerical distance effect, respectively. We found a functional hemispheric asymmetry within parietal cortex with only the TMS-induced right parietal disruption impairing both automatic and intentional numerical processing. In contrast, disrupting the left parietal lobe with TMS, or applying sham stimulation, did not affect performance during automatic or intentional numerical processing. The current results provide causal evidence for the functional relevance of right, but not left, parietal cortex for intentional, and automatic numerical processing, implying that at least within the parietal cortices, automatic, and intentional numerical processing rely on the same underlying hemispheric lateralization. PMID:22347175

Study of the behavior of automatic track detectors for radon determination

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Moreno C, A.

1997-01-01

Both the alpha decay and the alpha and beta emitting radon daughters, may affect the living cells. In this thesis, experiments have been performed to study the response of environmental radon using different alpha particle detectors. A study was performed both in the laboratory and in the field of two kinds of detectors: a) Passive solid state nuclear track detectors, LR 115 type II, capable to integrate the alpha particles in a given period of time and, b) an automatic active detector, Clipperton, that continuously accumulate the alpha counting from radon decay. LR-115 track detectors were exposed in the laboratory to alpha particles from a radioactive source and a controlled radon atmosphere. The detectors were also exposed to electrons from an electron accelerator. The number of alpha tracks in the detectors were evaluated with two kinds of spark counters. The response of the track detectors as a function of the number of alpha tracks showed a reproducibility of 92%, and the effect of electron doses showed that the bulk etching velocity varied as a function of the electron dose. Additionally some changes were introduced in an SSNTD exchanger, exposed to the radon chamber in order to reduce the background in the non exposed positions. A conversion factor of 0.016 tracks/cm 2 . 10h per Bq/m 3 was obtained. The response of the two spark counters was similar. Field soil radon determinations were performed with track detectors during 11 months and with the active detector during 5 months with exposures each month and each hour respectively. When calculated for the same time periods exposure the response of both systems was similar. However differences were quite striking in the patterns of short and long term exposure periods since short term fluctuations are explicitly shown with the active detector while integrated within the passive one. (Author)

Automatic and manual segmentation of healthy retinas using high-definition optical coherence tomography.

Science.gov (United States)

Golbaz, Isabelle; Ahlers, Christian; Goesseringer, Nina; Stock, Geraldine; Geitzenauer, Wolfgang; Prünte, Christian; Schmidt-Erfurth, Ursula Margarethe

2011-03-01

This study compared automatic- and manual segmentation modalities in the retina of healthy eyes using high-definition optical coherence tomography (HD-OCT). Twenty retinas in 20 healthy individuals were examined using an HD-OCT system (Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc.). Three-dimensional imaging was performed with an axial resolution of 6 μm at a maximum scanning speed of 25,000 A-scans/second. Volumes of 6 × 6 × 2 mm were scanned. Scans were analysed using a matlab-based algorithm and a manual segmentation software system (3D-Doctor). The volume values calculated by the two methods were compared. Statistical analysis revealed a high correlation between automatic and manual modes of segmentation. The automatic mode of measuring retinal volume and the corresponding three-dimensional images provided similar results to the manual segmentation procedure. Both methods were able to visualize retinal and subretinal features accurately. This study compared two methods of assessing retinal volume using HD-OCT scans in healthy retinas. Both methods were able to provide realistic volumetric data when applied to raster scan sets. Manual segmentation methods represent an adequate tool with which to control automated processes and to identify clinically relevant structures, whereas automatic procedures will be needed to obtain data in larger patient populations. © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Acta Ophthalmol.

Automatic noninvasive measurement of systolic blood pressure using photoplethysmography

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Glik Zehava

2009-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Automatic measurement of arterial blood pressure is important, but the available commercial automatic blood pressure meters, mostly based on oscillometry, are of low accuracy. Methods In this study, we present a cuff-based technique for automatic measurement of systolic blood pressure, based on photoplethysmographic signals measured simultaneously in fingers of both hands. After inflating the pressure cuff to a level above systolic blood pressure in a relatively slow rate, it is slowly deflated. The cuff pressure for which the photoplethysmographic signal reappeared during the deflation of the pressure-cuff was taken as the systolic blood pressure. The algorithm for the detection of the photoplethysmographic signal involves: (1 determination of the time-segments in which the photoplethysmographic signal distal to the cuff is expected to appear, utilizing the photoplethysmographic signal in the free hand, and (2 discrimination between random fluctuations and photoplethysmographic pattern. The detected pulses in the time-segments were identified as photoplethysmographic pulses if they met two criteria, based on the pulse waveform and on the correlation between the signal in each segment and the signal in the two neighboring segments. Results Comparison of the photoplethysmographic-based automatic technique to sphygmomanometry, the reference standard, shows that the standard deviation of their differences was 3.7 mmHg. For subjects with systolic blood pressure above 130 mmHg the standard deviation was even lower, 2.9 mmHg. These values are much lower than the 8 mmHg value imposed by AAMI standard for automatic blood pressure meters. Conclusion The photoplethysmographic-based technique for automatic measurement of systolic blood pressure, and the algorithm which was presented in this study, seems to be accurate.

Is personality profile a relevant determinant of fatigue in multiple sclerosis ?

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Herbert eSchreiber

2015-02-01

Full Text Available The origin and pathophysiological background of MS-associated fatigue is poorly understood. There is no unifying concept of its nature and its determinants to date. This paper reviews possible influences of factors determining personality profile on mental fatigue in MS. Likewise, the role of psychological factors and their interaction with personality to promote fatigue is discussed. Current data suggests that fatigue, especially in early MS states, may be influenced by vulnerable personality traits and personality-associated features. Among them are depressive disease coping, avoidance behavior and inhibition, irritability, less extraversion, neuroticism, disturbed reward responsiveness and somatization behavior. However, among the validated personality factors no genuine influences that are independent of depression have been documented. From a psychological perspective, depressiveness, anxiety and perhaps somatization may be relevant mediators of fatigue. Interesting to note that in early MS a psychiatric diagnosis is significantly more likely than on a later stage of the disease and that fatigue and motivation might share neural circuits. It is hypothesized that psychological factors promote fatigue in MS by psychological distress and sustained neuro-endocrine and neurovegetative stress response. Despite there are limitations of data as discussed in the paper, personality research might help to disentangle specific promoting factors of fatigue in MS. Further research efforts are warranted since they might open ways to early psychological intervention of MS-associated fatigue. This is all the more important since medication is insufficient until now.

Research on the automatic laser navigation system of the tunnel boring machine

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Yake; Li, Yueqiang

2011-12-01

By establishing relevant coordinates of the Automatic Laser Navigation System, the basic principle of the system which accesses the TBM three-dimensional reference point and yawing angle by mathematical transformation between TBM, target prism and earth coordinate systems is discussed deeply in details. According to the way of rigid body descriptions of its posture, TBM attitude parameters measurement and data acquisition methods are proposed, and measures to improve the accuracy of the Laser Navigation System are summarized.

Alignment effects in beer mugs: Automatic action activation or response competition?

Science.gov (United States)

Roest, Sander A; Pecher, Diane; Naeije, Lilian; Zeelenberg, René

2016-08-01

Responses to objects with a graspable handle are faster when the response hand and handle orientation are aligned (e.g., a key press with the right hand is required and the object handle is oriented to the right) than when they are not aligned. This effect could be explained by automatic activation of specific motor programs when an object is viewed. Alternatively, the effect could be explained by competition at the response level. Participants performed a reach-and-grasp or reach-and-button-press action with their left or right hand in response to the color of a beer mug. The alignment effect did not vary as a function of the type of action. In addition, the alignment effect disappeared in a go/no-go version of the task. The same results were obtained when participants made upright/inverted decisions, so that object shape was task-relevant. Our results indicate that alignment effects are not due to automatic motor activation of the left or right limb.

Genital automatisms: Reappraisal of a remarkable but ignored symptom of focal seizures.

Science.gov (United States)

Dede, Hava Özlem; Bebek, Nerses; Gürses, Candan; Baysal-Kıraç, Leyla; Baykan, Betül; Gökyiğit, Ayşen

2018-03-01

Genital automatisms (GAs) are uncommon clinical phenomena of focal seizures. They are defined as repeated fondling, grabbing, or scratching of the genitals. The aim of this study was to determine the lateralizing and localizing value and associated clinical characteristics of GAs. Three hundred thirteen consecutive patients with drug-resistant seizures who were referred to our tertiary center for presurgical evaluation between 2009 and 2016 were investigated. The incidence of specific kinds of behavior, clinical semiology, associated symptoms/signs with corresponding ictal electroencephalography (EEG) findings, and their potential role in seizure localization and lateralization were evaluated. Fifteen (4.8%) of 313 patients had GAs. Genital automatisms were identified in 19 (16.4%) of a total 116 seizures. Genital automatisms were observed to occur more often in men than in women (M/F: 10/5). Nine of fifteen patients (60%) had temporal lobe epilepsy (right/left: 4/5) and three (20%) had frontal lobe epilepsy (right/left: 1/2), whereas the remaining two patients could not be classified. One patient was diagnosed as having Rasmussen encephalitis. Genital automatisms were ipsilateral to epileptic focus in 12 patients and contralateral in only one patient according to ictal-interictal EEG and neuroimaging findings. Epileptic focus could not be lateralized in the last 2 patients. Genital automatisms were associated with unilateral hand automatisms such as postictal nose wiping or manual automatisms in 13 (86.7%) of 15 and contralateral dystonia was seen in 6 patients. All patients had amnesia of the performance of GAs. Genital automatisms are more frequent in seizures originating from the temporal lobe, and they can also be seen in frontal lobe seizures. Genital automatisms seem to have a high lateralizing value to the ipsilateral hemisphere and are mostly concordant with other unilateral hand automatisms. Men exhibit GAs more often than women. Copyright © 2017

Automatic sets and Delone sets

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Barbe, A; Haeseler, F von

2004-01-01

Automatic sets D part of Z m are characterized by having a finite number of decimations. They are equivalently generated by fixed points of certain substitution systems, or by certain finite automata. As examples, two-dimensional versions of the Thue-Morse, Baum-Sweet, Rudin-Shapiro and paperfolding sequences are presented. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for an automatic set D part of Z m to be a Delone set in R m . The result is then extended to automatic sets that are defined as fixed points of certain substitutions. The morphology of automatic sets is discussed by means of examples

A framework for automatic information quality ranking of diabetes websites.

Science.gov (United States)

Belen Sağlam, Rahime; Taskaya Temizel, Tugba

2015-01-01

Objective: When searching for particular medical information on the internet the challenge lies in distinguishing the websites that are relevant to the topic, and contain accurate information. In this article, we propose a framework that automatically identifies and ranks diabetes websites according to their relevance and information quality based on the website content. Design: The proposed framework ranks diabetes websites according to their content quality, relevance and evidence based medicine. The framework combines information retrieval techniques with a lexical resource based on Sentiwordnet making it possible to work with biased and untrusted websites while, at the same time, ensuring the content relevance. Measurement: The evaluation measurements used were Pearson-correlation, true positives, false positives and accuracy. We tested the framework with a benchmark data set consisting of 55 websites with varying degrees of information quality problems. Results: The proposed framework gives good results that are comparable with the non-automated information quality measuring approaches in the literature. The correlation between the results of the proposed automated framework and ground-truth is 0.68 on an average with p < 0.001 which is greater than the other proposed automated methods in the literature (r score in average is 0.33).

Automatic determination of L/H transition times in DIII-D through a collaborative distributed environment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Farias, G.; Vega, J.; González, S.; Pereira, A.; Lee, X.; Schissel, D.; Gohil, P.

2012-01-01

Highlights: ► An automatic predictor of L/H transition times has been implemented for the DIII-D tokamak. ► The system predicts the transition combining two techniques: a morphological pattern recognition algorithm and a support vector machines multi-layer model. ► The predictor is employed within a collaborative distributed computing environment. The system is trained remotely in the Ciemat computer cluster and operated on the DIII-D site. - Abstract: An automatic predictor of L/H transition times has been implemented for the DIII-D tokamak. The system predicts the transition combining two techniques: A morphological pattern recognition algorithm, which estimates the transition based on the waveform of a Dα emission signal, and a support vector machines multi-layer model, which predicts the L/H transition using a non-parametric model. The predictor is employed within a collaborative distributed computing environment. The system is trained remotely in the Ciemat computer cluster and operated on the DIII-D site.

Automatic titrator for high precision plutonium assay

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jackson, D.D.; Hollen, R.M.

1986-01-01

Highly precise assay of plutonium metal is required for accountability measurements. We have developed an automatic titrator for this determination which eliminates analyst bias and requires much less analyst time. The analyst is only required to enter sample data and start the titration. The automated instrument titrates the sample, locates the end point, and outputs the results as a paper tape printout. Precision of the titration is less than 0.03% relative standard deviation for a single determination at the 250-mg plutonium level. The titration time is less than 5 min

CURRENT STATE ANALYSIS OF AUTOMATIC BLOCK SYSTEM DEVICES, METHODS OF ITS SERVICE AND MONITORING

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A. M. Beznarytnyy

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Purpose. Development of formalized description of automatic block system of numerical code based on the analysis of characteristic failures of automatic block system and procedure of its maintenance. Methodology. For this research a theoretical and analytical methods have been used. Findings. Typical failures of the automatic block systems were analyzed, as well as basic reasons of failure occur were found out. It was determined that majority of failures occurs due to defects of the maintenance system. Advantages and disadvantages of the current service technology of automatic block system were analyzed. Works that can be automatized by means of technical diagnostics were found out. Formal description of the numerical code of automatic block system as a graph in the state space of the system was carried out. Originality. The state graph of the numerical code of automatic block system that takes into account gradual transition from the serviceable condition to the loss of efficiency was offered. That allows selecting diagnostic information according to attributes and increasing the effectiveness of recovery operations in the case of a malfunction. Practical value. The obtained results of analysis and proposed the state graph can be used as the basis for the development of new means of diagnosing devices for automatic block system, which in turn will improve the efficiency and service of automatic block system devices in general.

Computer Aided Automatic Control - CAAC artificial intelligence block

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Balate, J.; Chramcov, B.; Princ, M. [Brno Univ. of Technology (Czech Republic). Faculty of Technology in Zlin

2000-07-01

The aim of the plan to build up the system CAAC - Computer Aided Automatic Control is to create modular setup of partial computing programs including theory of automatic control, algorithms of programs for processing signals and programs of control algorithms. To approach its informative contents to students and professional public the CAAC system utilizes Internet services http in the form of WWW pages. The CAAC system is being processed at the Institute of Automation and Control Technique of the Faculty of Technology in Zlin of the Brno University of Technology and is determined particularly for pedagogic purposes. Recently also the methods of artificial intelligence have been included to the open CAAC system and that is comprised in this article. (orig.)

Discovering relevance knowledge in data: a growing cell structures approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Azuaje, F; Dubitzky, W; Black, N; Adamson, K

2000-01-01

Both information retrieval and case-based reasoning systems rely on effective and efficient selection of relevant data. Typically, relevance in such systems is approximated by similarity or indexing models. However, the definition of what makes data items similar or how they should be indexed is often nontrivial and time-consuming. Based on growing cell structure artificial neural networks, this paper presents a method that automatically constructs a case retrieval model from existing data. Within the case-based reasoning (CBR) framework, the method is evaluated for two medical prognosis tasks, namely, colorectal cancer survival and coronary heart disease risk prognosis. The results of the experiments suggest that the proposed method is effective and robust. To gain a deeper insight and understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the proposed model, a detailed empirical analysis of the models structural and behavioral properties is also provided.

Human-competitive automatic topic indexing

CERN Document Server

Medelyan, Olena

2009-01-01

Topic indexing is the task of identifying the main topics covered by a document. These are useful for many purposes: as subject headings in libraries, as keywords in academic publications and as tags on the web. Knowing a document’s topics helps people judge its relevance quickly. However, assigning topics manually is labor intensive. This thesis shows how to generate them automatically in a way that competes with human performance. Three kinds of indexing are investigated: term assignment, a task commonly performed by librarians, who select topics from a controlled vocabulary; tagging, a popular activity of web users, who choose topics freely; and a new method of keyphrase extraction, where topics are equated to Wikipedia article names. A general two-stage algorithm is introduced that first selects candidate topics and then ranks them by significance based on their properties. These properties draw on statistical, semantic, domain-specific and encyclopedic knowledge. They are combined using a machine learn...

Determination of boron as boric acid by automatic potentiometric titration using Gran plots [in pressurized water reactor coolant

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Midgley, D.; Gatford, C.

1989-11-01

Boron in PWR primary coolant and related waters may be determined as boric acid by titration with sodium hydroxide, using a glass electrode as a pH indicator. Earlier work has shown that this analysis can conveniently be carried out automatically with adequate precision and accuracy for routine use, although bias became apparent at the lowest concentrations tested. The latest titrators enable the titration data to be transformed mathematically to give two linear segments, before and after the end-point (Gran plots). The results are as precise as those from other titration methods (in which the end-point is found from the point of inflexion of a plot of pH against volume of titrant), but the bias at low concentrations is much reduced. This is achieved without extra time or involvement of the operator. (author)

Automatic Thread-Level Parallelization in the Chombo AMR Library

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Christen, Matthias; Keen, Noel; Ligocki, Terry; Oliker, Leonid; Shalf, John; Van Straalen, Brian; Williams, Samuel

2011-05-26

The increasing on-chip parallelism has some substantial implications for HPC applications. Currently, hybrid programming models (typically MPI+OpenMP) are employed for mapping software to the hardware in order to leverage the hardware?s architectural features. In this paper, we present an approach that automatically introduces thread level parallelism into Chombo, a parallel adaptive mesh refinement framework for finite difference type PDE solvers. In Chombo, core algorithms are specified in the ChomboFortran, a macro language extension to F77 that is part of the Chombo framework. This domain-specific language forms an already used target language for an automatic migration of the large number of existing algorithms into a hybrid MPI+OpenMP implementation. It also provides access to the auto-tuning methodology that enables tuning certain aspects of an algorithm to hardware characteristics. Performance measurements are presented for a few of the most relevant kernels with respect to a specific application benchmark using this technique as well as benchmark results for the entire application. The kernel benchmarks show that, using auto-tuning, up to a factor of 11 in performance was gained with 4 threads with respect to the serial reference implementation.

Automatic Multiple-Needle Surgical Planning of Robotic-Assisted Microwave Coagulation in Large Liver Tumor Therapy.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shaoli Liu

Full Text Available The "robotic-assisted liver tumor coagulation therapy" (RALTCT system is a promising candidate for large liver tumor treatment in terms of accuracy and speed. A prerequisite for effective therapy is accurate surgical planning. However, it is difficult for the surgeon to perform surgical planning manually due to the difficulties associated with robot-assisted large liver tumor therapy. These main difficulties include the following aspects: (1 multiple needles are needed to destroy the entire tumor, (2 the insertion trajectories of the needles should avoid the ribs, blood vessels, and other tissues and organs in the abdominal cavity, (3 the placement of multiple needles should avoid interference with each other, (4 an inserted needle will cause some deformation of liver, which will result in changes in subsequently inserted needles' operating environment, and (5 the multiple needle-insertion trajectories should be consistent with the needle-driven robot's movement characteristics. Thus, an effective multiple-needle surgical planning procedure is needed. To overcome these problems, we present an automatic multiple-needle surgical planning of optimal insertion trajectories to the targets, based on a mathematical description of all relevant structure surfaces. The method determines the analytical expression of boundaries of every needle "collision-free reachable workspace" (CFRW, which are the feasible insertion zones based on several constraints. Then, the optimal needle insertion trajectory within the optimization criteria will be chosen in the needle CFRW automatically. Also, the results can be visualized with our navigation system. In the simulation experiment, three needle-insertion trajectories were obtained successfully. In the in vitro experiment, the robot successfully achieved insertion of multiple needles. The proposed automatic multiple-needle surgical planning can improve the efficiency and safety of robot-assisted large liver tumor

Automatic Multiple-Needle Surgical Planning of Robotic-Assisted Microwave Coagulation in Large Liver Tumor Therapy.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Shaoli; Xia, Zeyang; Liu, Jianhua; Xu, Jing; Ren, He; Lu, Tong; Yang, Xiangdong

2016-01-01

The "robotic-assisted liver tumor coagulation therapy" (RALTCT) system is a promising candidate for large liver tumor treatment in terms of accuracy and speed. A prerequisite for effective therapy is accurate surgical planning. However, it is difficult for the surgeon to perform surgical planning manually due to the difficulties associated with robot-assisted large liver tumor therapy. These main difficulties include the following aspects: (1) multiple needles are needed to destroy the entire tumor, (2) the insertion trajectories of the needles should avoid the ribs, blood vessels, and other tissues and organs in the abdominal cavity, (3) the placement of multiple needles should avoid interference with each other, (4) an inserted needle will cause some deformation of liver, which will result in changes in subsequently inserted needles' operating environment, and (5) the multiple needle-insertion trajectories should be consistent with the needle-driven robot's movement characteristics. Thus, an effective multiple-needle surgical planning procedure is needed. To overcome these problems, we present an automatic multiple-needle surgical planning of optimal insertion trajectories to the targets, based on a mathematical description of all relevant structure surfaces. The method determines the analytical expression of boundaries of every needle "collision-free reachable workspace" (CFRW), which are the feasible insertion zones based on several constraints. Then, the optimal needle insertion trajectory within the optimization criteria will be chosen in the needle CFRW automatically. Also, the results can be visualized with our navigation system. In the simulation experiment, three needle-insertion trajectories were obtained successfully. In the in vitro experiment, the robot successfully achieved insertion of multiple needles. The proposed automatic multiple-needle surgical planning can improve the efficiency and safety of robot-assisted large liver tumor therapy

Automatic on-line pre-concentration system using a knotted reactor for the FAAS determination of lead in drinking water

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Souza, Anderson S.; Brandao, Geovani C.; Santos, Walter N.L. dos; Lemos, Valfredo A.; Ganzarolli, Edgard M.; Bruns, Roy E.; Ferreira, Sergio L.C.

2007-01-01

An automatic on-line pre-concentration system is proposed for lead determination in drinking water using flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS). Lead(II) ions are retained as the 1-(2-pyridylazo)-2-naphthol (PAN) complex in the walls of a knotted reactor, followed by an elution step using 0.50 mol L -1 hydrochloric acid solution. Optimisation involving the sampling flow rate, pH and buffer concentration factors was performed using a Box-Behnken design. Other factors were established considering results of previous experiments. The procedure allows the determination of lead with a 0.43 μg L -1 detection limit (3σ/S) and precisions (expressed as relative standard deviation) of 4.84% (N = 7) and 2.9% (N = 7) for lead concentrations of 5 and 25 μg L -1 , respectively. The accuracy was confirmed by the determination of lead in the NIST SRM 1643d trace elements in natural water standard reference material. The pre-concentration factor obtained is 26.5 and the sampling frequency is 48 h -1 . The recovery achieved for lead determination in the presence of several ions demonstrated that this procedure could be applied to the analysis of drinking water samples. The method was applied for lead determination in drinking water samples collected in Jequie City, Brazil. The lead concentration found in 25 samples were always lower than the permissible maximum levels stipulated by World Health Organization

Predictors of Mental Health Symptoms, Automatic Thoughts, and Self-Esteem Among University Students.

Science.gov (United States)

Hiçdurmaz, Duygu; İnci, Figen; Karahan, Sevilay

2017-01-01

University youth is a risk group regarding mental health, and many mental health problems are frequent in this group. Sociodemographic factors such as level of income and familial factors such as relationship with father are reported to be associated with mental health symptoms, automatic thoughts, and self-esteem. Also, there are interrelations between mental health problems, automatic thoughts, and self-esteem. The extent of predictive effect of each of these variables on automatic thoughts, self-esteem, and mental health symptoms is not known. We aimed to determine the predictive factors of mental health symptoms, automatic thoughts, and self-esteem in university students. Participants were 530 students enrolled at a university in Turkey, during 2014-2015 academic year. Data were collected using the student information form, the Brief Symptom Inventory, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Mental health symptoms, self-esteem, perception of the relationship with the father, and level of income as a student significantly predicted automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts, mental health symptoms, participation in family decisions, and age had significant predictive effects on self-esteem. Finally, automatic thoughts, self-esteem, age, and perception of the relationship with the father had significant predictive effects on mental health symptoms. The predictive factors revealed in our study provide important information to practitioners and researchers by showing the elements that need to be screened for mental health of university students and issues that need to be included in counseling activities.

AUTOMATIC FREQUENCY CONTROL SYSTEM

Science.gov (United States)

Hansen, C.F.; Salisbury, J.D.

1961-01-10

A control is described for automatically matching the frequency of a resonant cavity to that of a driving oscillator. The driving oscillator is disconnected from the cavity and a secondary oscillator is actuated in which the cavity is the frequency determining element. A low frequency is mixed with the output of the driving oscillator and the resultant lower and upper sidebands are separately derived. The frequencies of the sidebands are compared with the secondary oscillator frequency. deriving a servo control signal to adjust a tuning element in the cavity and matching the cavity frequency to that of the driving oscillator. The driving oscillator may then be connected to the cavity.

A general digital computer procedure for synthesizing linear automatic control systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cummins, J.D.

1961-10-01

The fundamental concepts required for synthesizing a linear automatic control system are considered. A generalized procedure for synthesizing automatic control systems is demonstrated. This procedure has been programmed for the Ferranti Mercury and the IBM 7090 computers. Details of the programmes are given. The procedure uses the linearized set of equations which describe the plant to be controlled as the starting point. Subsequent computations determine the transfer functions between any desired variables. The programmes also compute the root and phase loci for any linear (and some non-linear) configurations in the complex plane, the open loop and closed loop frequency responses of a system, the residues of a function of the complex variable 's' and the time response corresponding to these residues. With these general programmes available the design of 'one point' automatic control systems becomes a routine scientific procedure. Also dynamic assessments of plant may be carried out. Certain classes of multipoint automatic control problems may also be solved with these procedures. Autonomous systems, invariant systems and orthogonal systems may also be studied. (author)

Cognitive regulation of smoking behavior within a cigarette: Automatic and nonautomatic processes.

Science.gov (United States)

Motschman, Courtney A; Tiffany, Stephen T

2016-06-01

There has been limited research on cognitive processes governing smoking behavior in individuals who are tobacco dependent. In a replication (Baxter & Hinson, 2001) and extension, this study examined the theory (Tiffany, 1990) that drug use may be controlled by automatic processes that develop over repeated use. Heavy and occasional cigarette smokers completed a button-press reaction time (RT) task while concurrently smoking a cigarette, pretending to smoke a lit cigarette, or not smoking. Slowed RT during the button-press task indexed the cognitive disruption associated with nonautomatic control of behavior. Occasional smokers' RTs were slowed when smoking or pretending to smoke compared with when not smoking. Heavy smokers' RTs were slowed when pretending to smoke versus not smoking; however, their RTs were similarly fast when smoking compared with not smoking. The results indicated that smoking behavior was more highly regulated by controlled, nonautomatic processes among occasional smokers and by automatic processes among heavy smokers. Patterns of RT across the interpuff interval indicated that occasional smokers were significantly slowed in anticipation of and immediately after puffing onset, whereas heavy smokers were only slowed significantly after puffing onset. These findings suggest that the entirety of the smoking sequence becomes automatized, with the behaviors leading up to puffing becoming more strongly regulated by automatic processes with experience. These results have relevance to theories on the cognitive regulation of cigarette smoking and support the importance of interventions that focus on routinized behaviors that individuals engage in during and leading up to drug use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

AUTOMATIC ARCHITECTURAL STYLE RECOGNITION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. Mathias

2012-09-01

Full Text Available Procedural modeling has proven to be a very valuable tool in the field of architecture. In the last few years, research has soared to automatically create procedural models from images. However, current algorithms for this process of inverse procedural modeling rely on the assumption that the building style is known. So far, the determination of the building style has remained a manual task. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which automates this process through classification of architectural styles from facade images. Our classifier first identifies the images containing buildings, then separates individual facades within an image and determines the building style. This information could then be used to initialize the building reconstruction process. We have trained our classifier to distinguish between several distinct architectural styles, namely Flemish Renaissance, Haussmannian and Neoclassical. Finally, we demonstrate our approach on various street-side images.

Neural Bases of Automaticity

Science.gov (United States)

Servant, Mathieu; Cassey, Peter; Woodman, Geoffrey F.; Logan, Gordon D.

2018-01-01

Automaticity allows us to perform tasks in a fast, efficient, and effortless manner after sufficient practice. Theories of automaticity propose that across practice processing transitions from being controlled by working memory to being controlled by long-term memory retrieval. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies have sought to test this…

Automatic determination of pressurized water reactor core loading patterns that maximize beginning-of-cycle reactivity within power-peaking and burnup constraints

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hobson, G.H.; Turinsky, P.J.

1986-01-01

Computational capability has been developed to automatically determine a good estimate of the core loading pattern, which minimizes fuel cycle costs for a pressurized water reactor (PWR). Equating fuel cycle cost minimization with core reactivity maximization, the objective is to determine the loading pattern that maximizes core reactivity while satisfying power peaking, discharge burnup, and other constraints. The method utilizes a two-dimensional, coarse-mesh, finite difference scheme to evaluate core reactivity and fluxes for an initial reference loading pattern. First-order perturbation theory is applied to determine the effects of assembly shuffling on reactivity, power distribution, end-of-cycle burnup. Monte Carlo integer programming is then used to determine a near-optimal loading pattern within a range of loading patterns near the reference pattern. The process then repeats with the new loading pattern as the reference loading pattern and terminates when no better loading pattern can be determined. The process was applied with both reactivity maximization and radial power-peaking minimization as objectives. Results on a typical large PWR indicate that the cost of obtaining an 8% improvement in radial power-peaking margin is ≅2% in fuel cycle costs, for the reload core loaded without burnable poisons that was studied

An automatized frequency analysis for vine plot detection and delineation in remote sensing

OpenAIRE

Delenne , Carole; Rabatel , G.; Deshayes , M.

2008-01-01

The availability of an automatic tool for vine plot detection, delineation, and characterization would be very useful for management purposes. An automatic and recursive process using frequency analysis (with Fourier transform and Gabor filters) has been developed to meet this need. This results in the determination of vine plot boundary and accurate estimation of interrow width and row orientation. To foster large-scale applications, tests and validation have been carried out on standard ver...

Brand and automaticity

OpenAIRE

Liu, J.

2008-01-01

A presumption of most consumer research is that consumers endeavor to maximize the utility of their choices and are in complete control of their purchasing and consumption behavior. However, everyday life experience suggests that many of our choices are not all that reasoned or conscious. Indeed, automaticity, one facet of behavior, is indispensable to complete the portrait of consumers. Despite its importance, little attention is paid to how the automatic side of behavior can be captured and...

Suppressing Unwanted Autobiographical Memories Reduces Their Automatic Influences: Evidence From Electrophysiology and an Implicit Autobiographical Memory Test.

Science.gov (United States)

Hu, Xiaoqing; Bergström, Zara M; Bodenhausen, Galen V; Rosenfeld, J Peter

2015-07-01

The present study investigated the extent to which people can suppress unwanted autobiographical memories in a memory-detection context involving a mock crime. Participants encoded sensorimotor-rich memories by enacting a lab-based crime (stealing a ring) and received instructions to suppress memory of the crime in order to evade guilt detection in a brain-wave-based concealed-information test. Aftereffects of suppression on automatic memory processes were measured in an autobiographical Implicit Association Test. Results showed that suppression attenuated brain-wave activity (the P300) associated with crime-relevant memory retrieval, which rendered waveforms from innocent and guilty participants indistinguishable. However, the two groups could nevertheless be discriminated via the late-posterior-negative slow wave, which may reflect the need to monitor response conflict arising between voluntary suppression and automatic recognition processes. Finally, extending recent findings that suppression can impair implicit memory processes, we provide novel evidence that suppression reduces automatic cognitive biases often associated with actual autobiographical memories. © The Author(s) 2015.

Automatic Program Development

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Automatic Program Development is a tribute to Robert Paige (1947-1999), our accomplished and respected colleague, and moreover our good friend, whose untimely passing was a loss to our academic and research community. We have collected the revised, updated versions of the papers published in his...... honor in the Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation Journal in the years 2003 and 2005. Among them there are two papers by Bob: (i) a retrospective view of his research lines, and (ii) a proposal for future studies in the area of the automatic program derivation. The book also includes some papers...... by members of the IFIP Working Group 2.1 of which Bob was an active member. All papers are related to some of the research interests of Bob and, in particular, to the transformational development of programs and their algorithmic derivation from formal specifications. Automatic Program Development offers...

Ecological Relevance Determines Task Priority in Older Adults' Multitasking.

Science.gov (United States)

Doumas, Michail; Krampe, Ralf Th

2015-05-01

Multitasking is a challenging aspect of human behavior, especially if the concurrently performed tasks are different in nature. Several studies demonstrated pronounced performance decrements (dual-task costs) in older adults for combinations of cognitive and motor tasks. However, patterns of costs among component tasks differed across studies and reasons for participants' resource allocation strategies remained elusive. We investigated young and older adults' multitasking of a working memory task and two sensorimotor tasks, one with low (finger force control) and one with high ecological relevance (postural control). The tasks were performed in single-, dual-, and triple-task contexts. Working memory accuracy was reduced in dual-task contexts with either sensorimotor task and deteriorated further under triple-task conditions. Postural and force performance deteriorated with age and task difficulty in dual-task contexts. However, in the triple-task context with its maximum resource demands, older adults prioritized postural control over both force control and memory. Our results identify ecological relevance as the key factor in older adults' multitasking. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Development of advanced automatic operation system for nuclear ship. 1. Perfect automatic normal operation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nakazawa, Toshio; Yabuuti, Noriaki; Takahashi, Hiroki; Shimazaki, Junya

1999-02-01

Development of operation support system such as automatic operating system and anomaly diagnosis systems of nuclear reactor is very important in practical nuclear ship because of a limited number of operators and severe conditions in which receiving support from others in a case of accident is very difficult. The goal of development of the operation support systems is to realize the perfect automatic control system in a series of normal operation from the reactor start-up to the shutdown. The automatic control system for the normal operation has been developed based on operating experiences of the first Japanese nuclear ship 'Mutsu'. Automation technique was verified by 'Mutsu' plant data at manual operation. Fully automatic control of start-up and shutdown operations was achieved by setting the desired value of operation and the limiting value of parameter fluctuation, and by making the operation program of the principal equipment such as the main coolant pump and the heaters. This report presents the automatic operation system developed for the start-up and the shutdown of reactor and the verification of the system using the Nuclear Ship Engineering Simulator System. (author)

Automatic Extraction of High-Resolution Rainfall Series from Rainfall Strip Charts

Science.gov (United States)

Saa-Requejo, Antonio; Valencia, Jose Luis; Garrido, Alberto; Tarquis, Ana M.

2015-04-01

Soil erosion is a complex phenomenon involving the detachment and transport of soil particles, storage and runoff of rainwater, and infiltration. The relative magnitude and importance of these processes depends on a host of factors, including climate, soil, topography, cropping and land management practices among others. Most models for soil erosion or hydrological processes need an accurate storm characterization. However, this data are not always available and in some cases indirect models are generated to fill this gap. In Spain, the rain intensity data known for time periods less than 24 hours back to 1924 and many studies are limited by it. In many cases this data is stored in rainfall strip charts in the meteorological stations but haven't been transfer in a numerical form. To overcome this deficiency in the raw data a process of information extraction from large amounts of rainfall strip charts is implemented by means of computer software. The method has been developed that largely automates the intensive-labour extraction work based on van Piggelen et al. (2011). The method consists of the following five basic steps: 1) scanning the charts to high-resolution digital images, 2) manually and visually registering relevant meta information from charts and pre-processing, 3) applying automatic curve extraction software in a batch process to determine the coordinates of cumulative rainfall lines on the images (main step), 4) post processing the curves that were not correctly determined in step 3, and 5) aggregating the cumulative rainfall in pixel coordinates to the desired time resolution. A colour detection procedure is introduced that automatically separates the background of the charts and rolls from the grid and subsequently the rainfall curve. The rainfall curve is detected by minimization of a cost function. Some utilities have been added to improve the previous work and automates some auxiliary processes: readjust the bands properly, merge bands when

14 CFR 23.1329 - Automatic pilot system.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Automatic pilot system. 23.1329 Section 23...: Installation § 23.1329 Automatic pilot system. If an automatic pilot system is installed, it must meet the following: (a) Each system must be designed so that the automatic pilot can— (1) Be quickly and positively...

46 CFR 52.01-10 - Automatic controls.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 46 Shipping 2 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Automatic controls. 52.01-10 Section 52.01-10 Shipping... Requirements § 52.01-10 Automatic controls. (a) Each main boiler must meet the special requirements for automatic safety controls in § 62.35-20(a)(1) of this chapter. (b) Each automatically controlled auxiliary...

SU-E-T-49: Automatic Beam Angle Determination for Lung IMRT Planning Using a Beam Configuration Atlas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yuan, L; Yin, F; Sheng, Y; Wu, Q J.; Ge, Y; Li, Y

2014-01-01

Purpose: To present a technique to automatically determine beam angle configurations for lung IMRT planning based on the patient-specific anatomy and tumor geometry. Methods: The relationship between individual patient anatomy and proper beam configurations was learned from high quality clinical plans in three steps. First, a beam configuration atlas was obtained by classifying 60 lung IMRT plans into 6 beam configuration clusters based on a dissimilarity measure defined between different beam configurations. A beam configuration template was extracted from each cluster to form an atlas. Second, a beam efficiency index map (EI map) was constructed to characterize the geometry of the tumor relative to the lungs, the body and other OARs along each candidate beam direction. Finally, the EI maps of the clinical cases and the cluster assignments of their beam configurations were paired to train a Bayesian classification model. This technique was validated by leave-one-out cross validation with 16 cases randomly selected from the original dataset. An IMRT plan (autobeam plan) for each test case was generated using the beam configuration template according to the cluster assignment given by the model and was compared with the corresponding clinical plan. Results: The dosimetric parameters (mean±S.D. in percentage of prescription dose) in the auto-beam plans and in the clinical plans, respectively, and the p-values by a paired ttest (in parenthesis) are: lung Dmean: 16.3±9.3, 18.6±7.4 (0.48), esophagus Dmean: 28.4±18, 30.7±19.3 (0.02), Heart Dmean: 21.5±17.5,21.1±17.2 (0.76), Spinal Cord D2%: 48±23, 51.2±21.8 (0.01), PTV dose homogeneity (D2%–D99%): 22±27.4, 20.4±12.8 (0.10).The dose reductions by the autobeam plans in esophagus Dmean and cord D02 are statistically significant but the differences (<4%) may not be clinically significant. The other dosimetric parameters are not statistically different. Conclusion: Plans generated by the automatic beam angle

Investigating Students' Perceived Discipline Relevance Subsequent to Playing Educational Computer Games: A Personal Interest and Self-Determination Theory Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Sorebo, Oystein; Haehre, Reidar

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study is to explain students' perceived relevance of playing an educational game as a means for development of discipline competence. Based on self-determination theory and the concept of personal interest, we propose that: Satisfying students' basic needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness when playing educational games…

Intentional and Automatic Numerical Processing as Predictors of Mathematical Abilities in Primary School Children

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Violeta ePina

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Previous studies have suggested that numerical processing relates to mathematical performance, but it seems that such relationship is more evident for intentional than for automatic numerical processing. In the present study we assessed the relationship between the two types of numerical processing and specific mathematical abilities in a sample of 109 children in grades 1 to 6. Participants were tested in an ample range of mathematical tests and also performed both a numerical and a size comparison task. The results showed that numerical processing related to mathematical performance only when inhibitory control was involved in the comparison tasks. Concretely, we found that intentional numerical processing, as indexed by the numerical distance effect in the numerical comparison task, was related to mathematical reasoning skills only when the task-irrelevant dimension (the physical size was incongruent; whereas automatic numerical processing, indexed by the congruency effect in the size comparison task, was related to mathematical calculation skills only when digits were separated by small distance. The observed double dissociation highlights the relevance of both intentional and automatic numerical processing in mathematical skills, but when inhibitory control is also involved.

Automatic welding and cladding in heavy fabrication

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Altamer, A. de

1980-01-01

A description is given of the automatic welding processes used by an Italian fabricator of pressure vessels for petrochemical and nuclear plant. The automatic submerged arc welding, submerged arc strip cladding, pulsed TIG, hot wire TIG and MIG welding processes have proved satisfactory in terms of process reliability, metal deposition rate, and cost effectiveness for low alloy and carbon steels. An example shows sequences required during automatic butt welding, including heat treatments. Factors which govern satisfactory automatic welding include automatic anti-drift rotator device, electrode guidance and bead programming system, the capability of single and dual head operation, flux recovery and slag removal systems, operator environment and controls, maintaining continuity of welding and automatic reverse side grinding. Automatic welding is used for: joining vessel sections; joining tubes to tubeplate; cladding of vessel rings and tubes, dished ends and extruded nozzles; nozzle to shell and butt welds, including narrow gap welding. (author)

MATHEMATICAL AND COMPUTER MODELING OF AUTOMATIC CONTROL SYSTEM FOR HYDROSTATIC BEARING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

N. A. Pelevin

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The paper presents simulation results of hydrostatic bearing dynamics in spindle assembly of standard flexible production module with throttled circuit. The necessity of dynamic quality increase for automatic control system of the hydrostatic bearing with the use of correcting means in the form of RC-chains is shown. The features of correction parameters choice coming from the existence of the crossing connections in automatic control system structure are noted. We propose the block diagram of automatic control system of the hydrostatic bearing in Simulink working field and cyclic algorithm for determination program of RC-chain parameters implemented in MATLAB taking into account typical thermal processes for the finishing treatment. Graphic-analytical method for the correction parameters choice is presented based on the stability stock phase gradient for dynamic quality determination of automatic control system. Researches of the method estimability in case of using the standard metal bellow valve as the hydrocapacity for RC-chain are also carried out. Recommendations for the bellow valve choice are formulated. The check of dynamic quality indicators concerning transition processes calculated by means of the appropriate programs developed for MATLAB is performed. Examples are given for phase stability factor gradient schedules with partition of various areas of hydrostatic bearing dynamic quality for different frequencies of spindle rotation and procedure description of data cursor function application on MATLAB toolbar. Improvement of hydrostatic bearing dynamics under typical low loadings for finishing treatment is noted. Also, decrease of dynamic indicators for high loadings treatment in case of roughing treatment is marked.

Automatic differentiation of functions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Douglas, S.R.

1990-06-01

Automatic differentiation is a method of computing derivatives of functions to any order in any number of variables. The functions must be expressible as combinations of elementary functions. When evaluated at specific numerical points, the derivatives have no truncation error and are automatically found. The method is illustrated by simple examples. Source code in FORTRAN is provided

Commutated automatic gain control system

Science.gov (United States)

Yost, S. R.

1982-01-01

A commutated automatic gain control (AGC) system was designed and built for a prototype Loran C receiver. The receiver uses a microcomputer to control a memory aided phase-locked loop (MAPLL). The microcomputer also controls the input/output, latitude/longitude conversion, and the recently added AGC system. The circuit designed for the AGC is described, and bench and flight test results are presented. The AGC circuit described actually samples starting at a point 40 microseconds after a zero crossing determined by the software lock pulse ultimately generated by a 30 microsecond delay and add network in the receiver front end envelope detector.

Automatic particle-size analysis of HTGR recycle fuel

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mack, J.E.; Pechin, W.H.

1977-09-01

An automatic particle-size analyzer was designed, fabricated, tested, and put into operation measuring and counting HTGR recycle fuel particles. The particle-size analyzer can be used for particles in all stages of fabrication, from the loaded, uncarbonized weak acid resin up to fully-coated Biso or Triso particles. The device handles microspheres in the range of 300 to 1000 μm at rates up to 2000 per minute, measuring the diameter of each particle to determine the size distribution of the sample, and simultaneously determining the total number of particles. 10 figures

Development of an automatic human duress detection system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Greene, E.R.; Davis, J.G.; Tuttle, W.C.

1979-01-01

A method for automatically detecting duress in security personnel utilizes real-time assessment of physiological data (heart rate) to evaluate psychological stress. Using body-worn tape recorders, field data have been collected on 22 Albuquerque police officers (20 male, 2 female) to determine actual heart rate responses in both routine and life-threatening situations. Off-line computer analysis has been applied to the data to determine the speed and reliability with which an alarm could be triggered. Alarm algorithms relating field responses to laboratory collected baseline responses have been developed

Facilitating coronary artery evaluation in MDCT using a 3D automatic vessel segmentation tool

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fawad Khan, M.; Gurung, Jessen; Maataoui, Adel; Brehmer, Boris; Herzog, Christopher; Vogl, Thomas J.; Wesarg, Stefan; Dogan, Selami; Ackermann, Hanns; Assmus, Birgit

2006-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate a 3D coronary artery segmentation algorithm using 16-row MDCT data sets. Fifty patients underwent cardiac CT (Sensation 16, Siemens) and coronary angiography. Automatic and manual detection of coronary artery stenosis was performed. A 3D coronary artery segmentation algorithm (Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Darmstadt) was used for automatic evaluation. All significant stenoses (>50%) in vessels >1.5 mm in diameter were protocoled. Each detection tool was used by one reader who was blinded to the results of the other detection method and the results of coronary angiography. Sensitivity and specificity were determined for automatic and manual detection as well as was the time for both CT-based evaluation methods. The overall sensitivity and specificity of the automatic and manual approach were 93.1 vs. 95.83% and 86.1 vs. 81.9%. The time required for automatic evaluation was significantly shorter than with the manual approach, i.e., 246.04±43.17 s for the automatic approach and 526.88±45.71 s for the manual approach (P<0.0001). In 94% of the coronary artery branches, automatic detection required less time than the manual approach. Automatic coronary vessel evaluation is feasible. It reduces the time required for cardiac CT evaluation with similar sensitivity and specificity as well as facilitates the evaluation of MDCT coronary angiography in a standardized fashion. (orig.)

Controlled versus automatic processes: which is dominant to safety? The moderating effect of inhibitory control.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yaoshan Xu

Full Text Available This study explores the precursors of employees' safety behaviors based on a dual-process model, which suggests that human behaviors are determined by both controlled and automatic cognitive processes. Employees' responses to a self-reported survey on safety attitudes capture their controlled cognitive process, while the automatic association concerning safety measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT reflects employees' automatic cognitive processes about safety. In addition, this study investigates the moderating effects of inhibition on the relationship between self-reported safety attitude and safety behavior, and that between automatic associations towards safety and safety behavior. The results suggest significant main effects of self-reported safety attitude and automatic association on safety behaviors. Further, the interaction between self-reported safety attitude and inhibition and that between automatic association and inhibition each predict unique variances in safety behavior. Specifically, the safety behaviors of employees with lower level of inhibitory control are influenced more by automatic association, whereas those of employees with higher level of inhibitory control are guided more by self-reported safety attitudes. These results suggest that safety behavior is the joint outcome of both controlled and automatic cognitive processes, and the relative importance of these cognitive processes depends on employees' individual differences in inhibitory control. The implications of these findings for theoretical and practical issues are discussed at the end.

Automatic text summarization

CERN Document Server

Torres Moreno, Juan Manuel

2014-01-01

This new textbook examines the motivations and the different algorithms for automatic document summarization (ADS). We performed a recent state of the art. The book shows the main problems of ADS, difficulties and the solutions provided by the community. It presents recent advances in ADS, as well as current applications and trends. The approaches are statistical, linguistic and symbolic. Several exemples are included in order to clarify the theoretical concepts.  The books currently available in the area of Automatic Document Summarization are not recent. Powerful algorithms have been develop

Automatic Ultrasound Scanning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Moshavegh, Ramin

on the user adjustments on the scanner interface to optimize the scan settings. This explains the huge interest in the subject of this PhD project entitled “AUTOMATIC ULTRASOUND SCANNING”. The key goals of the project have been to develop automated techniques to minimize the unnecessary settings...... on the scanners, and to improve the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) in ultrasound by introducing new quantitative measures. Thus, four major issues concerning automation of the medical ultrasound are addressed in this PhD project. They touch upon gain adjustments in ultrasound, automatic synthetic aperture image...

Construction and use of an optical semi-automatic titrator employing the technique of reflectance photometry

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hwang, Hoon

2001-01-01

An optical semi-automatic titrator was constructed employing the technique of the reflectance spectrometry and was tested for the determination of the end points of the acid-base, precipitation, and EDTA titrations. And since the current optical semi-automatic titrator built on the principle of the reflectance spectrometry could be successfully used even for the determination of the end of the end point in the precipitation titration where the solid particles are formed during the titration process, it was found to be feasible that a completely automated optical titrator would be designed and built based on the current findings

Political relevance in the eye of the beholder: Determining the substantiveness of TV shows and political debates with Twitter data

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Boukes, M.; Trilling, D.

Addressing the call to move beyond a simple genre classification of TV shows as either substantive (hard) news or non-substantive (soft) infotainment, we propose using social media reactions to determine a program’s political relevance. Such an approach provides information that goes beyond genre or

Uranium casting furnace automatic temperature control development

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lind, R.F.

1992-01-01

Development of an automatic molten uranium temperature control system for use on batch-type induction casting furnaces is described. Implementation of a two-color optical pyrometer, development of an optical scanner for the pyrometer, determination of furnace thermal dynamics, and design of control systems are addressed. The optical scanning system is shown to greatly improve pyrometer measurement repeatability, particularly where heavy floating slag accumulations cause surface temperature gradients. Thermal dynamics of the furnaces were determined by applying least-squares system identification techniques to actual production data. A unity feedback control system utilizing a proportional-integral-derivative compensator is designed by using frequency-domain techniques. 14 refs

An automatic flow injection analysis procedure for photometric determination of ethanol in red wine without using a chromogenic reagent.

Science.gov (United States)

Borges, Sivanildo S; Frizzarin, Rejane M; Reis, Boaventura F

2006-05-01

An automatic reagentless photometric procedure for the determination of ethanol in red wine is described. The procedure was based on a falling drop system that was implemented by employing a flow injection analysis manifold. The detection system comprised an infrared LED and a phototransistor. The experimental arrangement was designed to ensure that the wine drop grew between these devices, thus causing a decrease in the intensity of the radiation beam coming from the LED. Since ethanol content affected the size of the wine drop this feature was exploited to develop an analytical procedure for the photometric determination of ethanol in red wine without using a chromogenic reagent. In an attempt to prove the usefulness of the proposed procedure, a set of red wines were analysed. No significant difference between our results and those obtained with a reference method was observed at the 95% confidence level. Other advantages of our method were a linear response ranging from 0.17 up to 5.14 mol L(-1) (1.0 up to 30.0%) ethanol (R = 0.999); a limit of detection of 0.05 mol L(-1) (0.3%) ethanol; a relative standard deviation of 2.5% (n = 10) using typical wine sample containing 2.14 mol L(-1) (12.5%) ethanol; and a sampling rate of 50 determinations per hour.

Automatic gender determination from 3D digital maxillary tooth plaster models based on the random forest algorithm and discrete cosine transform.

Science.gov (United States)

Akkoç, Betül; Arslan, Ahmet; Kök, Hatice

2017-05-01

One of the first stages in the identification of an individual is gender determination. Through gender determination, the search spectrum can be reduced. In disasters such as accidents or fires, which can render identification somewhat difficult, durable teeth are an important source for identification. This study proposes a smart system that can automatically determine gender using 3D digital maxillary tooth plaster models. The study group was composed of 40 Turkish individuals (20 female, 20 male) between the ages of 21 and 24. Using the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, tooth models were aligned, and after the segmentation process, models were transformed into depth images. The local discrete cosine transform (DCT) was used in the process of feature extraction, and the random forest (RF) algorithm was used for the process of classification. Classification was performed using 30 different seeds for random generator values and 10-fold cross-validation. A value of 85.166% was obtained for average classification accuracy (CA) and a value of 91.75% for the area under the ROC curve (AUC). A multi-disciplinary study is performed here that includes computer sciences, medicine and dentistry. A smart system is proposed for the determination of gender from 3D digital models of maxillary tooth plaster models. This study has the capacity to extend the field of gender determination from teeth. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automatic measurement of the radioactive mercury uptake by the kidney

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zurowski, S.; Raynaud, C.; CEA, 91 - Orsay

1976-01-01

An entirely automatic method to measure the Hg uptake by the kidney is proposed. The following operations are carried out in succession: measurement of extrarenal activity, demarcation of uptake areas, anatomical identification of uptake areas, separation of overlapping organ images and measurement of kidney depth. The first results thus calculated on 30 patients are very close to those obtained with a standard manual method and are highly encouraging. Two important points should be stressed: a broad demarcation of the uptake areas is necessary and an original method, that of standard errors, is useful for the background noise determination and uptake area demarcation. This automatic measurement technique is so designed that it can be applied to other special cases [fr

Automatic, anatomically selective, artifact-free enhancement of digital chest radiographs

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sezan, M.I.; Tekalp, A.M.; Schaetzing, R.

1988-01-01

The authors propose a technique for automatic, anatomically selective, artifact-free enhancement of digital chest radiographs. Anatomically selective enhancement is motivated by the different enhancement requirements of the lung field and the mediastinum. A recent peak detection algorithm is applied to the image histogram to automatically determine a gray-level threshold between the lung and mediastinum fields. The gray-level threshold facilitates anatomically selective gray-scale modification and unsharp masking. Further, in an attempt to suppress possible white-band artifacts due to unsharp masking at sharp edges, local-contrast adaptivity is incorporated into anatomically selective unsharp masking by designing an anatomy-sensitive emphasis parameter that varied asymmetrically with positive and negative values of the local image contrast

30 CFR 77.314 - Automatic temperature control instruments.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 30 Mineral Resources 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Automatic temperature control instruments. 77... UNDERGROUND COAL MINES Thermal Dryers § 77.314 Automatic temperature control instruments. (a) Automatic temperature control instruments for thermal dryer system shall be of the recording type. (b) Automatic...

Determining the critical relative humidity at which the glassy to rubbery transition occurs in polydextrose using an automatic water vapor sorption instrument.

Science.gov (United States)

Yuan, Xiaoda; Carter, Brady P; Schmidt, Shelly J

2011-01-01

Similar to an increase in temperature at constant moisture content, water vapor sorption by an amorphous glassy material at constant temperature causes the material to transition into the rubbery state. However, comparatively little research has investigated the measurement of the critical relative humidity (RHc) at which the glass transition occurs at constant temperature. Thus, the central objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between the glass transition temperature (Tg), determined using thermal methods, and the RHc obtained using an automatic water vapor sorption instrument. Dynamic dewpoint isotherms were obtained for amorphous polydextrose from 15 to 40 °C. RHc was determined using an optimized 2nd-derivative method; however, 2 simpler RHc determination methods were also tested as a secondary objective. No statistical difference was found between the 3 RHc methods. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) Tg values were determined using polydextrose equilibrated from 11.3% to 57.6% RH. Both standard DSC and modulated DSC (MDSC) methods were employed, since some of the polydextrose thermograms exhibited a physical aging peak. Thus, a tertiary objective was to compare Tg values obtained using 3 different methods (DSC first scan, DSC rescan, and MDSC), to determine which method(s) yielded the most accurate Tg values. In general, onset and midpoint DSC first scan and MDSC Tg values were similar, whereas onset and midpoint DSC rescan values were different. State diagrams of RHc and experimental temperature and Tg and %RH were compared. These state diagrams, though obtained via very different methods, showed relatively good agreement, confirming our hypothesis that water vapor sorption isotherms can be used to directly detect the glassy to rubbery transition. Practical Application: The food polymer science (FPS) approach, pioneered by Slade and Levine, is being successfully applied in the food industry for understanding, improving, and

Automatic control systems engineering

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shin, Yun Gi

2004-01-01

This book gives descriptions of automatic control for electrical electronics, which indicates history of automatic control, Laplace transform, block diagram and signal flow diagram, electrometer, linearization of system, space of situation, state space analysis of electric system, sensor, hydro controlling system, stability, time response of linear dynamic system, conception of root locus, procedure to draw root locus, frequency response, and design of control system.

Computer program for automatic generation of BWR control rod patterns

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Taner, M.S.; Levine, S.H.; Hsia, M.Y.

1990-01-01

A computer program named OCTOPUS has been developed to automatically determine a control rod pattern that approximates some desired target power distribution as closely as possible without violating any thermal safety or reactor criticality constraints. The program OCTOPUS performs a semi-optimization task based on the method of approximation programming (MAP) to develop control rod patterns. The SIMULATE-E code is used to determine the nucleonic characteristics of the reactor core state

Automatic Anthropometric System Development Using Machine Learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Long The Nguyen

2016-08-01

Full Text Available The contactless automatic anthropometric system is proposed for the reconstruction of the 3D-model of the human body using the conventional smartphone. Our approach involves three main steps. The first step is the extraction of 12 anthropological features. Then we determine the most important features. Finally, we employ these features to build the 3D model of the human body and classify them according to gender and the commonly used sizes. 

A semi-automatic method for peak and valley detection in free-breathing respiratory waveforms

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lu Wei; Nystrom, Michelle M.; Parikh, Parag J.; Fooshee, David R.; Hubenschmidt, James P.; Bradley, Jeffrey D.; Low, Daniel A.

2006-01-01

The existing commercial software often inadequately determines respiratory peaks for patients in respiration correlated computed tomography. A semi-automatic method was developed for peak and valley detection in free-breathing respiratory waveforms. First the waveform is separated into breath cycles by identifying intercepts of a moving average curve with the inspiration and expiration branches of the waveform. Peaks and valleys were then defined, respectively, as the maximum and minimum between pairs of alternating inspiration and expiration intercepts. Finally, automatic corrections and manual user interventions were employed. On average for each of the 20 patients, 99% of 307 peaks and valleys were automatically detected in 2.8 s. This method was robust for bellows waveforms with large variations

Development of advanced automatic control system for nuclear ship. 2. Perfect automatic operation after reactor scram events

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yabuuchi, Noriaki; Nakazawa, Toshio; Takahashi, Hiroki; Shimazaki, Junya; Hoshi, Tsutao

1997-11-01

An automatic operation system has been developed for the purpose of realizing a perfect automatic plant operation after reactor scram events. The goal of the automatic operation after a reactor scram event is to bring the reactor hot stand-by condition automatically. The basic functions of this system are as follows; to monitor actions of the equipments of safety actions after a reactor scram, to control necessary control equipments to bring a reactor to a hot stand-by condition automatically, and to energize a decay heat removal system. The performance evaluation on this system was carried out by comparing the results using to Nuclear Ship Engineering Simulation System (NESSY) and the those measured in the scram test of the nuclear ship 'Mutsu'. As the result, it was showed that this system had the sufficient performance to bring a reactor to a hot syand-by condition quickly and safety. (author)

Development of advanced automatic control system for nuclear ship. 2. Perfect automatic operation after reactor scram events

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yabuuchi, Noriaki; Nakazawa, Toshio; Takahashi, Hiroki; Shimazaki, Junya; Hoshi, Tsutao [Japan Atomic Energy Research Inst., Tokai, Ibaraki (Japan). Tokai Research Establishment

1997-11-01

An automatic operation system has been developed for the purpose of realizing a perfect automatic plant operation after reactor scram events. The goal of the automatic operation after a reactor scram event is to bring the reactor hot stand-by condition automatically. The basic functions of this system are as follows; to monitor actions of the equipments of safety actions after a reactor scram, to control necessary control equipments to bring a reactor to a hot stand-by condition automatically, and to energize a decay heat removal system. The performance evaluation on this system was carried out by comparing the results using to Nuclear Ship Engineering Simulation System (NESSY) and the those measured in the scram test of the nuclear ship `Mutsu`. As the result, it was showed that this system had the sufficient performance to bring a reactor to a hot syand-by condition quickly and safety. (author)

Automatic exchange unit for control rod drive device

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nasu, Seiji; Sasaki, Masayoshi.

1982-01-01

Purpose: To enable automatic reoperation and continuation without external power interruption remedy device at the time of recovering the interrupted power soruce during automatic positioning operation. Constitution: In case of an automatic exchange unit for a control rod drive device of the control type for setting the deviation between the positioning target position and the present position of the device to zero, the position data of the drive device of the positioning target value of the device is automatically read, and an interlock of operation inhibit is applied to a control system until the data reading is completed and automatic operation start or restart conditions are sequentially confirmed. After the confirmation, the interlock is released to start the automatic operation or reoperation. Accordingly, the automatic operation can be safely restarted and continued. (Yoshihara, H.)

Automatic anatomically selective image enhancement in digital chest radiography

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sezan, M.I.; Minerbo, G.N.; Schaetzing, R.

1989-01-01

The authors develop a technique for automatic anatomically selective enhancement of digital chest radiographs. Anatomically selective enhancement is motivated by the desire to simultaneously meet the different enhancement requirements of the lung field and the mediastinum. A recent peak detection algorithm and a set of rules are applied to the image histogram to determine automatically a gray-level threshold between the lung field and mediastinum. The gray-level threshold facilitates anatomically selective gray-scale modification and/or unsharp masking. Further, in an attempt to suppress possible white-band or black-band artifacts due to unsharp masking at sharp edges, local-contrast adaptivity is incorporated into anatomically selective unsharp masking by designing an anatomy-sensitive emphasis parameter which varies asymmetrically with positive and negative values of the local image contrast

A neurocomputational model of automatic sequence production.

Science.gov (United States)

Helie, Sebastien; Roeder, Jessica L; Vucovich, Lauren; Rünger, Dennis; Ashby, F Gregory

2015-07-01

Most behaviors unfold in time and include a sequence of submovements or cognitive activities. In addition, most behaviors are automatic and repeated daily throughout life. Yet, relatively little is known about the neurobiology of automatic sequence production. Past research suggests a gradual transfer from the associative striatum to the sensorimotor striatum, but a number of more recent studies challenge this role of the BG in automatic sequence production. In this article, we propose a new neurocomputational model of automatic sequence production in which the main role of the BG is to train cortical-cortical connections within the premotor areas that are responsible for automatic sequence production. The new model is used to simulate four different data sets from human and nonhuman animals, including (1) behavioral data (e.g., RTs), (2) electrophysiology data (e.g., single-neuron recordings), (3) macrostructure data (e.g., TMS), and (4) neurological circuit data (e.g., inactivation studies). We conclude with a comparison of the new model with existing models of automatic sequence production and discuss a possible new role for the BG in automaticity and its implication for Parkinson's disease.

An approach of optimal sensitivity applied in the tertiary loop of the automatic generation control

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Belati, Edmarcio A. [CIMATEC - SENAI, Salvador, BA (Brazil); Alves, Dilson A. [Electrical Engineering Department, FEIS, UNESP - Sao Paulo State University (Brazil); da Costa, Geraldo R.M. [Electrical Engineering Department, EESC, USP - Sao Paulo University (Brazil)

2008-09-15

This paper proposes an approach of optimal sensitivity applied in the tertiary loop of the automatic generation control. The approach is based on the theorem of non-linear perturbation. From an optimal operation point obtained by an optimal power flow a new optimal operation point is directly determined after a perturbation, i.e., without the necessity of an iterative process. This new optimal operation point satisfies the constraints of the problem for small perturbation in the loads. The participation factors and the voltage set point of the automatic voltage regulators (AVR) of the generators are determined by the technique of optimal sensitivity, considering the effects of the active power losses minimization and the network constraints. The participation factors and voltage set point of the generators are supplied directly to a computational program of dynamic simulation of the automatic generation control, named by power sensitivity mode. Test results are presented to show the good performance of this approach. (author)

Automatic ultrasound image enhancement for 2D semi-automatic breast-lesion segmentation

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Kongkuo; Hall, Christopher S.

2014-03-01

Breast cancer is the fastest growing cancer, accounting for 29%, of new cases in 2012, and second leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States and worldwide. Ultrasound (US) has been used as an indispensable tool for breast cancer detection/diagnosis and treatment. In computer-aided assistance, lesion segmentation is a preliminary but vital step, but the task is quite challenging in US images, due to imaging artifacts that complicate detection and measurement of the suspect lesions. The lesions usually present with poor boundary features and vary significantly in size, shape, and intensity distribution between cases. Automatic methods are highly application dependent while manual tracing methods are extremely time consuming and have a great deal of intra- and inter- observer variability. Semi-automatic approaches are designed to counterbalance the advantage and drawbacks of the automatic and manual methods. However, considerable user interaction might be necessary to ensure reasonable segmentation for a wide range of lesions. This work proposes an automatic enhancement approach to improve the boundary searching ability of the live wire method to reduce necessary user interaction while keeping the segmentation performance. Based on the results of segmentation of 50 2D breast lesions in US images, less user interaction is required to achieve desired accuracy, i.e. < 80%, when auto-enhancement is applied for live-wire segmentation.

Text Summarization Evaluation: Correlating Human Performance on an Extrinsic Task with Automatic Intrinsic Metrics

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

President, Stacy F; Dorr, Bonnie J

2006-01-01

This research describes two types of summarization evaluation methods, intrinsic and extrinsic, and concentrates on determining the level of correlation between automatic intrinsic methods and human...

The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tessel M. Bauduin

2015-09-01

Full Text Available In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism surrealist leader André Breton (1896-1966 defined Surrealism as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state,’ positioning ‘psychic automatism’ as both a concept and a technique. This definition followed upon an intense period of experimentation with various forms of automatism among the proto-surrealist group; predominantly automatic writing, but also induced dream states. This article explores how surrealist ‘psychic automatism’ functioned as a mechanism for communication, or the expression of thought as directly as possible through the unconscious, in the first two decades of Surrealism. It touches upon automatic writing, hysteria as an automatic bodily performance of the unconscious, dreaming and the experimentation with induced dream states, and automatic drawing and other visual arts-techniques that could be executed more or less automatically as well. For all that the surrealists reinvented automatism for their own poetic, artistic and revolutionary aims, the automatic techniques were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism, psychical research and experimentation with mediums, and the article teases out the connections to mediumistic automatism. It is demonstrated how the surrealists effectively and successfully divested automatism of all things spiritual. It furthermore becomes clear that despite various mishaps, automatism in many forms was a very successful creative technique within Surrealism.

A DYNAMIC FEATURE SELECTION METHOD FOR DOCUMENT RANKING WITH RELEVANCE FEEDBACK APPROACH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. Latha

2010-07-01

Full Text Available Ranking search results is essential for information retrieval and Web search. Search engines need to not only return highly relevant results, but also be fast to satisfy users. As a result, not all available features can be used for ranking, and in fact only a small percentage of these features can be used. Thus, it is crucial to have a feature selection mechanism that can find a subset of features that both meets latency requirements and achieves high relevance. In this paper we describe a 0/1 knapsack procedure for automatically selecting features to use within Generalization model for Document Ranking. We propose an approach for Relevance Feedback using Expectation Maximization method and evaluate the algorithm on the TREC Collection for describing classes of feedback textual information retrieval features. Experimental results, evaluated on standard TREC-9 part of the OHSUMED collections, show that our feature selection algorithm produces models that are either significantly more effective than, or equally effective as, models such as Markov Random Field model, Correlation Co-efficient and Count Difference method

Programmable automatic alpha--beta air sample counter

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Howell, W.P.

1978-01-01

A programmable automatic alpha-beta air sample counter was developed for routine sample counting by operational health physics personnel. The system is composed of an automatic sample changer utilizing a large silicon diode detector, an electronic counting system with energy analysis capability, an automatic data acquisition controller, an interface module, and a teletypewriter with paper tape punch and paper tape reader. The system is operated through the teletypewriter keyboard and the paper tape reader, which are used to instruct the automatic data acquisition controller. Paper tape programs are provided for background counting, Chi 2 test, and sample counting. Output data are printed by the teletypewriter on standard continuous roll or multifold paper. Data are automatically corrected for background and counter efficiency

MeSH Now: automatic MeSH indexing at PubMed scale via learning to rank.

Science.gov (United States)

Mao, Yuqing; Lu, Zhiyong

2017-04-17

MeSH indexing is the task of assigning relevant MeSH terms based on a manual reading of scholarly publications by human indexers. The task is highly important for improving literature retrieval and many other scientific investigations in biomedical research. Unfortunately, given its manual nature, the process of MeSH indexing is both time-consuming (new articles are not immediately indexed until 2 or 3 months later) and costly (approximately ten dollars per article). In response, automatic indexing by computers has been previously proposed and attempted but remains challenging. In order to advance the state of the art in automatic MeSH indexing, a community-wide shared task called BioASQ was recently organized. We propose MeSH Now, an integrated approach that first uses multiple strategies to generate a combined list of candidate MeSH terms for a target article. Through a novel learning-to-rank framework, MeSH Now then ranks the list of candidate terms based on their relevance to the target article. Finally, MeSH Now selects the highest-ranked MeSH terms via a post-processing module. We assessed MeSH Now on two separate benchmarking datasets using traditional precision, recall and F 1 -score metrics. In both evaluations, MeSH Now consistently achieved over 0.60 in F-score, ranging from 0.610 to 0.612. Furthermore, additional experiments show that MeSH Now can be optimized by parallel computing in order to process MEDLINE documents on a large scale. We conclude that MeSH Now is a robust approach with state-of-the-art performance for automatic MeSH indexing and that MeSH Now is capable of processing PubMed scale documents within a reasonable time frame. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/Demo/MeSHNow/ .

Method for automatically evaluating a transition from a batch manufacturing technique to a lean manufacturing technique

Science.gov (United States)

Ivezic, Nenad; Potok, Thomas E.

2003-09-30

A method for automatically evaluating a manufacturing technique comprises the steps of: receiving from a user manufacturing process step parameters characterizing a manufacturing process; accepting from the user a selection for an analysis of a particular lean manufacturing technique; automatically compiling process step data for each process step in the manufacturing process; automatically calculating process metrics from a summation of the compiled process step data for each process step; and, presenting the automatically calculated process metrics to the user. A method for evaluating a transition from a batch manufacturing technique to a lean manufacturing technique can comprise the steps of: collecting manufacturing process step characterization parameters; selecting a lean manufacturing technique for analysis; communicating the selected lean manufacturing technique and the manufacturing process step characterization parameters to an automatic manufacturing technique evaluation engine having a mathematical model for generating manufacturing technique evaluation data; and, using the lean manufacturing technique evaluation data to determine whether to transition from an existing manufacturing technique to the selected lean manufacturing technique.

Automatic Color Sorting of Hardwood Edge-Glued Panel Parts

Science.gov (United States)

D. Earl Kline; Richard Conners; Qiang Lu; Philip A. Araman

1997-01-01

This paper describes an automatic color sorting system for red oak edge-glued panel parts. The color sorting system simultaneously examines both faces of a panel part and then determines which face has the "best" color, and sorts the part into one of a number of color classes at plant production speeds. Initial test results show that the system generated over...

Effectiveness of an Automatic Tracking Software in Underwater Motion Analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fabrício A. Magalhaes

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Tracking of markers placed on anatomical landmarks is a common practice in sports science to perform the kinematic analysis that interests both athletes and coaches. Although different software programs have been developed to automatically track markers and/or features, none of them was specifically designed to analyze underwater motion. Hence, this study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a software developed for automatic tracking of underwater movements (DVP, based on the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi feature tracker. Twenty-one video recordings of different aquatic exercises (n = 2940 markers’ positions were manually tracked to determine the markers’ center coordinates. Then, the videos were automatically tracked using DVP and a commercially available software (COM. Since tracking techniques may produce false targets, an operator was instructed to stop the automatic procedure and to correct the position of the cursor when the distance between the calculated marker’s coordinate and the reference one was higher than 4 pixels. The proportion of manual interventions required by the software was used as a measure of the degree of automation. Overall, manual interventions were 10.4% lower for DVP (7.4% than for COM (17.8%. Moreover, when examining the different exercise modes separately, the percentage of manual interventions was 5.6% to 29.3% lower for DVP than for COM. Similar results were observed when analyzing the type of marker rather than the type of exercise, with 9.9% less manual interventions for DVP than for COM. In conclusion, based on these results, the developed automatic tracking software presented can be used as a valid and useful tool for underwater motion analysis.

Design of Low Power Algorithms for Automatic Embedded Analysis of Patch ECG Signals

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Saadi, Dorthe Bodholt

, several different cable-free wireless patch-type ECG recorders have recently reached the market. One of these recorders is the ePatch designed by the Danish company DELTA. The extended monitoring period available with the patch recorders has demonstrated to increase the diagnostic yield of outpatient ECG....... Such algorithms could allow the real-time transmission of clinically relevant information to a central monitoring station. The first step in embedded ECG interpretation is the automatic detection of each individual heartbeat. An important part of this project was therefore to design a novel algorithm...

Sensitivity analysis and design optimization through automatic differentiation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hovland, Paul D; Norris, Boyana; Strout, Michelle Mills; Bhowmick, Sanjukta; Utke, Jean

2005-01-01

Automatic differentiation is a technique for transforming a program or subprogram that computes a function, including arbitrarily complex simulation codes, into one that computes the derivatives of that function. We describe the implementation and application of automatic differentiation tools. We highlight recent advances in the combinatorial algorithms and compiler technology that underlie successful implementation of automatic differentiation tools. We discuss applications of automatic differentiation in design optimization and sensitivity analysis. We also describe ongoing research in the design of language-independent source transformation infrastructures for automatic differentiation algorithms

Automatically sweeping dual-channel boxcar integrator

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Keefe, D.J.; Patterson, D.R.

1978-01-01

An automatically sweeping dual-channel boxcar integrator has been developed to automate the search for a signal that repeatedly follows a trigger pulse by a constant or slowly varying time delay when that signal is completely hidden in random electrical noise and dc-offset drifts. The automatically sweeping dual-channel boxcar integrator improves the signal-to-noise ratio and eliminates dc-drift errors in the same way that a conventional dual-channel boxcar integrator does, but, in addition, automatically locates the hidden signal. When the signal is found, its time delay is displayed with 100-ns resolution, and its peak value is automatically measured and displayed. This relieves the operator of the tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone search for the signal whenever the time delay changes. The automatically sweeping boxcar integrator can also be used as a conventional dual-channel boxcar integrator. In either mode, it can repeatedly integrate a signal up to 990 times and thus make accurate measurements of the signal pulse height in the presence of random noise, dc offsets, and unsynchronized interfering signals

Hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric mixture models for clustering with variable relevance determination.

Science.gov (United States)

Yau, Christopher; Holmes, Chris

2011-07-01

We propose a hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric mixture model for clustering when some of the covariates are assumed to be of varying relevance to the clustering problem. This can be thought of as an issue in variable selection for unsupervised learning. We demonstrate that by defining a hierarchical population based nonparametric prior on the cluster locations scaled by the inverse covariance matrices of the likelihood we arrive at a 'sparsity prior' representation which admits a conditionally conjugate prior. This allows us to perform full Gibbs sampling to obtain posterior distributions over parameters of interest including an explicit measure of each covariate's relevance and a distribution over the number of potential clusters present in the data. This also allows for individual cluster specific variable selection. We demonstrate improved inference on a number of canonical problems.

What Automaticity Deficit? Activation of Lexical Information by Readers with Dyslexia in a Rapid Automatized Naming Stroop-Switch Task

Science.gov (United States)

Jones, Manon W.; Snowling, Margaret J.; Moll, Kristina

2016-01-01

Reading fluency is often predicted by rapid automatized naming (RAN) speed, which as the name implies, measures the automaticity with which familiar stimuli (e.g., letters) can be retrieved and named. Readers with dyslexia are considered to have less "automatized" access to lexical information, reflected in longer RAN times compared with…

Automatic aortic root segmentation in CTA whole-body dataset

Science.gov (United States)

Gao, Xinpei; Kitslaar, Pieter H.; Scholte, Arthur J. H. A.; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn P. F.; Dijkstra, Jouke; Reiber, Johan H. C.

2016-03-01

Trans-catheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is an evolving technique for patients with serious aortic stenosis disease. Typically, in this application a CTA data set is obtained of the patient's arterial system from the subclavian artery to the femoral arteries, to evaluate the quality of the vascular access route and analyze the aortic root to determine if and which prosthesis should be used. In this paper, we concentrate on the automated segmentation of the aortic root. The purpose of this study was to automatically segment the aortic root in computed tomography angiography (CTA) datasets to support TAVR procedures. The method in this study includes 4 major steps. First, the patient's cardiac CTA image was resampled to reduce the computation time. Next, the cardiac CTA image was segmented using an atlas-based approach. The most similar atlas was selected from a total of 8 atlases based on its image similarity to the input CTA image. Third, the aortic root segmentation from the previous step was transferred to the patient's whole-body CTA image by affine registration and refined in the fourth step using a deformable subdivision surface model fitting procedure based on image intensity. The pipeline was applied to 20 patients. The ground truth was created by an analyst who semi-automatically corrected the contours of the automatic method, where necessary. The average Dice similarity index between the segmentations of the automatic method and the ground truth was found to be 0.965±0.024. In conclusion, the current results are very promising.

On advisability of developing automatic complexes of radiation flow detection

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Akopov, V.S.; Voronin, S.A.; Meshalkin, I.A.

1976-01-01

On the basis of mathematical treatment of statistical data obtained by inquest of specialists from a number of factories, problems associated with the determination of the most acceptable efficiency of radiation defectoscopy automatized complexes are considered. Production requirements for radiation control sensitivity are generalized. The use of providing the complexes with computer technique is substantiated

14 CFR 29.1329 - Automatic pilot system.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Automatic pilot system. 29.1329 Section 29... pilot system. (a) Each automatic pilot system must be designed so that the automatic pilot can— (1) Be sufficiently overpowered by one pilot to allow control of the rotorcraft; and (2) Be readily and positively...

14 CFR 27.1329 - Automatic pilot system.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Automatic pilot system. 27.1329 Section 27... pilot system. (a) Each automatic pilot system must be designed so that the automatic pilot can— (1) Be sufficiently overpowered by one pilot to allow control of the rotorcraft; and (2) Be readily and positively...

Automatic differentiation algorithms in model analysis

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huiskes, M.J.

2002-01-01

Title: Automatic differentiation algorithms in model analysis
Author: M.J. Huiskes
Date: 19 March, 2002

In this thesis automatic differentiation algorithms and derivative-based methods

Formal Specification and Automatic Analysis of Business Processes under Authorization Constraints: An Action-Based Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Armando, Alessandro; Giunchiglia, Enrico; Ponta, Serena Elisa

We present an approach to the formal specification and automatic analysis of business processes under authorization constraints based on the action language \\cal{C}. The use of \\cal{C} allows for a natural and concise modeling of the business process and the associated security policy and for the automatic analysis of the resulting specification by using the Causal Calculator (CCALC). Our approach improves upon previous work by greatly simplifying the specification step while retaining the ability to perform a fully automatic analysis. To illustrate the effectiveness of the approach we describe its application to a version of a business process taken from the banking domain and use CCALC to determine resource allocation plans complying with the security policy.

FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ON SPREADSHEET-BASED AUTOMATIC TREND LINES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

DANIEL HOMOCIANU

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Most of the nowadays business applications working with data sets allow exports to the spreadsheet format. This fact is related to the experience of common business users with such products and to the possibility to couple what they have with something containing many models, functions and possibilities to process and represent data, by that getting something in dynamics and much more than a simple static less useful report. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to identify clusters, profiles, association rules, decision trees and many other patterns or even behaviours, but also to generate alerts for exceptions, determine trends and make predictions about the future based on historical data. In this context, the paper shows some practical results obtained after testing both the automatic creation of scatter charts and trend lines corresponding to the user’s preferences and the automatic suggesting of the most appropriate trend for the tested data mostly based on the statistical measure of how close they are to the regression function.

Plasma automatic control in magnetic traps

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Samojlenko, Yu.I.; Chuyanov, V.A.

1983-01-01

Principles of constructing the systems providing a plasma equilibrium and stability in thermonuctear devices are laid down. Operation of the servo system to maintain a plasma equilibrium is described using the tokamak plasma filament as an example. Operation of the system to suppress a flute instability is also described. This system measures electric disturbances on the plasma body surface and controls charge distribution on external electrodes. It is pointed out that systems of automatic control of plasma equilibrium and stability become an essential element of a future thermonuclear reactor and the system potentialities would much determine the reactor economic efficiency

An automatic sample changer for use on the SNS

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1982-10-01

A design for an Automatic Room Temperature Sample Changer suitable for any completely contained sample, gas, liquid or solid, has been produced. Samples can be moved in any sequence into the neutron beam. The design was evolved primarily to suit SNS instruments. A prototype was constructed specifically for the LAD spectrometer having ten sample positions. The accuracy of the sample positioning was determined. (author)

Automatic intelligent cruise control

OpenAIRE

Stanton, NA; Young, MS

2006-01-01

This paper reports a study on the evaluation of automatic intelligent cruise control (AICC) from a psychological perspective. It was anticipated that AICC would have an effect upon the psychology of driving—namely, make the driver feel like they have less control, reduce the level of trust in the vehicle, make drivers less situationally aware, but might reduce the workload and make driving might less stressful. Drivers were asked to drive in a driving simulator under manual and automatic inte...

Automatic CT-based finite element model generation for temperature-based death time estimation: feasibility study and sensitivity analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Schenkl, Sebastian; Muggenthaler, Holger; Hubig, Michael; Erdmann, Bodo; Weiser, Martin; Zachow, Stefan; Heinrich, Andreas; Güttler, Felix Victor; Teichgräber, Ulf; Mall, Gita

2017-05-01

Temperature-based death time estimation is based either on simple phenomenological models of corpse cooling or on detailed physical heat transfer models. The latter are much more complex but allow a higher accuracy of death time estimation, as in principle, all relevant cooling mechanisms can be taken into account.Here, a complete workflow for finite element-based cooling simulation is presented. The following steps are demonstrated on a CT phantom: Computer tomography (CT) scan Segmentation of the CT images for thermodynamically relevant features of individual geometries and compilation in a geometric computer-aided design (CAD) model Conversion of the segmentation result into a finite element (FE) simulation model Computation of the model cooling curve (MOD) Calculation of the cooling time (CTE) For the first time in FE-based cooling time estimation, the steps from the CT image over segmentation to FE model generation are performed semi-automatically. The cooling time calculation results are compared to cooling measurements performed on the phantoms under controlled conditions. In this context, the method is validated using a CT phantom. Some of the phantoms' thermodynamic material parameters had to be determined via independent experiments.Moreover, the impact of geometry and material parameter uncertainties on the estimated cooling time is investigated by a sensitivity analysis.

Automatic radioxenon analyzer for CTBT monitoring

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bowyer, T.W.; Abel, K.H.; Hensley, W.K.

1996-12-01

Over the past 3 years, with support from US DOE's NN-20 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) R ampersand D program, PNNL has developed and demonstrated a fully automatic analyzer for collecting and measuring the four Xe radionuclides, 131m Xe(11.9 d), 133m Xe(2.19 d), 133 Xe (5.24 d), and 135 Xe(9.10 h), in the atmosphere. These radionuclides are important signatures in monitoring for compliance to a CTBT. Activity ratios permit discriminating radioxenon from nuclear detonation and that from nuclear reactor operations, nuclear fuel reprocessing, or medical isotope production and usage. In the analyzer, Xe is continuously and automatically separated from the atmosphere at flow rates of about 7 m 3 /h on sorption bed. Aliquots collected for 6-12 h are automatically analyzed by electron-photon coincidence spectrometry to produce sensitivities in the range of 20-100 μBq/m 3 of air, about 100-fold better than with reported laboratory-based procedures for short time collection intervals. Spectral data are automatically analyzed and the calculated radioxenon concentrations and raw gamma- ray spectra automatically transmitted to data centers

Word Processing in Dyslexics: An Automatic Decoding Deficit?

Science.gov (United States)

Yap, Regina; Van Der Leu, Aryan

1993-01-01

Compares dyslexic children with normal readers on measures of phonological decoding and automatic word processing. Finds that dyslexics have a deficit in automatic phonological decoding skills. Discusses results within the framework of the phonological deficit and the automatization deficit hypotheses. (RS)

Clinical performance of a new hepatitis B surface antigen quantitative assay with automatic dilution

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ta-Wei Liu

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Hepatitis B virus surface antigen (HBsAg levels reflect disease status and can predict the clinical response to antiviral treatment; however, the emergence of HBsAg mutant strains has become a challenge. The Abbott HBsAg quantification assay provides enhanced detection of HBsAg and HBsAg mutants. We aimed to evaluate the performance of the Abbott HBsAg quantification assay with automatic sample dilutions (shortened as automatic Architect assay, compared with the Abbott HBsAg quantification assay with manual sample dilutions (shortened as manual Architect assay and the Roche HBsAg quantification assay with automatic sample dilutions (shortened as Elecsys. A total of 130 sera samples obtained from 87 hepatitis B virus (HBV-infected patients were collected to assess the correlation between the automatic and manual Architect assays. Among the 87 patients, 41 provided 42 sera samples to confirm the linearity and reproducibility of the automatic Architect assay, and find out the correlation among the Elecsys and two Architect assays. The coefficients of variation (0.44–9.53% and R2 = 0.996–1, which were both determined using values obtained from the automatic Architect assay, showed good reproducibility and linearity. Results of the two Architect assays demonstrated a feasible correlation (n = 130 samples; R = 0.898, p  0.93 in all cases. In conclusion, the correlation between the automatic and manual dilution Architect assays was feasible, particularly in the HBeAg-negative and low DNA groups. With lower labor costs and less human error than the manual version, the Abbott automatic dilution Architect assay provided a good clinical performance with regard to the HBsAg levels.

Drinking behavior in nursery pigs: determining the accuracy between an automatic water meter versus human observers.

Science.gov (United States)

Meiszberg, A M; Johnson, A K; Sadler, L J; Carroll, J A; Dailey, J W; Krebs, N

2009-12-01

Assimilating accurate behavioral events over a long period can be labor-intensive and relatively expensive. If an automatic device could accurately record the duration and frequency for a given behavioral event, it would be a valuable alternative to the traditional use of human observers for behavioral studies. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine the accuracy in the time spent at the waterer and the number of visits to the waterer by individually housed nursery pigs between human observers scoring video files using Observer software (OBS) and an automatic water meter Hobo (WM, control) affixed onto the waterline. Eleven PIC USA genotype gilts (22 +/- 2 d of age; 6.5 +/- 1.4 kg of BW) were housed individually in pens with ad libitum access to a corn-based starter ration and one nipple waterer. Behavior was collected on d 0 (day of weaning), 7, and 14 of the trial using 1 color camera positioned over 4 attached pens and a RECO-204 DVR at 1 frame per second. For the OBS method, 2 experienced observers recorded drinking behavior from the video files, which was defined as when the gilt placed her mouth over the nipple waterer. Data were analyzed using nonparametric methods and the general linear model and regression procedures in SAS. The experimental unit was the individual pen housing 1 gilt. The GLM model included the method of observation (WM vs. OBS) and time (24 h) as variables, and the gilt nested within method was used as the error term. Gilts consumed more water (P = 0.04) on d 14 than on d 0. The time of day affected (P waterer regardless of the method. However, the OBS method underestimated (P waterer (3.48 +/- 0.33 visits/h for OBS vs. 4.94 +/- 0.33 for WM) and overestimated (P waterer (22.6 +/- 1.46 s/h for OBS vs. 13.9 +/- 1.43 for WM) compared with WM. The relationship between the 2 methods for prediction of time spent at the waterer and number of visits made by the gilts was weak (R(2) = 0.56 and 0.69, respectively). Collectively

Automatic identification of single- and/or few-layer thin-film material

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

2014-01-01

One or more digital representations of single- (101) and/or few-layer (102) thin- film material are automatically identified robustly and reliably in a digital image (100), the digital image (100) having a predetermined number of colour components, by - determining (304) a background colour...... component of the digital image (100) for each colour component, and - determining or estimating (306) a colour component of thin-film material to be identified in the digital image (100) for each colour component by obtaining a pre-determined contrast value (C R; C G; C B) for each colour component...

Determining criminal responsibility: How relevant are insight and personal attitudes to mock jurors?

Science.gov (United States)

Jung, Sandy

2015-01-01

High levels of insight are interpreted as indications of a treatment compliance and good outcome by clinical professionals. However, it is unclear whether a defendant's insight plays a role in the decision-making of jurors when determining criminal responsibility. It may be the case that personal biases and attitudes toward the mentally ill and the insanity defense are more relevant in such decisions. This study examines the influence of two core dimensions of insight and personal attitudes on juror decision-making. Participants read trial scenarios describing a defendant who is accused of a violent crime and is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Assigning a verdict of not criminally responsible to the defendant was not influenced by insight, but instead, by supportive attitudes of the insanity defense and higher attributions of blame to external factors and to psychological factors. These findings highlight the need for continued investigation in the area of extra-legal factors that guide legal decision-making when defendants have a mental disorder. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A new fully automatic PIM tool to replicate two component tungsten DEMO divertor parts

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Antusch, Steffen; Commin, Lorelei; Heneka, Jochen; Piotter, Volker; Plewa, Klaus; Walter, Heinz

2013-01-01

Highlights: • Development of a fully automatic 2C-PIM tool. • Replicate fusion relevant components in one step without additional brazing. • No cracks or gaps in the seam of the joining zone visible. • For both material combinations a solid bond of the material interface was achieved. • PIM is a powerful process for mass production as well as for joining even complex shaped parts. -- Abstract: At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), divertor design concepts for future nuclear fusion power plants beyond ITER are intensively investigated. One promising KIT divertor design concept for the future DEMO power reactor is based on modular He-cooled finger units. The manufacturing of such parts by mechanical machining such as milling and turning, however, is extremely cost and time intensive because tungsten is very hard and brittle. Powder Injection Molding (PIM) has been adapted to tungsten processing at KIT since a couple of years. This production method is deemed promising in view of large-scale production of tungsten parts with high near-net-shape precision, hence, offering an advantage of cost-saving process compared to conventional machining. The properties of the effectively and successfully manufactured divertor part tile consisting only of pure tungsten are a microstructure without cracks and a high density (>98% T.D.). Based on the achieved results a new fully automatic multicomponent PIM tool was developed and allows the replication and joining without brazing of fusion relevant components of different materials in one step and the creation of composite materials. This contribution describes the process route to design and engineer a new fully automatic 2C-PIM tool, including the filling simulation and the implementing of the tool. The complete technological fabrication process of tungsten 2C-PIM, including material and feedstock (powder and binder) development, injection molding, and heat-treatment of real DEMO divertor parts is outlined

Deliberation versus automaticity in decision making: Which presentation format features facilitate automatic decision making?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anke Soellner

2013-05-01

Full Text Available The idea of automatic decision making approximating normatively optimal decisions without necessitating much cognitive effort is intriguing. Whereas recent findings support the notion that such fast, automatic processes explain empirical data well, little is known about the conditions under which such processes are selected rather than more deliberate stepwise strategies. We investigate the role of the format of information presentation, focusing explicitly on the ease of information acquisition and its influence on information integration processes. In a probabilistic inference task, the standard matrix employed in prior research was contrasted with a newly created map presentation format and additional variations of both presentation formats. Across three experiments, a robust presentation format effect emerged: Automatic decision making was more prevalent in the matrix (with high information accessibility, whereas sequential decision strategies prevailed when the presentation format demanded more information acquisition effort. Further scrutiny of the effect showed that it is not driven by the presentation format as such, but rather by the extent of information search induced by a format. Thus, if information is accessible with minimal need for information search, information integration is likely to proceed in a perception-like, holistic manner. In turn, a moderate demand for information search decreases the likelihood of behavior consistent with the assumptions of automatic decision making.

Forensic Automatic Speaker Recognition Based on Likelihood Ratio Using Acoustic-phonetic Features Measured Automatically

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Huapeng Wang

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Forensic speaker recognition is experiencing a remarkable paradigm shift in terms of the evaluation framework and presentation of voice evidence. This paper proposes a new method of forensic automatic speaker recognition using the likelihood ratio framework to quantify the strength of voice evidence. The proposed method uses a reference database to calculate the within- and between-speaker variability. Some acoustic-phonetic features are extracted automatically using the software VoiceSauce. The effectiveness of the approach was tested using two Mandarin databases: A mobile telephone database and a landline database. The experiment's results indicate that these acoustic-phonetic features do have some discriminating potential and are worth trying in discrimination. The automatic acoustic-phonetic features have acceptable discriminative performance and can provide more reliable results in evidence analysis when fused with other kind of voice features.

Automatic video shot boundary detection using k-means clustering and improved adaptive dual threshold comparison

Science.gov (United States)

Sa, Qila; Wang, Zhihui

2018-03-01

At present, content-based video retrieval (CBVR) is the most mainstream video retrieval method, using the video features of its own to perform automatic identification and retrieval. This method involves a key technology, i.e. shot segmentation. In this paper, the method of automatic video shot boundary detection with K-means clustering and improved adaptive dual threshold comparison is proposed. First, extract the visual features of every frame and divide them into two categories using K-means clustering algorithm, namely, one with significant change and one with no significant change. Then, as to the classification results, utilize the improved adaptive dual threshold comparison method to determine the abrupt as well as gradual shot boundaries.Finally, achieve automatic video shot boundary detection system.

46 CFR 63.25-1 - Small automatic auxiliary boilers.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 46 Shipping 2 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Small automatic auxiliary boilers. 63.25-1 Section 63.25... AUXILIARY BOILERS Requirements for Specific Types of Automatic Auxiliary Boilers § 63.25-1 Small automatic auxiliary boilers. Small automatic auxiliary boilers defined as having heat-input ratings of 400,000 Btu/hr...

Tracking of nuclear shipments with automatic vehicle location systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Colhoun, C.J.K.

1989-01-01

A complete Automatic Vehicle Location System (AVL) consists of three main elements: (1) the location sensor in the vehicle, this device constantly determines the coordinates of the vehicles position; (2) the radio link between vehicle and central base; (3) the data processing and display in the central base. For all three elements there are several solutions. The optimal combination of the different techniques depends on the requirements of the special application

Automatic Time Regulator for Switching on an Aeration Device for ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The need to aerate the pond at odd hours due to diurnal limit, save cost and human labor, necessitated the design of an automatic time regulator circuit, which controls the switching on and o of an aeration device at a pre determined and selected time interval (5mins., 10mins., 20mins., 30mins., and 40mins.) This design ...

49 CFR 236.825 - System, automatic train control.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false System, automatic train control. 236.825 Section..., INSPECTION, MAINTENANCE, AND REPAIR OF SIGNAL AND TRAIN CONTROL SYSTEMS, DEVICES, AND APPLIANCES Definitions § 236.825 System, automatic train control. A system so arranged that its operation will automatically...

Body odors promote automatic imitation in autism.

Science.gov (United States)

Parma, Valentina; Bulgheroni, Maria; Tirindelli, Roberto; Castiello, Umberto

2013-08-01

Autism spectrum disorders comprise a range of neurodevelopmental pathologies characterized, among other symptoms, by impaired social interactions. Individuals with this diagnosis are reported to often identify people by repetitively sniffing pieces of clothing or the body odor of family members. Since body odors are known to initiate and mediate many different social behaviors, smelling the body odor of a family member might constitute a sensory-based action promoting social contact. In light of this, we hypothesized that the body odor of a family member would facilitate the appearance of automatic imitation, an essential social skill known to be impaired in autism. We recruited 20 autistic and 20 typically developing children. Body odors were collected from the children's mothers' axillae. A child observed a model (their mother or a stranger mother) execute (or not) a reach-to-grasp action toward an object. Subsequently, she performed the same action. The object was imbued with the child's mother's odor, a stranger mother's odor, or no odor. The actions were videotaped, and movement time was calculated post hoc via a digitalization technique. Automatic imitation effects-expressed in terms of total movement time reduction-appear in autistic children only when exposed to objects paired with their own mother's odor. The maternal odor, which conveys a social message otherwise neglected, helps autistic children to covertly imitate the actions of others. Our results represent a starting point holding theoretical and practical relevance for the development of new strategies to enhance communication and social behavior among autistic individuals. Copyright © 2013 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automatic Recognition of Object Names in Literature

Science.gov (United States)

Bonnin, C.; Lesteven, S.; Derriere, S.; Oberto, A.

2008-08-01

SIMBAD is a database of astronomical objects that provides (among other things) their bibliographic references in a large number of journals. Currently, these references have to be entered manually by librarians who read each paper. To cope with the increasing number of papers, CDS develops a tool to assist the librarians in their work, taking advantage of the Dictionary of Nomenclature of Celestial Objects, which keeps track of object acronyms and of their origin. The program searches for object names directly in PDF documents by comparing the words with all the formats stored in the Dictionary of Nomenclature. It also searches for variable star names based on constellation names and for a large list of usual names such as Aldebaran or the Crab. Object names found in the documents often correspond to several astronomical objects. The system retrieves all possible matches, displays them with their object type given by SIMBAD, and lets the librarian make the final choice. The bibliographic reference can then be automatically added to the object identifiers in the database. Besides, the systematic usage of the Dictionary of Nomenclature, which is updated manually, permitted to automatically check it and to detect errors and inconsistencies. Last but not least, the program collects some additional information such as the position of the object names in the document (in the title, subtitle, abstract, table, figure caption...) and their number of occurrences. In the future, this will permit to calculate the 'weight' of an object in a reference and to provide SIMBAD users with an important new information, which will help them to find the most relevant papers in the object reference list.

The neural correlates of implicit self-relevant processing in low self-esteem: an ERP study.

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Juan; Guan, Lili; Dedovic, Katarina; Qi, Mingming; Zhang, Qinglin

2012-08-30

Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that implicit and explicit processing of self-relevant (schematic) material elicit activity in many of the same brain regions. Electrophysiological studies on the neural processing of explicit self-relevant cues have generally supported the view that P300 is an index of attention to self-relevant stimuli; however, there has been no study to date investigating the temporal course of implicit self-relevant processing. The current study seeks to investigate the time course involved in implicit self-processing by comparing processing of self-relevant with non-self-relevant words while subjects are making a judgment about color of the words in an implicit attention task. Sixteen low self-esteem participants were examined using event-related potentials technology (ERP). We hypothesized that this implicit attention task would involve P2 component rather than the P300 component. Indeed, P2 component has been associated with perceptual analysis and attentional allocation and may be more likely to occur in unconscious conditions such as this task. Results showed that latency of P2 component, which indexes the time required for perceptual analysis, was more prolonged in processing self-relevant words compared to processing non-self-relevant words. Our results suggested that the judgment of the color of the word interfered with automatic processing of self-relevant information and resulted in less efficient processing of self-relevant word. Together with previous ERP studies examining processing of explicit self-relevant cues, these findings suggest that the explicit and the implicit processing of self-relevant information would not elicit the same ERP components. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automatic validation of numerical solutions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Stauning, Ole

1997-01-01

This thesis is concerned with ``Automatic Validation of Numerical Solutions''. The basic theory of interval analysis and self-validating methods is introduced. The mean value enclosure is applied to discrete mappings for obtaining narrow enclosures of the iterates when applying these mappings...... differential equations, but in this thesis, we describe how to use the methods for enclosing iterates of discrete mappings, and then later use them for discretizing solutions of ordinary differential equations. The theory of automatic differentiation is introduced, and three methods for obtaining derivatives...... are described: The forward, the backward, and the Taylor expansion methods. The three methods have been implemented in the C++ program packages FADBAD/TADIFF. Some examples showing how to use the three metho ds are presented. A feature of FADBAD/TADIFF not present in other automatic differentiation packages...

Automaticity of walking: functional significance, mechanisms, measurement and rehabilitation strategies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David J Clark

2015-05-01

Full Text Available Automaticity is a hallmark feature of walking in adults who are healthy and well-functioning. In the context of walking, ‘automaticity’ refers to the ability of the nervous system to successfully control typical steady state walking with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources. Converging lines of evidence indicate that walking deficits and disorders are characterized in part by a shift in the locomotor control strategy from healthy automaticity to compensatory executive control. This is potentially detrimental to walking performance, as an executive control strategy is not optimized for locomotor control. Furthermore, it places excessive demands on a limited pool of executive reserves. The result is compromised ability to perform basic and complex walking tasks and heightened risk for adverse mobility outcomes including falls. Strategies for rehabilitation of automaticity are not well defined, which is due to both a lack of systematic research into the causes of impaired automaticity and to a lack of robust neurophysiological assessments by which to gauge automaticity. These gaps in knowledge are concerning given the serious functional implications of compromised automaticity. Therefore, the objective of this article is to advance the science of automaticity of walking by consolidating evidence and identifying gaps in knowledge regarding: a functional significance of automaticity; b neurophysiology of automaticity; c measurement of automaticity; d mechanistic factors that compromise automaticity; and e strategies for rehabilitation of automaticity.

The Use of Automatic Indexing for Authority Control.

Science.gov (United States)

Dillon, Martin; And Others

1981-01-01

Uses an experimental system for authority control on a collection of bibliographic records to demonstrate the resemblance between thesaurus-based automatic indexing and automatic authority control. Details of the automatic indexing system are given, results discussed, and the benefits of the resemblance examined. Included are a rules appendix and…

30 CFR 77.1401 - Automatic controls and brakes.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 30 Mineral Resources 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Automatic controls and brakes. 77.1401 Section... MINES Personnel Hoisting § 77.1401 Automatic controls and brakes. Hoists and elevators shall be equipped with overspeed, overwind, and automatic stop controls and with brakes capable of stopping the elevator...

30 CFR 57.19006 - Automatic hoist braking devices.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 30 Mineral Resources 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Automatic hoist braking devices. 57.19006 Section 57.19006 Mineral Resources MINE SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR METAL AND... Hoisting Hoists § 57.19006 Automatic hoist braking devices. Automatic hoists shall be provided with devices...

30 CFR 56.19006 - Automatic hoist braking devices.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 30 Mineral Resources 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Automatic hoist braking devices. 56.19006 Section 56.19006 Mineral Resources MINE SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR METAL AND... Hoisting Hoists § 56.19006 Automatic hoist braking devices. Automatic hoists shall be provided with devices...

Is gaze following purely reflexive or goal-directed instead? Revisiting the automaticity of orienting attention by gaze cues.

Science.gov (United States)

Ricciardelli, Paola; Carcagno, Samuele; Vallar, Giuseppe; Bricolo, Emanuela

2013-01-01

Distracting gaze has been shown to elicit automatic gaze following. However, it is still debated whether the effects of perceived gaze are a simple automatic spatial orienting response or are instead sensitive to the context (i.e. goals and task demands). In three experiments, we investigated the conditions under which gaze following occurs. Participants were instructed to saccade towards one of two lateral targets. A face distracter, always present in the background, could gaze towards: (a) a task-relevant target--("matching" goal-directed gaze shift)--congruent or incongruent with the instructed direction, (b) a task-irrelevant target, orthogonal to the one instructed ("non-matching" goal-directed gaze shift), or (c) an empty spatial location (no-goal-directed gaze shift). Eye movement recordings showed faster saccadic latencies in correct trials in congruent conditions especially when the distracting gaze shift occurred before the instruction to make a saccade. Interestingly, while participants made a higher proportion of gaze-following errors (i.e. errors in the direction of the distracting gaze) in the incongruent conditions when the distracter's gaze shift preceded the instruction onset indicating an automatic gaze following, they never followed the distracting gaze when it was directed towards an empty location or a stimulus that was never the target. Taken together, these findings suggest that gaze following is likely to be a product of both automatic and goal-driven orienting mechanisms.

Development of the automatic control rod operation system for JOYO. Verification of automatic control rod operation guide system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Terakado, Tsuguo; Suzuki, Shinya; Kawai, Masashi; Aoki, Hiroshi; Ohkubo, Toshiyuki

1999-10-01

The automatic control rod operation system was developed to control the JOYO reactor power automatically in all operation modes(critical approach, cooling system heat up, power ascent, power descent), development began in 1989. Prior to applying the system, verification tests of the automatic control rod operation guide system was conducted during 32nd duty cycles of JOYO' from Dec. 1997 to Feb. 1998. The automatic control rod operation guide system consists of the control rod operation guide function and the plant operation guide function. The control rod operation guide function provides information on control rod movement and position, while the plant operation guide function provide guidance for plant operations corresponding to reactor power changes(power ascent or power descent). Control rod insertion or withdrawing are predicted by fuzzy algorithms. (J.P.N.)

Why relevance theory is relevant for lexicography

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bothma, Theo; Tarp, Sven

2014-01-01

This article starts by providing a brief summary of relevance theory in information science in relation to the function theory of lexicography, explaining the different types of relevance, viz. objective system relevance and the subjective types of relevance, i.e. topical, cognitive, situational...... that is very important for lexicography as well as for information science, viz. functional relevance. Since all lexicographic work is ultimately aimed at satisfying users’ information needs, the article then discusses why the lexicographer should take note of all these types of relevance when planning a new...... dictionary project, identifying new tasks and responsibilities of the modern lexicographer. The article furthermore discusses how relevance theory impacts on teaching dictionary culture and reference skills. By integrating insights from lexicography and information science, the article contributes to new...

Determination of Intracellular Vitrification Temperatures for Unicellular Micro Organisms under Conditions Relevant for Cryopreservation.

Science.gov (United States)

Fonseca, Fernanda; Meneghel, Julie; Cenard, Stéphanie; Passot, Stéphanie; Morris, G John

2016-01-01

During cryopreservation ice nucleation and crystal growth may occur within cells or the intracellular compartment may vitrify. Whilst previous literature describes intracellular vitrification in a qualitative manner, here we measure the intracellular vitrification temperature of bacteria and yeasts under conditions relevant to cryopreservation, including the addition of high levels of permeating and nonpermeating additives and the application of rapid rates of cooling. The effects of growth conditions that are known to modify cellular freezing resistance on the intracellular vitrification temperature are also examined. For bacteria a plot of the activity on thawing against intracellular glass transition of the maximally freeze-concentrated matrix (Tg') shows that cells with the lowest value of intracellular Tg' survive the freezing process better than cells with a higher intracellular Tg'. This paper demonstrates the role of the physical state of the intracellular environment in determining the response of microbial cells to preservation and could be a powerful tool to be manipulated to allow the optimization of methods for the preservation of microorganisms.

Automatic detection of osteoporotic vertebral fractures in routine thoracic and abdominal MDCT

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Baum, Thomas; Dobritz, Martin; Rummeny, Ernst J.; Noel, Peter B. [Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Institut fuer Radiologie, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Muenchen (Germany); Bauer, Jan S. [Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Abteilung fuer Neuroradiologie, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Muenchen (Germany); Klinder, Tobias; Lorenz, Cristian [Philips Research Laboratories, Hamburg (Germany)

2014-04-15

To develop a prototype algorithm for automatic spine segmentation in MDCT images and use it to automatically detect osteoporotic vertebral fractures. Cross-sectional routine thoracic and abdominal MDCT images of 71 patients including 8 males and 9 females with 25 osteoporotic vertebral fractures and longitudinal MDCT images of 9 patients with 18 incidental fractures in the follow-up MDCT were retrospectively selected. The spine segmentation algorithm localised and identified the vertebrae T5-L5. Each vertebra was automatically segmented by using corresponding vertebra surface shape models that were adapted to the original images. Anterior, middle, and posterior height of each vertebra was automatically determined; the anterior-posterior ratio (APR) and middle-posterior ratio (MPR) were computed. As the gold standard, radiologists graded vertebral fractures from T5 to L5 according to the Genant classification in consensus. Using ROC analysis to differentiate vertebrae without versus with prevalent fracture, AUC values of 0.84 and 0.83 were obtained for APR and MPR, respectively (p < 0.001). Longitudinal changes in APR and MPR were significantly different between vertebrae without versus with incidental fracture (ΔAPR: -8.5 % ± 8.6 % versus -1.6 % ± 4.2 %, p = 0.002; ΔMPR: -11.4 % ± 7.7 % versus -1.2 % ± 1.6 %, p < 0.001). This prototype algorithm may support radiologists in reporting currently underdiagnosed osteoporotic vertebral fractures so that appropriate therapy can be initiated. circle This spine segmentation algorithm automatically localised, identified, and segmented the vertebrae in MDCT images. (orig.)

Compatibility of automatic exposure control with new screen phosphors in diagnostic roentgenography

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mulvaney, J.A.

1982-01-01

Automatic exposure control systems are used in diagnostic roentgenography to obtain proper film density for a variety of patient examinations and roentgenographic techniques. Most automatic exposure control systems have been designed for use with par speed, calcium tungstate intensifying screens. The use of screens with faster speeds and new phosphor materials has put extreme demands on present systems. The performance of a representative automatic exposure control system is investigated to determine its ability to maintain constant film density over a wide range of x-ray tube voltages and acrylic phantom thicknesses with four different intensifying screen phosphors. The effects of x-ray energy dependence, generator switching time and stored change are investigated. The system is able to maintain film density to within plus or minus 0.2 optical density units for techniques representing adult patients. A single nonadjustable tube voltage compensation circuit is adequate for the four different screen phosphors for x-ray tube voltages above sixty peak kilovolts. For techniques representing pediatric patients at high x-ray tube voltages, excess film density occurs due to stored charge in the transformer and high-voltage cables. An anticipation circuit in the automatic exposure control circuit can be modified to correct for stored charge effects. In a seperate experiment the energy dependence of three different ionization chamber detectors used in automatic exposure control systems is compared directly with the energy dependence of three different screen phosphors. The data on detector sensitivity and screen speed are combined to predict the best tube voltage compensation for each combination of screen and detector

Automatic control of nuclear power plants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jover, P.

1976-01-01

The fundamental concepts in automatic control are surveyed, and the purpose of the automatic control of pressurized water reactors is given. The response characteristics for the main components are then studied and block diagrams are given for the main control loops (turbine, steam generator, and nuclear reactors) [fr

Automatically measuring brain ventricular volume within PACS using artificial intelligence.

Science.gov (United States)

Yepes-Calderon, Fernando; Nelson, Marvin D; McComb, J Gordon

2018-01-01

The picture archiving and communications system (PACS) is currently the standard platform to manage medical images but lacks analytical capabilities. Staying within PACS, the authors have developed an automatic method to retrieve the medical data and access it at a voxel level, decrypted and uncompressed that allows analytical capabilities while not perturbing the system's daily operation. Additionally, the strategy is secure and vendor independent. Cerebral ventricular volume is important for the diagnosis and treatment of many neurological disorders. A significant change in ventricular volume is readily recognized, but subtle changes, especially over longer periods of time, may be difficult to discern. Clinical imaging protocols and parameters are often varied making it difficult to use a general solution with standard segmentation techniques. Presented is a segmentation strategy based on an algorithm that uses four features extracted from the medical images to create a statistical estimator capable of determining ventricular volume. When compared with manual segmentations, the correlation was 94% and holds promise for even better accuracy by incorporating the unlimited data available. The volume of any segmentable structure can be accurately determined utilizing the machine learning strategy presented and runs fully automatically within the PACS.

Interactivity in automatic control: foundations and experiences

OpenAIRE

Dormido Bencomo, Sebastián; Guzmán Sánchez, José Luis; Costa Castelló, Ramon; Berenguel, M

2012-01-01

The first part of this paper presents the concepts of interactivity and visualization and its essential role in learning the fundamentals and techniques of automatic control. More than 10 years experience of the authors in the development and design of interactive tools dedicated to the study of automatic control concepts are also exposed. The second part of the paper summarizes the main features of the “Automatic Control with Interactive Tools” text that has been recently published by Pea...

Towards unifying inheritance and automatic program specialization

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schultz, Ulrik Pagh

2002-01-01

with covariant specialization to control the automatic application of program specialization to class members. Lapis integrates object-oriented concepts, block structure, and techniques from automatic program specialization to provide both a language where object-oriented designs can be e#ciently implemented......Inheritance allows a class to be specialized and its attributes refined, but implementation specialization can only take place by overriding with manually implemented methods. Automatic program specialization can generate a specialized, effcient implementation. However, specialization of programs...

The design of an automatically-tuned beamline

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ball, M.S.; Ellison, T.J.P.; Hamilton, B.J.; Jones, W.P.

1994-01-01

A new 30 m beamline (BL1C) is being assembled to connect the new High Intensity Polarized Ion Source (HIPIOS) to the IUCF cyclotrons. This line is being instrumented for complete automatic optimization of all transverse and longitudinal ion optical elements by providing a unique feedback signal for each controllable device. Transversely, steerers and 4-quadrant electrostatic pickups are located approximately 90 degree apart in betatron phase advance along the beamline. Each pickup is instrumented with a single-board, 4-layer op-amp circuit (BPM system) which measures the beam intensity, horizontal (H) and vertical (V) position, and H and V 10 Hz position modulation. The transverse beam ellipse parameters are first automatically determined at the entrance to the beamline by measuring the beam size using a wire scanner as a function of the strength of a quadrupole. The computer then programs the amplitude and phase of four 10 Hz modulators which vary the current in 4 steerers to move the beam centroid around this (reduced area) ellipse in 4-dimensional phase space. The BPM system then outputs voltages proportional to the beam intensity, centroid location, and envelope. Computer algorithms will then set the steerers and quadrupoles to correct the beam position, dispersion, and envelope. Longitudinally, hardware feedback loops, with a bandwidth adjustable from 10 Hz to 30 kHz, will phase-lock the beam to the two bunching systems; another hardware system will automatically vary the buncher amplitudes to compensate for the significant and varying space charge defocusing as the beam current fluctuates. The bunchers' quiescent phases and amplitudes will be optimized using software ''synchronous detectors.''

Comparative Analysis of Music Recordings from Western and Non-Western traditions by Automatic Tonal Feature Extraction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emilia Gómez

2008-09-01

Full Text Available The automatic analysis of large musical corpora by means of computational models overcomes some limitations of manual analysis, and the unavailability of scores for most existing music makes necessary to work with audio recordings. Until now, research on this area has focused on music from the Western tradition. Nevertheless, we might ask if the available methods are suitable when analyzing music from other cultures. We present an empirical approach to the comparative analysis of audio recordings, focusing on tonal features and data mining techniques. Tonal features are related to the pitch class distribution, pitch range and employed scale, gamut and tuning system. We provide our initial but promising results obtained when trying to automatically distinguish music from Western and non- Western traditions; we analyze which descriptors are most relevant and study their distribution over 1500 pieces from different traditions and styles. As a result, some feature distributions differ for Western and non-Western music, and the obtained classification accuracy is higher than 80% for different classification algorithms and an independent test set. These results show that automatic description of audio signals together with data mining techniques provide means to characterize huge music collections from different traditions and complement musicological manual analyses.

Sensitometric characteristics of D-, E- and F-speed dental radiographic films in manual and automatic processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jahangir Haghani

2012-12-01

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the sensitometric characteristics of Ultraspeed, Ektaspeed Plus and Insight dental radiographic films using manual and automatic processing systems. METHODS: In this experimental invitro study, an aluminum step-wedge was used to construct characteristic curves for D-, E- and F-speed radiographic films (Kodak Eastman, Rochester, USA. All films were processed in Iranian processing solution (chemical industries Co., Iran, Tehran both manually and automatically in a period of six days. Unexposed films of three types were processed manually and automatically to determine base plus fog density. Speed and film contrast were measured according to International Standard Organization definition. RESULTS: There was significant difference in density obtained with the D-, E- and F-speed films in both manually and automatically processing systems (P < 0.001. There was significant difference in density obtained with the Ultraspeed and insight films. There was no significant difference in contrast obtained with the D-, E- and F-speed films in both manually and automatically processing systems (P = 0.255 , P = 0.26. There was significant difference in speed obtained with the D-, E- and F-speed films in both manually and automatically processing systems (P = 0.034, P = 0.04. CONCLUSIONS: The choice of processing system can affect radiographic characteristics. The F-speed film processed in automatic system has greater speed in comparison with manual processing system, and it provides a further reduction in radiation exposure without detriment to image quality.

An Automatic Multilevel Image Thresholding Using Relative Entropy and Meta-Heuristic Algorithms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Josue R. Cuevas

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Multilevel thresholding has been long considered as one of the most popular techniques for image segmentation. Multilevel thresholding outputs a gray scale image in which more details from the original picture can be kept, while binary thresholding can only analyze the image in two colors, usually black and white. However, two major existing problems with the multilevel thresholding technique are: it is a time consuming approach, i.e., finding appropriate threshold values could take an exceptionally long computation time; and defining a proper number of thresholds or levels that will keep most of the relevant details from the original image is a difficult task. In this study a new evaluation function based on the Kullback-Leibler information distance, also known as relative entropy, is proposed. The property of this new function can help determine the number of thresholds automatically. To offset the expensive computational effort by traditional exhaustive search methods, this study establishes a procedure that combines the relative entropy and meta-heuristics. From the experiments performed in this study, the proposed procedure not only provides good segmentation results when compared with a well known technique such as Otsu’s method, but also constitutes a very efficient approach.

Automated detection of retinal landmarks for the identification of clinically relevant regions in fundus photography

Science.gov (United States)

Ometto, Giovanni; Calivá, Francesco; Al-Diri, Bashir; Bek, Toke; Hunter, Andrew

2016-03-01

Automatic, quick and reliable identification of retinal landmarks from fundus photography is key for measurements used in research, diagnosis, screening and treating of common diseases affecting the eyes. This study presents a fast method for the detection of the centre of mass of the vascular arcades, optic nerve head (ONH) and fovea, used in the definition of five clinically relevant areas in use for screening programmes for diabetic retinopathy (DR). Thirty-eight fundus photographs showing 7203 DR lesions were analysed to find the landmarks manually by two retina-experts and automatically by the proposed method. The automatic identification of the ONH and fovea were performed using template matching based on normalised cross correlation. The centre of mass of the arcades was obtained by fitting an ellipse on sample coordinates of the main vessels. The coordinates were obtained by processing the image with hessian filtering followed by shape analyses and finally sampling the results. The regions obtained manually and automatically were used to count the retinal lesions falling within, and to evaluate the method. 92.7% of the lesions were falling within the same regions based on the landmarks selected by the two experts. 91.7% and 89.0% were counted in the same areas identified by the method and the first and second expert respectively. The inter-repeatability of the proposed method and the experts is comparable, while the 100% intra-repeatability makes the algorithm a valuable tool in tasks like analyses in real-time, of large datasets and of intra-patient variability.

Experimental investigation of an accelerometer controlled automatic braking system

Science.gov (United States)

Dreher, R. C.; Sleeper, R. K.; Nayadley, J. R., Sr.

1972-01-01

An investigation was made to determine the feasibility of an automatic braking system for arresting the motion of an airplane by sensing and controlling braked wheel decelerations. The system was tested on a rotating drum dynamometer by using an automotive tire, wheel, and disk-brake assembly under conditions which included two tire loadings, wet and dry surfaces, and a range of ground speeds up to 70 knots. The controlling parameters were the rates at which brake pressure was applied and released and the Command Deceleration Level which governed the wheel deceleration by controlling the brake operation. Limited tests were also made with the automatic braking system installed on a ground vehicle in an effort to provide a more realistic proof of its feasibility. The results of this investigation indicate that a braking system which utilizes wheel decelerations as the control variable to restrict tire slip is feasible and capable of adapting to rapidly changing surface conditions.

A Cough-Based Algorithm for Automatic Diagnosis of Pertussis

Science.gov (United States)

Pramono, Renard Xaviero Adhi; Imtiaz, Syed Anas; Rodriguez-Villegas, Esther

2016-01-01

Pertussis is a contagious respiratory disease which mainly affects young children and can be fatal if left untreated. The World Health Organization estimates 16 million pertussis cases annually worldwide resulting in over 200,000 deaths. It is prevalent mainly in developing countries where it is difficult to diagnose due to the lack of healthcare facilities and medical professionals. Hence, a low-cost, quick and easily accessible solution is needed to provide pertussis diagnosis in such areas to contain an outbreak. In this paper we present an algorithm for automated diagnosis of pertussis using audio signals by analyzing cough and whoop sounds. The algorithm consists of three main blocks to perform automatic cough detection, cough classification and whooping sound detection. Each of these extract relevant features from the audio signal and subsequently classify them using a logistic regression model. The output from these blocks is collated to provide a pertussis likelihood diagnosis. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using audio recordings from 38 patients. The algorithm is able to diagnose all pertussis successfully from all audio recordings without any false diagnosis. It can also automatically detect individual cough sounds with 92% accuracy and PPV of 97%. The low complexity of the proposed algorithm coupled with its high accuracy demonstrates that it can be readily deployed using smartphones and can be extremely useful for quick identification or early screening of pertussis and for infection outbreaks control. PMID:27583523

Automatic measurement for solid state track detectors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ogura, Koichi

1982-01-01

Since in solid state track detectors, their tracks are measured with a microscope, observers are forced to do hard works that consume time and labour. This causes to obtain poor statistic accuracy or to produce personal error. Therefore, many researches have been done to aim at simplifying and automating track measurement. There are two categories in automating the measurement: simple counting of the number of tracks and the requirements to know geometrical elements such as the size of tracks or their coordinates as well as the number of tracks. The former is called automatic counting and the latter automatic analysis. The method to generally evaluate the number of tracks in automatic counting is the estimation of the total number of tracks in the total detector area or in a field of view of a microscope. It is suitable for counting when the track density is higher. The method to count tracks one by one includes the spark counting and the scanning microdensitometer. Automatic analysis includes video image analysis in which the high quality images obtained with a high resolution video camera are processed with a micro-computer, and the tracks are automatically recognized and measured by feature extraction. This method is described in detail. In many kinds of automatic measurements reported so far, frequently used ones are ''spark counting'' and ''video image analysis''. (Wakatsuki, Y.)

Automatic Picking of Foraminifera: Design of the Foraminifera Image Recognition and Sorting Tool (FIRST) Prototype and Results of the Image Classification Scheme

Science.gov (United States)

de Garidel-Thoron, T.; Marchant, R.; Soto, E.; Gally, Y.; Beaufort, L.; Bolton, C. T.; Bouslama, M.; Licari, L.; Mazur, J. C.; Brutti, J. M.; Norsa, F.

2017-12-01

Foraminifera tests are the main proxy carriers for paleoceanographic reconstructions. Both geochemical and taxonomical studies require large numbers of tests to achieve statistical relevance. To date, the extraction of foraminifera from the sediment coarse fraction is still done by hand and thus time-consuming. Moreover, the recognition of morphotypes, ecologically relevant, requires some taxonomical skills not easily taught. The automatic recognition and extraction of foraminifera would largely help paleoceanographers to overcome these issues. Recent advances in automatic image classification using machine learning opens the way to automatic extraction of foraminifera. Here we detail progress on the design of an automatic picking machine as part of the FIRST project. The machine handles 30 pre-sieved samples (100-1000µm), separating them into individual particles (including foraminifera) and imaging each in pseudo-3D. The particles are classified and specimens of interest are sorted either for Individual Foraminifera Analyses (44 per slide) and/or for classical multiple analyses (8 morphological classes per slide, up to 1000 individuals per hole). The classification is based on machine learning using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), similar to the approach used in the coccolithophorid imaging system SYRACO. To prove its feasibility, we built two training image datasets of modern planktonic foraminifera containing approximately 2000 and 5000 images each, corresponding to 15 & 25 morphological classes. Using a CNN with a residual topology (ResNet) we achieve over 95% correct classification for each dataset. We tested the network on 160,000 images from 45 depths of a sediment core from the Pacific ocean, for which we have human counts. The current algorithm is able to reproduce the downcore variability in both Globigerinoides ruber and the fragmentation index (r2 = 0.58 and 0.88 respectively). The FIRST prototype yields some promising results for high

Automatization of welding

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Iwabuchi, Masashi; Tomita, Jinji; Nishihara, Katsunori.

1978-01-01

Automatization of welding is one of the effective measures for securing high degree of quality of nuclear power equipment, as well as for correspondence to the environment at the site of plant. As the latest ones of the automatic welders practically used for welding of nuclear power apparatuses in factories of Toshiba and IHI, those for pipes and lining tanks are described here. The pipe welder performs the battering welding on the inside of pipe end as the so-called IGSCC countermeasure and the succeeding butt welding through the same controller. The lining tank welder is able to perform simultaneous welding of two parallel weld lines on a large thin plate lining tank. Both types of the welders are demonstrating excellent performance at the shops as well as at the plant site. (author)

Social and individual determinants of car use. Application of the model Determinants of environmentally-relevant consumer behavior; Maatschappelijke en individuele determinanten van autogebruik. Toepassing van het model Determinanten van milieurelevant consumentengedrag

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Steg, L.; Arnold, M.; Ras, M.; Van Velzen, E.

1997-11-01

It is increasingly recognised that environmental problems are largely due to the behaviour of individual consumers and that one way of tackling those problems therefore consists of a change in behaviour. A good diagnosis based on a clear model is indispensable for an effective change in behaviour. For this reason the SCP has developed a conceptual model entitled Determinants of environmentally-relevant consumer behaviour (Dutch abbreviation is DMCG). This is a diagnostic model for the systematic analysis of relevant factors determining environmental behaviour. The diagnosis relates not just to the current situation but also to the historical developments that have led up to that situation as well as expectations concerning future developments in behaviour. A detailed diagnosis of this kind provides insight into the way in which environmentally behaviour can be influenced: policy instruments will be more effective and efficient the more they are geared to significant determinants of behaviour. The DMCG model has been used in this survey to explain the use of cars. The purpose of the study is to investigate the possibilities and limitations of the DMCG model. A second objective is to identify the factors that influence (or have influenced) the increasing use of cars. 88 refs.

Speed and automaticity of word recognition - inseparable twins?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Poulsen, Mads; Asmussen, Vibeke; Elbro, Carsten

'Speed and automaticity' of word recognition is a standard collocation. However, it is not clear whether speed and automaticity (i.e., effortlessness) make independent contributions to reading comprehension. In theory, both speed and automaticity may save cognitive resources for comprehension...... processes. Hence, the aim of the present study was to assess the unique contributions of word recognition speed and automaticity to reading comprehension while controlling for decoding speed and accuracy. Method: 139 Grade 5 students completed tests of reading comprehension and computer-based tests of speed...... of decoding and word recognition together with a test of effortlessness (automaticity) of word recognition. Effortlessness was measured in a dual task in which participants were presented with a word enclosed in an unrelated figure. The task was to read the word and decide whether the figure was a triangle...

Long Baseline Stereovision for Automatic Detection and Ranging of Moving Objects in the Night Sky

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vlad Turcu

2012-09-01

Full Text Available As the number of objects in Earth’s atmosphere and in low Earth orbit is continuously increasing; accurate surveillance of these objects has become important. This paper presents a generic, low cost sky surveillance system based on stereovision. Two cameras are placed 37 km apart and synchronized by a GPS-controlled external signal. The intrinsic camera parameters are calibrated before setup in the observation position, the translation vectors are determined from the GPS coordinates and the rotation matrices are continuously estimated using an original automatic calibration methodology based on following known stars. The moving objects in the sky are recognized as line segments in the long exposure images, using an automatic detection and classification algorithm based on image processing. The stereo correspondence is based on the epipolar geometry and is performed automatically using the image detection results. The resulting experimental system is able to automatically detect moving objects such as planes, meteors and Low Earth Orbit satellites, and measure their 3D position in an Earth-bound coordinate system.

Affective decision-making moderates the effects of automatic associations on alcohol use among drug offenders.

Science.gov (United States)

Cappelli, Christopher; Ames, Susan; Shono, Yusuke; Dust, Mark; Stacy, Alan

2017-09-01

This study used a dual-process model of cognition in order to investigate the possible influence of automatic and deliberative processes on lifetime alcohol use in a sample of drug offenders. The objective was to determine if automatic/implicit associations in memory can exert an influence over an individual's alcohol use and if decision-making ability could potentially modify the influence of these associations. 168 participants completed a battery of cognitive tests measuring implicit alcohol associations in memory (verb generation) as well as their affective decision-making ability (Iowa Gambling Task). Structural equation modeling procedures were used to test the relationship between implicit associations, decision-making, and lifetime alcohol use. Results revealed that among participants with lower levels of decision-making, implicit alcohol associations more strongly predicted higher lifetime alcohol use. These findings provide further support for the interaction between a specific decision function and its influence over automatic processes in regulating alcohol use behavior in a risky population. Understanding the interaction between automatic associations and decision processes may aid in developing more effective intervention components.

Automatic protein structure solution from weak X-ray data

Science.gov (United States)

Skubák, Pavol; Pannu, Navraj S.

2013-11-01

Determining new protein structures from X-ray diffraction data at low resolution or with a weak anomalous signal is a difficult and often an impossible task. Here we propose a multivariate algorithm that simultaneously combines the structure determination steps. In tests on over 140 real data sets from the protein data bank, we show that this combined approach can automatically build models where current algorithms fail, including an anisotropically diffracting 3.88 Å RNA polymerase II data set. The method seamlessly automates the process, is ideal for non-specialists and provides a mathematical framework for successfully combining various sources of information in image processing.

Status of reliability in determining SDDR for manual maintenance activities in ITER: Quality assessment of relevant activation cross sections involved

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Garcia, R.; Garcia, M.; Pampin, R.; Sanz, J.

2016-01-01

Highlights: • Feasibility of manual maintenance activities in ITER port cell and port interspace. • Activation of relevant materials and components placed in the current ITER model. • Dominant radionuclides and pathways for shutdown dose rate in ITER. • Quality analysis of typically used EAF and TENDL activation libraries is performed. • EAF performance found as trustworthy with slight recommended improvements. - Abstract: This paper assesses the quality of the EAF-2007 and 2010 activation cross sections for relevant reactions in the determination of the Shutdown Dose Rate (SDDR) in the Port Cell (PC) and Port Interspace (PI) areas of ITER. For each of relevant ITER materials, dominant radionuclides responsible of SDDR and their production pathways are listed. This information comes from a review of the recent reports/papers about SDDR in ITER and own calculations. A total of 26 relevant pathways are found. The quality of these cross sections pathways is assessed following EAF validation procedure, and for those found as not validated last TENDL library versions have been investigated in order to check possible improvements when compared to EAF. The use of EAF libraries is found as trustworthy and it is recommended for the prediction of SDDR in the ITER PC and PI. However, 3 cross section reactions are considered for further improvement: Co59(n,2n)Co58, Cu63(n,g)Cu64 and Cr50(n,g)Cr51.

Status of reliability in determining SDDR for manual maintenance activities in ITER: Quality assessment of relevant activation cross sections involved

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Garcia, R., E-mail: rgarciam@ind.uned.es [UNED, Power Engineering Department, C/Juan del Rosal 12, 28040 Madrid (Spain); Garcia, M. [UNED, Power Engineering Department, C/Juan del Rosal 12, 28040 Madrid (Spain); Pampin, R. [F4E, Torres Diagonal Litoral B3, Barcelona (Spain); Sanz, J. [UNED, Power Engineering Department, C/Juan del Rosal 12, 28040 Madrid (Spain)

2016-11-15

Highlights: • Feasibility of manual maintenance activities in ITER port cell and port interspace. • Activation of relevant materials and components placed in the current ITER model. • Dominant radionuclides and pathways for shutdown dose rate in ITER. • Quality analysis of typically used EAF and TENDL activation libraries is performed. • EAF performance found as trustworthy with slight recommended improvements. - Abstract: This paper assesses the quality of the EAF-2007 and 2010 activation cross sections for relevant reactions in the determination of the Shutdown Dose Rate (SDDR) in the Port Cell (PC) and Port Interspace (PI) areas of ITER. For each of relevant ITER materials, dominant radionuclides responsible of SDDR and their production pathways are listed. This information comes from a review of the recent reports/papers about SDDR in ITER and own calculations. A total of 26 relevant pathways are found. The quality of these cross sections pathways is assessed following EAF validation procedure, and for those found as not validated last TENDL library versions have been investigated in order to check possible improvements when compared to EAF. The use of EAF libraries is found as trustworthy and it is recommended for the prediction of SDDR in the ITER PC and PI. However, 3 cross section reactions are considered for further improvement: Co59(n,2n)Co58, Cu63(n,g)Cu64 and Cr50(n,g)Cr51.

Automatic terrain modeling using transfinite element analysis

KAUST Repository

Collier, Nathan; Calo, Victor M.

2010-01-01

An automatic procedure for modeling terrain is developed based on L2 projection-based interpolation of discrete terrain data onto transfinite function spaces. The function space is refined automatically by the use of image processing techniques

Towards automatic exchange of information

OpenAIRE

Oberson, Xavier

2015-01-01

This article describes the various steps that led towards automatic exchange of information as the global standard and the issues that remain to be solved. First, the various competing models of exchange information, such as Double Tax Treaty (DTT), TIEA's, FATCA or UE Directives are described with a view to show how they interact between themselves. Second, the so-called Rubik Strategy is summarized and compared with an automatic exchange of information (AEOI). The third part then describes ...

Automatically processed alpha-track radon monitor

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Langner, G.H. Jr.

1993-01-01

An automatically processed alpha-track radon monitor is provided which includes a housing having an aperture allowing radon entry, and a filter that excludes the entry of radon daughters into the housing. A flexible track registration material is located within the housing that records alpha-particle emissions from the decay of radon and radon daughters inside the housing. The flexible track registration material is capable of being spliced such that the registration material from a plurality of monitors can be spliced into a single strip to facilitate automatic processing of the registration material from the plurality of monitors. A process for the automatic counting of radon registered by a radon monitor is also provided

Is automatic CPAP titration as effective as manual CPAP titration in OSAHS patients? A meta-analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Gao, Weijie; Jin, Yinghui; Wang, Yan; Sun, Mei; Chen, Baoyuan; Zhou, Ning; Deng, Yuan

2012-06-01

It is costly and time-consuming to conduct the standard manual titration to identify an effective pressure before continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients. Automatic titration is cheaper and more easily available than manual titration. The purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the effect of automatic titration in identifying a pressure and on the improvement of apnea/hyponea index (AHI) and somnolence, the change of sleep quality, and the acceptance and compliance of CPAP treatment, compared with the manual titration. A systematic search was made of the PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, SCI, China Academic Journals Full-text Databases, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, Chinese Scientific Journals Databases and Chinese Medical Association Journals. Randomized controlled trials comparing automatic titration and manual titration were reviewed. Studies were pooled to yield odds ratios (OR) or mean differences (MD) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Ten trials involving 849 patients met the inclusion criteria. It is hard to identify a trend in the pressures determined by either automatic or manual titration. Automatic titration can improve the AHI (MD = 0.03/h, 95% CI = -4.48 to 4.53) and Epworth sleepiness scale (SMD = -0.02, 95% CI = -0.34 to 0.31,) as effectively as the manual titration. There is no difference between sleep architecture under automatic titration or manual titration. The acceptance of CPAP treatment (OR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.60 to 1.55) and the compliance with treatment (MD = -0.04, 95% CI = -0.17 to 0.10) after automatic titration is not different from manual titration. Automatic titration is as effective as standard manual titration in improving AHI, somnolence while maintaining sleep quality similar to the standard method. In addition, automatic titration has the same effect on the acceptance and compliance of CPAP treatment as manual titration. With the potential advantage

Morphometric Atlas Selection for Automatic Brachial Plexus Segmentation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Van de Velde, Joris; Wouters, Johan; Vercauteren, Tom; De Gersem, Werner; Duprez, Fréderic; De Neve, Wilfried; Van Hoof, Tom

2015-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of atlas selection based on different morphometric parameters, on the accuracy of automatic brachial plexus (BP) segmentation for radiation therapy planning. The segmentation accuracy was measured by comparing all of the generated automatic segmentations with anatomically validated gold standard atlases developed using cadavers. Methods and Materials: Twelve cadaver computed tomography (CT) atlases (3 males, 9 females; mean age: 73 years) were included in the study. One atlas was selected to serve as a patient, and the other 11 atlases were registered separately onto this “patient” using deformable image registration. This procedure was repeated for every atlas as a patient. Next, the Dice and Jaccard similarity indices and inclusion index were calculated for every registered BP with the original gold standard BP. In parallel, differences in several morphometric parameters that may influence the BP segmentation accuracy were measured for the different atlases. Specific brachial plexus-related CT-visible bony points were used to define the morphometric parameters. Subsequently, correlations between the similarity indices and morphometric parameters were calculated. Results: A clear negative correlation between difference in protraction-retraction distance and the similarity indices was observed (mean Pearson correlation coefficient = −0.546). All of the other investigated Pearson correlation coefficients were weak. Conclusions: Differences in the shoulder protraction-retraction position between the atlas and the patient during planning CT influence the BP autosegmentation accuracy. A greater difference in the protraction-retraction distance between the atlas and the patient reduces the accuracy of the BP automatic segmentation result

Automatic annotation of head velocity and acceleration in Anvil

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jongejan, Bart

2012-01-01

We describe an automatic face tracker plugin for the ANVIL annotation tool. The face tracker produces data for velocity and for acceleration in two dimensions. We compare the annotations generated by the face tracking algorithm with independently made manual annotations for head movements....... The annotations are a useful supplement to manual annotations and may help human annotators to quickly and reliably determine onset of head movements and to suggest which kind of head movement is taking place....

Prognosis Essay Scoring and Article Relevancy Using Multi-Text Features and Machine Learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Arif Mehmood

2017-01-01

Full Text Available This study develops a model for essay scoring and article relevancy. Essay scoring is a costly process when we consider the time spent by an evaluator. It may lead to inequalities of the effort by various evaluators to apply the same evaluation criteria. Bibliometric research uses the evaluation criteria to find relevancy of articles instead. Researchers mostly face relevancy issues while searching articles. Therefore, they classify the articles manually. However, manual classification is burdensome due to time needed for evaluation. The proposed model performs automatic essay evaluation using multi-text features and ensemble machine learning. The proposed method is implemented in two data sets: a Kaggle short answer data set for essay scoring that includes four ranges of disciplines (Science, Biology, English, and English language Arts, and a bibliometric data set having IoT (Internet of Things and non-IoT classes. The efficacy of the model is measured against the Tandalla and AutoP approach using Cohen’s kappa. The model achieves kappa values of 0.80 and 0.83 for the first and second data sets, respectively. Kappa values show that the proposed model has better performance than those of earlier approaches.

Automatic control system at the ''Loviisa'' NPP

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kukhtevich, I.V.; Mal'tsev, B.K.; Sergievskaya, E.N.

1980-01-01

Automatic control system of the Loviisa-1 NPP (Finland) is described. According to operation conditions of Finland power system the Loviisa-1 NPP must operate in the mode of week and day control of loading schedule and participate in current control of power system frequency and capacity. With provision for these requirements NPP is equipped with the all-regime system for automatic control functioning during reactor start-up, shut-down, in normal and transient regimes and in emergency situations. The automatic control system includes: a data subsystem, an automatic control subsystem, a discrete control subsystem including remote, a subsystem for reactor control and protection and overall station system of protections: control and dosimetry inside the reactor. Structures of a data-computer complex, discrete control subsystems, reactor control and protection systems, neutron flux control system, inside-reactor control system, station protection system and system for control of fuel element tightness are presented in short. Two-year experience of the NPP operation confirmed advisability of the chosen volume of automatization. The Loviisa-1 NPP operates successfully in the mode of the week and day control of supervisor schedule and current control of frequency (short-term control)

21 CFR 211.68 - Automatic, mechanical, and electronic equipment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... SERVICES (CONTINUED) DRUGS: GENERAL CURRENT GOOD MANUFACTURING PRACTICE FOR FINISHED PHARMACEUTICALS Equipment § 211.68 Automatic, mechanical, and electronic equipment. (a) Automatic, mechanical, or electronic... 21 Food and Drugs 4 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Automatic, mechanical, and electronic equipment...

Automatic Clustering Using FSDE-Forced Strategy Differential Evolution

Science.gov (United States)

Yasid, A.

2018-01-01

Clustering analysis is important in datamining for unsupervised data, cause no adequate prior knowledge. One of the important tasks is defining the number of clusters without user involvement that is known as automatic clustering. This study intends on acquiring cluster number automatically utilizing forced strategy differential evolution (AC-FSDE). Two mutation parameters, namely: constant parameter and variable parameter are employed to boost differential evolution performance. Four well-known benchmark datasets were used to evaluate the algorithm. Moreover, the result is compared with other state of the art automatic clustering methods. The experiment results evidence that AC-FSDE is better or competitive with other existing automatic clustering algorithm.

A new tool for rapid and automatic estimation of earthquake source parameters and generation of seismic bulletins

Science.gov (United States)

Zollo, Aldo

2016-04-01

of the equivalent Wood-Anderson displacement recordings. The moment magnitude (Mw) is then estimated from the inversion of displacement spectra. The duration magnitude (Md) is rapidly computed, based on a simple and automatic measurement of the seismic wave coda duration. Starting from the magnitude estimates, other relevant pieces of information are also computed, such as the corner frequency, the seismic moment, the source radius and the seismic energy. The ground-shaking maps on a Google map are produced, for peak ground acceleration (PGA), peak ground velocity (PGV) and instrumental intensity (in SHAKEMAP® format), or a plot of the measured peak ground values. Furthermore, based on a specific decisional scheme, the automatic discrimination between local earthquakes occurred within the network and regional/teleseismic events occurred outside the network is performed. Finally, for largest events, if a consistent number of P-wave polarity reading are available, the focal mechanism is also computed. For each event, all of the available pieces of information are stored in a local database and the results of the automatic analyses are published on an interactive web page. "The Bulletin" shows a map with event location and stations, as well as a table listing all the events, with the associated parameters. The catalogue fields are the event ID, the origin date and time, latitude, longitude, depth, Ml, Mw, Md, the number of triggered stations, the S-displacement spectra, and shaking maps. Some of these entries also provide additional information, such as the focal mechanism (when available). The picked traces are uploaded in the database and from the web interface of the Bulletin the traces can be download for more specific analysis. This innovative software represents a smart solution, with a friendly and interactive interface, for high-level analysis of seismic data analysis and it may represent a relevant tool not only for seismologists, but also for non

Automatic evaluation of body-related words among young women: an experimental study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cranney Jacquelyn

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to images depicting the thin female ideal has negative effects on some females' levels of body dissatisfaction. Much of this research, however, has utilised relatively long stimulus exposure times; thereby focusing on effortful and conscious processing of body-related stimuli. Relatively little is known about the nature of females' affective responses to the textual components of body-related stimuli, especially when these stimuli are only briefly encountered. The primary aim of the current research was to determine whether young women automatically evaluate body-related words and whether these responses are associated with body image concerns, including self-reported levels of appearance schematicity, thin internalisation, body dissatisfaction, and dietary restraint. Methods An affective priming task was used to investigate whether females automatically evaluate body-related words, and whether this is associated with self-reported body image concerns. In a within-participants experimental design, the valence congruence of the prime and target pairs was manipulated. Participants selected body words as primes in Experiment 1 (N = 27, while normatively selected body words were primes in Experiment 2 (N = 50. Each prime was presented briefly, followed by a target word which participants judged as "good" or "bad". The dependent variable was response latency to the target. Results Automatic evaluation was evident: responding to congruent pairs was faster than responding to incongruent pairs. Body image concerns were unrelated to automaticity. Conclusions The findings suggest that brief encounters with body words are likely to prompt automatic evaluation in all young women, and that this process proceeds unintentionally and efficiently, without conscious guidance.

ACTIV - a program for automatic processing of gamma-ray spectra

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zlokazov, V.B.

1982-01-01

Program ACTIV is intended for precise analysis of γ-rays and X-ray spectra and allows the user to carry out the full cycle of automatic processing of a series of spectra, i.e. calibration, automatic peak search, determination of peak positions and areas, identification of the radioisotopes and the transformation of the areas found into masses of isotopes in the irradiated sample. ACTIV uses a complex mathematical technique and is oriented mainly to large computers, but using overlaid loading, it can be run also on small computers like the PDP 11/70. Compared with other similar programs, ACTIV has some advantages in accuracy of peak shape description and in the reliability of the peak search and its least-square analysis. The program can be used for the purpose of activation analysis. The program can analyze spectra with poor statistics and with broad and narrow peaks. (orig.)

An Automatic Prediction of Epileptic Seizures Using Cloud Computing and Wireless Sensor Networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Sareen, Sanjay; Sood, Sandeep K; Gupta, Sunil Kumar

2016-11-01

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders which is characterized by the spontaneous and unforeseeable occurrence of seizures. An automatic prediction of seizure can protect the patients from accidents and save their life. In this article, we proposed a mobile-based framework that automatically predict seizures using the information contained in electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The wireless sensor technology is used to capture the EEG signals of patients. The cloud-based services are used to collect and analyze the EEG data from the patient's mobile phone. The features from the EEG signal are extracted using the fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT). The Higher Order Spectral Analysis (HOSA) is applied to FWHT coefficients in order to select the features set relevant to normal, preictal and ictal states of seizure. We subsequently exploit the selected features as input to a k-means classifier to detect epileptic seizure states in a reasonable time. The performance of the proposed model is tested on Amazon EC2 cloud and compared in terms of execution time and accuracy. The findings show that with selected HOS based features, we were able to achieve a classification accuracy of 94.6 %.

Antares automatic beam alignment system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Appert, Q.; Swann, T.; Sweatt, W.; Saxman, A.

1980-01-01

Antares is a 24-beam-line CO 2 laser system for controlled fusion research, under construction at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL). Rapid automatic alignment of this system is required prior to each experiment shot. The alignment requirements, operational constraints, and a developed prototype system are discussed. A visible-wavelength alignment technique is employed that uses a telescope/TV system to view point light sources appropriately located down the beamline. Auto-alignment is accomplished by means of a video centroid tracker, which determines the off-axis error of the point sources. The error is nulled by computer-driven, movable mirrors in a closed-loop system. The light sources are fiber-optic terminations located at key points in the optics path, primarily at the center of large copper mirrors, and remotely illuminated to reduce heating effects

Evaluation of automatic face recognition for automatic border control on actual data recorded of travellers at Schiphol Airport

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Spreeuwers, Lieuwe Jan; Hendrikse, A.J.; Gerritsen, K.J.; Brömme, A.; Busch, C.

2012-01-01

Automatic border control at airports using automated facial recognition for checking the passport is becoming more and more common. A problem is that it is not clear how reliable these automatic gates are. Very few independent studies exist that assess the reliability of automated facial recognition

Automatic identification of bullet signatures based on consecutive matching striae (CMS) criteria.

Science.gov (United States)

Chu, Wei; Thompson, Robert M; Song, John; Vorburger, Theodore V

2013-09-10

The consecutive matching striae (CMS) numeric criteria for firearm and toolmark identifications have been widely accepted by forensic examiners, although there have been questions concerning its observer subjectivity and limited statistical support. In this paper, based on signal processing and extraction, a model for the automatic and objective counting of CMS is proposed. The position and shape information of the striae on the bullet land is represented by a feature profile, which is used for determining the CMS number automatically. Rapid counting of CMS number provides a basis for ballistics correlations with large databases and further statistical and probability analysis. Experimental results in this report using bullets fired from ten consecutively manufactured barrels support this developed model. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

An introduction to automatic radioactive sample counters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1980-01-01

The subject is covered in chapters, entitled; the detection of radiation in sample counters; nucleonic equipment; liquid scintillation counting; basic features of automatic sample counters; statistics of counting; data analysis; purchase, installation, calibration and maintenance of automatic sample counters. (U.K.)

Observed use of automatic seat belts in 1987 cars.

Science.gov (United States)

Williams, A F; Wells, J K; Lund, A K; Teed, N

1989-10-01

Usage of the automatic belt systems supplied by six large-volume automobile manufacturers to meet the federal requirements for automatic restraints were observed in suburban Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. The different belt systems studied were: Ford and Toyota (motorized, nondetachable automatic shoulder belt), Nissan (motorized, detachable shoulder belt), VW and Chrysler (nonmotorized, detachable shoulder belt), and GM (nonmotorized detachable lap and shoulder belt). Use of automatic belts was significantly greater than manual belt use in otherwise comparable late-model cars for all manufacturers except Chrysler; in Chrysler cars, automatic belt use was significantly lower than manual belt use. The automatic shoulder belts provided by Ford, Nissan, Toyota, and VW increased use rates to about 90%. Because use rates were lower in Ford cars with manual belts, their increase was greater. GM cars had the smallest increase in use rates; however, lap belt use was highest in GM cars. The other manufacturers supply knee bolsters to supplement shoulder belt protection; all--except VW--also provide manual lap belts, which were used by about half of those who used the automatic shoulder belt. The results indicate that some manufacturers have been more successful than others in providing automatic belt systems that result in high use that, in turn, will mean fewer deaths and injuries in those cars.

Content-aware automatic cropping for consumer photos

Science.gov (United States)

Tang, Hao; Tretter, Daniel; Lin, Qian

2013-03-01

Consumer photos are typically authored once, but need to be retargeted for reuse in various situations. These include printing a photo on different size paper, changing the size and aspect ratio of an embedded photo to accommodate the dynamic content layout of web pages or documents, adapting a large photo for browsing on small displays such as mobile phone screens, and improving the aesthetic quality of a photo that was badly composed at the capture time. In this paper, we propose a novel, effective, and comprehensive content-aware automatic cropping (hereafter referred to as "autocrop") method for consumer photos to achieve the above purposes. Our autocrop method combines the state-of-the-art context-aware saliency detection algorithm, which aims to infer the likely intent of the photographer, and the "branch-and-bound" efficient subwindow search optimization technique, which seeks to locate the globally optimal cropping rectangle in a fast manner. Unlike most current autocrop methods, which can only crop a photo into an arbitrary rectangle, our autocrop method can automatically crop a photo into either a rectangle of arbitrary dimensions or a rectangle of the desired aspect ratio specified by the user. The aggressiveness of the cropping operation may be either automatically determined by the method or manually indicated by the user with ease. In addition, our autocrop method is extended to support the cropping of a photo into non-rectangular shapes such as polygons of any number of sides. It may also be potentially extended to return multiple cropping suggestions, which will enable the creation of new photos to enrich the original photo collections. Our experimental results show that the proposed autocrop method in this paper can generate high-quality crops for consumer photos of various types.

Automatic sample changers maintenance manual

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Myers, T.A.

1978-10-01

This manual describes and provides trouble-shooting aids for the Automatic Sample Changer electronics on the automatic beta counting system, developed by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory Group CNC-11. The output of a gas detector is shaped by a preamplifier, then is coupled to an amplifier. Amplifier output is discriminated and is the input to a scaler. An identification number is associated with each sample. At a predetermined count length, the identification number, scaler data plus other information is punched out on a data card. The next sample to be counted is automatically selected. The beta counter uses the same electronics as the prior count did, the only difference being the sample identification number and sample itself. This manual is intended as a step-by-step aid in trouble-shooting the electronics associated with positioning the sample, counting the sample, and getting the needed data punched on an 80-column data card

Automatic, semi-automatic and manual validation of urban drainage data.

Science.gov (United States)

Branisavljević, N; Prodanović, D; Pavlović, D

2010-01-01

Advances in sensor technology and the possibility of automated long distance data transmission have made continuous measurements the preferable way of monitoring urban drainage processes. Usually, the collected data have to be processed by an expert in order to detect and mark the wrong data, remove them and replace them with interpolated data. In general, the first step in detecting the wrong, anomaly data is called the data quality assessment or data validation. Data validation consists of three parts: data preparation, validation scores generation and scores interpretation. This paper will present the overall framework for the data quality improvement system, suitable for automatic, semi-automatic or manual operation. The first two steps of the validation process are explained in more detail, using several validation methods on the same set of real-case data from the Belgrade sewer system. The final part of the validation process, which is the scores interpretation, needs to be further investigated on the developed system.

Automatic Encoding and Language Detection in the GSDL

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Otakar Pinkas

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Automatic detection of encoding and language of the text is part of the Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL for building and distributing digital collections. It is developed by the University of Waikato (New Zealand in cooperation with UNESCO. The automatic encoding and language detection in Slavic languages is difficult and it sometimes fails. The aim is to detect cases of failure. The automatic detection in the GSDL is based on n-grams method. The most frequent n-grams for Czech are presented. The whole process of automatic detection in the GSDL is described. The input documents to test collections are plain texts encoded in ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2 and Windows-1250. We manually evaluated the quality of automatic detection. To the causes of errors belong the improper language model predominance and the incorrect switch to Windows-1250. We carried out further tests on documents that were more complex.

A curated database of cyanobacterial strains relevant for modern taxonomy and phylogenetic studies.

Science.gov (United States)

Ramos, Vitor; Morais, João; Vasconcelos, Vitor M

2017-04-25

The dataset herein described lays the groundwork for an online database of relevant cyanobacterial strains, named CyanoType (http://lege.ciimar.up.pt/cyanotype). It is a database that includes categorized cyanobacterial strains useful for taxonomic, phylogenetic or genomic purposes, with associated information obtained by means of a literature-based curation. The dataset lists 371 strains and represents the first version of the database (CyanoType v.1). Information for each strain includes strain synonymy and/or co-identity, strain categorization, habitat, accession numbers for molecular data, taxonomy and nomenclature notes according to three different classification schemes, hierarchical automatic classification, phylogenetic placement according to a selection of relevant studies (including this), and important bibliographic references. The database will be updated periodically, namely by adding new strains meeting the criteria for inclusion and by revising and adding up-to-date metadata for strains already listed. A global 16S rDNA-based phylogeny is provided in order to assist users when choosing the appropriate strains for their studies.

Automatic lung segmentation in the presence of alveolar collapse

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Noshadi Areg

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Lung ventilation and perfusion analyses using chest imaging methods require a correct segmentation of the lung to offer anatomical landmarks for the physiological data. An automatic segmentation approach simplifies and accelerates the analysis. However, the segmentation of the lungs has shown to be difficult if collapsed areas are present that tend to share similar gray values with surrounding non-pulmonary tissue. Our goal was to develop an automatic segmentation algorithm that is able to approximate dorsal lung boundaries even if alveolar collapse is present in the dependent lung areas adjacent to the pleura. Computed tomography data acquired in five supine pigs with injured lungs were used for this purpose. First, healthy lung tissue was segmented using a standard 3D region growing algorithm. Further, the bones in the chest wall surrounding the lungs were segmented to find the contact points of ribs and pleura. Artificial boundaries of the dorsal lung were set by spline interpolation through these contact points. Segmentation masks of the entire lung including the collapsed regions were created by combining the splines with the segmentation masks of the healthy lung tissue through multiple morphological operations. The automatically segmented images were then evaluated by comparing them to manual segmentations and determining the Dice similarity coefficients (DSC as a similarity measure. The developed method was able to accurately segment the lungs including the collapsed regions (DSCs over 0.96.

DETERMINATION OF RELEVANT FEATURES OF A SCALE MODEL FOR A 55 000 DWT BULK CARRIER NECESSARY TO STUDY THE SHIP MANEUVERABILITY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

ALECU TOMA

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The study method of a ship behavior based on practical tests on scale models is widely used both leading scientists and engineers, architects and researchers in the naval field. In this paper we propose to determine the parameters of a ship handling characteristics relevant to study the 55,000 dwt bulk carrier using a scale model. Scientific background for practical experimentation of this techniques necessary to built a scale model ship consists in applying the principles of similarity or "similitude". The scale model achieved by applying the laws of similarity must allow, through approximations available in certain circumstances, finding relevant parameters needed to simplify and solve the Navier-Stokes equations. These parameters are necessary for modeling the interaction between hull of the real ship and the fluid motion.

12th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control

CERN Document Server

Soares, Filomena; Moreira, António

2017-01-01

The biennial CONTROLO conferences are the main events promoted by The CONTROLO 2016 – 12th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control, Guimarães, Portugal, September 14th to 16th, was organized by Algoritmi, School of Engineering, University of Minho, in partnership with INESC TEC, and promoted by the Portuguese Association for Automatic Control – APCA, national member organization of the International Federation of Automatic Control – IFAC. The seventy-five papers published in this volume cover a wide range of topics. Thirty-one of them, of a more theoretical nature, are distributed among the first five parts: Control Theory; Optimal and Predictive Control; Fuzzy, Neural and Genetic Control; Modeling and Identification; Sensing and Estimation. The papers go from cutting-edge theoretical research to innovative control applications and show expressively how Automatic Control can be used to increase the well being of people. .

Some experimental results for an automatic helium liquefier

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Watanabe, T.; Kudo, T.; Kuraoka, Y.; Sakura, K.; Tsuruga, H.; Watanabe, T.

1984-01-01

This chapter describes the testing of an automatic cooldown system. The liquefying machine examined is a CTi Model 1400. The automatic helium gas liquefying system is operated by using sequence control with a programmable controller. The automatic mode is carried out by operation of two compressors. The monitoring system consists of 41 remote sensors. Liquid level is measured by a superconducting level meter. The J-T valve and return valve, which require precise control, are operated by pulse motors. The advantages of the automatic cooldown system are reduced operator man power; temperatures and pressures are changed smoothly, so that the flow chart of automation is simple; and the system makes continuous liquefier operation possible

Automatic Construction of Finite Algebras

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

张健

1995-01-01

This paper deals with model generation for equational theories,i.e.,automatically generating (finite)models of a given set of (logical) equations.Our method of finite model generation and a tool for automatic construction of finite algebras is described.Some examples are given to show the applications of our program.We argue that,the combination of model generators and theorem provers enables us to get a better understanding of logical theories.A brief comparison betwween our tool and other similar tools is also presented.

Grinding Parts For Automatic Welding

Science.gov (United States)

Burley, Richard K.; Hoult, William S.

1989-01-01

Rollers guide grinding tool along prospective welding path. Skatelike fixture holds rotary grinder or file for machining large-diameter rings or ring segments in preparation for welding. Operator grasps handles to push rolling fixture along part. Rollers maintain precise dimensional relationship so grinding wheel cuts precise depth. Fixture-mounted grinder machines surface to quality sufficient for automatic welding; manual welding with attendant variations and distortion not necessary. Developed to enable automatic welding of parts, manual welding of which resulted in weld bead permeated with microscopic fissures.

46 CFR 171.118 - Automatic ventilators and side ports.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 46 Shipping 7 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Automatic ventilators and side ports. 171.118 Section 171.118 Shipping COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (CONTINUED) SUBDIVISION AND STABILITY... Bulkhead or Weather Deck § 171.118 Automatic ventilators and side ports. (a) An automatic ventilator must...

30 CFR 75.1404 - Automatic brakes; speed reduction gear.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 30 Mineral Resources 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Automatic brakes; speed reduction gear. 75.1404... Automatic brakes; speed reduction gear. [Statutory Provisions] Each locomotive and haulage car used in an... permit automatic brakes, locomotives and haulage cars shall be subject to speed reduction gear, or other...

Automatic Error Recovery in Robot Assembly Operations Using Reverse Execution

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Laursen, Johan Sund; Schultz, Ulrik Pagh; Ellekilde, Lars-Peter

2015-01-01

, in particular for small-batch productions. As an alternative, we propose a system for automatically handling certain classes of errors instead of preventing them. Specifically, we show that many operations can be automatically reversed. Errors can be handled through automatic reverse execution of the control...... program to a safe point, from which forward execution can be resumed. This paper describes the principles behind automatic reversal of robotic assembly operations, and experimentally demonstrates the use of a domain-specific language that supports automatic error handling through reverse execution. Our...

Dentalmaps: Automatic Dental Delineation for Radiotherapy Planning in Head-and-Neck Cancer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Thariat, Juliette; Ramus, Liliane; Maingon, Philippe; Odin, Guillaume; Gregoire, Vincent; Darcourt, Vincent; Guevara, Nicolas; Orlanducci, Marie-Helene; Marcie, Serge; Poissonnet, Gilles; Marcy, Pierre-Yves

2012-01-01

Purpose: To propose an automatic atlas-based segmentation framework of the dental structures, called Dentalmaps, and to assess its accuracy and relevance to guide dental care in the context of intensity-modulated radiotherapy. Methods and Materials: A multi-atlas–based segmentation, less sensitive to artifacts than previously published head-and-neck segmentation methods, was used. The manual segmentations of a 21-patient database were first deformed onto the query using nonlinear registrations with the training images and then fused to estimate the consensus segmentation of the query. Results: The framework was evaluated with a leave-one-out protocol. The maximum doses estimated using manual contours were considered as ground truth and compared with the maximum doses estimated using automatic contours. The dose estimation error was within 2-Gy accuracy in 75% of cases (with a median of 0.9 Gy), whereas it was within 2-Gy accuracy in 30% of cases only with the visual estimation method without any contour, which is the routine practice procedure. Conclusions: Dose estimates using this framework were more accurate than visual estimates without dental contour. Dentalmaps represents a useful documentation and communication tool between radiation oncologists and dentists in routine practice. Prospective multicenter assessment is underway on patients extrinsic to the database.

Automatic segmentation of the left ventricle in a cardiac MR short axis image using blind morphological operation

Science.gov (United States)

Irshad, Mehreen; Muhammad, Nazeer; Sharif, Muhammad; Yasmeen, Mussarat

2018-04-01

Conventionally, cardiac MR image analysis is done manually. Automatic examination for analyzing images can replace the monotonous tasks of massive amounts of data to analyze the global and regional functions of the cardiac left ventricle (LV). This task is performed using MR images to calculate the analytic cardiac parameter like end-systolic volume, end-diastolic volume, ejection fraction, and myocardial mass, respectively. These analytic parameters depend upon genuine delineation of epicardial, endocardial, papillary muscle, and trabeculations contours. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method using the sum of absolute differences technique to localize the left ventricle. Blind morphological operations are proposed to segment and detect the LV contours of the epicardium and endocardium, automatically. We test the benchmark Sunny Brook dataset for evaluation of the proposed work. Contours of epicardium and endocardium are compared quantitatively to determine contour's accuracy and observe high matching values. Similarity or overlapping of an automatic examination to the given ground truth analysis by an expert are observed with high accuracy as with an index value of 91.30% . The proposed method for automatic segmentation gives better performance relative to existing techniques in terms of accuracy.

Shaping electromagnetic waves using software-automatically-designed metasurfaces.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Qian; Wan, Xiang; Liu, Shuo; Yuan Yin, Jia; Zhang, Lei; Jun Cui, Tie

2017-06-15

We present a fully digital procedure of designing reflective coding metasurfaces to shape reflected electromagnetic waves. The design procedure is completely automatic, controlled by a personal computer. In details, the macro coding units of metasurface are automatically divided into several types (e.g. two types for 1-bit coding, four types for 2-bit coding, etc.), and each type of the macro coding units is formed by discretely random arrangement of micro coding units. By combining an optimization algorithm and commercial electromagnetic software, the digital patterns of the macro coding units are optimized to possess constant phase difference for the reflected waves. The apertures of the designed reflective metasurfaces are formed by arranging the macro coding units with certain coding sequence. To experimentally verify the performance, a coding metasurface is fabricated by automatically designing two digital 1-bit unit cells, which are arranged in array to constitute a periodic coding metasurface to generate the required four-beam radiations with specific directions. Two complicated functional metasurfaces with circularly- and elliptically-shaped radiation beams are realized by automatically designing 4-bit macro coding units, showing excellent performance of the automatic designs by software. The proposed method provides a smart tool to realize various functional devices and systems automatically.

Process acceptance and adjustment techniques for Swiss automatic screw machine parts. Final report

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Robb, J.M.

1976-01-01

Product tolerance requirements for small, cylindrical, piece parts produced on swiss automatic screw machines have progressed to the reliability limits of inspection equipment. The miniature size, configuration, and tolerance requirements (plus or minus 0.0001 in.) (0.00254 mm) of these parts preclude the use of screening techniques to accept product or adjust processes during setup and production runs; therefore, existing means of product acceptance and process adjustment must be refined or new techniques must be developed. The purpose of this endeavor has been to determine benefits gained through the implementation of a process acceptance technique (PAT) to swiss automatic screw machine processes. PAT is a statistical approach developed for the purpose of accepting product and centering processes for parts produced by selected, controlled processes. Through this endeavor a determination has been made of the conditions under which PAT can benefit a controlled process and some specific types of screw machine processes upon which PAT could be applied. However, it was also determined that PAT, if used indiscriminately, may become a record keeping burden when applied to more than one dimension at a given machining operation

Automatic flow-batch system for cold vapor atomic absorption spectroscopy determination of mercury in honey from Argentina using online sample treatment.

Science.gov (United States)

Domínguez, Marina A; Grünhut, Marcos; Pistonesi, Marcelo F; Di Nezio, María S; Centurión, María E

2012-05-16

An automatic flow-batch system that includes two borosilicate glass chambers to perform sample digestion and cold vapor atomic absorption spectroscopy determination of mercury in honey samples was designed. The sample digestion was performed by using a low-cost halogen lamp to obtain the optimum temperature. Optimization of the digestion procedure was done using a Box-Behnken experimental design. A linear response was observed from 2.30 to 11.20 μg Hg L(-1). The relative standard deviation was 3.20% (n = 11, 6.81 μg Hg L(-1)), the sample throughput was 4 sample h(-1), and the detection limit was 0.68 μg Hg L(-1). The obtained results with the flow-batch method are in good agreement with those obtained with the reference method. The flow-batch system is simple, allows the use of both chambers simultaneously, is seen as a promising methodology for achieving green chemistry goals, and is a good proposal to improving the quality control of honey.

Automatic trend estimation

CERN Document Server

Vamos¸, C˘alin

2013-01-01

Our book introduces a method to evaluate the accuracy of trend estimation algorithms under conditions similar to those encountered in real time series processing. This method is based on Monte Carlo experiments with artificial time series numerically generated by an original algorithm. The second part of the book contains several automatic algorithms for trend estimation and time series partitioning. The source codes of the computer programs implementing these original automatic algorithms are given in the appendix and will be freely available on the web. The book contains clear statement of the conditions and the approximations under which the algorithms work, as well as the proper interpretation of their results. We illustrate the functioning of the analyzed algorithms by processing time series from astrophysics, finance, biophysics, and paleoclimatology. The numerical experiment method extensively used in our book is already in common use in computational and statistical physics.

Development and implementation of an automatic control algorithm for the University of Utah nuclear reactor

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Crawford, Kevan C.; Sandquist, Gary M.

1990-01-01

The emphasis of this work is the development and implementation of an automatic control philosophy which uses the classical operational philosophies as a foundation. Three control algorithms were derived based on various simplifying assumptions. Two of the algorithms were tested in computer simulations. After realizing the insensitivity of the system to the simplifications, the most reduced form of the algorithms was implemented on the computer control system at the University of Utah (UNEL). Since the operational philosophies have a higher priority than automatic control, they determine when automatic control may be utilized. Unlike the operational philosophies, automatic control is not concerned with component failures. The object of this philosophy is the movement of absorber rods to produce a requested power. When the current power level is compared to the requested power level, an error may be detected which will require the movement of a control rod to correct the error. The automatic control philosophy adds another dimension to the classical operational philosophies. Using this philosophy, normal operator interactions with the computer would be limited only to run parameters such as power, period, and run time. This eliminates subjective judgements, objective judgements under pressure, and distractions to the operator and insures the reactor will be operated in a safe and controlled manner as well as providing reproducible operations

Application of a semi-automatic cartilage segmentation method for biomechanical modeling of the knee joint.

Science.gov (United States)

Liukkonen, Mimmi K; Mononen, Mika E; Tanska, Petri; Saarakkala, Simo; Nieminen, Miika T; Korhonen, Rami K

2017-10-01

Manual segmentation of articular cartilage from knee joint 3D magnetic resonance images (MRI) is a time consuming and laborious task. Thus, automatic methods are needed for faster and reproducible segmentations. In the present study, we developed a semi-automatic segmentation method based on radial intensity profiles to generate 3D geometries of knee joint cartilage which were then used in computational biomechanical models of the knee joint. Six healthy volunteers were imaged with a 3T MRI device and their knee cartilages were segmented both manually and semi-automatically. The values of cartilage thicknesses and volumes produced by these two methods were compared. Furthermore, the influences of possible geometrical differences on cartilage stresses and strains in the knee were evaluated with finite element modeling. The semi-automatic segmentation and 3D geometry construction of one knee joint (menisci, femoral and tibial cartilages) was approximately two times faster than with manual segmentation. Differences in cartilage thicknesses, volumes, contact pressures, stresses, and strains between segmentation methods in femoral and tibial cartilage were mostly insignificant (p > 0.05) and random, i.e. there were no systematic differences between the methods. In conclusion, the devised semi-automatic segmentation method is a quick and accurate way to determine cartilage geometries; it may become a valuable tool for biomechanical modeling applications with large patient groups.

Progress on statistical learning systems as data mining tools for the creation of automatic databases in Fusion environments

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vega, J.; Murari, A.; Ratta, G.A.; Gonzalez, S.; Dormido-Canto, S.

2010-01-01

Nowadays, processing all information of a fusion database is a much more important issue than acquiring more data. Although typically fusion devices produce tens of thousands of discharges, specialized databases for physics studies are normally limited to a few tens of shots. This is due to the fact that these databases are almost always generated manually, which is a very time consuming and unreliable activity. The development of automatic methods to create specialized databases ensures first, the reduction of human efforts to identify and locate physical events, second, the standardization of criteria (reducing the vulnerability to human errors) and, third, the improvement of statistical relevance. Classification and regression techniques have been used for these purposes. The objective has been the automatic recognition of physical events (that can appear in a random and/or infrequent way) in waveforms and video-movies. Results are shown for the JET database.

Automatic control of commercial computer programs

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rezvov, B.A.; Artem'ev, A.N.; Maevskij, A.G.; Demkiv, A.A.; Kirillov, B.F.; Belyaev, A.D.; Artem'ev, N.A.

2010-01-01

The way of automatic control of commercial computer programs is presented. The developed connection of the EXAFS spectrometer automatic system (which is managed by PC for DOS) is taken with the commercial program for the CCD detector control (which is managed by PC for Windows). The described complex system is used for the automation of intermediate amplitude spectra processing in EXAFS spectrum measurements at Kurchatov SR source

Automatic shadowing device for electron microscopy

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bishop, F W; Bogitch, S

1960-01-01

For the past ten years in the laboratory of the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology at the University of California, and before that at Rochester, New York, every evaporation was done with the aid of an automatic shadowing device. For several months the automatic shadowing device has been available at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) Hiroshima, Japan with the modifications described. 1 reference.

Real-Time FPGA-Based Object Tracker with Automatic Pan-Tilt Features for Smart Video Surveillance Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sanjay Singh

2017-05-01

Full Text Available The design of smart video surveillance systems is an active research field among the computer vision community because of their ability to perform automatic scene analysis by selecting and tracking the objects of interest. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an FPGA-based standalone working prototype system for real-time tracking of an object of interest in live video streams for such systems. In addition to real-time tracking of the object of interest, the implemented system is also capable of providing purposive automatic camera movement (pan-tilt in the direction determined by movement of the tracked object. The complete system, including camera interface, DDR2 external memory interface controller, designed object tracking VLSI architecture, camera movement controller and display interface, has been implemented on the Xilinx ML510 (Virtex-5 FX130T FPGA Board. Our proposed, designed and implemented system robustly tracks the target object present in the scene in real time for standard PAL (720 × 576 resolution color video and automatically controls camera movement in the direction determined by the movement of the tracked object.

Automatic phoneme category selectivity in the dorsal auditory stream.

Science.gov (United States)

Chevillet, Mark A; Jiang, Xiong; Rauschecker, Josef P; Riesenhuber, Maximilian

2013-03-20

Debates about motor theories of speech perception have recently been reignited by a burst of reports implicating premotor cortex (PMC) in speech perception. Often, however, these debates conflate perceptual and decision processes. Evidence that PMC activity correlates with task difficulty and subject performance suggests that PMC might be recruited, in certain cases, to facilitate category judgments about speech sounds (rather than speech perception, which involves decoding of sounds). However, it remains unclear whether PMC does, indeed, exhibit neural selectivity that is relevant for speech decisions. Further, it is unknown whether PMC activity in such cases reflects input via the dorsal or ventral auditory pathway, and whether PMC processing of speech is automatic or task-dependent. In a novel modified categorization paradigm, we presented human subjects with paired speech sounds from a phonetic continuum but diverted their attention from phoneme category using a challenging dichotic listening task. Using fMRI rapid adaptation to probe neural selectivity, we observed acoustic-phonetic selectivity in left anterior and left posterior auditory cortical regions. Conversely, we observed phoneme-category selectivity in left PMC that correlated with explicit phoneme-categorization performance measured after scanning, suggesting that PMC recruitment can account for performance on phoneme-categorization tasks. Structural equation modeling revealed connectivity from posterior, but not anterior, auditory cortex to PMC, suggesting a dorsal route for auditory input to PMC. Our results provide evidence for an account of speech processing in which the dorsal stream mediates automatic sensorimotor integration of speech and may be recruited to support speech decision tasks.

CT-based patient modeling for head and neck hyperthermia treatment planning: manual versus automatic normal-tissue-segmentation.

Science.gov (United States)

Verhaart, René F; Fortunati, Valerio; Verduijn, Gerda M; van Walsum, Theo; Veenland, Jifke F; Paulides, Margarethus M

2014-04-01

Clinical trials have shown that hyperthermia, as adjuvant to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy, improves treatment of patients with locally advanced or recurrent head and neck (H&N) carcinoma. Hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP) guided H&N hyperthermia is being investigated, which requires patient specific 3D patient models derived from Computed Tomography (CT)-images. To decide whether a recently developed automatic-segmentation algorithm can be introduced in the clinic, we compared the impact of manual- and automatic normal-tissue-segmentation variations on HTP quality. CT images of seven patients were segmented automatically and manually by four observers, to study inter-observer and intra-observer geometrical variation. To determine the impact of this variation on HTP quality, HTP was performed using the automatic and manual segmentation of each observer, for each patient. This impact was compared to other sources of patient model uncertainties, i.e. varying gridsizes and dielectric tissue properties. Despite geometrical variations, manual and automatic generated 3D patient models resulted in an equal, i.e. 1%, variation in HTP quality. This variation was minor with respect to the total of other sources of patient model uncertainties, i.e. 11.7%. Automatically generated 3D patient models can be introduced in the clinic for H&N HTP. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

CT-based patient modeling for head and neck hyperthermia treatment planning: Manual versus automatic normal-tissue-segmentation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Verhaart, René F.; Fortunati, Valerio; Verduijn, Gerda M.; Walsum, Theo van; Veenland, Jifke F.; Paulides, Margarethus M.

2014-01-01

Background and purpose: Clinical trials have shown that hyperthermia, as adjuvant to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy, improves treatment of patients with locally advanced or recurrent head and neck (H and N) carcinoma. Hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP) guided H and N hyperthermia is being investigated, which requires patient specific 3D patient models derived from Computed Tomography (CT)-images. To decide whether a recently developed automatic-segmentation algorithm can be introduced in the clinic, we compared the impact of manual- and automatic normal-tissue-segmentation variations on HTP quality. Material and methods: CT images of seven patients were segmented automatically and manually by four observers, to study inter-observer and intra-observer geometrical variation. To determine the impact of this variation on HTP quality, HTP was performed using the automatic and manual segmentation of each observer, for each patient. This impact was compared to other sources of patient model uncertainties, i.e. varying gridsizes and dielectric tissue properties. Results: Despite geometrical variations, manual and automatic generated 3D patient models resulted in an equal, i.e. 1%, variation in HTP quality. This variation was minor with respect to the total of other sources of patient model uncertainties, i.e. 11.7%. Conclusions: Automatically generated 3D patient models can be introduced in the clinic for H and N HTP

Automatic segmentation of liver structure in CT images

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bae, K.T.; Giger, M.L.; Chen, C.; Kahn, C.E. Jr.

1993-01-01

The segmentation and three-dimensional representation of the liver from a computed tomography (CT) scan is an important step in many medical applications, such as in the surgical planning for a living-donor liver transplant and in the automatic detection and documentation of pathological states. A method is being developed to automatically extract liver structure from abdominal CT scans using a priori information about liver morphology and digital image-processing techniques. Segmentation is performed sequentially image-by-image (slice-by-slice), starting with a reference image in which the liver occupies almost the entire right half of the abdomen cross section. Image processing techniques include gray-level thresholding, Gaussian smoothing, and eight-point connectivity tracking. For each case, the shape, size, and pixel density distribution of the liver are recorded for each CT image and used in the processing of other CT images. Extracted boundaries of the liver are smoothed using mathematical morphology techniques and B-splines. Computer-determined boundaries were compared with those drawn by a radiologist. The boundary descriptions from the two methods were in agreement, and the calculated areas were within 10%

An automatic, stagnation point based algorithm for the delineation of Wellhead Protection Areas

Science.gov (United States)

Tosco, Tiziana; Sethi, Rajandrea; di Molfetta, Antonio

2008-07-01

Time-related capture areas are usually delineated using the backward particle tracking method, releasing circles of equally spaced particles around each well. In this way, an accurate delineation often requires both a very high number of particles and a manual capture zone encirclement. The aim of this work was to propose an Automatic Protection Area (APA) delineation algorithm, which can be coupled with any model of flow and particle tracking. The computational time is here reduced, thanks to the use of a limited number of nonequally spaced particles. The particle starting positions are determined coupling forward particle tracking from the stagnation point, and backward particle tracking from the pumping well. The pathlines are postprocessed for a completely automatic delineation of closed perimeters of time-related capture zones. The APA algorithm was tested for a two-dimensional geometry, in homogeneous and nonhomogeneous aquifers, steady state flow conditions, single and multiple wells. Results show that the APA algorithm is robust and able to automatically and accurately reconstruct protection areas with a very small number of particles, also in complex scenarios.

Development of an automatic scaler

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

He Yuehong

2009-04-01

A self-designed automatic scaler is introduced. A microcontroller LPC936 is used as the master chip in the scaler. A counter integrated with the micro-controller is configured to operate as external pulse counter. Software employed in the scaler is based on a embedded real-time operating system kernel named Small RTOS. Data storage, calculation and some other functions are also provided. The scaler is designed for applications with low cost, low power consumption solutions. By now, the automatic scaler has been applied in a surface contamination instrument. (authors)

Annual review in automatic programming

CERN Document Server

Goodman, Richard

2014-01-01

Annual Review in Automatic Programming focuses on the techniques of automatic programming used with digital computers. Topics covered range from the design of machine-independent programming languages to the use of recursive procedures in ALGOL 60. A multi-pass translation scheme for ALGOL 60 is described, along with some commercial source languages. The structure and use of the syntax-directed compiler is also considered.Comprised of 12 chapters, this volume begins with a discussion on the basic ideas involved in the description of a computing process as a program for a computer, expressed in

Automatic measurement of images on astrometric plates

Science.gov (United States)

Ortiz Gil, A.; Lopez Garcia, A.; Martinez Gonzalez, J. M.; Yershov, V.

1994-04-01

We present some results on the process of automatic detection and measurement of objects in overlapped fields of astrometric plates. The main steps of our algorithm are the following: determination of the Scale and Tilt between charge coupled devices (CCD) and microscope coordinate systems and estimation of signal-to-noise ratio in each field;--image identification and improvement of its position and size;--image final centering;--image selection and storage. Several parameters allow the use of variable criteria for image identification, characterization and selection. Problems related with faint images and crowded fields will be approached by special techniques (morphological filters, histogram properties and fitting models).

Automatic Modulation Recognition by Support Vector Machines Using Wavelet Kernel

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Feng, X Z; Yang, J; Luo, F L; Chen, J Y; Zhong, X P [College of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha (China)

2006-10-15

Automatic modulation identification plays a significant role in electronic warfare, electronic surveillance systems and electronic counter measure. The task of modulation recognition of communication signals is to determine the modulation type and signal parameters. In fact, automatic modulation identification can be range to an application of pattern recognition in communication field. The support vector machines (SVM) is a new universal learning machine which is widely used in the fields of pattern recognition, regression estimation and probability density. In this paper, a new method using wavelet kernel function was proposed, which maps the input vector xi into a high dimensional feature space F. In this feature space F, we can construct the optimal hyperplane that realizes the maximal margin in this space. That is to say, we can use SVM to classify the communication signals into two groups, namely analogue modulated signals and digitally modulated signals. In addition, computer simulation results are given at last, which show good performance of the method.

Automatic Modulation Recognition by Support Vector Machines Using Wavelet Kernel

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Feng, X Z; Yang, J; Luo, F L; Chen, J Y; Zhong, X P

2006-01-01

Automatic modulation identification plays a significant role in electronic warfare, electronic surveillance systems and electronic counter measure. The task of modulation recognition of communication signals is to determine the modulation type and signal parameters. In fact, automatic modulation identification can be range to an application of pattern recognition in communication field. The support vector machines (SVM) is a new universal learning machine which is widely used in the fields of pattern recognition, regression estimation and probability density. In this paper, a new method using wavelet kernel function was proposed, which maps the input vector xi into a high dimensional feature space F. In this feature space F, we can construct the optimal hyperplane that realizes the maximal margin in this space. That is to say, we can use SVM to classify the communication signals into two groups, namely analogue modulated signals and digitally modulated signals. In addition, computer simulation results are given at last, which show good performance of the method

Automatic Tagging as a Support Strategy for Creating Knowledge Maps

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leonardo Moura De Araújo

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Graph organizers are powerful tools for both structuring and transmitting knowledge. Because of their unique characteristics, these organizers are valuable for cultural institutions, which own large amounts of information assets and need to constantly make sense of them. On one hand, graph organizers are tools for connecting numerous chunks of data. On the other hand, because they are visual media, they offer a bird's-eye view perspective on complexity, which is digestible to the human eye. They are effective tools for information synthesis, and are capable of providing valuable insights on data. Information synthesis is essential for Heritage Interpretation, since institutions depend on constant generation of new content to preserve relevance among their audiences. While Mind Maps are simpler to be structured and comprehended, Knowledge Maps offer challenges that require new methods to minimize the difficulties encountered during their assembly. This paper presents strategies based on manual and automatic tagging as an answer to this problem. In addition, we describe the results of a usability test and qualitative analysis performed to compare the workflows employed to construct both Mind Maps and Knowledge Maps. Furthermore, we also talk about how well concepts can be communicated through the visual representation of trees and networks. Depending on the employed method, different results can be achieved, because of their unique topological characteristics. Our findings suggest that automatic tagging supports and accelerates the construction of graphs.

Automatic multiresolution age-related macular degeneration detection from fundus images

Science.gov (United States)

Garnier, Mickaël.; Hurtut, Thomas; Ben Tahar, Houssem; Cheriet, Farida

2014-03-01

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of legal blindness. As the disease progress, visual loss occurs rapidly, therefore early diagnosis is required for timely treatment. Automatic, fast and robust screening of this widespread disease should allow an early detection. Most of the automatic diagnosis methods in the literature are based on a complex segmentation of the drusen, targeting a specific symptom of the disease. In this paper, we present a preliminary study for AMD detection from color fundus photographs using a multiresolution texture analysis. We analyze the texture at several scales by using a wavelet decomposition in order to identify all the relevant texture patterns. Textural information is captured using both the sign and magnitude components of the completed model of Local Binary Patterns. An image is finally described with the textural pattern distributions of the wavelet coefficient images obtained at each level of decomposition. We use a Linear Discriminant Analysis for feature dimension reduction, to avoid the curse of dimensionality problem, and image classification. Experiments were conducted on a dataset containing 45 images (23 healthy and 22 diseased) of variable quality and captured by different cameras. Our method achieved a recognition rate of 93:3%, with a specificity of 95:5% and a sensitivity of 91:3%. This approach shows promising results at low costs that in agreement with medical experts as well as robustness to both image quality and fundus camera model.

Automatic isotope gas analysis of tritium labelled organic materials Pt. 1

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gacs, I.; Mlinko, S.

1978-01-01

A new automatic procedure developed to convert tritium in HTO hydrogen for subsequent on-line gas counting is described. The water containing tritium is introduced into a column prepared from molecular sieve-5A and heated to 550 deg C. The tritium is transferred by isotopic exchange into hydrogen flowing through the column. The radioactive gas is led into an internal detector for radioactivity measurement. The procedure is free of memory effects, provides quantitative recovery with analytical reproducibility better than 0.5% rel. at a preset number of counts. The experimental and analytical results indicate that isotopic exchange between HTO and hydrogen over a column prepared from alumina or molecular sieve-5A can be successfully applied for the quantitative transfer of tritium from HTO into hydrogen for on-line gas countinq. This provides an analytical procedure for the automatic determination of tritium in water with an analytical reproducibility better than 0.5% rel. The exchange process will also be suitable for rapid tritium transfer from water formed during the decomposition of tritium-labelled organic compounds or biological materials. The application of the procedure in automatic isotope gas analysis of organic materials labelled with tritium will be described in subsequent papers (Parts II and III). (T.G.)

A Unification of Inheritance and Automatic Program Specialization

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schultz, Ulrik Pagh

2004-01-01

, inheritance is used to control the automatic application of program specialization to class members during compilation to obtain an efficient implementation. This paper presents the language JUST, which integrates object-oriented concepts, block structure, and techniques from automatic program specialization......The object-oriented style of programming facilitates program adaptation and enhances program genericness, but at the expense of efficiency. Automatic program specialization can be used to generate specialized, efficient implementations for specific scenarios, but requires the program...... to be structured appropriately for specialization and is yet another new concept for the programmer to understand and apply. We have unified automatic program specialization and inheritance into a single concept, and implemented this approach in a modified version of Java named JUST. When programming in JUST...

Predicting automatic speech recognition performance over communication channels from instrumental speech quality and intelligibility scores

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gallardo, L.F.; Möller, S.; Beerends, J.

2017-01-01

The performance of automatic speech recognition based on coded-decoded speech heavily depends on the quality of the transmitted signals, determined by channel impairments. This paper examines relationships between speech recognition performance and measurements of speech quality and intelligibility

Automatic alignment device for focal spot measurements in the center of the field for mammography

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vieira, Marcelo A.C.; Watanabe, Alex O.; Oliveira Junior, Paulo D.; Schiabel, Homero

2010-01-01

Some quality control procedures used for mammography, such as focal spot evaluation, requires previous alignment of the measurement equipment with the X-ray central beam. However, alignment procedures are, in general, the most difficult task and the one that needs more time to be performed. Moreover, the operator sometimes is exposed to radiation during this procedure. This work presents an automatic alignment system for mammographic equipment that allows locating the central ray of the radiation beam and, immediately, aligns with it by dislocating itself automatically along the field. The system consists on a bidirectional moving device, connected to a CCD sensor for digital radiographic image acquisition. A computational analysis of a radiographic image, acquired at any position on the field, is performed in order to determine its positioning under the X-ray beam. Finally, a mechanical system for two moving directions, electronically controlled by a microcontroller under USB communication, makes the system to align automatically with the radiation beam central ray. The alignment process is fully automatic, fast and accurate, with no operator exposure to radiation, which allows a considerable time saving for quality control procedures achievement for mammography. (author)

Relevance feature selection of modal frequency-ambient condition pattern recognition in structural health assessment for reinforced concrete buildings

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

He-Qing Mu

2016-08-01

Full Text Available Modal frequency is an important indicator for structural health assessment. Previous studies have shown that this indicator is substantially affected by the fluctuation of ambient conditions, such as temperature and humidity. Therefore, recognizing the pattern between modal frequency and ambient conditions is necessary for reliable long-term structural health assessment. In this article, a novel machine-learning algorithm is proposed to automatically select relevance features in modal frequency-ambient condition pattern recognition based on structural dynamic response and ambient condition measurement. In contrast to the traditional feature selection approaches by examining a large number of combinations of extracted features, the proposed algorithm conducts continuous relevance feature selection by introducing a sophisticated hyperparameterization on the weight parameter vector controlling the relevancy of different features in the prediction model. The proposed algorithm is then utilized for structural health assessment for a reinforced concrete building based on 1-year daily measurements. It turns out that the optimal model class including the relevance features for each vibrational mode is capable to capture the pattern between the corresponding modal frequency and the ambient conditions.

Equipment for fully automatic radiographic pipe inspection

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Basler, G.; Sperl, H.; Weinschenk, K.

1977-01-01

The patent describes a device for fully automatic radiographic testing of large pipes with longitudinal welds. Furthermore the invention enables automatic marking of films in radiographic inspection with regard to a ticketing of the test piece and of that part of it where testing took place. (RW) [de

Towards Automatic Improvement of Patient Queries in Health Retrieval Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nesrine KSENTINI

2016-07-01

Full Text Available With the adoption of health information technology for clinical health, e-health is becoming usual practice today. Users of this technology find it difficult to seek information relevant to their needs due to the increasing amount of the clinical and medical data on the web, and the lack of knowledge of medical jargon. In this regards, a method is described to improve user's needs by automatically adding new related terms to their queries which appear in the same context of the original query in order to improve final search results. This method is based on the assessment of semantic relationships defined by a proposed statistical method between a set of terms or keywords. Experiments were performed on CLEF-eHealth-2015 database and the obtained results show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Metabolic changes in occipital lobe epilepsy with automatisms.

Science.gov (United States)

Wong, Chong H; Mohamed, Armin; Wen, Lingfeng; Eberl, Stefan; Somerville, Ernest; Fulham, Michael; Bleasel, Andrew F

2014-01-01

Some studies suggest that the pattern of glucose hypometabolism relates not only to the ictal-onset zone but also reflects seizure propagation. We investigated metabolic changes in patients with occipital lobe epilepsy (OLE) that may reflect propagation of ictal discharge during seizures with automatisms. Fifteen patients who had undergone epilepsy surgery for intractable OLE and had undergone interictal Fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography ((18)F-FDG-PET) between 1994 and 2004 were divided into two groups (with and without automatisms during seizure). Significant regions of hypometabolism were identified by comparing (18)F-FDG-PET results from each group with 16 healthy controls by using statistical parametric mapping. Significant hypometabolism was confined largely to the epileptogenic occipital lobe in the patient group without automatisms. In patients with automatisms, glucose hypometabolism extended from the epileptogenic occipital lobe into the ipsilateral temporal lobe. We identified a distinctive hypometabolic pattern that was specific for OLE patients with automatisms during a seizure. This finding supports the postulate that seizure propagation is a cause of glucose hypometabolism beyond the region of seizure onset.

Automatic ultrasound technique to measure angle of progression during labor.

Science.gov (United States)

Conversano, F; Peccarisi, M; Pisani, P; Di Paola, M; De Marco, T; Franchini, R; Greco, A; D'Ambrogio, G; Casciaro, S

2017-12-01

To evaluate the accuracy and reliability of an automatic ultrasound technique for assessment of the angle of progression (AoP) during labor. Thirty-nine pregnant women in the second stage of labor, with fetus in cephalic presentation, underwent conventional labor management with additional translabial sonographic examination. AoP was measured in a total of 95 acquisition sessions, both automatically by an innovative algorithm and manually by an experienced sonographer, who was blinded to the algorithm outcome. The results obtained from the manual measurement were used as the reference against which the performance of the algorithm was assessed. In order to overcome the common difficulties encountered when visualizing by sonography the pubic symphysis, the AoP was measured by considering as the symphysis landmark its centroid rather than its distal point, thereby assuring high measurement reliability and reproducibility, while maintaining objectivity and accuracy in the evaluation of progression of labor. There was a strong and statistically significant correlation between AoP values measured by the algorithm and the reference values (r = 0.99, P < 0.001). The high accuracy provided by the automatic method was also highlighted by the corresponding high values of the coefficient of determination (r 2  = 0.98) and the low residual errors (root mean square error = 2°27' (2.1%)). The global agreement between the two methods, assessed through Bland-Altman analysis, resulted in a negligible mean difference of 1°1' (limits of agreement, 4°29'). The proposed automatic algorithm is a reliable technique for measurement of the AoP. Its (relative) operator-independence has the potential to reduce human errors and speed up ultrasound acquisition time, which should facilitate management of women during labor. Copyright © 2017 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Copyright © 2017 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Enhancing interpretability of automatically extracted machine learning features: application to a RBM-Random Forest system on brain lesion segmentation.

Science.gov (United States)

Pereira, Sérgio; Meier, Raphael; McKinley, Richard; Wiest, Roland; Alves, Victor; Silva, Carlos A; Reyes, Mauricio

2018-02-01

Machine learning systems are achieving better performances at the cost of becoming increasingly complex. However, because of that, they become less interpretable, which may cause some distrust by the end-user of the system. This is especially important as these systems are pervasively being introduced to critical domains, such as the medical field. Representation Learning techniques are general methods for automatic feature computation. Nevertheless, these techniques are regarded as uninterpretable "black boxes". In this paper, we propose a methodology to enhance the interpretability of automatically extracted machine learning features. The proposed system is composed of a Restricted Boltzmann Machine for unsupervised feature learning, and a Random Forest classifier, which are combined to jointly consider existing correlations between imaging data, features, and target variables. We define two levels of interpretation: global and local. The former is devoted to understanding if the system learned the relevant relations in the data correctly, while the later is focused on predictions performed on a voxel- and patient-level. In addition, we propose a novel feature importance strategy that considers both imaging data and target variables, and we demonstrate the ability of the approach to leverage the interpretability of the obtained representation for the task at hand. We evaluated the proposed methodology in brain tumor segmentation and penumbra estimation in ischemic stroke lesions. We show the ability of the proposed methodology to unveil information regarding relationships between imaging modalities and extracted features and their usefulness for the task at hand. In both clinical scenarios, we demonstrate that the proposed methodology enhances the interpretability of automatically learned features, highlighting specific learning patterns that resemble how an expert extracts relevant data from medical images. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Facial emotion processing in pediatric social anxiety disorder: Relevance of situational context.

Science.gov (United States)

Schwab, Daniela; Schienle, Anne

2017-08-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) typically begins in childhood. Previous research has demonstrated that adult patients respond with elevated late positivity (LP) to negative facial expressions. In the present study on pediatric SAD, we investigated responses to negative facial expressions and the role of social context information. Fifteen children with SAD and 15 non-anxious controls were first presented with images of negative facial expressions with masked backgrounds. Following this, the complete images which included context information, were shown. The negative expressions were either a result of an emotion-relevant (e.g., social exclusion) or emotion-irrelevant elicitor (e.g., weight lifting). Relative to controls, the clinical group showed elevated parietal LP during face processing with and without context information. Both groups differed in their frontal LP depending on the type of context. In SAD patients, frontal LP was lower in emotion-relevant than emotion-irrelevant contexts. We conclude that SAD patients direct more automatic attention towards negative facial expressions (parietal effect) and are less capable in integrating affective context information (frontal effect). Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

30 CFR 75.1403-4 - Criteria-Automatic elevators.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... appropriate on automatic elevators which will automatically shut-off the power and apply the brakes in the... telephone or other effective communication system by which aid or assistance can be obtained promptly. ...

Automatic positioning control device for automatic control rod exchanger

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nasu, Seiji; Sasaki, Masayoshi.

1982-01-01

Purpose: To attain accurate positioning for a control rod exchanger. Constitution: The present position for an automatic control rod exchanger is detected by a synchro generator. An aimed stopping position for the exchanger, a stop instruction range depending on the distantial operation delay in the control system and the inertia-running distance of the mechanical system, and a coincidence confirmation range depending on the required positioning accuracy are previously set. If there is a difference between the present position and the aimed stopping position, the automatic exchanger is caused to run toward the aimed stopping position. A stop instruction is generated upon arrival at the position within said stop instruction range, and a coincidence confirmation signal is generated upon arrival at the position within the coincidence confirmation range. Since uncertain factors such as operation delay in the control system and the inertia-running distance of the mechanical system that influence the positioning accuracy are made definite by the method of actual measurement or the like and the stop instruction range and the coincidence confirmation range are set based on the measured data, the accuracy for the positioning can be improved. (Ikeda, J.)

Automatic size analysis of coated fuel particles

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wallisch, K.; Koss, P.

1977-01-01

The determination of the diameter, coating thickness, and sphericity of coated fuel particles by conventional methods is very time consuming. Therefore, statistical data can only be obtained with limited accuracy. An alternative method is described that avoids these disadvantages by utilizing a fast optical data-collecting system of high accuracy. This system allows the determination of the diameter of particles in the range between 100 and 1500 μm, with an accuracy of better than +-2 μm and with a rate of 100 particles per second. The density and thickness of coating layers can be determined by comparing the data obtained before and after coating, taking into account the relative increase of weight. A special device allows the automatic determination of the sphericity of single particles as well as the distribution in a batch. This device measures 50 to 100 different diameters of each particle per second. An on-line computer stores the measured data and calculates all parameters required, e.g., number of particles measured, particle diameter, standard deviation, diameter limiting values, average particle volume, average particle surface area, and the distribution of sphericity in absolute and percent form

Modulation of the mirror system by social relevance.

Science.gov (United States)

Kilner, James M; Marchant, Jennifer L; Frith, Chris D

2006-09-01

When we observe the actions of others, certain areas of the brain are activated in a similar manner as to when we perform the same actions ourselves. This 'mirror system' includes areas in the ventral premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobule. Experimental studies suggest that action observation automatically elicits activity in the observer, which precisely mirrors the activity observed. In this case we would expect this activity to be independent of observer's viewpoint. Here we use whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record cortical activity of human subjects whilst they watched a series of videos of an actor making a movement recorded from different viewpoints. We show that one cortical response to action observation (oscillatory activity in the 7-12 Hz frequency range) is modulated by the relationship between the observer and the actor. We suggest that this modulation reflects a mechanism that filters information into the 'mirror system', allowing only socially relevant information to pass.

The policy relevance of global environmental change research

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yarnal, Brent

1996-01-01

Many scientists are striving to identify and promote the policy implications of their global change research. Much basic research on global environmental change cannot advance policy directly, but new projects can determine the relevance of their research to decision makers and build policy-relevant products into the work. Similarly, many ongoing projects can alter or add to the present science design to make the research policy relevant. Thus, this paper shows scientists working on global change how to make their research policy relevant. It demonstrates how research on physical global change relates to human dimensions studies and integrated assessments. It also presents an example of how policy relevance can be fit retroactively into a global change project (in this case, SRBEX-the Susquehanna River Basin Experiment) and how that addition can enhance the project's status and science. The paper concludes that policy relevance is desirable from social and scientific perspectives

Automatic Operation For A Robot Lawn Mower

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Y. Y.; Cao, Z. L.; Oh, S. J.; Kattan, E. U.; Hall, E. L.

1987-02-01

A domestic mobile robot, lawn mower, which performs the automatic operation mode, has been built up in the Center of Robotics Research, University of Cincinnati. The robot lawn mower automatically completes its work with the region filling operation, a new kind of path planning for mobile robots. Some strategies for region filling of path planning have been developed for a partly-known or a unknown environment. Also, an advanced omnidirectional navigation system and a multisensor-based control system are used in the automatic operation. Research on the robot lawn mower, especially on the region filling of path planning, is significant in industrial and agricultural applications.

Musical space synesthesia: automatic, explicit and conceptual connections between musical stimuli and space.

Science.gov (United States)

Akiva-Kabiri, Lilach; Linkovski, Omer; Gertner, Limor; Henik, Avishai

2014-08-01

In musical-space synesthesia, musical pitches are perceived as having a spatially defined array. Previous studies showed that symbolic inducers (e.g., numbers, months) can modulate response according to the inducer's relative position on the synesthetic spatial form. In the current study we tested two musical-space synesthetes and a group of matched controls on three different tasks: musical-space mapping, spatial cue detection and a spatial Stroop-like task. In the free mapping task, both synesthetes exhibited a diagonal organization of musical pitch tones rising from bottom left to the top right. This organization was found to be consistent over time. In the subsequent tasks, synesthetes were asked to ignore an auditory or visually presented musical pitch (irrelevant information) and respond to a visual target (i.e., an asterisk) on the screen (relevant information). Compatibility between musical pitch and the target's spatial location was manipulated to be compatible or incompatible with the synesthetes' spatial representations. In the spatial cue detection task participants had to press the space key immediately upon detecting the target. In the Stroop-like task, they had to reach the target by using a mouse cursor. In both tasks, synesthetes' performance was modulated by the compatibility between irrelevant and relevant spatial information. Specifically, the target's spatial location conflicted with the spatial information triggered by the irrelevant musical stimulus. These results reveal that for musical-space synesthetes, musical information automatically orients attention according to their specific spatial musical-forms. The present study demonstrates the genuineness of musical-space synesthesia by revealing its two hallmarks-automaticity and consistency. In addition, our results challenge previous findings regarding an implicit vertical representation for pitch tones in non-synesthete musicians. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Characterizing chaotic melodies in automatic music composition

Science.gov (United States)

Coca, Andrés E.; Tost, Gerard O.; Zhao, Liang

2010-09-01

In this paper, we initially present an algorithm for automatic composition of melodies using chaotic dynamical systems. Afterward, we characterize chaotic music in a comprehensive way as comprising three perspectives: musical discrimination, dynamical influence on musical features, and musical perception. With respect to the first perspective, the coherence between generated chaotic melodies (continuous as well as discrete chaotic melodies) and a set of classical reference melodies is characterized by statistical descriptors and melodic measures. The significant differences among the three types of melodies are determined by discriminant analysis. Regarding the second perspective, the influence of dynamical features of chaotic attractors, e.g., Lyapunov exponent, Hurst coefficient, and correlation dimension, on melodic features is determined by canonical correlation analysis. The last perspective is related to perception of originality, complexity, and degree of melodiousness (Euler's gradus suavitatis) of chaotic and classical melodies by nonparametric statistical tests.

Automatic face morphing for transferring facial animation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bui Huu Trung, B.H.T.; Bui, T.D.; Poel, Mannes; Heylen, Dirk K.J.; Nijholt, Antinus; Hamza, H.M.

2003-01-01

In this paper, we introduce a novel method of automatically finding the training set of RBF networks for morphing a prototype face to represent a new face. This is done by automatically specifying and adjusting corresponding feature points on a target face. The RBF networks are then used to transfer

Automatic needle insertion diminishes pain during growth hormone injection

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Main, K M; Jørgensen, J T; Hertel, N T

1995-01-01

prototype pens for GH administration, providing either manual or automatic sc needle insertion, using a combined visual analogue/facial scale and a five-item scale in 18 children. With the automatic pen there was a significantly lower maximum pain score compared with the manual pen (median 28.5 versus 52.......0 mm) as well as a lower mean pain score (mean 13.7 versus 23.5 mm). The five-item scale revealed that automatic needle insertion was significantly less painful than manual insertion and 13 patients chose to continue treatment with the automatic pen. In conclusion, pain during GH injection can...

Information processing requirements for on-board monitoring of automatic landing

Science.gov (United States)

Sorensen, J. A.; Karmarkar, J. S.

1977-01-01

A systematic procedure is presented for determining the information processing requirements for on-board monitoring of automatic landing systems. The monitoring system detects landing anomalies through use of appropriate statistical tests. The time-to-correct aircraft perturbations is determined from covariance analyses using a sequence of suitable aircraft/autoland/pilot models. The covariance results are used to establish landing safety and a fault recovery operating envelope via an event outcome tree. This procedure is demonstrated with examples using the NASA Terminal Configured Vehicle (B-737 aircraft). The procedure can also be used to define decision height, assess monitoring implementation requirements, and evaluate alternate autoland configurations.

Exposure to violent video games increases automatic aggressiveness.

Science.gov (United States)

Uhlmann, Eric; Swanson, Jane

2004-02-01

The effects of exposure to violent video games on automatic associations with the self were investigated in a sample of 121 students. Playing the violent video game Doom led participants to associate themselves with aggressive traits and actions on the Implicit Association Test. In addition, self-reported prior exposure to violent video games predicted automatic aggressive self-concept, above and beyond self-reported aggression. Results suggest that playing violent video games can lead to the automatic learning of aggressive self-views.

Automatic Knowledge Extraction and Knowledge Structuring for a National Term Bank

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lassen, Tine; Madsen, Bodil Nistrup; Erdman Thomsen, Hanne

2011-01-01

This paper gives an introduction to the plans and ongoing work in a project, the aim of which is to develop methods for automatic knowledge extraction and automatic construction and updating of ontologies. The project also aims at developing methods for automatic merging of terminological data fr...... various existing sources, as well as methods for target group oriented knowledge dissemination. In this paper, we mainly focus on the plans for automatic knowledge extraction and knowledge structuring that will result in ontologies for a national term bank.......This paper gives an introduction to the plans and ongoing work in a project, the aim of which is to develop methods for automatic knowledge extraction and automatic construction and updating of ontologies. The project also aims at developing methods for automatic merging of terminological data from...

Development of automatic ultrasonic testing system and its application

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oh, Sang Hong; Matsuura, Toshihiko; Iwata, Ryusuke; Nakagawa, Michio; Horikawa, Kohsuke; Kim, You Chul

1997-01-01

The radiographic testing (RT) has been usually applied to a nondestructive testing, which is carried out on purpose to detect internal defects at welded joints of a penstock. In the case that RT could not be applied to, the ultrasonic testing (UT) was performed. UT was generally carried out by manual scanning and the inspections data were recorded by the inspector in a site. So, as a weak point, there was no objective inspection records correspond to films of RT. It was expected that the automatic ultrasonic testing system by which automatic scanning and automatic recording are possible was developed. In this respect, the automatic ultrasonic testing system was developed. Using newly developed the automatic ultrasonic testing system, test results to the circumferential welded joints of the penstock at a site were shown in this paper.

Alexithymia is associated with attenuated automatic brain response to facial emotion in clinical depression.

Science.gov (United States)

Suslow, Thomas; Kugel, Harald; Rufer, Michael; Redlich, Ronny; Dohm, Katharina; Grotegerd, Dominik; Zaremba, Dario; Dannlowski, Udo

2016-02-04

Alexithymia is a clinically relevant personality trait related to difficulties in recognizing and describing emotions. Previous studies examining the neural correlates of alexithymia have shown mainly decreased response of several brain areas during emotion processing in healthy samples and patients suffering from autism or post-traumatic stress disorder. In the present study, we examined the effect of alexithymia on automatic brain reactivity to negative and positive facial expressions in clinical depression. Brain activation in response to sad, happy, neutral, and no facial expression (presented for 33 ms and masked by neutral faces) was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T in 26 alexithymic and 26 non-alexithymic patients with major depression. Alexithymic patients manifested less activation in response to masked sad and happy (compared to neutral) faces in right frontal regions and right caudate nuclei than non-alexithymic patients. Our neuroimaging study provides evidence that the personality trait alexithymia has a modulating effect on automatic emotion processing in clinical depression. Our findings support the idea that alexithymia could be associated with functional deficits of the right hemisphere. Future research on the neural substrates of emotion processing in depression should assess and control alexithymia in their analyses.

Full automatic fiducial marker detection on coil arrays for accurate instrumentation placement during MRI guided breast interventions

Science.gov (United States)

Filippatos, Konstantinos; Boehler, Tobias; Geisler, Benjamin; Zachmann, Harald; Twellmann, Thorsten

2010-02-01

With its high sensitivity, dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging (DCE-MRI) of the breast is today one of the first-line tools for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer, particularly in the dense breast of young women. However, many relevant findings are very small or occult on targeted ultrasound images or mammography, so that MRI guided biopsy is the only option for a precise histological work-up [1]. State-of-the-art software tools for computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer in DCE-MRI data offer also means for image-based planning of biopsy interventions. One step in the MRI guided biopsy workflow is the alignment of the patient position with the preoperative MR images. In these images, the location and orientation of the coil localization unit can be inferred from a number of fiducial markers, which for this purpose have to be manually or semi-automatically detected by the user. In this study, we propose a method for precise, full-automatic localization of fiducial markers, on which basis a virtual localization unit can be subsequently placed in the image volume for the purpose of determining the parameters for needle navigation. The method is based on adaptive thresholding for separating breast tissue from background followed by rigid registration of marker templates. In an evaluation of 25 clinical cases comprising 4 different commercial coil array models and 3 different MR imaging protocols, the method yielded a sensitivity of 0.96 at a false positive rate of 0.44 markers per case. The mean distance deviation between detected fiducial centers and ground truth information that was appointed from a radiologist was 0.94mm.

Automatic change detection to facial expressions in adolescents

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Liu, Tongran; Xiao, Tong; Jiannong, Shi

2016-01-01

Adolescence is a critical period for the neurodevelopment of social-emotional processing, wherein the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions is crucial for the development of interpersonal communication. Two groups of participants (an adolescent group and an adult group) were...... in facial expressions between the two age groups. The current findings demonstrated that the adolescent group featured more negative vMMN amplitudes than the adult group in the fronto-central region during the 120–200 ms interval. During the time window of 370–450 ms, only the adult group showed better...... automatic processing on fearful faces than happy faces. The present study indicated that adolescent’s posses stronger automatic detection of changes in emotional expression relative to adults, and sheds light on the neurodevelopment of automatic processes concerning social-emotional information....

Automatic Generation of Mashups for Personalized Commerce in Digital TV by Semantic Reasoning

Science.gov (United States)

Blanco-Fernández, Yolanda; López-Nores, Martín; Pazos-Arias, José J.; Martín-Vicente, Manuela I.

The evolution of information technologies is consolidating recommender systems as essential tools in e-commerce. To date, these systems have focused on discovering the items that best match the preferences, interests and needs of individual users, to end up listing those items by decreasing relevance in some menus. In this paper, we propose extending the current scope of recommender systems to better support trading activities, by automatically generating interactive applications that provide the users with personalized commercial functionalities related to the selected items. We explore this idea in the context of Digital TV advertising, with a system that brings together semantic reasoning techniques and new architectural solutions for web services and mashups.

Automatic Control of Silicon Melt Level

Science.gov (United States)

Duncan, C. S.; Stickel, W. B.

1982-01-01

A new circuit, when combined with melt-replenishment system and melt level sensor, offers continuous closed-loop automatic control of melt-level during web growth. Installed on silicon-web furnace, circuit controls melt-level to within 0.1 mm for as long as 8 hours. Circuit affords greater area growth rate and higher web quality, automatic melt-level control also allows semiautomatic growth of web over long periods which can greatly reduce costs.

Improvement of the exponential experiment system for the automatical and accurate measurement of the exponential decay constant

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shin, Hee Sung; Jang, Ji Woon; Lee, Yoon Hee; Hwang, Yong Hwa; Kim, Ho Dong

2004-01-01

The previous exponential experiment system has been improved for the automatical and accurate axial movement of the neutron source and detector with attaching the automatical control system which consists of a Programmable Logical Controller(PLC) and a stepping motor set. The automatic control program which controls MCA and PLC consistently has been also developed on the basis of GENIE 2000 library. The exponential experiments have been carried out for Kori 1 unit spent fuel assemblies, C14, J14 and G23, and Kori 2 unit spent fuel assembly, J44, using the improved systematical measurement system. As the results, the average exponential decay constants for 4 assemblies are determined to be 0.1302, 0.1267, 0.1247, and 0.1210, respectively, with the application of poisson regression

Bianchi identities and the automatic conservation of energy-momentum and angular momentum in general-relativistic field theories

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hehl, F.W.; McCrea, J.D.

1986-01-01

Automatic conservation of energy-momentum and angular momentum is guaranteed in a gravitational theory if, via the field equations, the conservation laws for the material currents are reduced to the contracted Bianchi identities. We first execute an irreducible decomposition of the Bianchi identities in a Riemann-Cartan space-time. Then, starting from a Riemannian space-time with or without torsion, we determine those gravitational theories which have automatic conservation: general relativity and the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory, both with cosmological constant, and the nonviable pseudoscalar model. The Poincare gauge theory of gravity, like gauge theories of internal groups, has no automatic conservation in the sense defined above. This does not lead to any difficulties in principle. Analogies to 3-dimensional continuum mechanics are stressed throughout the article

Bianchi identities and the automatic conservation of energy-momentum and angular momentum in general-relativistic field theories

Science.gov (United States)

Hehl, Friedrich W.; McCrea, J. Dermott

1986-03-01

Automatic conservation of energy-momentum and angular momentum is guaranteed in a gravitational theory if, via the field equations, the conservation laws for the material currents are reduced to the contracted Bianchi identities. We first execute an irreducible decomposition of the Bianchi identities in a Riemann-Cartan space-time. Then, starting from a Riemannian space-time with or without torsion, we determine those gravitational theories which have automatic conservation: general relativity and the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory, both with cosmological constant, and the nonviable pseudoscalar model. The Poincaré gauge theory of gravity, like gauge theories of internal groups, has no automatic conservation in the sense defined above. This does not lead to any difficulties in principle. Analogies to 3-dimensional continuum mechanics are stressed throughout the article.

Automatic design of decision-tree induction algorithms tailored to flexible-receptor docking data.

Science.gov (United States)

Barros, Rodrigo C; Winck, Ana T; Machado, Karina S; Basgalupp, Márcio P; de Carvalho, André C P L F; Ruiz, Duncan D; de Souza, Osmar Norberto

2012-11-21

This paper addresses the prediction of the free energy of binding of a drug candidate with enzyme InhA associated with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This problem is found within rational drug design, where interactions between drug candidates and target proteins are verified through molecular docking simulations. In this application, it is important not only to correctly predict the free energy of binding, but also to provide a comprehensible model that could be validated by a domain specialist. Decision-tree induction algorithms have been successfully used in drug-design related applications, specially considering that decision trees are simple to understand, interpret, and validate. There are several decision-tree induction algorithms available for general-use, but each one has a bias that makes it more suitable for a particular data distribution. In this article, we propose and investigate the automatic design of decision-tree induction algorithms tailored to particular drug-enzyme binding data sets. We investigate the performance of our new method for evaluating binding conformations of different drug candidates to InhA, and we analyze our findings with respect to decision tree accuracy, comprehensibility, and biological relevance. The empirical analysis indicates that our method is capable of automatically generating decision-tree induction algorithms that significantly outperform the traditional C4.5 algorithm with respect to both accuracy and comprehensibility. In addition, we provide the biological interpretation of the rules generated by our approach, reinforcing the importance of comprehensible predictive models in this particular bioinformatics application. We conclude that automatically designing a decision-tree algorithm tailored to molecular docking data is a promising alternative for the prediction of the free energy from the binding of a drug candidate with a flexible-receptor.

Using Probe Vehicle Data for Automatic Extraction of Road Traffic Parameters

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roman Popescu Maria Alexandra

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Through this paper the author aims to study and find solutions for automatic detection of traffic light position and for automatic calculation of the waiting time at traffic light. The first objective serves mainly the road transportation field, mainly because it removes the need for collaboration with local authorities to establish a national network of traffic lights. The second objective is important not only for companies which are providing navigation solutions, but especially for authorities, institutions, companies operating in road traffic management systems. Real-time dynamic determination of traffic queue length and of waiting time at traffic lights allow the creation of dynamic systems, intelligent and flexible, adapted to actual traffic conditions, and not to generic, theoretical models. Thus, cities can approach the Smart City concept by boosting, efficienting and greening the road transport, promoted in Europe through the Horizon 2020, Smart Cities, Urban Mobility initiative.

Automatic Payroll Deposit System.

Science.gov (United States)

Davidson, D. B.

1979-01-01

The Automatic Payroll Deposit System in Yakima, Washington's Public School District No. 7, directly transmits each employee's salary amount for each pay period to a bank or other financial institution. (Author/MLF)

Thai Automatic Speech Recognition

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Suebvisai, Sinaporn; Charoenpornsawat, Paisarn; Black, Alan; Woszczyna, Monika; Schultz, Tanja

2005-01-01

.... We focus on the discussion of the rapid deployment of ASR for Thai under limited time and data resources, including rapid data collection issues, acoustic model bootstrap, and automatic generation of pronunciations...

Decaying relevance of clinical data towards future decisions in data-driven inpatient clinical order sets.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Jonathan H; Alagappan, Muthuraman; Goldstein, Mary K; Asch, Steven M; Altman, Russ B

2017-06-01

Determine how varying longitudinal historical training data can impact prediction of future clinical decisions. Estimate the "decay rate" of clinical data source relevance. We trained a clinical order recommender system, analogous to Netflix or Amazon's "Customers who bought A also bought B..." product recommenders, based on a tertiary academic hospital's structured electronic health record data. We used this system to predict future (2013) admission orders based on different subsets of historical training data (2009 through 2012), relative to existing human-authored order sets. Predicting future (2013) inpatient orders is more accurate with models trained on just one month of recent (2012) data than with 12 months of older (2009) data (ROC AUC 0.91 vs. 0.88, precision 27% vs. 22%, recall 52% vs. 43%, all P<10 -10 ). Algorithmically learned models from even the older (2009) data was still more effective than existing human-authored order sets (ROC AUC 0.81, precision 16% recall 35%). Training with more longitudinal data (2009-2012) was no better than using only the most recent (2012) data, unless applying a decaying weighting scheme with a "half-life" of data relevance about 4 months. Clinical practice patterns (automatically) learned from electronic health record data can vary substantially across years. Gold standards for clinical decision support are elusive moving targets, reinforcing the need for automated methods that can adapt to evolving information. Prioritizing small amounts of recent data is more effective than using larger amounts of older data towards future clinical predictions. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automatic single questionnaire intensity (SQI, EMS98 scale) estimation using ranking models built on the existing BCSF database

Science.gov (United States)

Schlupp, A.; Sira, C.; Schmitt, K.; Schaming, M.

2013-12-01

In charge of intensity estimations in France, BCSF has collected and manually analyzed more than 47000 online individual macroseismic questionnaires since 2000 up to intensity VI. These macroseismic data allow us to estimate one SQI value (Single Questionnaire Intensity) for each form following the EMS98 scale. The reliability of the automatic intensity estimation is important as they are today used for automatic shakemaps communications and crisis management. Today, the automatic intensity estimation at BCSF is based on the direct use of thumbnails selected on a menu by the witnesses. Each thumbnail corresponds to an EMS-98 intensity value, allowing us to quickly issue an intensity map of the communal intensity by averaging the SQIs at each city. Afterwards an expert, to determine a definitive SQI, manually analyzes each form. This work is time consuming and not anymore suitable considering the increasing number of testimonies at BCSF. Nevertheless, it can take into account incoherent answers. We tested several automatic methods (USGS algorithm, Correlation coefficient, Thumbnails) (Sira et al. 2013, IASPEI) and compared them with 'expert' SQIs. These methods gave us medium score (between 50 to 60% of well SQI determined and 35 to 40% with plus one or minus one intensity degree). The best fit was observed with the thumbnails. Here, we present new approaches based on 3 statistical ranking methods as 1) Multinomial logistic regression model, 2) Discriminant analysis DISQUAL and 3) Support vector machines (SVMs). The two first methods are standard methods, while the third one is more recent. Theses methods could be applied because the BCSF has already in his database more then 47000 forms and because their questions and answers are well adapted for a statistical analysis. The ranking models could then be used as automatic method constrained on expert analysis. The performance of the automatic methods and the reliability of the estimated SQI can be evaluated thanks to

Piloted Simulation Evaluation of a Model-Predictive Automatic Recovery System to Prevent Vehicle Loss of Control on Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Litt, Jonathan S.; Liu, Yuan; Sowers, Thomas S.; Owen, A. Karl; Guo, Ten-Huei

2014-01-01

This paper describes a model-predictive automatic recovery system for aircraft on the verge of a loss-of-control situation. The system determines when it must intervene to prevent an imminent accident, resulting from a poor approach. It estimates the altitude loss that would result from a go-around maneuver at the current flight condition. If the loss is projected to violate a minimum altitude threshold, the maneuver is automatically triggered. The system deactivates to allow landing once several criteria are met. Piloted flight simulator evaluation showed the system to provide effective envelope protection during extremely unsafe landing attempts. The results demonstrate how flight and propulsion control can be integrated to recover control of the vehicle automatically and prevent a potential catastrophe.

Region-Based Image Retrieval Using an Object Ontology and Relevance Feedback

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kompatsiaris Ioannis

2004-01-01

Full Text Available An image retrieval methodology suited for search in large collections of heterogeneous images is presented. The proposed approach employs a fully unsupervised segmentation algorithm to divide images into regions and endow the indexing and retrieval system with content-based functionalities. Low-level descriptors for the color, position, size, and shape of each region are subsequently extracted. These arithmetic descriptors are automatically associated with appropriate qualitative intermediate-level descriptors, which form a simple vocabulary termed object ontology. The object ontology is used to allow the qualitative definition of the high-level concepts the user queries for (semantic objects, each represented by a keyword and their relations in a human-centered fashion. When querying for a specific semantic object (or objects, the intermediate-level descriptor values associated with both the semantic object and all image regions in the collection are initially compared, resulting in the rejection of most image regions as irrelevant. Following that, a relevance feedback mechanism, based on support vector machines and using the low-level descriptors, is invoked to rank the remaining potentially relevant image regions and produce the final query results. Experimental results and comparisons demonstrate, in practice, the effectiveness of our approach.

A novel automatic flow method with direct-injection photometric detector for determination of dissolved reactive phosphorus in wastewater and freshwater samples.

Science.gov (United States)

Koronkiewicz, Stanislawa; Trifescu, Mihaela; Smoczynski, Lech; Ratnaweera, Harsha; Kalinowski, Slawomir

2018-02-12

The novel automatic flow system, direct-injection detector (DID) integrated with multi-pumping flow system (MPFS), dedicated for the photometric determination of orthophosphates in wastewater and freshwater samples is for the first time described. All reagents and the sample were injected simultaneously, in counter-current into the reaction-detection chamber by the system of specially selected for this purpose solenoid micro-pumps. The micro-pumps provided good precision and accuracy of the injected volumes. For the determination of orthophosphates, the molybdenum blue method was employed. The developed method can be used to detect orthophosphate in the range 0.1-12 mg L -1 , with the repeatability (RSD) about 2.2% at 4 mg L -1 and a very high injection throughput of 120 injections h -1 . It was possible to achieve a very small consumption of reagents (10 μL of ammonium molybdate and 10 μL of ascorbic acid) and sample (20 μL). The volume of generated waste was only 440 μL per analysis. The method has been successfully applied, giving a good accuracy, to determination of orthophosphates in complex matrix samples: treated wastewater, lake water and reference sample of groundwater. The developed system is compact, small in both size and weight, requires 12 V in supply voltage, which are desirable for truly portable equipment used in routine analysis. The simplicity of the system should result in its greater long-time reliability comparing to other flow methods previously described.

Feature relevance assessment for the semantic interpretation of 3D point cloud data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. Weinmann

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The automatic analysis of large 3D point clouds represents a crucial task in photogrammetry, remote sensing and computer vision. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for the semantic interpretation of such point clouds which involves feature relevance assessment in order to reduce both processing time and memory consumption. Given a standard benchmark dataset with 1.3 million 3D points, we first extract a set of 21 geometric 3D and 2D features. Subsequently, we apply a classifier-independent ranking procedure which involves a general relevance metric in order to derive compact and robust subsets of versatile features which are generally applicable for a large variety of subsequent tasks. This metric is based on 7 different feature selection strategies and thus addresses different intrinsic properties of the given data. For the example of semantically interpreting 3D point cloud data, we demonstrate the great potential of smaller subsets consisting of only the most relevant features with 4 different state-of-the-art classifiers. The results reveal that, instead of including as many features as possible in order to compensate for lack of knowledge, a crucial task such as scene interpretation can be carried out with only few versatile features and even improved accuracy.

Heads for learning, tails for memory: Reward, reinforcement and a role of dopamine in determining behavioural relevance across multiple timescales

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mathieu eBaudonnat

2013-10-01

Full Text Available Dopamine has long been tightly associated with aspects of reinforcement learning and motivation in simple situations where there are a limited number of stimuli to guide behaviour and constrained range of outcomes. In naturalistic situations, however, there are many potential cues and foraging strategies that could be adopted, and it is critical that animals determine what might be behaviourally relevant in such complex environments. This requires not only detecting discrepancies with what they have recently experienced, but also identifying similarities with past experiences stored in memory. Here, we review what role dopamine might play in determining how and when to learn about the world, and how to develop choice policies appropriate to the situation faced. We discuss evidence that dopamine is shaped by motivation and memory and in turn shapes reward-based memory formation. In particular, we suggest that hippocampal-striatal-dopamine networks may interact to determine how surprising the world is and to either inhibit or promote actions at time of behavioural uncertainty.

Development of an Automatic Testing Platform for Aviator’s Night Vision Goggle Honeycomb Defect Inspection

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bo-Lin Jian

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Due to the direct influence of night vision equipment availability on the safety of night-time aerial reconnaissance, maintenance needs to be carried out regularly. Unfortunately, some defects are not easy to observe or are not even detectable by human eyes. As a consequence, this study proposed a novel automatic defect detection system for aviator’s night vision imaging systems AN/AVS-6(V1 and AN/AVS-6(V2. An auto-focusing process consisting of a sharpness calculation and a gradient-based variable step search method is applied to achieve an automatic detection system for honeycomb defects. This work also developed a test platform for sharpness measurement. It demonstrates that the honeycomb defects can be precisely recognized and the number of the defects can also be determined automatically during the inspection. Most importantly, the proposed approach significantly reduces the time consumption, as well as human assessment error during the night vision goggle inspection procedures.

Adaptive pseudolinear compensators of dynamic characteristics of automatic control systems

Science.gov (United States)

Skorospeshkin, M. V.; Sukhodoev, M. S.; Timoshenko, E. A.; Lenskiy, F. V.

2016-04-01

Adaptive pseudolinear gain and phase compensators of dynamic characteristics of automatic control systems are suggested. The automatic control system performance with adaptive compensators has been explored. The efficiency of pseudolinear adaptive compensators in the automatic control systems with time-varying parameters has been demonstrated.

Automatic Complexity Analysis

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rosendahl, Mads

1989-01-01

One way to analyse programs is to to derive expressions for their computational behaviour. A time bound function (or worst-case complexity) gives an upper bound for the computation time as a function of the size of input. We describe a system to derive such time bounds automatically using abstract...

Metabolic changes in occipital lobe epilepsy with automatisms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chong H Wong

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Purpose: Some studies suggest that the pattern of glucose hypometabolism relates not only to the ictal-onset zone, but also reflects seizure propagation. We investigated metabolic changes in patients with occipital lobe epilepsy (OLE that may reflect propagation of ictal discharge during seizures with automatisms.Methods: Fifteen patients who had undergone epilepsy surgery for intractable OLE and had undergone interictal Fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG-PET between 1994 and 2004 were divided into two groups (with and without automatisms during seizure. Significant regions of hypometabolism were identified by comparing 18F-FDG-PET results from each group with 16 healthy controls by using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM 2.Key Findings: Significant hypometabolism was confined largely to the epileptogenic occipital lobe in the patient group without automatisms. In patients with automatisms, glucose hypometabolism extended from the epileptogenic occipital lobe into the ipsilateral temporal lobe.Significance: We identified a distinctive hypometabolic pattern that was specific for OLE patients with automatisms during a seizure. This finding supports the postulate that seizure propagation is a cause of glucose hypometabolism beyond the region of seizure onset.

Analysis of hydrogen and methane in seawater by "Headspace" method: Determination at trace level with an automatic headspace sampler.

Science.gov (United States)

Donval, J P; Guyader, V

2017-01-01

"Headspace" technique is one of the methods for the onboard measurement of hydrogen (H 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ) in deep seawater. Based on the principle of an automatic headspace commercial sampler, a specific device has been developed to automatically inject gas samples from 300ml syringes (gas phase in equilibrium with seawater). As valves, micro pump, oven and detector are independent, a gas chromatograph is not necessary allowing a reduction of the weight and dimensions of the analytical system. The different steps from seawater sampling to gas injection are described. Accuracy of the method is checked by a comparison with the "purge and trap" technique. The detection limit is estimated to 0.3nM for hydrogen and 0.1nM for methane which is close to the background value in deep seawater. It is also shown that this system can be used to analyze other gases such as Nitrogen (N 2 ), carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and light hydrocarbons. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Knowledge-based full-automatic control system for a nuclear ship reactor

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shimazaki, J.; Nakazawa, T.; Yabuuchi, N.

2000-01-01

Plant operations aboard nuclear ships require quick judgements and actions due to changing marine conditions such as wind, waves and currents. Furthermore, additional human support is not available for nuclear ship operation at sea, so advanced automatic operations are necessary to reduce the number of operators required finally. Therefore, an advanced automatic operating system has been developed based on operational knowledge of nuclear ship 'Mutsu' plant. The advanced automatic operating system includes both the automatic operation system and the operator-support system which assists operators in completing actions during plant accidents, anomaly diagnosis and plant supervision. These system are largely being developed using artificial intelligent techniques such as neural network, fuzzy logic and knowledge-based expert. The automatic operation system is fundamentally based upon application of an operator's knowledge of both normal (start-up to rated power level) and abnormal (after scram) operations. Comparing plant behaviors from start-up to power level by the automatic operation with by 'Mutsu' manual operation, stable automatic operation was obtained almost same as manual operation within all operating limits. The abnormal automatic system was for hard work of manual operations after scram or LOCA accidents. An integrating system with the normal and the abnormal automatic systems are being developed for interacting smoothly both systems. (author)

Applications of the automatic meter reading techniques at the Brazilian gas domestic market; Application des techniques de releve automatique des compteurs sur le marche domestique Bresilien du gaz

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Venancio, J.; Monteiro, F. [Comgas, Sao Paulo (Brazil); D' Oliveira, R.D. [ORBIS, Curitiba (Brazil)

2000-07-01

This article will describe applications of the automation and automatic meter reading techniques at the internal gas pipes installations design, considering residential and commercial buildings, and taking in account the tendency of rapid growth of the activities related to the natural gas industry in Brazil, as well as the recently development of new technologies that can be applied with affordable prices. It will be analysed the application of an automatic meter reading technology in a building of several floors in Sao Paulo, which gas installations design is being carried up, with be purpose of making a comparative cost-effectiveness study with the traditional constructive methods applied in Brazil. As a result, it will be purposed a new commercialization model for the gas in Brazil at the residential and commercial market. (authors)

Automatic structural scene digitalization.

Science.gov (United States)

Tang, Rui; Wang, Yuhan; Cosker, Darren; Li, Wenbin

2017-01-01

In this paper, we present an automatic system for the analysis and labeling of structural scenes, floor plan drawings in Computer-aided Design (CAD) format. The proposed system applies a fusion strategy to detect and recognize various components of CAD floor plans, such as walls, doors, windows and other ambiguous assets. Technically, a general rule-based filter parsing method is fist adopted to extract effective information from the original floor plan. Then, an image-processing based recovery method is employed to correct information extracted in the first step. Our proposed method is fully automatic and real-time. Such analysis system provides high accuracy and is also evaluated on a public website that, on average, archives more than ten thousands effective uses per day and reaches a relatively high satisfaction rate.

Identification of conductive hearing loss using air conduction tests alone: reliability and validity of an automatic test battery.

Science.gov (United States)

Convery, Elizabeth; Keidser, Gitte; Seeto, Mark; Freeston, Katrina; Zhou, Dan; Dillon, Harvey

2014-01-01

The primary objective of this study was to determine whether a combination of automatically administered pure-tone audiometry and a tone-in-noise detection task, both delivered via an air conduction (AC) pathway, could reliably and validly predict the presence of a conductive component to the hearing loss. The authors hypothesized that performance on the battery of tests would vary according to hearing loss type. A secondary objective was to evaluate the reliability and validity of a novel automatic audiometry algorithm to assess its suitability for inclusion in the test battery. Participants underwent a series of hearing assessments that were conducted in a randomized order: manual pure-tone air conduction audiometry and bone conduction audiometry; automatic pure-tone air conduction audiometry; and an automatic tone-in-noise detection task. The automatic tests were each administered twice. The ability of the automatic test battery to: (a) predict the presence of an air-bone gap (ABG); and (b) accurately measure AC hearing thresholds was assessed against the results of manual audiometry. Test-retest conditions were compared to determine the reliability of each component of the automatic test battery. Data were collected on 120 ears from normal-hearing and conductive, sensorineural, and mixed hearing-loss subgroups. Performance differences between different types of hearing loss were observed. Ears with a conductive component (conductive and mixed ears) tended to have normal signal to noise ratios (SNR) despite impaired thresholds in quiet, while ears without a conductive component (normal and sensorineural ears) demonstrated, on average, an increasing relationship between their thresholds in quiet and their achieved SNR. Using the relationship between these two measures among ears with no conductive component as a benchmark, the likelihood that an ear has a conductive component can be estimated based on the deviation from this benchmark. The sensitivity and

Applications Of A Low Cost System For Industrial Automatic Inspection

Science.gov (United States)

Krey, C.; Ayache, A.; Bruel, A.

1987-05-01

In industrial environment, some repetitive tasks wich do not need a high degree of understanding, can be solved automatically owing to Vision. Among the systems available on the market, most of them are rather expensive with various capabilities. The described system is a modular system, built with some standard circuit boards. One of the advantages of this system is that its architecture can be redefined for each application, by assembling judiciously the standard modules. The vision system has been used successfully to sort fruits according to their colour and diameter. The system can sort 8 fruits per second on each sorting line and manage simultaneously up to 16 lines. An application of sheep skin cutting has been implemented too. After chemical and mechanical treatments, the skins present many defaults all around their contour, that must be cut off. A movable camera follows and inspects the contour ; the vision system determines where the cutting device must cut the skin. A third application has been implemented ; it concerns automatic recording and reproduction of logotypes. A moving camera driven by the system picks up the points, of the logotype contours. Before reproduction, programs can modify the logotypes shape, change the scale, and so on. For every application, the system uses the world smallest CCD camera developped in the laboratory. The small dimensions of the vision system and its low cost are major advantages for a wide use in industrial automatic inspection.

Colour transformations and K-means segmentation for automatic cloud detection

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martin Blazek

2015-08-01

Full Text Available The main aim of this work is to find simple criteria for automatic recognition of several meteorological phenomena using optical digital sensors (e.g., Wide-Field cameras, automatic DSLR cameras or robotic telescopes. The output of those sensors is commonly represented in RGB channels containing information about both colour and luminosity even when normalised. Transformation into other colour spaces (e.g., CIE 1931 xyz, CIE L*a*b*, YCbCr can separate colour from luminosity, which is especially useful in the image processing of automatic cloud boundary recognition. Different colour transformations provide different sectorization of cloudy images. Hence, the analysed meteorological phenomena (cloud types, clear sky project differently into the colour diagrams of each international colour systems. In such diagrams, statistical tools can be applied in search of criteria which could determine clear sky from a covered one and possibly even perform a meteorological classification of cloud types. For the purpose of this work, a database of sky images (both clear and cloudy, with emphasis on a variety of different observation conditions (e.g., time, altitude, solar angle, etc. was acquired. The effectiveness of several colour transformations for meteorological application is discussed and the representation of different clouds (or clear sky in those colour systems is analysed. Utilisation of this algorithm would be useful in all-sky surveys, supplementary meteorological observations, solar cell effectiveness predictions or daytime astronomical solar observations.

Computer codes for automatic tuning of the beam transport at the UNILAC

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dahl, L.; Ehrich, A.

1984-01-01

For application in routine operation fully automatic computer controlled algorithms are developed for tuning of beam transport elements at the Unilac. Computations, based on emittance measurements, simulate the beam behaviour and evaluate quadrupole settings, in order to produce defined beam properties at specified positions along the accelerator. The interactive program is controlled using a graphic display on which the beam emittances and envelopes are plotted. To align the beam onto the ion-optical axis of the accelerator two automatic computer controlled procedures have been developed. The misalignment of the beam is determined by variation of quadrupole or steering magnet settings with simultaneous measurement of the beam distribution on profile grids. According to the result a pair of steering magnet settings are adjusted to bend the beam on the axis. The effects of computer controlled tuning on beam quality and operation are reported

Automatic segmentation in three-dimensional analysis of fibrovascular pigmentepithelial detachment using high-definition optical coherence tomography.

Science.gov (United States)

Ahlers, C; Simader, C; Geitzenauer, W; Stock, G; Stetson, P; Dastmalchi, S; Schmidt-Erfurth, U

2008-02-01

A limited number of scans compromise conventional optical coherence tomography (OCT) to track chorioretinal disease in its full extension. Failures in edge-detection algorithms falsify the results of retinal mapping even further. High-definition-OCT (HD-OCT) is based on raster scanning and was used to visualise the localisation and volume of intra- and sub-pigment-epithelial (RPE) changes in fibrovascular pigment epithelial detachments (fPED). Two different scanning patterns were evaluated. 22 eyes with fPED were imaged using a frequency-domain, high-speed prototype of the Cirrus HD-OCT. The axial resolution was 6 mum, and the scanning speed was 25 kA scans/s. Two different scanning patterns covering an area of 6 x 6 mm in the macular retina were compared. Three-dimensional topographic reconstructions and volume calculations were performed using MATLAB-based automatic segmentation software. Detailed information about layer-specific distribution of fluid accumulation and volumetric measurements can be obtained for retinal- and sub-RPE volumes. Both raster scans show a high correlation (p0.89) of measured values, that is PED volume/area, retinal volume and mean retinal thickness. Quality control of the automatic segmentation revealed reasonable results in over 90% of the examinations. Automatic segmentation allows for detailed quantitative and topographic analysis of the RPE and the overlying retina. In fPED, the 128 x 512 scanning-pattern shows mild advantages when compared with the 256 x 256 scan. Together with the ability for automatic segmentation, HD-OCT clearly improves the clinical monitoring of chorioretinal disease by adding relevant new parameters. HD-OCT is likely capable of enhancing the understanding of pathophysiology and benefits of treatment for current anti-CNV strategies in future.

14 CFR 25.904 - Automatic takeoff thrust control system (ATTCS).

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Automatic takeoff thrust control system... Automatic takeoff thrust control system (ATTCS). Each applicant seeking approval for installation of an engine power control system that automatically resets the power or thrust on the operating engine(s) when...

SAVLOC, computer program for automatic control and analysis of X-ray fluorescence experiments

Science.gov (United States)

Leonard, R. F.

1977-01-01

A program for a PDP-15 computer is presented which provides for control and analysis of trace element determinations by using X-ray fluorescence. The program simultaneously handles data accumulation for one sample and analysis of data from previous samples. Data accumulation consists of sample changing, timing, and data storage. Analysis requires the locating of peaks in X-ray spectra, determination of intensities of peaks, identification of origins of peaks, and determination of a real density of the element responsible for each peak. The program may be run in either a manual (supervised) mode or an automatic (unsupervised) mode.

Development of an automatic prompt gamma-ray activation analysis system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Osawa, Takahito

2013-01-01

An automatic prompt gamma-ray activation analysis system was developed and installed at the Japan Research Reactor No. 3 Modified (JRR-3M). The main control software, referred to as AutoPGA, was developed using LabVIEW 2011 and the hand-made program can control all functions of the analytical system. The core of the new system is an automatic sample exchanger and measurement system with several additional automatic control functions integrated into the system. Up to fourteen samples can be automatically measured by the system. (author)

Automatic segmentation of the heart in radiotherapy for breast cancer

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Laugaard Lorenzen, Ebbe; Ewertz, Marianne; Brink, Carsten

2014-01-01

Background. The aim of this study was to evaluate two fully automatic segmentation methods in comparison with manual delineations for their use in delineating the heart on planning computed tomography (CT) used in radiotherapy for breast cancer. Material and methods. Automatic delineation of heart...... in 15 breast cancer patients was performed by two different automatic delineation systems. Analysis of accuracy and precision of the differences between manual and automatic delineations were evaluated on volume, mean dose, maximum dose and spatial distance differences. Two sets of manual delineations...

Spike Pattern Recognition for Automatic Collimation Alignment

CERN Document Server

Azzopardi, Gabriella; Salvachua Ferrando, Belen Maria; Mereghetti, Alessio; Redaelli, Stefano; CERN. Geneva. ATS Department

2017-01-01

The LHC makes use of a collimation system to protect its sensitive equipment by intercepting potentially dangerous beam halo particles. The appropriate collimator settings to protect the machine against beam losses relies on a very precise alignment of all the collimators with respect to the beam. The beam center at each collimator is then found by touching the beam halo using an alignment procedure. Until now, in order to determine whether a collimator is aligned with the beam or not, a user is required to follow the collimator’s BLM loss data and detect spikes. A machine learning (ML) model was trained in order to automatically recognize spikes when a collimator is aligned. The model was loosely integrated with the alignment implementation to determine the classification performance and reliability, without effecting the alignment process itself. The model was tested on a number of collimators during this MD and the machine learning was able to output the classifications in real-time.

The Associate Principal Astronomer for AI Management of Automatic Telescopes

Science.gov (United States)

Henry, Gregory W.

1998-01-01

This research program in scheduling and management of automatic telescopes had the following objectives: 1. To field test the 1993 Automatic Telescope Instruction Set (ATIS93) programming language, which was specifically developed to allow real-time control of an automatic telescope via an artificial intelligence scheduler running on a remote computer. 2. To develop and test the procedures for two-way communication between a telescope controller and remote scheduler via the Internet. 3. To test various concepts in Al scheduling being developed at NASA Ames Research Center on an automatic telescope operated by Tennessee State University at the Fairborn Observatory site in southern Arizona. and 4. To develop a prototype software package, dubbed the Associate Principal Astronomer, for the efficient scheduling and management of automatic telescopes.

Automatic programming for critical applications

Science.gov (United States)

Loganantharaj, Raj L.

1988-01-01

The important phases of a software life cycle include verification and maintenance. Usually, the execution performance is an expected requirement in a software development process. Unfortunately, the verification and the maintenance of programs are the time consuming and the frustrating aspects of software engineering. The verification cannot be waived for the programs used for critical applications such as, military, space, and nuclear plants. As a consequence, synthesis of programs from specifications, an alternative way of developing correct programs, is becoming popular. The definition, or what is understood by automatic programming, has been changed with our expectations. At present, the goal of automatic programming is the automation of programming process. Specifically, it means the application of artificial intelligence to software engineering in order to define techniques and create environments that help in the creation of high level programs. The automatic programming process may be divided into two phases: the problem acquisition phase and the program synthesis phase. In the problem acquisition phase, an informal specification of the problem is transformed into an unambiguous specification while in the program synthesis phase such a specification is further transformed into a concrete, executable program.

Automatic fault extraction using a modified ant-colony algorithm

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhao, Junsheng; Sun, Sam Zandong

2013-01-01

The basis of automatic fault extraction is seismic attributes, such as the coherence cube which is always used to identify a fault by the minimum value. The biggest challenge in automatic fault extraction is noise, including that of seismic data. However, a fault has a better spatial continuity in certain direction, which makes it quite different from noise. Considering this characteristic, a modified ant-colony algorithm is introduced into automatic fault identification and tracking, where the gradient direction and direction consistency are used as constraints. Numerical model test results show that this method is feasible and effective in automatic fault extraction and noise suppression. The application of field data further illustrates its validity and superiority. (paper)

Automatically repairing invalid polygons with a constrained triangulation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ledoux, H.; Arroyo Ohori, K.; Meijers, M.

2012-01-01

Although the validation of single polygons has received considerable attention, the automatic repair of invalid polygons has not. Automated repair methods can be considered as interpreting ambiguous or ill-defined polygons and giving a coherent and clearly defined output. At this moment, automatic

The irace package: Iterated racing for automatic algorithm configuration

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Manuel López-Ibáñez

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Modern optimization algorithms typically require the setting of a large number of parameters to optimize their performance. The immediate goal of automatic algorithm configuration is to find, automatically, the best parameter settings of an optimizer. Ultimately, automatic algorithm configuration has the potential to lead to new design paradigms for optimization software. The irace package is a software package that implements a number of automatic configuration procedures. In particular, it offers iterated racing procedures, which have been used successfully to automatically configure various state-of-the-art algorithms. The iterated racing procedures implemented in irace include the iterated F-race algorithm and several extensions and improvements over it. In this paper, we describe the rationale underlying the iterated racing procedures and introduce a number of recent extensions. Among these, we introduce a restart mechanism to avoid premature convergence, the use of truncated sampling distributions to handle correctly parameter bounds, and an elitist racing procedure for ensuring that the best configurations returned are also those evaluated in the highest number of training instances. We experimentally evaluate the most recent version of irace and demonstrate with a number of example applications the use and potential of irace, in particular, and automatic algorithm configuration, in general.

Mimicry and automatic imitation are not correlated

Science.gov (United States)

van Den Bossche, Sofie; Cracco, Emiel; Bardi, Lara; Rigoni, Davide; Brass, Marcel

2017-01-01

It is widely known that individuals have a tendency to imitate each other. However, different psychological disciplines assess imitation in different manners. While social psychologists assess mimicry by means of action observation, cognitive psychologists assess automatic imitation with reaction time based measures on a trial-by-trial basis. Although these methods differ in crucial methodological aspects, both phenomena are assumed to rely on similar underlying mechanisms. This raises the fundamental question whether mimicry and automatic imitation are actually correlated. In the present research we assessed both phenomena and did not find a meaningful correlation. Moreover, personality traits such as empathy, autism traits, and traits related to self- versus other-focus did not correlate with mimicry or automatic imitation either. Theoretical implications are discussed. PMID:28877197

Support vector machine for automatic pain recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Monwar, Md Maruf; Rezaei, Siamak

2009-02-01

Facial expressions are a key index of emotion and the interpretation of such expressions of emotion is critical to everyday social functioning. In this paper, we present an efficient video analysis technique for recognition of a specific expression, pain, from human faces. We employ an automatic face detector which detects face from the stored video frame using skin color modeling technique. For pain recognition, location and shape features of the detected faces are computed. These features are then used as inputs to a support vector machine (SVM) for classification. We compare the results with neural network based and eigenimage based automatic pain recognition systems. The experiment results indicate that using support vector machine as classifier can certainly improve the performance of automatic pain recognition system.

Automatic color preference correction for color reproduction

Science.gov (United States)

Tsukada, Masato; Funayama, Chisato; Tajima, Johji

2000-12-01

The reproduction of natural objects in color images has attracted a great deal of attention. Reproduction more pleasing colors of natural objects is one of the methods available to improve image quality. We developed an automatic color correction method to maintain preferred color reproduction for three significant categories: facial skin color, green grass and blue sky. In this method, a representative color in an object area to be corrected is automatically extracted from an input image, and a set of color correction parameters is selected depending on the representative color. The improvement in image quality for reproductions of natural image was more than 93 percent in subjective experiments. These results show the usefulness of our automatic color correction method for the reproduction of preferred colors.

FragIdent--automatic identification and characterisation of cDNA-fragments.

Science.gov (United States)

Seelow, Dominik; Goehler, Heike; Hoffmann, Katrin

2009-03-02

Many genetic studies and functional assays are based on cDNA fragments. After the generation of cDNA fragments from an mRNA sample, their content is at first unknown and must be assigned by sequencing reactions or hybridisation experiments. Even in characterised libraries, a considerable number of clones are wrongly annotated. Furthermore, mix-ups can happen in the laboratory. It is therefore essential to the relevance of experimental results to confirm or determine the identity of the employed cDNA fragments. However, the manual approach for the characterisation of these fragments using BLAST web interfaces is not suited for larger number of sequences and so far, no user-friendly software is publicly available. Here we present the development of FragIdent, an application for the automatic identification of open reading frames (ORFs) within cDNA-fragments. The software performs BLAST analyses to identify the genes represented by the sequences and suggests primers to complete the sequencing of the whole insert. Gene-specific information as well as the protein domains encoded by the cDNA fragment are retrieved from Internet-based databases and included in the output. The application features an intuitive graphical interface and is designed for researchers without any bioinformatics skills. It is suited for projects comprising up to several hundred different clones. We used FragIdent to identify 84 cDNA clones from a yeast two-hybrid experiment. Furthermore, we identified 131 protein domains within our analysed clones. The source code is freely available from our homepage at http://compbio.charite.de/genetik/FragIdent/.

Algorithm for automatic analysis of electro-oculographic data.

Science.gov (United States)

Pettersson, Kati; Jagadeesan, Sharman; Lukander, Kristian; Henelius, Andreas; Haeggström, Edward; Müller, Kiti

2013-10-25

Large amounts of electro-oculographic (EOG) data, recorded during electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements, go underutilized. We present an automatic, auto-calibrating algorithm that allows efficient analysis of such data sets. The auto-calibration is based on automatic threshold value estimation. Amplitude threshold values for saccades and blinks are determined based on features in the recorded signal. The performance of the developed algorithm was tested by analyzing 4854 saccades and 213 blinks recorded in two different conditions: a task where the eye movements were controlled (saccade task) and a task with free viewing (multitask). The results were compared with results from a video-oculography (VOG) device and manually scored blinks. The algorithm achieved 93% detection sensitivity for blinks with 4% false positive rate. The detection sensitivity for horizontal saccades was between 98% and 100%, and for oblique saccades between 95% and 100%. The classification sensitivity for horizontal and large oblique saccades (10 deg) was larger than 89%, and for vertical saccades larger than 82%. The duration and peak velocities of the detected horizontal saccades were similar to those in the literature. In the multitask measurement the detection sensitivity for saccades was 97% with a 6% false positive rate. The developed algorithm enables reliable analysis of EOG data recorded both during EEG and as a separate metrics.

Automatic weld torch guidance control system

Science.gov (United States)

Smaith, H. E.; Wall, W. A.; Burns, M. R., Jr.

1982-01-01

A highly reliable, fully digital, closed circuit television optical, type automatic weld seam tracking control system was developed. This automatic tracking equipment is used to reduce weld tooling costs and increase overall automatic welding reliability. The system utilizes a charge injection device digital camera which as 60,512 inidividual pixels as the light sensing elements. Through conventional scanning means, each pixel in the focal plane is sequentially scanned, the light level signal digitized, and an 8-bit word transmitted to scratch pad memory. From memory, the microprocessor performs an analysis of the digital signal and computes the tracking error. Lastly, the corrective signal is transmitted to a cross seam actuator digital drive motor controller to complete the closed loop, feedback, tracking system. This weld seam tracking control system is capable of a tracking accuracy of + or - 0.2 mm, or better. As configured, the system is applicable to square butt, V-groove, and lap joint weldments.

2nd International Conference on Mechatronics and Automatic Control

CERN Document Server

2015-01-01

This book examines mechatronics and automatic control systems. The book covers important emerging topics in signal processing, control theory, sensors, mechanic manufacturing systems and automation. The book presents papers from the second International Conference on Mechatronics and Automatic Control Systems held in Beijing, China on September 20-21, 2014. Examines how to improve productivity through the latest advanced technologies Covering new systems and techniques in the broad field of mechatronics and automatic control systems.

FRICTION - WELDING MACHINE AUTOMATIC CONTROL CIRCUIT DESIGN AND APPLICATION

OpenAIRE

Hakan ATEŞ; Ramazan BAYINDIR

2003-01-01

In this work, automatic controllability of a laboratory-sized friction-welding machine has been investigated. The laboratory-sized friction-welding machine was composed of motor, brake, rotary and constant samples late pliers, and hydraulic unit. In automatic method, welding parameters such as friction time, friction pressure, forge time and forge pressure can be applied sensitively using time relays and contactors. At the end of the experimental study it's observed that automatic control sys...

Semi-automatic version of the potentiometric titration method for characterization of uranium compounds

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cristiano, Bárbara F.G.; Delgado, José Ubiratan; Wanderley S da Silva, José; Barros, Pedro D. de; Araújo, Radier M.S. de; Dias, Fábio C.; Lopes, Ricardo T.

2012-01-01

The potentiometric titration method was used for characterization of uranium compounds to be applied in intercomparison programs. The method is applied with traceability assured using a potassium dichromate primary standard. A semi-automatic version was developed to reduce the analysis time and the operator variation. The standard uncertainty in determining the total concentration of uranium was around 0.01%, which is suitable for uranium characterization and compatible with those obtained by manual techniques. - Highlights: ► A semi-automatic potentiometric titration method was developed for U charaterization. ► K 2 Cr 2 O 7 was the only certified reference material used. ► Values obtained for U 3 O 8 samples were consistent with certified. ► Uncertainty of 0.01% was useful for characterization and intercomparison program.

The MELANIE project: from a biopsy to automatic protein map interpretation by computer.

Science.gov (United States)

Appel, R D; Hochstrasser, D F; Funk, M; Vargas, J R; Pellegrini, C; Muller, A F; Scherrer, J R

1991-10-01

The goals of the MELANIE project are to determine if disease-associated patterns can be detected in high resolution two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (HR 2D-PAGE) images and if a diagnosis can be established automatically by computer. The ELSIE/MELANIE system is a set of computer programs which automatically detect, quantify, and compare protein spots shown on HR 2D-PAGE images. Classification programs help the physician to find disease-associated patterns from a given set of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis images and to form diagnostic rules. Prototype expert systems that use these rules to establish a diagnosis from new HR 2D-PAGE images have been developed. They successfully diagnosed cirrhosis of the liver and were able to distinguish a variety of cancer types from biopsies known to be cancerous.

THE USE OF RELEVANT FACTORS FOR CONSUMERS IN DESIGNING A COMMUNICATIONAL MESSAGE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Olimpia OANCEA

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Today, organizations must adapt to the new realities of the environment in which they operate, and their efforts must be increasingly more oriented towards identifying the factors that influence consumer behavior, in particular economic, social and psychological aspects. When consumers are acting on incomplete information base, they assume automatically a risk for each purchasing decision. The size of the risk decreases depending on the quantity and relevance of information transmitted through communicational messages. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to highlight the factors that should be taken into account when designing a communicational message, so that this has to have the ability to change consumer attitudes and to keep constant interest to the products and / or services of a company.

Dynamic Analysis of a Pendulum Dynamic Automatic Balancer

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)