19,488 research outputs found
A comparative study of breast surface reconstruction for aesthetic outcome assessment
Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer type in women, and while its
survival rate is generally high the aesthetic outcome is an increasingly
important factor when evaluating different treatment alternatives. 3D scanning
and reconstruction techniques offer a flexible tool for building detailed and
accurate 3D breast models that can be used both pre-operatively for surgical
planning and post-operatively for aesthetic evaluation. This paper aims at
comparing the accuracy of low-cost 3D scanning technologies with the
significantly more expensive state-of-the-art 3D commercial scanners in the
context of breast 3D reconstruction. We present results from 28 synthetic and
clinical RGBD sequences, including 12 unique patients and an anthropomorphic
phantom demonstrating the applicability of low-cost RGBD sensors to real
clinical cases. Body deformation and homogeneous skin texture pose challenges
to the studied reconstruction systems. Although these should be addressed
appropriately if higher model quality is warranted, we observe that low-cost
sensors are able to obtain valuable reconstructions comparable to the
state-of-the-art within an error margin of 3 mm.Comment: This paper has been accepted to MICCAI201
Tidal stripping as a mechanism for placing globular clusters on wide orbits: the case of MGC1 in M31
The globular clusters of large spiral galaxies can be divided into two
populations: one which formed in-situ and one which comprises clusters tidally
stripped away from other galaxies. In this paper we investigate the
contribution to the outer globular cluster population in the M31 galaxy through
donation of clusters from dwarf galaxies. We test this numerically by comparing
the contribution of globular clusters from simulated encounters to the observed
M31 globular cluster population. To constrain our simulations, we specifically
investigate the outermost globular cluster in the M31 system, MGC1. The remote
location of MGC1 favours the idea of it being captured, however, the cluster is
devoid of features associated with tidal interactions. Hence we separate
simulations where tidal features are present and where they are hidden. We find
that our simulated encounters can place clusters on MGC1-like orbits. In
addition, we find that tidal stripping of clusters from dwarf galaxies leaves
them on orbits having a range of separations, broadly matching those observed
in M31. We find that the specific energies of globular clusters captured by M31
closely matches those of the incoming host dwarf galaxies. Furthermore, in our
simulations we find an equal number of accreted clusters on co-rotating and
counter-rotating orbits within M31 and use this to infer the fraction of
clusters that has been accreted. We find that even close in roughly 50% of the
clusters are accreted, whilst this figure increases to over 80% further out.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Innovation and firm performance
Understanding the relation between innovation and performance in both large, medium, and small firms is of crucial importance for ongoing economic growth, but still hardly understood. The topic of understanding innovations and their relationship with firm performance has become more relevant since the EU stated, in March 2000 in Lisbon, the ambition to become the world's most competitive and innovative region by 2010. The underlying rationale is that encouraging firms to innovate will lead to a better economic performance; higher growth, more jobs and higher wages. Is this rationale empirically validated, and is there a preferential one-size-fits-all innovation trajectory for all European companies? The objective of this paper is to depict the current state of knowledge regarding the relation between innovation and performance in general, and for SMEs in particular.
Annual Research Briefs, 1987
Lagrangian techniques have found widespread application to the prediction and understanding of turbulent transport phenomena and have yielded satisfactory results for different cases of shear flow problems. However, it must be kept in mind that in most experiments what is really available are Eulerian statistics, and it is far from obvious how to extract from them the information relevant to the Lagrangian behavior of the flow; in consequence, Lagrangian models still include some hypothesis for which no adequate supporting evidence was until now available. Direct numerical simulation of turbulence offers a new way to obtain Lagrangian statistics and so verify the validity of the current predictive models and the accuracy of their results. After the pioneering work of Riley (Riley and Patterson, 1974) in the 70's, some such results have just appeared in the literature (Lee et al, Yeung and Pope). The present contribution follows in part similar lines, but focuses on two particle statistics and comparison with existing models
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