CIDI-Lung-Seg: A Single-Click Annotation Tool for Automatic Delineation of Lungs from CT Scans

Accurate and fast extraction of lung volumes from computed tomography (CT) scans remains in a great demand in the clinical environment because the available methods fail to provide a generic solution due to wide anatomical variations of lungs and existence of pathologies. Manual annotation, current gold standard, is time consuming and often subject to human bias. On the other hand, current state-of-the-art fully automated lung segmentation methods fail to make their way into the clinical practice due to their inability to efficiently incorporate human input for handling misclassifications and praxis. This paper presents a lung annotation tool for CT images that is interactive, efficient, and robust. The proposed annotation tool produces an "as accurate as possible" initial annotation based on the fuzzy-connectedness image segmentation, followed by efficient manual fixation of the initial extraction if deemed necessary by the practitioner. To provide maximum flexibility to the users, our annotation tool is supported in three major operating systems (Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS X). The quantitative results comparing our free software with commercially available lung segmentation tools show higher degree of consistency and precision of our software with a considerable potential to enhance the performance of routine clinical tasks.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; to appear in the proceedings of 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2014

Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices

The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate company’s environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewers’ collectives related to the company’s activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisers’ knowledge

Fast Fuzzy Inference in Octave

Fuzzy relations are simple mathematical structures that enable a very general representation of fuzzy knowledge, and fuzzy relational calculus offers a powerful machinery for approximate reasoning. However, one of the most relevant limitations of approximate reasoning is the efficiency bottleneck. In this paper, we present two implementations for fast fuzzy inference through relational composition, with the twofold objective of being general and efficient. The two implementations are capable of working on full and sparse representations respectively. Further, a wrapper procedure is capable of automatically selecting the best implementation on the basis of the input features. We implemented the code in GNU Octave because it is a high-level language targeted to numerical computations. Experimental results show the impressive performance gain when the proposed implementation is used

Wireless Interference Identification with Convolutional Neural Networks

The steadily growing use of license-free frequency bands requires reliable coexistence management for deterministic medium utilization. For interference mitigation, proper wireless interference identification (WII) is essential. In this work we propose the first WII approach based upon deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The CNN naively learns its features through self-optimization during an extensive data-driven GPU-based training process. We propose a CNN example which is based upon sensing snapshots with a limited duration of 12.8 {\mu}s and an acquisition bandwidth of 10 MHz. The CNN differs between 15 classes. They represent packet transmissions of IEEE 802.11 b/g, IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.1 with overlapping frequency channels within the 2.4 GHz ISM band. We show that the CNN outperforms state-of-the-art WII approaches and has a classification accuracy greater than 95% for signal-to-noise ratio of at least -5 dB

SyFSeL: generating synthetic fuzzy sets made simple

Empirical tests can help determine if methods developed for fuzzy sets work correctly. However, finding a large enough data set with suitable properties to conduct thorough tests can be challenging. This paper presents a new library named SyFSeL (Synthetic Fuzzy Set Library) which automatically generates synthetic fuzzy sets with specified characteristics and fuzzy set type. SyFSeL generates as many sets as desired, with adjustable parameters to enable users to emulate real data. Generated fuzzy sets are exported so users can import them into their own fuzzy systems software. SyFSeL can also create graphical plots of the generated sets, examples of which are shown in this paper. The library is cross-platform and open-source under the GNU General Public License, and users are free to develop upon and adapt the code. However, SyFSeL has been designed so that no understanding of the code is required to use it

A Collection of Art-Family Graphical Simulations

The Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) architecture, first proposed by (Grossberg, 1976b, 1976a), is a self-organizing neural network for stable pattern categorization in response to arbitrary input sequences. Since its original formulation, several versions of ART have been proposed, each designed to handle a particular task or input format. Recent ART architectures have been designed to work in a supervised fashion, offering a viable alternative to supervised neural networks such as backpropagation (Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams, 1986). Perhaps the best-known variant of ART is ART2 (Carpenter & Grossberg, 1987b), an unsupervised neural network that handles analog inputs. We have developed a series of simulators for some of the ART-family neural architectures, namely, ART2 (Carpenter & Grossberg, 1987b), ART2-A (Carpenter, Grossberg, & Rosen, 1991b), Fuzzy ART (Carpenter, Grossberg, & Rosen, 1990), and Fuzzy ARTMAP (Carpenter, Grossberg, Markuzon, & Reynolds, 1992). This article briefly summarizes the history and functionality of ART and its variants, and then describes the software package, which is available in the public domain