Technology of swallowable capsule for medical applications

Medical technology has undergone major breakthroughs in recent years, especially in the area of the examination tools for diagnostic purposes. This paper reviews the swallowable capsule technology in the examination of the gastrointestinal system for various diseases. The wireless camera pill has created a more advanced method than many traditional examination methods for the diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases such as gastroscopy by the use of an endoscope. After years of great innovation, commercial swallowable pills have been produced and applied in clinical practice. These smart pills can cover the examination of the gastrointestinal system and not only provide to the physicians a lot more useful data that is not available from the traditional methods, but also eliminates the use of the painful endoscopy procedure. In this paper, the key state-of-the-art technologies in the existing Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) systems are fully reported and the recent research progresses related to these technologies are reviewed. The paper ends by further discussion on the current technical bottlenecks and future research in this area

Digital Imaging and Screening for Diabetic Retinopathy

The National Screening Committee has stated that “All people with diabetes aged 12 years and older should be offered screening for sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy using digital photography.”1 Digital imaging offers several advantages such as archiving, ease of viewing evidence of progression, quality assurance, patient education and immediate indication of ungradable images. Knowledge of key aspects of digital imaging technology and performance therefore underpin screening for diabetic retinopathy in the UK. This article aims to discuss aspects of digital imaging related to diabetic screening as well as provide an indication of how computers can be used to automatically screen for sight threatening retinopathy. We live in a digital world but to start at the beginning, what is “digital”? Analogue signals vary continuously in that they can take any value e.g. sound or light. Photographic film is analogue in that the darkening of silver halide crystals increases continuously with light exposure. Digital devices represent signals using discrete levels and this is necessary if we are to exploit digital computers and display devices. Following some historical context, the remainder of this article will consider the steps in the process of imaging a diabetic funuds in some detail before finally examining automatic screening methods for diabetic retinopathy using image processing. The process of converting an analogue signal such as light variations in an image and converting it to a digital representation is known as sampling (fig. 1). Sampling has two important parameters: the spatial resolution and how many digital levels or “steps” are used to represent the light. The former is determined by the sensor resolution and the latter relates to the bit-depth of the image. Both will be considered in separate sections below

Digital mammography, cancer screening: Factors important for image compression

The use of digital mammography for breast cancer screening poses several novel problems such as development of digital sensors, computer assisted diagnosis (CAD) methods for image noise suppression, enhancement, and pattern recognition, compression algorithms for image storage, transmission, and remote diagnosis. X-ray digital mammography using novel direct digital detection schemes or film digitizers results in large data sets and, therefore, image compression methods will play a significant role in the image processing and analysis by CAD techniques. In view of the extensive compression required, the relative merit of 'virtually lossless' versus lossy methods should be determined. A brief overview is presented here of the developments of digital sensors, CAD, and compression methods currently proposed and tested for mammography. The objective of the NCI/NASA Working Group on Digital Mammography is to stimulate the interest of the image processing and compression scientific community for this medical application and identify possible dual use technologies within the NASA centers

Astronomical Image Compression Techniques Based on ACC and KLT Coder

This paper deals with a compression of image data in applications in astronomy. Astronomical images have typical specific properties — high grayscale bit depth, size, noise occurrence and special processing algorithms. They belong to the class of scientific images. Their processing and compression is quite different from the classical approach of multimedia image processing. The database of images from BOOTES (Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System) has been chosen as a source of the testing signal. BOOTES is a Czech-Spanish robotic telescope for observing AGN (active galactic nuclei) and the optical transient of GRB (gamma ray bursts) searching. This paper discusses an approach based on an analysis of statistical properties of image data. A comparison of two irrelevancy reduction methods is presented from a scientific (astrometric and photometric) point of view. The first method is based on a statistical approach, using the Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) with uniform quantization in the spectral domain. The second technique is derived from wavelet decomposition with adaptive selection of used prediction coefficients. Finally, the comparison of three redundancy reduction methods is discussed. Multimedia format JPEG2000 and HCOMPRESS, designed especially for astronomical images, are compared with the new Astronomical Context Coder (ACC) coder based on adaptive median regression

A JPEG-Like Algorithm for Compression of Single-Sensor Camera Image

International audienceThis paper presents a JPEG-like coder for image compression of single-sensor camera images using a Bayer Color Filter Array (CFA). The originality of the method is a joint scheme of compression.demosaicking in the DCT domain. In this method, the captured CFA raw data is first separated in four distinct components and then converted to YCbCr. A JPEG compression scheme is then applied. At the decoding level, the bitstream is decompressed until reaching the DCT coefficients. These latter are used for the interpolation stage. The obtained results are better than those obtained by the conventional JPEG in terms of CPSNR, DeltaE2000 and SSIM. The obtained JPEG-like scheme is also less complex

Application guide for universal source encoding for space

Lossless data compression was studied for many NASA missions. The Rice algorithm was demonstrated to provide better performance than other available techniques on most scientific data. A top-level description of the Rice algorithm is first given, along with some new capabilities implemented in both software and hardware forms. Systems issues important for onboard implementation, including sensor calibration, error propagation, and data packetization, are addressed. The latter part of the guide provides twelve case study examples drawn from a broad spectrum of science instruments

The development of lossless data compression technology for remote sensing applications

Lossless data compression has been studied for many NASA missions to achieve the benefit of increased science return, reduced onboard memory requirement, station contact time and communication bandwidth. This paper first addresses the requirement for onboard applications and provides rational for the selection of the Rice algorithm among other available techniques. A top-level description of the Rice algorithm will be given, along with some new capabilities already implemented in both software and hardware VLSI forms. The paper then addresses systems issues important for onboard implementation including sensor calibration, error propagation and data packetization. The latter part of the paper provides several case study examples drawn from a broad spectrum of science instruments including the thematic mapper, x-ray telescope, gamma-ray spectrometer, and acousto-optical spectrometer