Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 153)

This bibliography lists 175 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1976

Book reviews and book notices.

Volume: 1

Mathematical Methods for the Quantification of Actin-Filaments in Microscopic Images

In cell biology confocal laser scanning microscopic images of the actin filament of human osteoblasts are produced to assess the cell development. This thesis aims at an advanced approach for accurate quantitative measurements about the morphology of the bright-ridge set of these microscopic images and thus about the actin filament. Therefore automatic preprocessing, tagging and quantification interplay to approximate the capabilities of the human observer to intuitively recognize the filaments correctly. Numerical experiments with random models confirm the accuracy of this approach

The Singular Value Decomposition over Completed Idempotent Semifields

In this paper, we provide a basic technique for Lattice Computing: an analogue of the Singular Value Decomposition for rectangular matrices over complete idempotent semifields (i-SVD). These algebras are already complete lattices and many of their instances—the complete schedule algebra or completed max-plus semifield, the tropical algebra, and the max-times algebra—are useful in a range of applications, e.g., morphological processing. We further the task of eliciting the relation between i-SVD and the extension of Formal Concept Analysis to complete idempotent semifields (K-FCA) started in a prior work. We find out that for a matrix with entries considered in a complete idempotent semifield, the Galois connection at the heart of K-FCA provides two basis of left- and right-singular vectors to choose from, for reconstructing the matrix. These are join-dense or meet-dense sets of object or attribute concepts of the concept lattice created by the connection, and they are almost surely not pairwise orthogonal. We conclude with an attempt analogue of the fundamental theorem of linear algebra that gathers all results and discuss it in the wider setting of matrix factorization.This research was funded by the Spanish Government-MinECo project TEC2017-84395-P and the Dept. of Research and Innovation of Madrid Regional Authority project EMPATIA-CM (Y2018/TCS-5046)

Four-fold Formal Concept Analysis based on Complete Idempotent Semifields

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a well-known supervised boolean data-mining technique rooted in Lattice and Order Theory, that has several extensions to, e.g., fuzzy and idempotent semirings. At the heart of FCA lies a Galois connection between two powersets. In this paper we extend the FCA formalism to include all four Galois connections between four different semivectors spaces over idempotent semifields, at the same time. The result is K¯¯¯¯-four-fold Formal Concept Analysis (K¯¯¯¯-4FCA) where K¯¯¯¯ is the idempotent semifield biasing the analysis. Since complete idempotent semifields come in dually-ordered pairs—e.g., the complete max-plus and min-plus semirings—the basic construction shows dual-order-, row–column- and Galois-connection-induced dualities that appear simultaneously a number of times to provide the full spectrum of variability. Our results lead to a fundamental theorem of K¯¯¯¯-four-fold Formal Concept Analysis that properly defines quadrilattices as 4-tuples of (order-dually) isomorphic lattices of vectors and discuss its relevance vis-à-vis previous formal conceptual analyses and some affordances of their results

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: A Review

Acquiring information about the environment is a key step during each study in the field of environmental biology at different levels, from an individual species to community and biome. However, obtaining information about the environment is frequently difficult because of, for example, the phenological timing, spatial distribution of a species or limited accessibility of a particular area for the field survey. Moreover, remote sensing technology, which enables the observation of the Earth’s surface and is currently very common in environmental research, has many limitations such as insufficient spatial, spectral and temporal resolution and a high cost of data acquisition. Since the 1990s, researchers have been exploring the potential of different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring Earth’s surface. The present study reviews recent scientific literature dealing with the use of UAV in environmental biology. Amongst numerous papers, short communications and conference abstracts, we selected 110 original studies of how UAVs can be used in environmental biology and which organisms can be studied in this manner. Most of these studies concerned the use of UAV to measure the vegetation parameters such as crown height, volume, number of individuals (14 studies) and quantification of the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation changes (12 studies). UAVs were also frequently applied to count birds and mammals, especially those living in the water. Generally, the analytical part of the present study was divided into following sections: (1) detecting, assessing and predicting threats on vegetation, (2) measuring the biophysical parameters of vegetation, (3) quantifying the dynamics of changes in plants and habitats and (4) population and behaviour studies of animals. At the end, we also synthesised all the information showing, amongst others, the advances in environmental biology because of UAV application. Considering that 33% of studies found and included in this review were published in 2017 and 2018, it is expected that the number and variety of applications of UAVs in environmental biology will increase in the future