A New Combination Method Based on Adaptive Genetic Algorithm for Medical Image Retrieval

Medical image retrieval could be based on the text describing the image as the caption or the title. The use of text terms to retrieve images have several disadvantages such as term-disambiguation. Recent studies prove that representing text into semantic units (concepts) can improve the semantic representation of textual information. However, the use of conceptual representation has other problems as the miss or erroneous semantic relation between two concepts. Other studies show that combining textual and conceptual text representations leads to better accuracy. Popularly, a score for textual representation and a score for conceptual representation are computed and then a combination function is used to have one score. Although the existing of many combination methods of two scores, we propose in this paper a new combination method based on adaptive version of the genetic algorithm. Experiments are carried out on Medical Information Retrieval Task of the ImageCLEF 2009 and 2010. The results confirm that the combination of both textual and conceptual scores allows best accuracy. In addition, our approach outperforms the other combination methods

A Physical Impact of Organic Fouling Layers on Bacterial Adhesion During Nanofiltration

Organic conditioning films have been shown to alter properties of surfaces, such as hydrophobicity and surface free energy. Furthermore, initial bacterial adhesion has been shown to depend on the conditioning film surface properties as opposed to the properties of the virgin surface. For the particular case of nanofiltration membranes under permeate flux conditions, however, the conditioning film thickens to form a thin fouling layer. This study hence sought to determine if a thin fouling layer deposited on a nanofiltration membrane under permeate flux conditions governed bacterial adhesion in the same manner as a conditioning film on a surface. Thin fouling layers (less than 50 μm thick) of humic acid or alginic acid were formed on Dow Filmtec NF90 membranes and analysed using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), confocal microscopy and surface energy techniques. Fluorescent microscopy was then used to quantify adhesion of Pseudomonas fluorescens bacterial cells onto virgin or fouled membranes under filtration conditions.It was found that instead of adhering on or into the organic fouling layer, the bacterial cells penetrated the thin fouling layer and adhered directly to the membrane surface underneath. Contrary to what surface energy measurements of the fouling layer would indicate, bacteria adhered to a greater extent onto clean membranes (24 ± 3% surface coverage) than onto those fouled with humic acid (9.8 ± 4%) or alginic acid (7.5 ± 4%). These results were confirmed by AFM measurements which indicated that a considerable amount of energy (10−7 J/μm) was dissipated when attempting to penetrate the fouling layers compared to adhering onto clean NF90 membranes (10−15 J/μm). The added resistance of this fouling layer was thusly seen to reduce the number of bacterial cells which could reach the membrane surface under permeate conditions. This research has highlighted an important difference between fouling layers for the particular case of nanofiltration membranes under permeate flux conditions and surface conditioning films which should be considered when conducting adhesion experiments under filtration conditions. It has also shown AFM to be an integral tool for such experiments.Science Foundation IrelandEuropean Research Counci

The Effect of Feature Characteristics on the Performance of Feature Location Techniques

Feature Location (FL) is a core software maintenance activity that aims to locate observable functionalities in the source code. Given its key role in software change, a vast array of Feature Location Techniques (FLTs) have been proposed but, as more and more FLTs are introduced, the selection of an appropriate FLT is an increasingly difficult problem. One consideration is the characteristics of the features being sought. For example, in the code associated with the feature, programmers may have named identifiers consistently, and with meaningful naming conventions, or not, and this may impact on the suitability of different FLTs. The suggestion that such characteristics matter has implicit support in the literature: An analysis of existing FLT empirical studies reveals that the system under study can often have a stronger impact on FLT performance than differing FLTs themselves. To understand this interaction between feature characteristics and FLTs better, this paper proposes a suite of feature-characteristic metrics that are hypothesized to control FLTs performance, holistically across FLTs and impacting on individual FLTs to different degrees. To evaluate the suite, a controlled experiment is performed, using 878 features, to probe the relationship between the metrics and the performance of four FTL techniques: three commonly-used techniques and one state-of-the-art technique. The evaluation is performed using four commonly used evaluation measures and extended by employing 41 other established source-code metrics as extraneous variables. Results of the empirical evaluation suggest that the feature-metric suite presented impacts FLT performance holistically, and impacts different FLTs to different degrees. Thus, this paper moves towards the more standard selection of appropriate FLTs, with respect to the prominent feature characteristics in the software systems under study, and more rigorous consideration of the features selected to compare FLTs

Dynamic Adaptation of the Traffic Management System CarDemo

2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, SASO, London, UK, 8-12 September, 2014This paper demonstrates how we applied a constraint-based dynamic adaptation approach on CarDemo, a traffic management system. The approach allows domain experts to describe the adaptation goals as declarative constraints, and automatically plan the adaptation decisions to satisfy these constraints. We demonstrate how to utilise this approach to realise the dynamic switch of routing services of the traffic management system, according to the change of global system states and user requests.Science Foundation IrelandLer

Practical Application of Ozone: Principles and Case Studies

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