Gold nanorods:contrast agents for photoacoustic imaging

Gold nanorods are seen as possible contrast agents for photoacoustic imaging since they have strong absorption peaks at near-infrared wavelengths. Also they are easy to conjugate with various proteins. If these particles can be conjugated with cancer affinity proteins then these particles can accumulate specifically at a tumor site. By detecting the presence of accumulation of gold nanorods inside the tissue the indirect detection of tumor can be realized. When these particles are irradiated with light pulses of appropriate temporal properties and energy the temperature around these particles can be high enough to induce apoptosis or necrosis in the surrounding cells. In order to use these particles at their full potential we must determine precisely their optical properties. We simulated the optical properties of gold nanorods synthesized by us using the DDSCAT code. The simulated spectra agree qualitatively with the spectra determined using spectrometry and also determined using photoacoustic spectroscopy. Further the values of molar extinction coefficient derived from the simulations were similar to the data measured experimentally by other groups. These results validated qualitatively the model used in the simulations. During simulations we found that the choice of the dielectric function used in simulations plays an important role in the results

Family coordination in families who have a child with autism spectrum disorder

Little is known about the interactions of families where there is a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study applies the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) to explore both its applicability to this population as well as to assess resources and areas of deficit in these families. The sample consisted of 68 families with a child with ASD, and 43 families with a typically developing (TD) child. With respect to the global score for family coordination there were several negative correlations: the more severe the symptoms (based on the child’s ADOS score), the more family coordination was dysfunctional. This correlation was particularly high when parents had to play together with the child. In the parts in which only one of the parents played actively with the child, while the other was simply present, some families did achieve scores in the functional range, despite the child’s symptom severity. The outcomes are discussed in terms of their clinical implications both for assessment and for interventio

Combining visual and textual systems within the context of user feedback

It has been proven experimentally, that a combination of textual and visual representations can improve the retrieval performance ([20], [23]). It is due to the fact, that the textual and visual feature spaces often represent complementary yet correlated aspects of the same image, thus forming a composite system. In this paper, we present a model for the combination of visual and textual sub-systems within the user feedback context. The model was inspired by the measurement utilized in quantum mechanics (QM) and the tensor product of co-occurrence (density) matrices, which represents a density matrix of the composite system in QM. It provides a sound and natural framework to seamlessly integrate multiple feature spaces by considering them as a composite system, as well as a new way of measuring the relevance of an image with respect to a context. The proposed approach takes into account both intra (via co-occurrence matrices) and inter (via tensor operator) relationships between features’ dimensions. It is also computationally cheap and scalable to large data collections. We test our approach on ImageCLEF2007photo data collection and present interesting findings

Capture, processing, and display of real-world 3D objects using digital holography

"Digital holography for 3D and 4D real-world objects' capture, processing, and display" (acronym "Real 3D") is a research project funded under the Information and Communication Technologies theme of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, and brings together nine participants from academia and industry (see www.digitalholography.eu).This three-year project marks the beginning a long-term effort to facilitate the entry of a new technology (digital holography) into the three-dimensional capture and display markets. Its progress at the end of year 2 is summarised. © 2010 IEEE

Processing of optically-captured digital holograms for three-dimensional display

In digital holography, holograms are usually optically captured and then two-dimensional slices of the reconstruction volume are reconstructed by computer and displayed on a two-dimensional display. When the recording is of a three-dimensional scene then such two-dimensional display becomes restrictive. We outline our progress on capturing larger ranges of perspectives of three-dimensional scenes, and our progress on four approaches to better visualise this three-dimensional information encoded in the digital holograms. The research has been performed within a European Commission funded research project dedicated the capture, processing, transmission, and display of real-world 3D and 4D scenes using digital holography. © 2009 SPIE

Optical reconstruction of transparent objects with phase-only SLMs

Three approaches for visualization of transparent micro-objects from holographic data using phase-only SLMs are described. The objects are silicon micro-lenses captured in the near infrared by means of digital holographic microscopy and a simulated weakly refracting 3D object with size in the micrometer range. In the first method, profilometric/tomographic data are retrieved from captured holograms and converted into a 3D point cloud which allows for computer generation of multi-view phase holograms using Rayleigh-Sommerfeld formulation. In the second method, the microlens is computationally placed in front of a textured object to simulate the image of the textured data as seen through the lens. In the third method, direct optical reconstruction of the micrometer object through a digital lens by modifying the phase with the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm is achieved. © 2013 Optical Society of America

Bag-of-Colors for Biomedical Document Image Classification

The number of biomedical publications has increased noticeably in the last 30 years. Clinicians and medical researchers regularly have unmet information needs but require more time for searching than is usually available to find publications relevant to a clinical situation. The techniques described in this article are used to classify images from the biomedical open access literature into categories, which can potentially reduce the search time. Only the visual information of the images is used to classify images based on a benchmark database of ImageCLEF 2011 created for the task of image classification and image retrieval. We evaluate particularly the importance of color in addition to the frequently used texture and grey level features. Results show that bags–of–colors in combination with the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) provide an image representation allowing to improve the classification quality. Accuracy improved from 69.75% of the best system in ImageCLEF 2011 using visual information, only, to 72.5% of the system described in this paper. The results highlight the importance of color for the classification of biomedical images

Prototypes for Content-Based Image Retrieval in Clinical Practice

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been proposed as key technology for computer-aided diagnostics (CAD). This paper reviews the state of the art and future challenges in CBIR for CAD applied to clinical practice

Experiences from the ImageCLEF Medical Retrieval and Annotation Tasks

The medical tasks in ImageCLEF have been run every year from 2004-2018 and many different tasks and data sets have been used over these years. The created resources are being used by many researchers well beyond the actual evaluation campaigns and are allowing to compare the performance of many techniques on the same grounds and in a reproducible way. Many of the larger data sets are from the medical literature, as such images are easier to obtain and to share than clinical data, which was used in a few smaller ImageCLEF challenges that are specifically marked with the disease type and anatomic region. This chapter describes the main results of the various tasks over the years, including data, participants, types of tasks evaluated and also the lessons learned in organizing such tasks for the scientific community