Xilinx System Generator Based HW Components for Rapid Prototyping of Computer Vision SW/HW Systems

This paper shows how the Xilinx System Generator can be used to develop hardware-based computer vision algorithms from a system level approach without the necessity of in-depth knowing neither a hardware description language nor the particulars of the hardware platform. Also, it is demonstrated that Simulink can be employed as a co-design and co-simulation platform for rapid prototyping of Computer Vision HW/SW systems. To do this, a library of optimized image processing components based on XSG and Matlab has been developed and tested in hybrid schemes including HW and SW modules. As a part of the testing, results of the prototyping and co-simulation of a HW/SW Computer Vision System for the automated inspection of tangerine segments are presented.COSIVA (TIC 2000-1765-C03-02)Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Industria

Cross-talk between epidermal growth factor receptor and protein kinase C during calcium-induced differentiation of keratinocytes

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74029/1/j.1600-0625.2000.009003192.x.pd

Itraconazole associated quadriparesis and edema: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Itraconazole is an anti-fungal agent widely used to treat various forms of mycosis. It is particularly useful in allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis and severe asthma with fungal sensitization. Side effects are uncommon and usually mild. Mild neuropathy is noted to occur very rarely. We present an unusual and, to the best of our knowledge, as yet unreported case of severe neuropathy and peripheral edema due to itraconazole in the absence of a concomitant risk factor.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 72-year-old Caucasian man was started on itraconazole following diagnosis of severe asthma with fungal sensitization. One month later he presented with severe bilateral ankle edema with an elevated serum itraconazole level. The itraconazole dose was reduced but his ankle edema persisted and he developed weakness of all four limbs. Itraconazole was completely stopped leading to improvement in his leg edema but he became bed bound due to weakness. He gradually improved with supportive care and neurorehabilitation. On review at six months, our patient was able to mobilize with the aid of two elbow crutches and power had returned to 5/5 in distal extremities and 4+/5 in proximal extremities. The diagnosis was established based on the classical presentation of drug-induced neuropathy and negative investigatory findings for any alternative diagnoses.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We report the case of a patient presenting with an unusual complication of severe neuropathy and peripheral edema due to itraconazole. Clinicians should be alert to this association when encountered with neuropathy and/or edema in an itraconazole therapy recipient.</p

An intuitionistic approach to scoring DNA sequences against transcription factor binding site motifs

Background: Transcription factors (TFs) control transcription by binding to specific regions of DNA called transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs). The identification of TFBSs is a crucial problem in computational biology and includes the subtask of predicting the location of known TFBS motifs in a given DNA sequence. It has previously been shown that, when scoring matches to known TFBS motifs, interdependencies between positions within a motif should be taken into account. However, this remains a challenging task owing to the fact that sequences similar to those of known TFBSs can occur by chance with a relatively high frequency. Here we present a new method for matching sequences to TFBS motifs based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) theory, an approach that has been shown to be particularly appropriate for tackling problems that embody a high degree of uncertainty. Results: We propose SCintuit, a new scoring method for measuring sequence-motif affinity based on IFS theory. Unlike existing methods that consider dependencies between positions, SCintuit is designed to prevent overestimation of less conserved positions of TFBSs. For a given pair of bases, SCintuit is computed not only as a function of their combined probability of occurrence, but also taking into account the individual importance of each single base at its corresponding position. We used SCintuit to identify known TFBSs in DNA sequences. Our method provides excellent results when dealing with both synthetic and real data, outperforming the sensitivity and the specificity of two existing methods in all the experiments we performed. Conclusions: The results show that SCintuit improves the prediction quality for TFs of the existing approaches without compromising sensitivity. In addition, we show how SCintuit can be successfully applied to real research problems. In this study the reliability of the IFS theory for motif discovery tasks is proven

High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer for the Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Microwave imaging radiometers operating in the 50-183 GHz range for retrieving atmospheric temperature and water vapor profiles from airborne platforms have been limited in the spatial scales of atmospheric structures that are resolved not because of antenna aperture size, but because of high receiver noise masking the small variations that occur on small spatial scales. Atmospheric variability on short spatial and temporal scales (second/ km scale) is completely unresolved by existing microwave profilers. The solution was to integrate JPL-designed, high-frequency, low-noise-amplifier (LNA) technology into the High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR), which is an airborne microwave sounding radiometer, to lower the system noise by an order of magnitude to enable the instrument to resolve atmospheric variability on small spatial and temporal scales. HAMSR has eight sounding channels near the 60-GHz oxygen line complex, ten channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen line, and seven channels near the 183.31-GHz water vapor line. The HAMSR receiver system consists of three heterodyne spectrometers covering the three bands. The antenna system consists of two back-to-back reflectors that rotate together at a programmable scan rate via a stepper motor. A single full rotation includes the swath below the aircraft followed by observations of ambient (roughly 0 C in flight) and heated (70 C) blackbody calibration targets located at the top of the rotation. A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is used to read the digitized radiometer counts and receive the reflector position from the scan motor encoder, which are then sent to a microprocessor and packed into data files. The microprocessor additionally reads telemetry data from 40 onboard housekeeping channels (containing instrument temperatures), and receives packets from an onboard navigation unit, which provides GPS time and position as well as independent attitude information (e.g., heading, roll, pitch, and yaw). The raw data files are accessed through an Ethernet port. The HAMSR data rate is relatively low at 75 kbps, allowing for real-time access over the Global Hawk high-data-rate downlink. Once on the ground, the raw data are unpacked and processed through two levels of processing. The Level 1 product contains geo-located, time-stamped, calibrated brightness temperatures for the Earth scan. These data are then input to a lD variational retrieval algorithm to produce temperature, water vapor, and cloud liquid water profiles, as well as several derived products such as potential temperature and relative humidity

A MIQE-Compliant Real-Time PCR Assay for Aspergillus Detection

PMCID: PMC3393739This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Quantifying Privacy: A Novel Entropy-Based Measure of Disclosure Risk

It is well recognised that data mining and statistical analysis pose a serious treat to privacy. This is true for financial, medical, criminal and marketing research. Numerous techniques have been proposed to protect privacy, including restriction and data modification. Recently proposed privacy models such as differential privacy and k-anonymity received a lot of attention and for the latter there are now several improvements of the original scheme, each removing some security shortcomings of the previous one. However, the challenge lies in evaluating and comparing privacy provided by various techniques. In this paper we propose a novel entropy based security measure that can be applied to any generalisation, restriction or data modification technique. We use our measure to empirically evaluate and compare a few popular methods, namely query restriction, sampling and noise addition.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure