Asymmetries in tongue-palate contact during speech

Research has shown that speech articulation tends to be asymmetrical in the transverse plane of the vocal tract. A recent meta-study of previously published electropalatograms revealed that 83% of these images show asymmetrical tongue-palate contact [1]. The present study investigated articulation asymmetry on the basis of a large number of electropalatograms acquired in a sentence-reading task at the Centre for Speech Technology Research, Edinburgh University (Mocha: Multichannel Articulatory Database). The vast majority (97.5%) of these palatograms showed some degree of left-right asymmetry, with greater contact on the left-hand side being the more common finding. Asymmetry was not strongly determined by voice or place of articulation. However, it was highly dependent on manner, with fricatives and the lateral approximant showing the greatest degree of asymmetry. Characterisation of articulation asymmetry could improve our understanding of the speech-production process and its relationship with both neural organisation and the anatomy of the organs of speech

Three-dimensional quantification of the morphology and intragranular void ratio of a shelly carbonate sand

Shelly carbonate sands represent an extreme soil type in terms of their mechanical behavior which derives from the bioclastic nature of the constituent grains. In their uncemented form, these deposits exhibit very high compressibility, which has posed a number of geotechnical engineering problems; in most cases related to the reduction in the bearing capacities of both shallow and deep foundations. Remarkable features of these carbonate sands include the complex shape and the structural weakness of the grains and the high inter and intra granular porosity. Previous studies, have quoted the interlocking of the angular shelly particles to be at the origin of their high friction angles and high initial void ratio, however, up until now, no scientific micro-scale examination has been carried out. This paper presents a non-invasive image based investigation into the grain morphology of a carbonate sand from the Persian Gulf. This sand has a median grain size of 570μm and a high CaCO3 content in the form of aragonite and calcite. Three-dimensional images from x-ray computed tomography (3DXRCT) with a size of 6μm were used. The presence of various skeletal bodies such as shells of small organisms with distinct densities and composition poses real challenges for an accurate segmentation. Image processing algorithms were developed in order to identify the individual sand grains and quantify their properties. Earlier work on silica sands has highlighted the importance of 3D non-invasive techniques in providing an accurate distribution of the grain sizes when compared to more traditional techniques such as sieving analysis and 2D microscopy. The methodology here proposed allows an accurate quantification of grain shape and size and the assessment of grain damage following mechanical deformation. This study, contributes towards improving our understanding of the engineering properties of carbonate sands and thus, predicting their response under loading

Texture Segmentation: An Objective Comparison between Traditional and Deep-Learning Methodologies

This paper compares a series of traditional and deep learning methodologies for the segmentation of textures. Six well-known texture composites first published by Randen and Hus{\o}y were used to compare traditional segmentation techniques (co-occurrence, filtering, local binary patterns, watershed, multiresolution sub-band filtering) against a deep-learning approach based on the U-Net architecture. For the latter, the effects of depth of the network, number of epochs and different optimisation algorithms were investigated. Overall, the best results were provided by the deep-learning approach. However, the best results were distributed within the parameters, and many configurations provided results well below the traditional techniques

A Framework for Providing Research Applications as a Service Using the IOME Toolkit

This paper presents a unique, multi-purpose toolkit, enabling researchers to easily develop modelling and analysis applications, which can be run as web services and accessed interactively. The development kit is based on a protocol that uses an XML markup called the "Interactive Object Management Environment Markup Language" (IOME ML). The paper describes the IOME ML and its development kit. We illustrate the capabilities of IOME with two case studies the first case study is based on a medical image processing application (CAIMAN: CAncer IMage ANalysis), offering image analysis tools for life scientists. For the second case study, the Pi-Phi collaboration have developed an inverse imaging method for ‘lensless’ microscopy a demonstrator is introduced for the Pi-Phi project. For both case studies the application is wrapped as a web service and accessed through a web browser. The paper concludes with a review of further developments, including refinements to the mark up language and the development of a service factory, enabling a more scalable service provision model through the dynamic invocation of published simulations as IOME web service applications

Experimental investigation into the primary fabric of stress transmitting particles

Understanding the stress distribution amongst the constituent grains is fundamental to predict the response of soil and advance science-based, rather than purely empirical, constitutive models. Photoelastic experiments and discrete element method simulations have provided evidence that, upon loading, discrete force chains form in granular materials. These force chains are made up of particles transmitting relatively large stresses and they are aligned in the direction of the major principal stress. A few qualitative studies have identified the presence of these force chains in sands but direct measurements of force chains have not been previously documented and tracking stress transmission in assemblies of real soil grains remains a challenging task. The present study makes use of three dimensional micro CT images to investigate the evolution of the internal topology of a sand subjected to triaxial compression loading. The analysis of the contact normal and branch vector orientations has shown the realignment of the contact normals in the direction of the major principal stress as a clear indication of the formation of force chains in the post-peak regime. Here the extent of the non-colinearity of the branch and contact normal vectors is explored. Using the micro CT data contact force networks within and outside of shear bands are compared

Analysis of the Interactions of Migrating Macrophages

Understanding the migrating patterns of cells in the immune system is of great importance; especially the changes of direction and its cause. For macrophages and other immune cells, excessive migration could be related to autoimmune diseases and cancer. In this work, an algorithm to analyse the change in direction of cells before and after they interact with another cell is proposed. The main objective is to provide insights into the notion that interactions between cell structures appear to anticipate migration. Such interactions are determined when the cells overlap and form clumps of two or more cells. The algorithm integrates a segmentation technique capable of detecting overlapping cells and a tracking framework into a tool for the analysis of the trajectories of cells before and after they overlap. The preliminary results show promise into the analysis and the hypothesis proposed, and it lays the ground work for further developments

Nuevos datos morfométricos para el Lago de Sanabria

Se presenta un nuevo mapa batimétrico del lago de Sanabria, con curvas de nivel situadas a cada metro de profundidad y algunos parametros morfométricos. La forma de este lago, basándonos en la curva hipsográfica relativa del área frente a la profundidad es cóncava (C). Este lago tiene altos valores de los parámetros: desarrollo del volumen (Dv) y la relación de profundidad (cociente profundidad media / profundidad máxima: zm / zmax), esto refleja su morfometría con un fondo considerablemente plano y grandes pendientes desde las orillas hacia el mismo, como ocurre en algunos tipos de lagos de origen glaciar. La profundidad relativa (Zr) es intermedia y los índices: área de la cuenca / volumen del lago (Ac / V) y área de la cuenca / área del lago (Ac / A) son bastante altos, si los comparamos con otros lagos. El valor de estos parámetros indica la gran influencia de los factores externos sobre la dinámica del lago.A new bathymetric map of Lake Sanabria is presented, showing depth isolines each meter and some morphometric parameters. The lake form, based on the relative hypsographic curve (cumulative area-depth), is concave (C). This lake shows high values of volume development (Dv) and of the depth relation (mean depth / maximal depth ratio: zm / zmax), which indicates a nearly flat bottom and high slopes in the shores, like those of some types of glacial lakes. The relative depth (Zr) has an intermediate value and the indexes: basin area / lake volume (Ac / V) and basin area / lake area (Ac / A) are quite high, when compared to other lakes. The values of these parameters indicate the large influence of external factors on the lake dynamics

Shape analysis and tracking of migrating macrophages

Cell migration is important in many human processes of development and disease. In Cancer, migration can be related to metastasis or cell defects. A precise analysis of the cell shapes in biological studies could lead to insights about migration. Therefore, this paper describes an algorithm to iteratively segment, track and analyse the shape of macrophages from fluorescent microscopy image sequences. This process allows observation of shape variations as the cells migrate. The algorithm identifies and separates overlapping and non-overlapping cells, then for the non-overlapping cases analyses the shape and extracts a series of measurements, including the number of "corner" or pointy edges through a multiscale angle variation matrix, anglegram. The shape evolution algorithm was tested on fluorescently labelled macrophages observed on embryos of Drosophila melanogaster

Segmentation of Overlapping Macrophages Using Anglegram Analysis

This paper describes the automatic segmentation of overlapping cells through different algorithms. As the first step, the algorithm detects junctions between the boundaries of overlapping objects based on the angles between points of the overlapping boundary. For this purpose, a novel 2D matrix with multiscale angle variation is introduced, i.e anglegram. The anglegram is used to find junctions of overlapping cells. The algorithm to retrieve junctions from the boundary was tested and validated with synthetic data and fluorescently labelled macrophages observed on embryos of Drosophila melanogaster. Then, four different segmentation techniques were evaluated: (i) a Voronoi partition based on the nuclei positions, (ii) a slicing method, which joined the clumps together (junction slicing), (iii) a partition based on the following of the edges from the junctions (edge following), and (iv) a custom self-organising map to fit to the area of overlap between the cells. Only (ii)-(iv) were based on the junctions. The segmentation results were compared based on precision, recall and Jaccard similarity. The algorithm that reported the best segmentation was the junction slicing