PO-0698: Clinical outcomes of 4D CBCT-guided stereotactic body radiotherapy for inoperable hepatocellular carcinomas

Poster: Clinical track: Gastrointestinal tumours (upper and lower GI)published_or_final_version3rd ESTRO Forum, Barcelona, Spain, 24-28 April 2015. In Radiotherapy & Oncology, 2015, v. 115, p. S342-S34

A review on biodiesel production using catalyzed transesterification

Biodiesel is a low-emissions diesel substitute fuel made from renewable resources and waste lipid. The most common way to produce biodiesel is through transesterification, especially alkali-catalyzed transesterification. When the raw materials (oils or fats) have a high percentage of free fatty acids or water, the alkali catalyst will react with the free fatty acids to form soaps. The water can hydrolyze the triglycerides into diglycerides and form more free fatty acids. Both of the above reactions are undesirable and reduce the yield of the biodiesel product. In this situation, the acidic materials should be pre-treated to inhibit the saponification reaction. This paper reviews the different approaches of reducing free fatty acids in the raw oil and refinement of crude biodiesel that are adopted in the industry. The main factors affecting the yield of biodiesel, i.e. alcohol quantity, reaction time, reaction temperature and catalyst concentration, are discussed. This paper also described other new processes of biodiesel production. For instance, the Biox co-solvent process converts triglycerides to esters through the selection of inert co-solvents that generates a one-phase oil-rich system. The non-catalytic supercritical methanol process is advantageous in terms of shorter reaction time and lesser purification steps but requires high temperature and pressure. For the in situ biodiesel process, the oilseeds are treated directly with methanol in which the catalyst has been preciously dissolved at ambient temperatures and pressure to perform the transesterification of oils in the oilseeds. This process, however, cannot handle waste cooking oils and animal fats.Biodiesel Alkali-catalyzed transesterification Feedstock Purification Mass transfer

Content-based video sequence interpretation

Video sequence interpretation attempts to make sense of events that occur when they have been captured on video. When such scenario understanding can be employed in real-time or near-instantaneously, it can be applied to situations where constant watch would otherwise be needed. The potential for consumer applications is wide-ranging. Examples include safety monitoring of unattended elderly persons, children, pets and security surveillance. In this paper, we present a content-based video sequence interpretation algorithm for confined or semi-confined spaces. The algorithm comprises spatio-temporal video object (VO) segmentation, feature extraction, and scene analysis. Application of the proposed algorithm is illustrated in the context of security monitoring. Our system activates an alarm to alert the user of a suspicious event virtually instantaneously

Palmprint verification for controlling access to shared computing resources

Access security is an important aspect of pervasive computing systems. It offers the system developer and end users a certain degree of trust in the use of shared computing resources. Biometrics offers many advantages over the username-plus-password approach for access security control. Palmprint-based personal identification has seen less research than identification using fingerprints, irises, and faces. A proposed personal verification system employs palmprint images stored as 8-bit grayscale TIFF files. The system components include mechanisms for locating and aligning, extracting, and matching palmprints. The system first detects a human hand's interfinger key points and locates the palmprint on the basis of those points. Next, the system generates a line-edge-map representation of palmprint features. Finally, it performs feature matching based on the line segment Hausdorff distance. The LHD matching score provides the basis for verification decisions. Experimental results demonstrate that the key-point-detection technique is effective and that the palmprint line edge map has high discriminative power. This article is part of a special issue on security and privacy

A review on hydrogen production using aluminum and aluminum alloys

The hydrogen economy has been identified as an alternative to substitute the non-sustainable fossil fuel based economy. Ongoing research is underway to develop environmentally friendly and economical hydrogen production technologies that are essential for the hydrogen economy. One of the promising ways to produce hydrogen is to use aluminum or its alloys to reduce water or hydrocarbons to hydrogen. This paper gives an overview on these aluminum-based hydrogen production methods, their limitations and challenges for commercialization. Also, a newly developed concept for cogeneration of hydrogen and electrical energy is discussed.Hydrogen production Aluminum Aluminum alloys Water Alcohols Electricity cogeneration

Negative space template: a novel feature to describe activities in video

In this paper, we propose an implicit silhouette based (template based) method of recognizing activities in video. The novelty of the proposed method is that it extracts features from the negative space to form action templates while other implicit methods employed positive spaces to construct action templates. Extracting features from negative space facilitates the system to extract simple, yet effective features to describe each action. These features are robust to deformed actions due to complex boundary variations, partial occlusions, non-rigid deformation and small shadow. Moreover, other template based methods need to apply additional processing to reduce the dimensionality of the extracted features, but negative space templates do not require dimensionality reduction since it describes actions with low-dimensional features. The proposed method improves its processing time while achieving comparable accuracies with other state of the art methods