Asymptotic Accuracy of Geoacoustic Inversions

Criteria necessary to accurately estimate a set of unknown geoacoustic parameters from remote acoustic measurements are developed in order to aid the design of geoacoustic experiments. The approach is to have estimation error fall within a specified design threshold by adjusting controllable quantities such as experimental sample size or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is done by computing conditions on sample size and SNR necessary for any estimate to have a variance that (1) asymptotically attains the Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB) and (2) has a CRLB that falls within the specified design error threshold. Applications to narrow band deterministic signals received with additive noise by vertical and horizontal arrays in typical continental shelf waveguides are explored. For typical low-frequency scenarios, necessary SNRs and samples sizes can often approach prohibitively large values when a few or more important geoacoustic parameters are unknown, making it difficult to attain practical design thresholds for allowable estimation error

Quantifying hurricane wind speed with undersea sound

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution June 2006Hurricanes, powerful storms with wind speeds that can exceed 80 m/s, are one of the most destructive natural disasters known to man. While current satellite technology has made it possible to effectively detect and track hurricanes, expensive 'hurricanehunting' aircraft are required to accurately classify their destructive power. Here we show that passive undersea acoustic techniques may provide a promising tool for accurately quantifying the destructive power of a hurricane and so may provide a safe and inexpensive alternative to aircraft-based techniques. It is well known that the crashing of wind-driven waves generates underwater noise in the 10 Hz to 10 kHz range. Theoretical and empirical evidence are combined to show that underwater acoustic sensing techniques may be valuable for measuring the wind speed and determining the destructive power of a hurricane. This is done by first developing a model for the acoustic intensity and mutual intensity in an ocean waveguide due to a hurricane and then determining the relationship between local wind speed and underwater acoustic intensity. Acoustic measurements of the underwater noise generated by hurricane Gert are correlated with meteorological data from reconnaissance aircraft and satellites to show that underwater noise intensity between 10 and 50 Hz is approximately proportional to the cube of the local wind speed. From this it is shown that it should be feasible to accurately measure the local wind speed and quantify the destructive power of a hurricane if its eye wall passes directly over a single underwater acoustic sensor. The potential advantages and disadvantages of the proposed acoustic method are weighed against those of currently employed techniques. It has also long been known that hurricanes generate microseisms in the 0.1 to 0.6 Hz frequency range through the non-linear interaction of ocean surface waves. Here we model microseisms generated by the spatially inhomogeneous waves of a hurricane with the non-linear wave equation where a second-order acoustic field is created by first-order ocean surface wave motion. We account for the propagation of microseismic noise through range-dependent waveguide environments from the deep ocean to a receiver on land. We compare estimates based on the ocean surface wave field measured in hurricane Bonnie with seismic measurements from Florida.Finally, I am grateful to have been awarded the Office of Naval Research Graduate Traineeship Award in Ocean Acoustics. I also thank the MIT Sea Grant office for funding portions of this research

Using a coherent hydrophone array for observing sperm whale range, classification, and shallow-water dive profiles

Sperm whales in the New England continental shelf and slope were passively localized, in both range and bearing, and classified using a single low-frequency (<2500 Hz), densely sampled, towed horizontal coherent hydrophone array system. Whale bearings were estimated using time-domain beamforming that provided high coherent array gain in sperm whale click signal-to-noise ratio. Whale ranges from the receiver array center were estimated using the moving array triangulation technique from a sequence of whale bearing measurements. Multiple concurrently vocalizing sperm whales, in the far-field of the horizontal receiver array, were distinguished and classified based on their horizontal spatial locations and the inter-pulse intervals of their vocalized click signals. The dive profile was estimated for a sperm whale in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Maine with 160 m water-column depth located close to the array's near-field where depth estimation was feasible by employing time difference of arrival of the direct and multiply reflected click signals received on the horizontal array. By accounting for transmission loss modeled using an ocean waveguide-acoustic propagation model, the sperm whale detection range was found to exceed 60 km in low to moderate sea state conditions after coherent array processing.National Science Foundation (U.S.)United States. Office of Naval Researc

Human subcortical brain asymmetries in 15,847 people worldwide reveal effects of age and sex

The two hemispheres of the human brain differ functionally and structurally. Despite over a century of research, the extent to which brain asymmetry is influenced by sex, handedness, age, and genetic factors is still controversial. Here we present the largest ever analysis of subcortical brain asymmetries, in a harmonized multi-site study using meta-analysis methods. Volumetric asymmetry of seven subcortical structures was assessed in 15,847 MRI scans from 52 datasets worldwide. There were sex differences in the asymmetry of the globus pallidus and putamen. Heritability estimates, derived from 1170 subjects belonging to 71 extended pedigrees, revealed that additive genetic factors influenced the asymmetry of these two structures and that of the hippocampus and thalamus. Handedness had no detectable effect on subcortical asymmetries, even in this unprecedented sample size, but the asymmetry of the putamen varied with age. Genetic drivers of asymmetry in the hippocampus, thalamus and basal ganglia may affect variability in human cognition, including susceptibility to psychiatric disorders

Telomerecat: A ploidy-agnostic method for estimating telomere length from whole genome sequencing data.

Telomere length is a risk factor in disease and the dynamics of telomere length are crucial to our understanding of cell replication and vitality. The proliferation of whole genome sequencing represents an unprecedented opportunity to glean new insights into telomere biology on a previously unimaginable scale. To this end, a number of approaches for estimating telomere length from whole-genome sequencing data have been proposed. Here we present Telomerecat, a novel approach to the estimation of telomere length. Previous methods have been dependent on the number of telomeres present in a cell being known, which may be problematic when analysing aneuploid cancer data and non-human samples. Telomerecat is designed to be agnostic to the number of telomeres present, making it suited for the purpose of estimating telomere length in cancer studies. Telomerecat also accounts for interstitial telomeric reads and presents a novel approach to dealing with sequencing errors. We show that Telomerecat performs well at telomere length estimation when compared to leading experimental and computational methods. Furthermore, we show that it detects expected patterns in longitudinal data, repeated measurements, and cross-species comparisons. We also apply the method to a cancer cell data, uncovering an interesting relationship with the underlying telomerase genotype

Publisher Correction: Telomerecat: A ploidy-agnostic method for estimating telomere length from whole genome sequencing data.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper

Effectiveness of a national quality improvement programme to improve survival after emergency abdominal surgery (EPOCH): a stepped-wedge cluster-randomised trial

BACKGROUND: Emergency abdominal surgery is associated with poor patient outcomes. We studied the effectiveness of a national quality improvement (QI) programme to implement a care pathway to improve survival for these patients. METHODS: We did a stepped-wedge cluster-randomised trial of patients aged 40 years or older undergoing emergency open major abdominal surgery. Eligible UK National Health Service (NHS) hospitals (those that had an emergency general surgical service, a substantial volume of emergency abdominal surgery cases, and contributed data to the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit) were organised into 15 geographical clusters and commenced the QI programme in a random order, based on a computer-generated random sequence, over an 85-week period with one geographical cluster commencing the intervention every 5 weeks from the second to the 16th time period. Patients were masked to the study group, but it was not possible to mask hospital staff or investigators. The primary outcome measure was mortality within 90 days of surgery. Analyses were done on an intention-to-treat basis. This study is registered with the ISRCTN registry, number ISRCTN80682973. FINDINGS: Treatment took place between March 3, 2014, and Oct 19, 2015. 22 754 patients were assessed for elegibility. Of 15 873 eligible patients from 93 NHS hospitals, primary outcome data were analysed for 8482 patients in the usual care group and 7374 in the QI group. Eight patients in the usual care group and nine patients in the QI group were not included in the analysis because of missing primary outcome data. The primary outcome of 90-day mortality occurred in 1210 (16%) patients in the QI group compared with 1393 (16%) patients in the usual care group (HR 1·11, 0·96-1·28). INTERPRETATION: No survival benefit was observed from this QI programme to implement a care pathway for patients undergoing emergency abdominal surgery. Future QI programmes should ensure that teams have both the time and resources needed to improve patient care. FUNDING: National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research Programme

c ○ 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Recognition, Resolution, and Complexity of Objects Subject to Affine Transformations ∗

Abstract. The problem of recognizing objects subject to affine transformation in images is examined from a physical perspective using the theory of statistical estimation. Focusing first on objects that occlude zero-mean scenes with additive noise, we derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound on the mean-square error in an estimate of the six-dimensional parameter vector that describes an object subject to affine transformation and so generalize the bound on one-dimensional position error previously obtained in radar and sonar pattern recognition. We then derive two useful descriptors from the object’s Fisher information that are independent of noise level. The first is a generalized coherence scale that has great practical value because it corresponds to the width of the object’s autocorrelation peak under affine transformation and so provides a physical measure of the extent to which an object can be resolved under affine parameterization. The second is a scalar measure of an object’s complexity that is invariant under affine transformation and can be used to quantitatively describe the ambiguity level of a general 6-dimensional affine recognition problem. This measure of complexity has a strong inverse relationship to the level of recognition ambiguity. We then develop a method for recognizing objects subject to affine transformation imaged in thousands of complex real-world scenes. Our method exploits the resolution gain made available by the brightness contrast between the object perimeter and the scene it partially occludes. The level of recognition ambiguity is shown to decrease exponentially with increasing object and scene complexity. Ambiguity is then avoided by conditionin

Maximum Likelihood Deconvolution of Beamformed Images with Signal-Dependent Speckle Fluctuations from Gaussian Random Fields: With Application to Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS)

Wide area acoustic remote sensing often involves the use of coherent receiver arrays to determine the spatial distribution of sources and scatterers at any instant. The resulting acoustic intensity images are typically corrupted by signal-dependent noise from Gaussian random field fluctuations arising from the central limit theorem and have a spatial resolution that depends on the incident direction, sensing array aperture and wavelength. Here, we use the maximum likelihood method to deconvolve the intensity distribution measured on a coherent line array assuming a discrete angular distribution of incident plane waves. Instantaneous wide area population density images of fish aggregations measured with Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS) are deconvolved to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach in improving angular resolution over conventional planewave beamforming