Finding lumbar vertebrae by evidence gathering

Low back pain is a very common problem and lumbar segmental instability is one of the causes. It is essential to investigate lumbar spine movement in order to understand instability better and as an aid to diagnosis. Digital videofluoroscopy (DVF) provides a method of quantifying the motion of individual vertebra. In this paper, we apply a new version of the Hough transform (HT) to locate the lumbar vertebra automatically in DVF image sequences. At present, this algorithm has been applied to a calibration model and to the vertebra L3 in DVF images, and has shown to provide satisfactory results. Further work will concentrate on reducing the computational time for realtime application, on developing a spatiotemporal sequences method and on determining the spinal kinematics based on the extracted parameters

Networking Effects on Cooperation in Evolutionary Snowdrift Game

The effects of networking on the extent of cooperation emerging in a competitive setting are studied. The evolutionary snowdrift game, which represents a realistic alternative to the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma, is studied in the Watts-Strogatz network that spans the regular, small-world, and random networks through random re-wiring. Over a wide range of payoffs, a re-wired network is found to suppress cooperation when compared with a well-mixed or fully connected system. Two extinction payoffs, that characterize the emergence of a homogeneous steady state, are identified. It is found that, unlike in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the standard deviation of the degree distribution is the dominant network property that governs the extinction payoffs.Comment: Changed conten

Test of shell-model interactions for nuclear structure calculations

The binding energy and excitation spectra of 6Li are calculated in a no-core shell-model space giving encouraging results. The results of this calculation are then treated as a theoretical experiment, against which different effective-interaction approximations are compared. In this way insight into the perturbation expansion for the effective interaction is obtained