Segmentation of ultrasound images of thyroid nodule for assisting fine needle aspiration cytology

The incidence of thyroid nodule is very high and generally increases with the age. Thyroid nodule may presage the emergence of thyroid cancer. The thyroid nodule can be completely cured if detected early. Fine needle aspiration cytology is a recognized early diagnosis method of thyroid nodule. There are still some limitations in the fine needle aspiration cytology, and the ultrasound diagnosis of thyroid nodule has become the first choice for auxiliary examination of thyroid nodular disease. If we could combine medical imaging technology and fine needle aspiration cytology, the diagnostic rate of thyroid nodule would be improved significantly. The properties of ultrasound will degrade the image quality, which makes it difficult to recognize the edges for physicians. Image segmentation technique based on graph theory has become a research hotspot at present. Normalized cut (Ncut) is a representative one, which is suitable for segmentation of feature parts of medical image. However, how to solve the normalized cut has become a problem, which needs large memory capacity and heavy calculation of weight matrix. It always generates over segmentation or less segmentation which leads to inaccurate in the segmentation. The speckle noise in B ultrasound image of thyroid tumor makes the quality of the image deteriorate. In the light of this characteristic, we combine the anisotropic diffusion model with the normalized cut in this paper. After the enhancement of anisotropic diffusion model, it removes the noise in the B ultrasound image while preserves the important edges and local details. This reduces the amount of computation in constructing the weight matrix of the improved normalized cut and improves the accuracy of the final segmentation results. The feasibility of the method is proved by the experimental results.Comment: 15pages,13figure

Evolving Optical Networks for Latency-Sensitive Smart-Grid Communications via Optical Time Slice Switching (OTSS) Technologies

In this paper, we proposed a novel OTSS-assisted optical network architecture for smart-grid communication networks, which has unique requirements for low-latency connections. Illustrative results show that, OTSS can provide extremely better performance in latency and blocking probability than conventional flexi-grid optical networks.Comment: IEEE Photonics Society 1st Place Best Poster Award, on CLEO-PR/OECC/PGC 201

Privacy Protection Performance of De-identified Face Images with and without Background

Li Meng, 'Privacy Protection Performance of De-identified Face Images with and without Background', paper presented at the 39th International Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Convention. Grand Hotel Adriatic Congress Centre and Admiral Hotel, Opatija, Croatia, May 30 - June 3, 2016.This paper presents an approach to blending a de-identified face region with its original background, for the purpose of completing the process of face de-identification. The re-identification risk of the de-identified FERET face images has been evaluated for the k-Diff-furthest face de-identification method, using several face recognition benchmark methods including PCA, LBP, HOG and LPQ. The experimental results show that the k-Diff-furthest face de-identification delivers high privacy protection within the face region while blending the de-identified face region with its original background may significantly increases the re-identification risk, indicating that de-identification must also be applied to image areas beyond the face region

Competing electronic orders on Kagome lattices at van Hove filling

The electronic orders in Hubbard models on a Kagome lattice at van Hove filling are of intense current interest and debate. We study this issue using the singular-mode functional renormalization group theory. We discover a rich variety of electronic instabilities under short range interactions. With increasing on-site repulsion $U$, the system develops successively ferromagnetism, intra unit-cell antiferromagnetism, and charge bond order. With nearest-neighbor Coulomb interaction $V$ alone (U=0), the system develops intra-unit-cell charge density wave order for small $V$, s-wave superconductivity for moderate $V$, and the charge density wave order appears again for even larger $V$. With both $U$ and $V$, we also find spin bond order and chiral $d_{x^2 - y^2} + i d_{xy}$ superconductivity in some particular regimes of the phase diagram. We find that the s-wave superconductivity is a result of charge density wave fluctuations and the squared logarithmic divergence in the pairing susceptibility. On the other hand, the d-wave superconductivity follows from bond order fluctuations that avoid the matrix element effect. The phase diagram is vastly different from that in honeycomb lattices because of the geometrical frustration in the Kagome lattice.Comment: 8 pages with 9 color figure