Optimization and enhancement of H&E stained microscopical images by applying bilinear interpolation method on lab color mode

Background: Hematoxylin & Eosin (H&E) is a widely employed technique in pathology and histology to distinguish nuclei and cytoplasm in tissues by staining them in different colors. This procedure helps to ease the diagnosis by enhancing contrast through digital microscopes. However, microscopic digital images obtained from this technique usually suffer from uneven lighting, i.e. poor Koehler illumination. Several off-the-shelf methods particularly established to correct this problem along with some popular general commercial tools have been examined to find out a robust solution. Methods: First, the characteristics of uneven lighting in pathological images obtained from the H&E technique are revealed, and then how the quality of these images can be improved by employing bilinear interpolation based approach applied on the channels of Lab color mode is explored without losing any essential detail, especially for the color information of nuclei (hematoxylin stained sections). Second, an approach to enhance the nuclei details that are a fundamental part of diagnosis and crucially needed by the pathologists who work with digital images is demonstrated. Results: Merits of the proposed methodology are substantiated on sample microscopic images. The results show that the proposed methodology not only remedies the deficiencies of H&E microscopical images, but also enhances delicate details. Conclusions: Non-uniform illumination problems in H&E microscopical images can be corrected without compromising crucial details that are essential for revealing the features of tissue samples

Intelligent system for spoken term detection using the belief combination

Spoken Term Detection (STD) can be considered as a sub-part of the automatic speech recognition which aims to extract the partial information from speech signals in the form of query utterances. A variety of STD techniques available in the literature employ a single source of evidence for the query utterance match/mismatch determination. In this manuscript, we develop an acoustic signal processing based approach for STD that incorporates a number of techniques for silence removal, dynamic noise filtration, and evidence combination using Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST). A ‘spectral-temporal features based voiced segment detection’ and ‘energy and zero cross rate based unvoiced segment detection’ are built to remove the silence segments in the speech signal. Comprehensive experiments have been performed on large speech datasets and consequently satisfactory results have been achieved with the proposed approach. Our approach improves the existing speaker dependent STD approaches, specifically the reliability of query utterance spotting by combining the evidences from multiple belief sources

TCitySmartF: A comprehensive systematic framework for transforming cities into smart cities

A shared agreed-upon definition of "smart city" (SC) is not available and there is no "best formula" to follow in transforming each and every city into SC. In a broader inclusive definition, it can be described as an opportunistic concept that enhances harmony between the lives and the environment around those lives perpetually in a city by harnessing the smart technology enabling a comfortable and convenient living ecosystem paving the way towards smarter countries and the smarter planet. SCs are being implemented to combine governors, organisations, institutions, citizens, environment, and emerging technologies in a highly synergistic synchronised ecosystem in order to increase the quality of life (QoL) and enable a more sustainable future for urban life with increasing natural resource constraints. In this study, we analyse how to develop citizen- and resource-centric smarter cities based on the recent SC development initiatives with the successful use cases, future SC development plans, and many other particular SC development solutions. The main features of SC are presented in a framework fuelled by recent technological advancement, particular city requirements and dynamics. This framework - TCitySmartF 1) aims to aspire a platform that seamlessly forges engineering and technology solutions with social dynamics in a new philosophical city automation concept - socio-technical transitions, 2) incorporates many smart evolving components, best practices, and contemporary solutions into a coherent synergistic SC topology, 3) unfolds current and future opportunities in order to adopt smarter, safer and more sustainable urban environments, and 4) demonstrates a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for local governors and private sector about how to transform cities into smarter cities from the technological, social, economic and environmental point of view, particularly by both putting residents and urban dynamics at the forefront of the development with participatory planning and interaction for the robust community- and citizen-tailored services. The framework developed in this paper is aimed to be incorporated into the real-world SC development projects in Lancashire, UK

Conceptualisation of human-on-the-loop haptic teleoperation with fully autonomous self-driving vehicles in the urban environment

The automotive industry aims to deploy commercial level-5 fully autonomous self-driving vehicles (FA-SDVs) in a diverse range of benefit-driven concepts on city roads in the years to come. In all future visions of operating networks of FA-SDVs, humans are expected to intervene with some kind of remote supervisory role. Recent advances in cyber-physical systems (CPS) within the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE) using tactile internet (TI) teleport us to teleoperate remote objects within the cyber-world. Human-on-the-loop (HOTL) haptic teleoperation with an extension of human control and sensing capability by coupling with artificial sensors and actuators with an increased sense of real-time driving in the remote vehicle can help overcome the challenging tasks when the new driver - artificial intelligence (AI) agent - encounters an unorthodox situation that can't be addressed by the autonomous capabilities. This paper analyses HOTL real-time haptic delay-sensitive teleoperation with FA-SDVs, in the aspects of human-vehicle teamwork by establishing two similar remote parallel worlds --- real-world vehicle time-varying environment and cyber-world emulation of this environment, i.e., digital twins (DTs) --- in which a human telesupervisor (HTS), as a biological agent, can be immersed within a reasonable timescale with no cybersickness enabling omnipresence and a bidirectional flow of energy and information. The experiments conducted as a proof of concept of HOTL haptic teleoperation shows promising results and the potential of benefiting from the proposed framework

MetaOmniCity: Towards urban metaverse cyberspaces using immersive smart city digital twins

The movie - The Matrix (1999) - boosted our imagination about how further we can be immersed within the cyber world, i.e., how further the cyber world can be indistinguishable from the real world with the metaverse space travel. Nobody had expected involving the creators that the aspirational fictional virtual worlds such as "ActiveWorlds (1995)", and ``Second Life (2003)'' with many urban experiences embedded into a rich featured 3D environment would impact the way of experiencing our real urban environments. Are we going to feel/become ourselves - our cyber-physical presence (e.g., our augmented avatars) - in other mirror worlds doing many other things? Are the created imaginary worlds becoming a part of the real worlds or vice versa? The recent once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has confirmed the importance of location and time-independent Digital Twins (DTs) (i.e., virtual scale models) of cities and their automated services that can provide everybody with equity and accessibility by democratising all types of services leading to increased Quality of Life (QoL). This study analyses how the metaverse (3D elevation of linear Internet), that aims to build high-fidelity virtual worlds with which to interact with the real world, can be engaged within the Smart City (SC) ecosystem with high immersive Quality of Experiences (QoE) and an urban metaverse ecosystem framework — MetaOmniCity — that is designed to demonstrate a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for policymakers, city planners and all other stakeholders about how to transform data-driven SCs with DTs into virtually inhabitable cities with a network of shared urban experiences from a metaverse point of view. MetaOmniCity, allowing the metaversification of cities with granular virtual societies, i.e., MetaSocieties, and eliminating the boundaries (e.g., time, space and language) between the real world and their virtual counterparts, can be shaped to the particular requirements and features of cities. This can pave the way for immersive globalisation with the bigger and richer metaverse of Country (MoC) and metaverse of World (MoW) being an immersive DT of the broader universe with digitally connected cities by removing physical borders. MetaOmniCity is expected to accelerate the building, deployment, and adoption of immersive urban metaverse worlds/networks for citizens to interface with as an extension of real urban social and individual experiences

Planning the future of smart cities with swarms of fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles using a novel framework

The autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - self-governing in the aerospace discipline has been a remarkable research area with the development of the advanced bespoke microcontrollers embedded with advanced AI techniques for the last several decades. The road forward about the operational environment is certain about the swarms of fully automated UAVs (FAUAVs), that is, urban areas. Therefore, the planning the future of cities with swarms of fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles is explored in this paper to optimise the use of this type of autonomy with a diverse range of applications and a contemporary methodology is proposed using a synergistic holistic framework equipped with various effective and efficient techniques along with a novel FAUAV routing approach customisable to the constraints of FAUAVs and urban areas. The framework consists of a decentralized agent-based control architecture that monitors and controls the swarms of resource-constraint FAUAVs for their real-time requirements in optimising their urban uses. The results demonstrate that the constraints of FAUAVs can be mitigated significantly in urban areas and their use in realising their diverse range of missions can be optimised using the proposed methodology

Sağlık Bilgi Sistemlerinin zayıf yönlerinin belirlenmesi: Bir Deneysel E-sağlık Değerlendirme Çalışması [Determining the weak sides of Healthcare Information Systems: An Emprical e-Health Evaluation Study]

Abstract in Turkish Sağlık tüm sağlık teşkillerinin bir bilgi sistemi kullandığı teknoloji-yoğun bir alandır. Sağlık hizmetinin devamının sağlanması ve günlük sağlık bakımı işlemlerinin yürütülmesi sağlık bilgi sistemleri olmaksızın imkansız bir hale gelmiştir. Sağlık bilgi sistmleri sürelki değişen ihtiyaçları karşılamak için iyi yönetilmeli ve desteklenmeli, sürekli geliştirilmelidir. Bunun için yaşayan sistemler olmalıdırlar. Bu bağlamda, işletilen sistemlerin zayıf ve güçlü yanlarını belirlemek için değerlendirme çalışmaları yapılmaktadır. Sağlık bilişimi alanında değerlendirme çok önemli mbir konudur. Yatırımcılar ve yöneticiler bilgi sistemlerini geliştirebilmek için sistemlerinin başarı seviyesini ve zayıf noktalarını bilmek isterler. Burdan yola çıkarak, bir sağlık bilgi sisteminin değerlendirildiği bir çalışma yapılmıştır. Yeni kurulan labaratuvar bilgi sistemi (LBS), hem hastalara hem de kullanıcılara uygulanan anketler vasıtası ile very toplanarak değerlendirilmiştir. LBS Fonksiyon yeterliliği, İş yükü azaltma, Hız, Öğrenme kolaylığı, Hizmet kalitesini arttırma, Süreklilik, Yardım menüleri, Kulanıcı tatmini ve Hasta tatmini özellikleri bazında değerlendirmeye tabii tutulmuştur. Belirlenen eşik değerinin altında kalan özellikler geliştirme gerektiren özellikler olarak belirlenmişit.r Değişik eşik değerlerine göre hangi özelliklerin geliştirilmesi gerektiği bir tablo olarak verilerek, eşik değeri seçimi duruma özel olması nedeniyle değerlendirmeciye bırakılmıştır. Eşik değeri yükseldikçe geliştirme gereken özellik sayısı artmaktadır. [Healthcare is a technology-intensive area where all the healthcare organisations use an information system. Managing daily works and providing the continuity of healthcare is impossible without healthcare information systems. Healthcare information systems have to be well supported and managed, also have to be improved to meet the changing needs, they must be living systems. In this respect, evaluations are carried out to reveal the weak and strong sides of information systems in operation. Evaluation is an important subject for medical informatics domain. The investors and managers need to know the success level and poor sides of their information system to make improvements. In this sense, a case study is performed in this study, to evaluate a healthcare information system. Particularly, the recently deployed laboratory information system (LIS) is evaluated by means of questionnaires, applied to both patients and users of the laboratory information system. Laboratory information system is evaluated on the basis of Function sufficiency, Decreasing Work Load, Speed, Learning Ease, Improving Service Quality, Availability, Help Manuals, User Satisfaction, and Patient Satisfaction features. The features needing to be improved in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency of LIS are measured based on the threshold value. The results are presented in a variable table according to the threshold value selected by the evaluator. As the target threshold value increases, the number of features needing to be improved also increases.

Use of Wearable Miniaturised Medical Devices With Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Enhancing Physical Medicine

High-quality data needs to be acquired from patients at the right time not only to build effective intelligent diagnostic decision support systems (DDSSs) and medical decision-making (MDM) tools without tedious data preprocessing steps but also to trigger the most appropriate means of treatment at the proper time [1], ideally in an autonomous manner without physician intervention. Within this context, wearable miniaturised medical devices instilled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques [2] equipped with geo-distributed intelligence [3] have been taking their indispensable places in the medical field with numerous sub-disciplines [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10] to take care of patients while they are performing their daily activities. The recent advances in miniaturised mechatronics systems [11], sensor technologies, and AI expedite the development of such devices. Miniaturised sensors are the essential components in developing miniaturised wearable devices to perceive continuous health conditions through uninterrupted tight coupling with the human body. This research analyses the non-invasive wearable miniaturised medical devices, essential sensor components to acquire high-quality health data, and AI used in these devices to build MDM and DDSSs for improving the daily routines of people with quality suggestions, alerts, and directions

A Novel Report Generation System for Medical Applications

There has been an increasing demand for high quality medical data that are in a standard electronic format and easily shared. Although a great amount of effort has been invested to ease the process, an effective solution has yet to be found. In this study, we first discuss necessary features of an effective data collection and reporting system, and then reveal the conceptual view of a novel method that aims to encompass these features. We also present the design and implementation details of a Web-based prototype

Technical Report: Use of A-mode Ultrasound in Medicine

This technical report summarises the basics of ultrasound physics in the human body, particularly, human tissues (e.g., bladder). This report was prepared to shed light on research performed on ultrasound medicine, particularly, A-mode ultrasound. The researchers are expected to benefit from this report for their studies conducted on medicine using ultrasound technologies