Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Spatial Resolution in a Variable Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography Scanner

A variable resolution x-ray (VRX) computed tomography (CT) scanner can image objects of various sizes with greatly improved spatial resolution. The scanner employs an angulated discrete detector and achieves the resolution boost by matching the detector angulation to the scanner field of view (FOV) determined by the size of an object being imaged. A comprehensive evaluation of spatial resolution in an experimental version of the VRX CT scanner is presented in this dissertation. Two components of this resolution were evaluated – the pre-reconstruction spatial resolution, described by the detector presampling modulation transfer function (MTF), and the post-reconstruction spatial resolution, given by the scanner reconstruction MTF. The detector presampling MTF was modeled by the Monte Carlo simulation and measured by the moving-slit method. The modeled results showed the increase in the maximum cutoff frequency (in the detector plane) from 1.53 to 53.64 cycles per mm (cy/mm) as the scanner FOV decreased from 32 to 1 cm. The measured results supported the modeling, except for the small FOVs (below 8 cm), where the MTF could not be measured up to the cutoff frequency due to the focal-spot limitation. The scanner reconstruction MTF was measured by the special-phantom method. The measured results demonstrated the increase in the average cutoff frequency (in the object plane) from 2.44 to 4.13 cy/mm as the scanner FOV decreased from 16 to 8 cm. The MTF could not be measured at the FOVs other than 8 and 16 cm, due to the calibration-reconstruction inaccuracies and, again, the focal-spot limitation. Overall, the evaluation confirmed the potential value of the VRX CT scanner and produced results important for its further development

Tehnološki aspekti transseterifikacije biljnih ulja etanolom u prisutnosti metalnih oksida

Transesterification of vegetable oil with ethanol in the presence of fine metal oxide particles as catalysts has been investigated. Zinc and nickel(II) oxides were shown to have the highest catalytic activity. In their presence, the conversion of sunflower oil triglycerides, after 150 min, reached 95.3 and 94.2 %, respectively. The optimal mass fraction of zinc oxide catalyst was found to be 0.25–0.31 %. In the presence of zinc oxide, with mass fraction of water in ethanol of 5 and 10 %, the conversion of triglycerides was 98.5 and 94.8 %, respectively. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Ispitana je transseterifikacija biljnog ulja etanolom u prisustvu sitnih čestica metalnih oksida kao katalizatora. Pokazalo se da najveću katalitičku aktivnost imaju cinkovi i nikl(II) oksidi. U njihovoj prisutnosti, konverzija triglicerida suncokretova ulja nakon 150 min dostigla je 95,3 odnosno 94,2 %. Otkriveno je da je optimalni maseni udio katalizatora cinkova oksida 0,25 – 0,31 %. U prisutnosti cinkova oksida, s udjelom vode u etanolu od 5 i 10 mas.%, konverzija triglicerida iznosila je 98,5 odnosno 94,8 %. Ovo djelo je dano na korištenje pod licencom Creative Commons Imenovanje 4.0 međunarodna

PREKOGRANIČNA JAVNA UPRAVA: PERSPEKTIVE UVOĐENJA “BLOCKCHAIN” NADLEŽNOSTI

Institutional, teleological and consensual blockchain jurisdiction manifestations have been articulated in the activities of the public administration concerning interventional, contributory, protective, delegated, executive and efficient public administration. The authors have revealed the service format of functioning and synergy of the cross-border interaction of public administration within horizontal and vertical relations with the subjects of public and private law. Legitimacy of transformational remodelling of power, as well as the specifics of the values intercourse in information and traditional societies in the framework of implementing the powers of cross-border public administration through the simulation category. The paper highlights the functioning dynamics of cross-border public administration in the external and internal dimension in terms of using such instruments of public administration, as regulatory and administrative acts, acts-plans, acts-actions, administrative contracts. Fundamental influence of technological innovations on the public service activities of public administration has been proved in a transboundary perspective to achieve the rule of law, the maximum legal certainty of streamlining the process of public governance. Institutionalization of the synergetic paradigm has been established for using the tools of public administration within the blockchain jurisdiction to properly implement the cross-border competence of public administration, which will contribute to the adaptation of national law to the supranational legal framework. The authors have specified that, with proper implementation of the competence of cross-border public administration within the blockchain jurisdiction, there is a ‘self-propelled’ system with a measurable number of variables for institutionalization of such an organizational structure, which could be self- reproducible in the presence of corresponding internal and external links with the allocation of order parameters.Institucionalne, teleološke i konsenzualne manifestacije blokovskih nadležnosti artikulirane su u aktivnostima javne uprave koje se odnose na intervencijsku, doprinosnu, zaštitnu, delegiranu, izvršnu i učinkovitu javnu upravu. Autori su otkrili format usluge funkcioniranja i sinergiju prekogranične interakcije javne uprave u horizontalnim i vertikalnim odnosima s subjektima javnog i privatnog prava. Legitimnost transformacijskog preoblikovanja moći, kao i specifičnosti odnosa vrijednosti u informacijskim i tradicionalnim društvima u okviru provedbe ovlasti prekogranične javne uprave kroz simulacijsku kategoriju. U radu se ističe dinamika funkcioniranja prekogranične javne uprave u vanjskoj i unutarnjoj dimenziji u smislu korištenja takvih instrumenata javne uprave, kao regulatornih i upravnih akata, akata-planova, akata-akcija, administrativnih ugovora. Temeljni utjecaj tehnoloških inovacija na javne usluge javne uprave pokazao se u prekograničnoj perspektivi kako bi se postigla vladavina prava, maksimalna pravna sigurnost usmjeravanja procesa javne uprave. Uspostavljena je institucionalizacija sinergijske paradigme za korištenje alata javne uprave u nadležnosti blockchaina za pravilno provođenje prekogranične kompetencije javne uprave, što će pridonijeti prilagodbi nacionalnog prava nadnacionalnom pravnom okviru. Autori su naveli da uz pravilnu provedbu nadležnosti prekogranične javne uprave u okviru jurisdikcije blokova, postoji \u27samohodni\u27 sustav s mjerljivim brojem varijabli za institucionalizaciju takve organizacijske strukture, koja bi mogla biti samo-ponovljiva u prisutnosti odgovarajućih unutarnjih i vanjskih veza s dodjelom parametara naloga

An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Applying a Machine Learning Approach for Classification of Technical Documents in Knowledge Discovery Systems

An important component of knowledge management (KM) is the organization of documents for quick and easy access. One advantageous and effective way of organizing these documents is to group them by a fixed set of specific knowledge categories. For large-scale technical teams, the number of categories can reach thousands or even tens of thousands, which makes the aforementioned cataloging especially useful. Text classification (TC) is a sophisticated process that involves data pre-processing, transformation, dimensionality reduction, application of classification techniques, classifier evaluation, and classifier validation. TC remains a prominent research topic and still depends on human work rather than on machine learning (ML). It is a relatively new area of research and remains in a premature phase. The goal is to develop and evaluate a prototype model that uses ML algorithms to classify technical documentation in a KM system for technical teams of financial institutions involved in software development projects. This research contributes to the field of KM by determining whether an ML approach constitutes a feasible solution for TC in knowledge discovery

Конститутивні ознаки адміністративного акта: критика та аналіз

The relevance of the topic has been determined by the entry into force of the Law of Ukraine «On Administrative Procedure». The article is aimed at analyzing the approaches on understanding the features of an administrative act existing in Ukrainian legal doctrine and formulating recommendations oriented on building their universal system. Various methods of scientific cognition, including comparative and legal, systematic and structural, analysis, synthesis, and others constitute the research methodology. It makes it possible to systematically and consistently solve scientific problems, to study and compare the standpoints of scholars, the provisions of legal acts of the relevant countries, caselaw and to formulate the author’s conclusions. A number of systematic problems related to the incorrect understanding of the essence and features of administrative acts has been revealed in the research process. This situation, according to the author’s opinion, is largely related to the imperfection of legal definition of an administrative act, which was enshrined in the Law of Ukraine «On Administrative Procedure». Further analysis of the works of Ukrainian authors has demonstrated that in order to formulate relevant scientific provisions they in the vast majority use the results of Soviet authors. According to the author, such an approach is wrong; it blocks the development of modern, practically oriented concepts and conclusions. The author of the article has separately emphasized the fact that the features of an administrative act perform very important practical function. They help to solve comprehensive objectives primarily arising at the legal enforcement level. The author provides relevant detailed explanations on this matter. The article’s center of attention is the detailed presentation of the features of an administrative act. While performing this objective, the author has widely used the achievements of Western European authors, as well as refers to certain decisions of the judicial power to demonstrate the validity of the formulated conclusions and recommendations. As a result of the conducted research, the author comes to a sound conclusion that an administrative act should be characterized by the following features: 1) it represents a decision; 2) it is taken by an administrative agency; 3) it is oriented on the application / implementation of the norms of public (administrative) law; 4) it causes legal consequences in the form of establishing the rights or obligations for its addressee (regulatory nature); 5) it has a concrete and individual character; 6) it is characterized by an external orientation of the action. The conducted research allowed to draw the following conclusion:the features of an administrative act play a constitutive role by helping to solve various theoretical and practical problems. The features of an administrative act are universal in nature. It means that they do not depend (should not depend) on the national peculiarities of legal regulation and ideas about it. Ukrainian authors must be extremely responsible while formulating their own conclusions in regard to those categories and provisions having a supranational nature.Актуальність теми зумовлено набуттям чинності Законом України «Про адміністративну процедуру». У статті поставлено завдання проаналізувати наявні в українській юридичній доктрині підходи до розуміння ознак адміністративного акта та сформулювати рекомендації, спрямовані на розбудову їх універсальної системи, яка відповідатиме насамперед потребам правозастосування. Методологію дослідження становлять різноманітні методи наукового пізнання, включаючи порівняльно-правовий, системно-структурний, аналізу, синтезу та інші, що дають змогу системно й послідовно підійти до розв’язання наукових завдань, дослідити і порівняти між собою позиції вчених, положення правових актів відповідних держав, судової практики та сформулювати відповідні висновки. У процесі дослідження виявлено низку системних проблем, пов’язаних із неправильним розумінням сутності та ознак адміністративного акта. На думку автора, такий стан справ багато в чому зумовлений недосконалістю легального визначення адміністративного акта, яке знайшло своє закріплення у Законі України «Про адміністративну процедуру». Аналіз праць українських науковців показав, що вони здебільшого послуговуються результатами творчості радянських вчених для формулювання відповідних наукових положень. Такий підхід є помилковим; він блокує розроблення сучасних, орієнтованих на практику правозастосування, концепцій та висновків. У статті окремо акцентується увага та тому, що ознаки адміністративного акта виконують важливу практичну функцію. Вони допомагають розв’язувати складні завдання, які виникають насамперед на рівні правозастосування. З приводу цього наводяться відповідні розгорнуті пояснення. Центральне місце у роботі відведено презентації ознак адміністративного акта. У процесі виконання цього завдання широко використовуються здобутки західноєвропейських дослідників, а також окремі рішення судової влади для демонстрації обґрунтованості сформульованих висновків та рекомендацій. У результаті проведеного дослідження автор доходить обґрунтованого висновку про те, що адміністративний акт має характеризуватися такими ознаками: 1) є рішенням; 2) приймається адміністративним органом; 3) спрямований на застосування / реалізацію норми публічного (адміністративного) права; 4) викликає юридичні наслідки у вигляді встановлення прав чи обов’язків для свого адресата (регулюючий характер); 5) має конкретно-індивідуальний характер; 6) характеризується зовнішньою спрямованістю дії. Проведене дослідження дозволило дійти такого висновку: ознаки адміністративного акта виконують конститутивну роль, допомагаючи розв’язувати різноманітні як теоретичні, так і практичні завдання. Вони мають універсальний характер, тобто не залежать (не повинні залежати) від національних особливостей правового регулювання та уявлень про нього. Отже, українським вченим слід надзвичайно відповідально ставитися до формулювання власних висновків щодо тих категорій та положень, які мають загальноєвропейський характер

Зниження впливу ознак середньої інтенсивності для порівняння облич

Розглянуто особливості індивідуальної інтенсивності пікселів у стовпцях і рядках. Особливості були застосовані до граней з різними коефіцієнтами експозиції. Для зменшення різниці між ознаками, зумовленими різними рівнями інтенсивності, була запропонована зміна інтенсивності та сегментації.Face mean intensity features of pixels in columns and rows are considered. The features were applied to faces with different exposure coefficients. To reduce a difference between the features caused by different levels of intensity changing of intensity and segmenting approach was proposed

Prospects for implementation of corporate environmental responsibility concept: the eu experience for Ukraine

A comparative analysis of the main indicators of ecological sustainability in Ukraine and European countries has been done and the economic indicators of nature use in Ukraine have been studied. The purpose of this article is to study the experience and development peculiarities of corporate environmental responsibility, as well as the implementation of better European environmental practice in Ukrainian business. The research methodology concerns to the study of the Environmental Sustainability Index of Ukraine and European countries, as well as the Eco-innovations Index. The key criteria for corporate environmental responsibility has been identified based on the analysis results and a list of factors affecting the environmental responsibility of the enterprise has been formed. The conceptual framework of corporate environmental responsibility in Ukraine with application European principles and approaches for creating a favourable business environment has been developed

MODERN METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE INVESTIGATION OF ENSURING AND PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHT TO ACCESS TO PUBLIC INFORMATION

The purpose of the paper is to study the preconditions of the necessity to use new scientific tools during the study of issues related to the ensuring and protection of human right to access to public information; to characterize the main scientific approaches to modern researches in the sphere of safeguarding human right to access to public information; to identify promising directions for further research on this topic. Methodology. The paper presents the examples of a negative use of scientific methodology in conducting research in the area of administrative law and procedure and also draws attention to the need to reconsider an obsolete scientific methodology that does not correspond to the current realities and negatively affects the development of legal science. It indicates and characterizes the main preconditions of the necessity to use new scientific tools while investigating the issues related to ensuring and protection of human right to access to public information. In the context of the research of peculiarities of administrative and legal coverage and protection of human right to access to public information, it is proposed to use the systems approach, which is extremely effective in analysing complicated legal phenomena and processes and permits to study the peculiarities of substantive, procedure and procedural legal regulation as a cohesive whole. Practical implications. The system approach is an extremely promising technique for studying legal reality. Its use allows synthesizing all the knowledge about legal phenomena (legal rules, legal relations, legal consciousness, etc.), which is accumulated during the past stages of formation and development of domestic legal science, for a deeper insight into the development and functioning of law in general and administrative law in particular. Value/originality. Problems that exist in legal science in general and in the science of administrative law, in particular, can be solved only with the help of new scientific tools, specifically, by applying the system approach. The use of the systems approach in case of studying the issues of ensuring and protection of the human right to access to public information would allow combining all studies that were performed on this issue in substantive, procedure or procedural parts of the administrative law

Statistically Adaptive Filtering for Low Signal Correction in X-ray Computed Tomography

Low x-ray dose is desirable in x-ray computed tomographic (CT) imaging due to health concerns. But low dose comes with a cost of low signal artifacts such as streaks and low frequency bias in the reconstruction. As a result, low signal correction is needed to help reduce artifacts while retaining relevant anatomical structures. Low signal can be encountered in cases where sufficient number of photons do not reach the detector to have confidence in the recorded data. % NOTE: SNR is ratio of powers, not std. dev. X-ray photons, assumed to have Poisson distribution, have signal to noise ratio proportional to the dose, with poorer SNR in low signal areas. Electronic noise added by the data acquisition system further reduces the signal quality. In this paper we will demonstrate a technique to combat low signal artifacts through adaptive filtration. It entails statistics-based filtering on the uncorrected data, correcting the lower signal areas more aggressively than the high signal ones. We look at local averages to decide how aggressive the filtering should be, and local standard deviation to decide how much detail preservation to apply. Implementation consists of a pre-correction step i.e. local linear minimum mean-squared error correction, followed by a variance stabilizing transform, and finally adaptive bilateral filtering. The coefficients of the bilateral filter are computed using local statistics. Results show that improvements were made in terms of low frequency bias, streaks, local average and standard deviation, modulation transfer function and noise power spectrum

MBIR Training for a 2.5D DL network in X-ray CT

In computed tomographic imaging, model based iterative reconstruction methods have generally shown better image quality than the more traditional, faster filtered backprojection technique. The cost we have to pay is that MBIR is computationally expensive. In this work we train a 2.5D deep learning (DL) network to mimic MBIR quality image. The network is realized by a modified Unet, and trained using clinical FBP and MBIR image pairs. We achieve the quality of MBIR images faster and with a much smaller computation cost. Visually and in terms of noise power spectrum (NPS), DL-MBIR images have texture similar to that of MBIR, with reduced noise power. Image profile plots, NPS plots, standard deviation, etc. suggest that the DL-MBIR images result from a successful emulation of an MBIR operator