2536263
Multi-scale Voxel-Based Morphometry Via Weighted Spherical Harmonic Representation
Although the voxel-based morphometry (VBM) has been widely used in quantifying the amount of gray matter of the human brain, the optimal amount of registration that should be used in VBM has not been addressed. In this paper, we present a novel multi-scale VBM using the weighted spherical harmonic (SPHARM) representation to address the issue. The weighted-SPHARM provides the explicit smooth functional representation of a true unknown cortical boundary. Based on this new representation, the gray matter tissue density is constructed using the Euclidean distance map from a voxel to the estimated smooth cortical boundary. The methodology is applied in localizing abnormal cortical regions in a group of autistic subjects.
33719729
New Algorithms for Efficient Mining of Association Rules
Abstract Discovery of association rules is an important data mining task. Several algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. Most of them require repeated passes over the database, which incurs huge I/O overhead and high synchronization expense in parallel cases. There are a few algorithms trying to reduce these costs. But they contain weaknesses such as often requiring high pre-processing cost to get a vertical database layout, containing much redundant computation in parallel cases, and so on. We propose new association mining algorithms to overcome the above drawbacks, through minimizing the I/O cost and effectively controlling the computation cost. Experiments on well-known synthetic data show that our algorithms consistently outperform a priori, one of the best algorithms for association mining, by factors ranging from 2 to 4 in most cases. Also, our algorithms are very easy to be parallelized, and we present a parallelization for them based on a shared-nothing architecture. We observe that our parallelization develops the parallelism more sufficiently than two of the best existing parallel algorithms.
15225252
Morphometric Analysis of Hippocampal Shape in Mild Cognitive Impairment: An Imaging Genetics Study
A computational framework is presented for surface based morphometry to localize shape changes between groups of 3D objects. It employs the spherical harmonic (SPHARM) method for surface modeling and random field theory (RFT) for statistical inference. Several new components are introduced to overcome previous limitations: (1) a general linear model is used to facilitate controlling for covariates; (2) a new SPHARM registration method SHREC is proposed to better align SPHARM models; and (3) an estimated smoothness is used in RFT-based analysis to obtain more accurate results. This framework is applied in a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) study to examine hippocampal shape changes related to diagnostic and genetic conditions. Several interesting findings from our analyses suggest combining imaging phenotypes and genetic profiles has the potential to elucidate biological pathways for better understanding MCI and Alzheimer's disease.
2480556
Data Brokers: Building Collections through Automated Negotiation
Collecting digital materials is time-consuming and can gain from automation. Since each source – and even each acquisition – may involve a separate negotiation of terms, a collector may prefer to use a broker to represent his interests with owners. This paper describes the Data Broker Framework (DBF), which is designed to automate the process of digital object acquisition. For each acquisition, a negotiation agent is assigned to negotiate on the collector’s behalf, choosing from strategies in a strategy pool to automatically handle most bargaining cases and decide what to accept and what counteroffers to propose. We introduce NOODLE (Negotiation OntOlogy Description LanguagE) to formally specify terms in the negotiation domain.
6859814
Three-dimensional Models for Cardiac Bioelectricity Simulation: Cell to Organ
Computer models of the heart have become useful tools in improving understanding of cardiac electrical activation at the cellular level, and in analyzing mechanisms of arrhythmias and antiarrhythmic therapies. In this paper, we propose to use spherical harmonic (SPHARM) surface reconstruction and alignment methods to generate curvilinear meshes for finite element models of ventricular anatomy which incorporate detailed structural information. The endocardial and epicardial surfaces are defined by SPHARM, and the volume between these surfaces is divided into nested shells. Consequently, the resulting mesh comprises hexahedral elements. Using this novel SPHARM-based meshing method, the transmembrane potential propagation is simulated, based on FitzHugh—Nagumo reaction—diffusion equations. The dynamic electrical activation propagations are simulated on realistic cardiac data during a heart cycle. The obtained results clearly demonstrate an accurate resolution of the cardiac potential during the excitation. Our novel curvilinear mesh models have a great potential to be used in an improved simulation of cardiovascular pathologies for testing therapy strategies and planning interventions.
14826038
A Spatio-Temporal Modeling Method for Shape Representation
The spherical harmonic (SPHARM) description is a powerful surface modeling technique that can model arbitrarily shaped but simply connected three dimensional (3D) objects. Because SPHARM based 3D models can derive functional information analysis and classify different pathological symptoms, it has been used in many applications in biomedical image computing. There is an urgent requirement for efficient spatio-temporal shape modeling to represent the dynamic anatomical structures in many applications (e.g., medical image analysis, geospatial information systems). In this paper we propose a novel real spherical harmonics based spatio-temporal shape modeling method to efficiently and flexibly represent the shapes sequence of anatomical structures in medical images. Our method works well on the simply connected 3D objects and the effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through theoretic and experimental exploration of a set of medical image applications. Furthermore, an evaluation criterion for spatio-temporal shape modeling efficiency is proposed and the comparison results showed the good performance of our method.
8607029
Illumination Brush: Interactive Design of All-Frequency Lighting
We present an appearance-based user interface for artists to efficiently design customized image-based lighting environments. 1 Our approach avoids typical iterations of parameter editing, rendering, and confirmation by providing a set of intuitive user interfaces for directly specifying the desired appearance of the model in the scene. Then the system automatically creates the lighting environment by solving the inverse shading problem. To obtain a realistic image, all-frequency lighting is used with a spherical radial basis function (SRBF) representation. Rendering is performed using precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) to achieve a responsive speed. User experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed system compared to a previous approach.
45019016
A Simplified Algorithm for Testing Microprocessors
Abstract In this paper, we present a number of algorithms to test the instruction decoding function of microprocessors. The algorithms are based on the knowledge of some timing and control information available to users through microprocessor manuals and data sheets. The tests are functional in nature. We also establish the order of complexity of the algorithms presented in this paper. As an example, the test complexity for a microprocessor is computed and the results are compared with a known algorithm.
60639655
Parallel simulation of chip-multiprocessor by using multi-threading
Multi-core on one chip becomes the current main trend of micro processors' architecture, and simulation plays an important role in evaluating new processor architectures. Traditional ways of sequential simulation for chip-multiprocessor (CMP) require lots of simulation time which can't be afford during processor design phase. Therefore, exploiting parallelism is necessary for speeding up the multi-core processor simulation. 
 
In this paper, we present a parallel CMP simulator, which is implemented by using POSIX threads, and also present the programming methodology for converting a sequential single core simulator to a parallel CMP simulator. Furthermore, the tradeoffs in parallel simulator implementation are also discussed. The experiments are carried out on a four-CPU dual core Xeon server. Under weak consistence order model, the parallel simulator achieves a speedup of 7.2X comparing with the sequential one.
13122218
Intrinsic image decomposition with non-local texture cues
We present a method for decomposing an image into its intrinsic reflectance and shading components. Different from previous work, our method examines texture information to obtain constraints on reflectance among pixels that may be distant from one another in the image. We observe that distinct points with the same intensity-normalized texture configuration generally have the same reflectance value. The separation of shading and reflectance components should thus be performed in a manner that guarantees these non-local constraints. We formulate intrinsic image decomposition by adding these non-local texture constraints to the local derivative analysis employed in conventional techniques. Our results show a significant improvement in performance, with better recovery of global reflectance and shading structure than by previous methods.
31075540
Reducing multiclass cancer classification to binary by output coding and SVM
Multiclass cancer classification based on microarray data is presented. The binary classifiers used combine support vector machines with a generalized output-coding scheme. Different coding strategies, decoding functions and feature selection methods are incorporated and validated on two cancer datasets: GCM and ALL. Using random coding strategy and recursive feature elimination, the testing accuracy achieved is as high as 83% on GCM data with 14 classes. Comparing with other classification methods, our method is superior in classificatory performance.