16866295
Defect Tolerance Based on Graceful Degradation and Dynamic Reconfiguration for Digital Microfluidics-Based Biochips
Defect tolerance is an important design consideration for microfluidics-based biochips that are used for safety-critical applications. The authors propose a defect-tolerance methodology based on graceful degradation and dynamic reconfiguration. A tile-based biochip architecture is first introduced, which is scalable for large-scale bioassays. A clustered defect model is used to evaluate the graceful-degradation method for tile-based biochips. The proposed schemes ensure that the bioassays mapped to a droplet-based microfluidic array during design can be executed on a defective biochip through operation rescheduling and/or resource rebinding. Real-life biochemical procedures, namely polymerase chain reaction and multiplexed in vitro diagnostics on human physiological fluids, are used to evaluate the proposed defect-tolerance schemes
13266891
Unified high-level synthesis and module placement for defect-tolerant microfluidic biochips
Microfluidic biochips promise to revolutionize biosensing and clinical diagnostics. As more bioassays are executed concurrently on a biochip, system integration and design complexity are expected to increase dramatically. This problem is also identified by the 2003 ITRS document as a major system-level design challenge beyond 2009. We focus here on the automated design of droplet-based microfluidic biochips. We present a synthesis methodology that unifies operation scheduling, resource binding, and module placement for such "digital" biochips. The proposed technique, which is based on parallel recombinative simulated annealing, can also be used after fabrication to bypass defective cells in the microfluidic array. A real-life protein assay is used to evaluate the synthesis methodology.
1293291
Microfluidics-Based Biochips: Technology Issues, Implementation Platforms, and Design-Automation Challenges
Microfluidics-based biochips are soon expected to revolutionize clinical diagnosis, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing, and other laboratory procedures involving molecular biology. In contrast to continuous-flow systems that rely on permanently etched microchannels, micropumps, and microvalves, digital microfluidics offers a scalable system architecture and dynamic reconfigurability; groups of unit cells in a microfluidics array can be reconfigured to change their functionality during the concurrent execution of a set of bioassays. As more bioassays are executed concurrently on a biochip, system integration and design complexity are expected to increase dramatically. This paper presents an overview of an integrated system-level design methodology that attempts to address key issues in the synthesis, testing and reconfiguration of digital microfluidics-based biochips. Different actuation mechanisms for microfluidics-based biochips, and associated design-automation trends and challenges are also discussed. The proposed top-down design-automation approach is expected to relieve biochip users from the burden of manual optimization of bioassays, time-consuming hardware design, and costly testing and maintenance procedures, and it will facilitate the integration of fluidic components with a microelectronic component in next-generation systems-on-chips (SOCs).
9995821
Testing of droplet-based microelectrofluidic systems
Composite microsystems that integrate mechanical and fluidic components are fast emerging as the next generation of system-on-chip designs. As these systems become widespread in safety-critical biomedical applications, dependability emerges as a critical performance parameter. In this paper, we present a costeffective concurrent test methodology for droplet-based microelectrofluidic systems. We present a classification of catastrophic and parametric faults in such systems and show how faults can be detected by electrostatically controlling and tracking droplet motion. We then present tolerance analysis based on Monte-Carlo simulations to characterize the impact of parameter variations on system performance. To the best of our knowledge, this constitutes the first attempt to define a fault model and to develop a test methodology for droplet-based microelectrofluidic systems.
6635658
High-level synthesis of digital microfluidic biochips
Microfluidic biochips offer a promising platform for massively parallel DNA analysis, automated drug discovery, and real-time biomolecular recognition. Current techniques for full-custom design of droplet-based “digital” biochips do not scale well for concurrent assays and for next-generation system-on-chip (SOC) designs that are expected to include microfluidic components. We propose a system design methodology that attempts to apply classical high-level synthesis techniques to the design of digital microfluidic biochips. We focus here on the problem of scheduling bioassay functions under resource constraints. We first develop an optimal scheduling strategy based on integer linear programming. However, because the scheduling problem is NP-complete, we also develop two heuristic techniques that scale well for large problem instances. A clinical diagnostic procedure, namely multiplexed in-vitro diagnostics on human physiological fluids, is first used to illustrate and evaluate the proposed method. Next, the synthesis approach is applied to a protein assay, which serves as a more complex bioassay application. The proposed synthesis approach is expected to reduce human effort and design cycle time, and it will facilitate the integration of microfluidic components with microelectronic components in next-generation SOCs.
8296105
Concurrent testing of digital microfluidics-based biochips
We present a concurrent testing methodology for detecting catastrophic faults in digital microfluidics-based biochips and investigate the related problems of test planning and resource optimization. We first show that an integer linear programming model can be used to minimize testing time for a given hardware overhead, for example, droplet dispensing sources and capacitive sensing circuitry. Due to the NP-complete nature of the problem, we also develop efficient heuristic procedures to solve this optimization problem. We apply the proposed concurrent testing methodology to a droplet-based microfluidic array that was fabricated and used to perform multiplexed glucose and lactate assays. Experimental results show that the proposed test approach interleaves test application with the biomedical assays and prevents resource conflicts. The proposed method is therefore directed at ensuring high reliability and availability of bio-MEMS and lab-on-a-chip systems, as they are increasingly deployed for safety-critical applications.
13557739
A Robust Fingerprint Minutiae Matching Algorithm Based on the Support Model
A novel method to match two minutiae point-sets based on the support model we proposed is presented in this paper. In this method, coarse matching is first performed from a number of seeds, and the results are then fused to obtain a constrained corresponding relationship of minutiae in two point-sets. By using the support degree of the elements in the constrained relations, the one-to-one correspondence is finally determined by comparison of similarity of local structures. Experiments show that this algorithm is robust and can deal with the translation, rotation, distortion and outlier problems well.
35785382
Multi-UCAV Cooperative Path Planning Using Improved Coevolutionary Multi-Ant-Colony Algorithm
Teams of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) are well suited to perform cooperative mission in hostile environment, and cooperative path planning holds great attention for improving the efficiency of multi-UCAV combating. In this paper, a mathematical formulation for cooperative path planning problem is presented based on the analysis of typical constraints in the scenario. Different from previous studies, the formulation introduces cooperation coefficient to estimate how the UCAV flight paths fulfill the cooperative constraints. Then a coevolutionary multi-ant-colony algorithm is designed and implemented to solve the above-mentioned problem, based on multi-ant-colony algorithm and coevolutionary strategy. The state transition rule and pheromone updating strategy is modified to increase the algorithm performance. Finally, the proposed method is validated to be effective and feasible to solve the cooperative constraints efficiently, and is effective for the multi-UCAV cooperative path planning problem.
17266009
An Exact Ridge Matching Algorithm for Fingerprint Verification
Unlike traditional minutiae-based fingerprint matching approach, which establishes the minutiae correspondence between two fingerprints, in this paper a novel ridge-based fingerprint matching algorithm, which establishes the exact ridge correspondence between two fingerprints is proposed. The ridge correspondence is called ‘exact' because correspondences between points on ridges are also established. The matching score is computed as the ratio of the length of matched ridges to that of all ridges. Experimental results on FVC2002 databases show that the ridge matching approach performs comparably to minutiae-based one, and an obvious improvement on matching performance can be obtained by combining the two matchers.
11609039
A Hierarchical Fingerprint Matching Method Based on Rotation Invariant Features
A hierarchical matching algorithm based on rotation invariant features to align two fingerprints is proposed in this paper The translation and rotational offsets are extracted using the maximum overlapped fingerprint images The proposed method can reduce the searching space in alignment, and what is more attractive is that it obviates the need for extracting minutiae points or the core point to align the fingerprint images Experimental results show that the proposed method is more robust than using the reference point or using the minutiae to align the fingerprint images.
41723661
An Adaptive Fingerprint Post-processing Algorithm Based on Mathematical Morphology
In this paper, an adaptive post-processing method using mathematical morphology combined with analyzing the properties of each candidate minutia based on the gray-level image, binary image, local ridge spacing and local orientation is presented to decide whether the minutia is false or true and to eliminate the false one The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness to reduce the number of false minutiae encountered and improve the thinning fingerprint images at the same time.