PHYSQuiz - Aplicação computacional para formação contínua em Física Radiológica

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computação e Instrumentação Médica

10 kVp rule - An anthropomorphic pelvis phantom imaging study using a CR system: impact on image quality and effective dose using AEC and manual mode

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the influence of tube potential (kVp) variation in relation to perceptual image quality and effective dose for pelvis using automatic exposure control (AEC) and non-AEC in a computed radiography (CR) system. Methods and Materials: To determine the effects of using AEC and non-AEC by applying the 10 kVp rule in two experiments using an anthropomorphic pelvis phantom. Images were acquired using 10 kVp increments (60-120 kVp) for both experiments. The first experiment, based on seven AEC combinations, produced 49 images. The mean mAs from each kVp increment were used as a baseline for the second experiment producing 35 images. A total of 84 images were produced and a panel of 5 experienced observers participated for the image scoring using the 2 AFC visual grading software. PCXMC software was used to estimate the effective dose. Results: A decrease in perceptual image quality as the kVp increases was observed both in non-AEC and AEC experiments, however no significant statistical differences (p> 0.05) were found. Image quality scores from all observers at 10 kVp increments for all mAs values using non-AEC mode demonstrates a better score up to 90 kVp. Effective dose results show a statistical significant decrease (p=0.000) on the 75th quartile from 0.3 mSv at 60 kVp to 0.1 mSv at 120 kVp when applying the 10 kVp rule in non-AEC mode. Conclusion: No significant reduction in perceptual image quality is observed when increasing kVp whilst a marked and significant effective dose reduction is observed.

Cooperative memory and database transactions

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Sustainable Development Action Plan at ISEP - From Concept to Engineering Practice

Some of the main challenges in Incorporating Sustainable Development practices into Engineering Education reside in establishing the bridge between concept and application. In particular the relation between value creation and the knowledge economy, innovation and entrepreneurship, as the main vehicles to a relevant application of the sustainable development concept, is not yet part of the majority of the engineering curricula in schools. Porto Polytechnical Engineering School (ISEP), a Global Reporting Initiative training partner in Portugal, as just presented its Sustainable Development Action Plan, with the main objective of creating a new kind of engineers, with Sustainable Development at the core of their degrees. The plan has several issues like publish an annual sustainability report, sustainable buildings, minimization of energy consumption and water policy, waste management, sustainable mobility, green procurement, EMAS certification, research and postgraduate activity and promotion of lectures and seminars in Sustainable Development.

ErasmusApp: A Location-Based Collaborative System for Erasmus Students

This paper reports on the design and development of an Android-based context-aware system to support Erasmus students during their mobility in Porto. It enables: (i) guest users to create, rate and store personal points of interest (POI) in a private, local on board database; and (ii) authenticated users to upload and share POI as well as get and rate recommended POI from the shared central database. The system is a distributed client / server application. The server interacts with a central database that maintains the user profiles and the shared POI organized by category and rating. The Android GUI application works both as a standalone application and as a client module. In standalone mode, guest users have access to generic info, a map-based interface and a local database to store and retrieve personal POI. Upon successful authentication, users can, additionally, share POI as well as get and rate recommendations sorted by category, rating and distance-to-user.

O projeto COMAP - comissão de apadrinhamento

Trabalho de Projeto apresentado ao Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Marketing Digital, sob orientação do Mestre António da Silva Vieira

The role of cultural mega events in the enhancement of city’s image attributes: differences between engaged and attendee participants

In a time of fierce competition between regions, an image serve as a basis to develop a strong sense of community, which fosters trust and cooperation that can be mobilized for regional growth. A positive image and reputation could be used in the promotional activities of the region benefiting all the stakeholders as a whole. Mega cultural events are frequently used to attract tourists and investments to a region, but also to enhance the city’s image. This study adopts a marketing/communication perspective of city’s image, and intends to explain how the image of the city is perceived by their residents. Specifically, we intend to compare the perceptions of residents that effectively participated in the Guimarães European Capital of Culture (ECOC) 2012 (engaged residents), and the residents that only assisted to the event (attendees). Several significant findings are reported and their implications for event managers and public policy administrators presented, along with the limitations of the study

Automated illustration of multimedia stories

Submitted in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science

In-plane displacement and strain image analysis

Measurements in civil engineering load tests usually require considerable time and complex procedures. Therefore, measurements are usually constrained by the number of sensors resulting in a restricted monitored area. Image processing analysis is an alternative way that enables the measurement of the complete area of interest with a simple and effective setup. In this article photo sequences taken during load displacement tests were captured by a digital camera and processed with image correlation algorithms. Three different image processing algorithms were used with real images taken from tests using specimens of PVC and Plexiglas. The data obtained from the image processing algorithms were also compared with the data from physical sensors. A complete displacement and strain map were obtained. Results show that the accuracy of the measurements obtained by photogrammetry is equivalent to that from the physical sensors but with much less equipment and fewer setup requirements. © 2015Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.

Mobile cockpit system for enhanced electric bicycle use

This paper presents the project of a mobile cockpit system (MCS) for smartphones, which provides assistance to electric bicycle (EB) cyclists in smart cities' environment. The presented system introduces a mobile application (MCS App) with the goal to provide useful personalized information to the cyclist related to the EB's use, including EB range prediction considering the intended path, management of the cycling effort performed by the cyclist, handling of the battery charging process, and the provisioning of information regarding available public transport. This work also introduces the EB cyclist profile concept, which is based on historical data analysis previously stored in a database and collected from mobile devices' sensors. From the tests performed, the results show the importance of route guidance, taking into account the energy savings. The results also show significant changes on range prediction based on user and route taken. It is important to say that the proposed system can be used for all bicycles in general.

Interoperability frameworks for competencies and learning outcomes: databases vs ontologies

The changes introduced into the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by the Bologna Process, together with renewed pedagogical and methodological practices, have created a new teaching-learning paradigm: Student-Centred Learning. In addition, the last few years have been characterized by the application of Information Technologies, especially the Semantic Web, not only to the teaching-learning process, but also to administrative processes within learning institutions. On one hand, the aim of this study was to present a model for identifying and classifying Competencies and Learning Outcomes and, on the other hand, the computer applications of the information management model were developed, namely a relational Database and an Ontology.

PINPIN a-Si: H based structures for X-ray image detection using the laser scanning technique

Conventional film based X-ray imaging systems are being replaced by their digital equivalents. Different approaches are being followed by considering direct or indirect conversion, with the later technique dominating. The typical, indirect conversion, X-ray panel detector uses a phosphor for X-ray conversion coupled to a large area array of amorphous silicon based optical sensors and a couple of switching thin film transistors (TFT). The pixel information can then be readout by switching the correspondent line and column transistors, routing the signal to an external amplifier. In this work we follow an alternative approach, where the electrical switching performed by the TFT is replaced by optical scanning using a low power laser beam and a sensing/switching PINPIN structure, thus resulting in a simpler device. The optically active device is a PINPIN array, sharing both front and back electrical contacts, deposited over a glass substrate. During X-ray exposure, each sensing side photodiode collects photons generated by the scintillator screen (560 nm), charging its internal capacitance. Subsequently a laser beam (445 nm) scans the switching diodes (back side) retrieving the stored charge in a sequential way, reconstructing the image. In this paper we present recent work on the optoelectronic characterization of the PINPIN structure to be incorporated in the X-ray image sensor. The results from the optoelectronic characterization of the device and the dependence on scanning beam parameters are presented and discussed. Preliminary results of line scans are also presented. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

A quest for the right word enhancing reflexivity and technology in terminology training

INTED2010, the 4th International Technology, Education and Development Conference was held in Valencia (Spain), on March 8, 9 and 10, 2010.

Towards a flexible and transparent database evolution

Applications refactorings that imply the schema evolution are common activities in programming practices. Although modern object-oriented databases provide transparent schema evolution mechanisms, those refactorings continue to be time consuming tasks for programmers. In this paper we address this problem with a novel approach based on aspect-oriented programming and orthogonal persistence paradigms, as well as our meta-model. An overview of our framework is presented. This framework, a prototype based on that approach, provides applications with aspects of persistence and database evolution. It also provides a new pointcut/advice language that enables the modularization of the instance adaptation crosscutting concern of classes, which were subject to a schema evolution. We also present an application that relies on our framework. This application was developed without any concern regarding persistence and database evolution. However, its data is recovered in each execution, as well as objects, in previous schema versions, remain available, transparently, by means of our framework.