Off-axis low coherence interferometry contouring

In this article we present a method to achieve tri-dimensional contouring of macroscopic objects. A modified reference wave speckle interferometer is used in conjunction with a source of reduced coherence. The depth signal is given by the envelope of the interference signal, directly determined by the coherence length of the source. Fringes are detected in the interferogram obtained by a single shot and are detected by means of adequate filtering. With the approach based on off-axis configuration, a contour line can be extracted from a single acquisition, thus allowing to use the system in harsh environment. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Locating and extracting the textual content from complex colour images using techniques inspired by human perception

Los sistemas de radio cognitivos son una solución a la deficiente distribución del espectro inalámbrico de frecuencias. Usando acceso dinámico al medio, los usuarios secundarios pueden comunicarse en canales de frecuencia disponibles, mientras los usuarios asignados no están usando dichos canales. Un buen sistema de mensajería de control es necesario para que los usuarios secundarios no interfieran con los usuarios primarios en las redes de radio cognitivas. Para redes en donde los usuarios son heterogéneos en frecuencia, es decir, no poseen los mismos canales de frecuencia para comunicarse, el grupo de canales utilizado para transmitir información de control debe elegirse cuidadosamente. Por esta razón, en esta tesis se estudian las ideas básicas de los esquemas de mensajería de control usados en las redes de radio cognitivas y se presenta un esquema adecuado para un control adecuado para usuarios heterogéneos en canales de frecuencia. Para ello, primero se presenta una nueva taxonomía para clasificar las estrategias de mensajería de control, identificando las principales características que debe cumplir un esquema de control para sistemas heterogéneos en frecuencia. Luego, se revisan diversas técnicas matemáticas para escoger el mínimo número de canales por los cuales se transmite la información de control. Después, se introduce un modelo de un esquema de mensajería de control que use el mínimo número de canales y que utilice las características de los sistemas heterogéneos en frecuencia. Por último, se comparan diversos esquemas de mensajería de control en términos de la eficiencia de transmisión.

The Coherence of the European Foreign Policy: A Real Barrier or an Academic Term?

The purpose of the present study is to break down, in a general and summarised way, the concept of the coherence of the European Foreign Policy, in order to analyse its meaning, its scope and its implications. This focus on coherence will be specifically dealt with upon the analysis of the impact of this phenomenon on single institutional framework, as defined by the Treaty on European Union.

Endoscopic low-coherence topography measurement for upper airways and hollow samples.

To evaluate the severity of airway pathologies, quantitative dimensioning of airways is of utmost importance. Endoscopic vision gives a projective image and thus no true scaling information can be directly deduced from it. In this article, an approach based on an interferometric setup, a low-coherence laser source and a standard rigid endoscope is presented, and applied to hollow samples measurements. More generally, the use of the low-coherence interferometric setup detailed here could be extended to any other endoscopy-related field of interest, e.g., gastroscopy, arthroscopy and other medical or industrial applications where tri-dimensional topology is required. The setup design with a multiple fibers illumination system is presented. Demonstration of the method ability to operate on biological samples is assessed through measurements on ex vivo pig bronchi.

El corpus tècnic del IULA: corpus textual especializado plurilingüe

Corpus constituido desde 1993 hasta la actualidad en el marco del proyecto Corpus del Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada (IULA) de la Universidad Pompeu Fabra. Este proyecto recopila textos escritos en cinco lenguas diferentes (catalán, castellano, inglés, francés y alemán) de las áreas de especialidad de la economía, el derecho,el medio ambiente, la medicina y la informática.

Allostatic working memory processing in schizophrenia: Human and animal model coherence

The most evident symptoms of schizophrenia are severe impairment of cognitive functions like attention, abstract reasoning and working memory. The latter has been defined as the ability to maintain and manipulate on-line a limited amount of information. Whereas several studies show that working memory processes are impaired in schizophrenia, the specificity of this deficit is still unclear. Results obtained with a new paradigm, involving visuospatial, dynamic and static working memory processing, suggest that schizophrenic patients rely on a specific compensatory strategy. An animal model of schizophrenia with a transient deficit in glutathione during the development reveals similar substitutive processing, masking the impairment in working memory functions in specific test conditions only. Taken together, these results show coherence between working memory deficits in schizophrenic patients and in animal models. More generally, it is possible to consider that the pathological state may be interpreted as a reduced homeostatic reserve. However, this may be balanced in specific situations by efficient allostatic strategies. Thus, the pathological condition would remain latent in several situations, due to such allostatic regulations. However, to maintain a performance based on highly specific strategies requires in turn specific conditions, limitating adaptative resources in humans and in animals. In summary, we suggest that the psychological and physical load to maintain this rigid allostatic state is very high in patients and animal subjects.

Self-Care, Sense Of Coherence And Depression In Patients Hospitalized For Decompensated Heart Failure

OBJECTIVE To analyze the self-care behaviors according to gender, the symptoms of depression and sense of coherence and compare the measurements of depression and sense of coherence according to gender. METHOD A correlational, cross-sectional study that investigated 132 patients with decompensated heart failure (HF). Data were collected through interviews and consultation to medical records, and analyzed using the chi-square and the Student's t tests with significance level of 0.05. Participants were 75 men and 57 women, aged 63.2 years on average (SD = 13.8). RESULTS No differences in self-care behavior by gender were found, except for rest after physical activity (p = 0.017). Patients who practiced physical activity showed fewer symptoms of depression (p<0.001). There were no differences in sense of coherence according to self-care behavior and gender. Women had more symptoms of depression than men (p = 0.002). CONCLUSION Special attention should be given to women with HF considering self-care and depressive symptoms.

Intravitreal ranibizumab for age-related macular degeneration : optical coherence tomography guided retreatment intervals and their intra- and inter-individual variability

Purpose: To determine whether the need for retreatment after an initial phase of 3 monthly intravitreal injections of ranibizumab shows an intra-individual regular rhythm and to what degree it varies between different patients. Methods: Prospective study with 42 patients with exudative AMD, treatment naïve. Loading dose of 3 monthly doses of ranibizumab (0,5 mg), followed by a 12 months pro re nata (PRN) regimen according to early exudative signs on HD-OCT Cirrus, Zeiss. The follow-up visits were intensified (week 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20, etc after each injection) in order to detect recurrences early, and injection followed within 3 days in cases of subretinal fluid, cysts, or central thickness increase of>50microns. Intervals were calculated between injections for the 12 month follow-up with PRN treatment. Variability was expressed as standard deviation (SD). Results: Visual acuity (VA) improved from a mean ETDRS score of 61.6 (SD 10.8) at baseline to 68.0 (SD 10.2) at month 3 and to 74.7(SD 9.0) at month 12. The 15 patients who have already completed the study showed maintenance of the VA improvement. Central foveal thickness improved from a mean value of 366 microns (baseline) to 253 microns (month 3), well maintained thereafter. Mean number of injections was 8.8 (SD 3.5,range 0-12) per 12 months of follow-up (after 3 doses), with mean individual treatment-recurrence (TR) intervals ranging from 28->365 days (mean 58). Intraindividual variability of TR intervals (SD) was 7.1 days as a mean value (range 1.7¡V22.6). It ranged within 20% of the mean intra-individual interval for 30 (91%) and within 15% for 21 patients (64%). The first interval was within 1 week of the mean intra-individual interval in 64% and within 2 weeks in 89% of patients. Conclusions: The majority of AMD patients showed a relatively stable rhythm for PRN injections of ranibizumab after initial loading phase, associated with excellent functional/anatomical results. The initial interval last loading dose-first recurrence may have a predictive value for further need of treatment, potentially facilitating follow-up and patient care.

Making Predictions with Textual Contents

Forecasting real-world quantities with basis on information from textual descriptions has recently attracted significant interest as a research problem, although previous studies have focused on applications involving only the English language. This document presents an experimental study on the subject of making predictions with textual contents written in Portuguese, using documents from three distinct domains. I specifically report on experiments using different types of regression models, using state-of-the-art feature weighting schemes, and using features derived from cluster-based word representations. Through controlled experiments, I have shown that prediction models using the textual information achieve better results than simple baselines such as taking the average value over the training data, and that richer document representations (i.e., using Brown clusters and the Delta- TF-IDF feature weighting scheme) result in slight performance improvements.

Distributional equivalence and subcompositional coherence in the analysis of contingency tables, ratio-scale measurements and compositional data

We consider two fundamental properties in the analysis of two-way tables of positive data: the principle of distributional equivalence, one of the cornerstones of correspondence analysis of contingency tables, and the principle of subcompositional coherence, which forms the basis of compositional data analysis. For an analysis to be subcompositionally coherent, it suffices to analyse the ratios of the data values. The usual approach to dimension reduction in compositional data analysis is to perform principal component analysis on the logarithms of ratios, but this method does not obey the principle of distributional equivalence. We show that by introducing weights for the rows and columns, the method achieves this desirable property. This weighted log-ratio analysis is theoretically equivalent to spectral mapping , a multivariate method developed almost 30 years ago for displaying ratio-scale data from biological activity spectra. The close relationship between spectral mapping and correspondence analysis is also explained, as well as their connection with association modelling. The weighted log-ratio methodology is applied here to frequency data in linguistics and to chemical compositional data in archaeology.

Notes sobre la tradició textual del Llibre dels àngels de Francesc Eiximenis

L’edició completa de les obres de Francesc Eiximenis és una empresa filològica que presenta dificultats objectives, no només perquè les obres tenen un pes material més que considerable, sinó també per la gran quantitat de testimonis manuscrits i impresos que cal col·lacionar. Amb l’objectiu d’ajudar a superar aquestes dificultats, ja fa alguns anys que l’Institut de Llengua i Cultura Catalanes de la Universitat de Girona ha emprès la publicació de les Obres de Francesc Eiximenis, i avui afortunadament podem afirmar que les obres d’Eiximenis, especialment les inèdites, ja tenen equips de treball que s’ocupen de la preparació de les edicions corresponents. Paral·lelament, i en la mateixa línia de treball, s’ha iniciat una nova descripció integral dels testimonis manuscrits i impresos de Francesc Eiximenis, els primers resultats de la qual es podran consultar en línia ben aviat. En el marc que acabo de descriure fa temps que un equip treballa en l’edició crítica del Llibre dels àngels (en endavant LA), escrit a València el 1392