Cloud computing has attracted a great deal of attention in both academia and industry. We envision the provisioning of differentiated services as being one of the key components to the success of cloud computing. Unfortunately, this issue has not been fully addressed in the past. Realizing that different users might have different requirements regarding availability, reliability, durability, re...

Introduction Black-blood coronary vessel wall imaging is a powerful non-invasive tool for the quantitative assessment of positive arterial remodeling. Although dual-inversionrecovery (DIR) is the current standard for non-invasive coronary vessel wall imaging, optimal lumen-vessel wall contrast is sometimes difficult to obtain and the time-window available for imaging is limited due to the compe...

Reliability of data exchange is becoming increasingly important. In addition, applications may require multiple degrees of reliability. The concept of Differentiated Reliability (DiR) was recently introduced in [1] to provide multiple degrees of reliability in protection schemes that provision spare resources. With this paper, the authors extend the DiR concept to restoration schemes in which n...

We develop an optical whole-body imaging technique for monitoring normal and leukemic hematopoietic cell homing in vivo. A recently developed near-infrared (NIR) lipophilic carbocyanine dye 1,1'-dioctadecyl-3,3,3',3'-tetramethylindotricarbocyanine iodide (DiR) is used to safely and directly label the membranes of human leukemic Pre-B ALL G2 cell lines as well as primary murine lymphocytes and e...

In the context of head and neck cancer (HNC) adaptive radiation therapy (ART), the two purposes of the study were to compare the performance of multiple deformable image registration (DIR) methods and to quantify their impact for dose accumulation, in healthy structures. Fifteen HNC patients had a planning computed tomography (CT0) and weekly CTs during the 7 weeks of intensity-modulated radiat...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to assess the performance of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) methods for discriminating acute from chronic myocardial infarction (MI). BACKGROUND Although T2-weighted CMR is thought to be accurate in differentiating acute from chronic MI, few studies have reported on diagnostic accuracy, and these generally compared extremes in infarct age (e.g., <1 w...

OBJECTIVES Studies have shown that listener preferences for omnidirectional (OMNI) or directional (DIR) processing in hearing aids depend largely on the characteristics of the listening environment, including the relative locations of the listener, signal sources, and noise sources; and whether reverberation is present. Many modern hearing aids incorporate algorithms to switch automatically bet...

PURPOSE To compare black-blood multicontrast carotid imaging at 3T and 1.5T and assess compatibility between morphological measurements of carotid arteries at 1.5T and 3T. MATERIALS AND METHODS Five healthy subjects and two atherosclerosis patients were scanned in 1.5T and 3T scanners with a similar protocol providing transverse T1-, T2-, and proton density (PD)-weighted black-blood images us...

In June 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) convened a meeting of technical specialists from a dozen member states to initiate a coordinated research project (CRP) focussing on optimization of DIR techniques for specific applications. The objectives of this CRP are to test and validate simple and low cost DIR techniques and the optimization of X-Ray detector, detector source con...

Potassium channels vary in their function and regulation, yet they maintain a number of important features - they are involved in the control of potassium flow, cell volume, cell membrane resting potential, cell excitability and hormone release. The potassium (K(+)) inward rectifier (Kir) superfamily of channels are potassium selective channels, that are sensitive to the concentration of K(+) i...