Although the brain is not perfectly symmetrical with respect to the mid-sagittal plane, the automatic detection of this plane and of the degree of symmetry is of interest for many anatomical and functional studies. We propose a method for detecting the best symmetry plane in 3D MR brain images. We express this problem as a registration problem and compute a degree of similarity between the imag...

We examined whether cross-bridge cycle models with one or two tension-generating steps can account for the force-velocity relation of and tension response to length steps of frog skeletal muscle. Transition-state theory defined the strain dependence of the rate constants. The filament stiffness was non-Hookean. Models were refined against experimental data by simulated annealing and downhill si...

Noninvasive dental diagnostics is a growing discipline since it has been established that early detection and quantification of tooth mineral loss can reverse caries lesions in their incipient state. A theoretical coupled diffuse photon density and thermal-wave model was developed and applied to photothermal radiometric frequency responses, fitted to experimental data using a multiparameter sim...

A sediment geoacoustic parameter estimation technique is described which compares bottom returns, measured by a calibrated monostatic sonar oriented within 15 degrees of vertical and having a 10 degree-21 degree beamwidth, with an echo envelope model based on high-frequency (10-100 kHz) incoherent backscatter theory and sediment properties such as: mean grain size, strength, and exponent of the...

The paper deals with testing and evaluation of selected modified heuristic optimization methods Random Search, Downhill Simplex, Hill Climbing, Tabu Search, Local Search, Simulated Annealing, Evolution Strategy; Differential Evolution and Self Organizing Migrating Algorithm. The optimization methods were tested on four standard testing functions – the domain of the function is a defined step fo...

A Bayesian approach is presented for detecting and characterising the signal from discrete objects embedded in a diffuse background. The approach centres around the evaluation of the posterior distribution for the parameters of the discrete objects, given the observed data, and defines the theoretically-optimal procedure for parametrised object detection. Two alternative strategies are investig...

In a Statistical Machine Translation system many models, called features, complement each other in producing natural language translations. In how far we should rely on a certain feature is governed by parameters, or weights. Learning these weights is the sub field of SMT, called parameter tuning, that is addressed in this thesis. Three existing methods for learning such parameters are compared...

Generalized word posterior probability (GWPP), a confidence measure for verifying recognized words, needs to equalize and weight acoustic and language model likelihood contributions to minimize verification errors. In this study, we investigate the word verification error surface and use it to optimize these weights and the corresponding verification threshold in a development set. We test thre...

This work aims to extract optical parameters of coastal sea water with high sediment and chlorophyll content by fitting reflectance spectra to a model. Sea-truth water sampling campaigns were carried out from Dec 1996 to Dec 1999 in coastal waters around Singapore. In-situ reflectance spectra were acquired using a portable spectroradiometer. Laboratory measurement of the total suspended solid (...

background: human pathogens that can cause infertility may also affect sperm count and quality. viral infections can be considered as direct and/or indirect cause of male factor infertility. objective: our goal was to investigate the prevalence of herpes simplex virus in the semen of infertile men attending the avicenna infertility clinic, and to compare it with the herpes virus serology result...