We discuss the underlying algorithms, design principles and implementation issues of an extremely compact and cost-efficient volume rendering accelerator for PCI-based systems. It operates on classified and shaded data sets which have been coded and compressed using Redundant Block Compression (RBC), a tech­ nique originating from 2D-imaging and extended to 3D. This specific encoding scheme red...

INTRODUCTION The current report detailed an investigation of melamine-linked urinary stones in children exposed to contaminated formula. MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 1062 children fed with melamine-contaminated infant formula were screened for urinary stones. Sixty healthy children without melamine exposure were recruited as a control group. Ultrasonography of the urinary tract system was ...

The basics of a parallel real-time volume visualization architecture are introduced. Volume data is divided into subcubes that are dis­ tributed among multiple image processors and stored in their pri­ vate voxel memories. Rays fall into ray segments at the subcube borders. Each image processor is responsible for the ray segments within its assigned subcubes. Results of the ray segments are pas...

A magnetic resonance microscopy technique was developed to visualize and quantify the three-dimensional structure of snowpack. Because the NMR signal from the ice was very weak, we looked at the air space in the snow that was filled with dodecane doped with iron acetylaetonate. Four types of snow were tested: ice spheres, large rounded poly-crystals, small rounded mono-crystals and depth hoar c...

On many distributed memory systems, such as workstation clusters or the Intel iPSC/860, the multigrid algorithm suffers from having extensive communication requirements and, in general, it is not very competitive in comparison to the conjugate gradient algorithm. This is in contrast to the sequential problem whereby the multigrid algorithm is very effective in reducing the global residual, part...

The cellular location of beta-1,4-glucosidase activity from, as well as the transport of glucose and cellobiose into, cells of Clavispora lusitaniae NRRL Y-5394 and Candida wickerhamii NRRL Y-2563 was investigated. The beta-glucosidase from Cl. lusitaniae appeared to be a soluble cytoplasmic enzyme. This yeast transported both glucose and cellobiose when grown in medium containing cellobiose as...

To assess the initial phase of a telecardiology diagnostic service for general practitioners (GPs), we provided 93 GPs in 26 health centres with direct telephone access to a cardiologist, and equipped them with hand-held, automatic standard 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) transmitters for on-line cardiac consultations and ECG interpretation in their daily practice. Clinical details, reason for ...

activating activity in the cell-free supernatant (19—21 , 23, 34, 35) and bound to a particulate fraction of homogenized cells (7, 34) has been observed with virally transformed malignant fibroblasts. Plasminogen-independent fibrino lytic activity has also been demonstrated in Rous sarcoma virus-transformed chick embryo fibroblasts (6). In a recent report (40), we have described a new experi ...

A novel algorithm is proposed for displaying 3D voxel-based binary objects encoded as octrees. It traverses an octree recursively in a front-to-back (FfB) order determined by a given viewing direction and produces a depth image by scan-converting the visible portion of faces of black octants encountered during the traversal. The algorithm is efficient because many obscured nodes are never visit...

A computational kernel of particular importance for many scientific applications is the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of multi-dimensional data. A fundamental challenge is the design and implementation of such parallel numerical algorithms to utilise efficiently thousands of nodes. The BlueGene/L is a massively parallel high performance computer organised as a three-dimensional torus of compute ...