today, ecotourism is a major tourist activity around the world. it is based on environment potential through which suitable utilization and conservation of sites under management practices including considering accurate planning, potential, and peoples’ preferences are realized. the present study was conducted to determine people’s recreational preferences using questionnaires to evaluate the e...

In this paper we discuss methods for predicting the performance of any formulation of randomized parallel search, and propose a new performance prediction method that is based on obtaining an accurate estimate of the k-processor run-time distribution. We show that the k-processor prediction method delivers accurate performance predictions and demonstrate the validity of our analysis on several ...

PURPOSE Head and neck radiotherapy planning with positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) requires the images to be reliably registered with treatment planning CT. Acquiring PET/CT in treatment position is problematic, and in practice for some patients it may be beneficial to use diagnostic PET/CT for radiotherapy planning. Therefore, the aim of this study was first to quantify...

Consistency of MR scan planning is very important for diagnosis, especially in multi-site trials and follow-up studies, where disease progress or response to treatment is evaluated. Accurate manual scan planning is tedious and requires skillful operators. On the other hand, automated scan planning is difficult due to relatively low quality of survey images ("scouts") and strict processing time ...

Impressive progress has been made in global surgery in the past 10 years, and now serious and evidence-based national strategies are being developed for scaling-up surgical services in sub-Saharan Africa. Key to achieving this goal requires developing a realistic country-based estimate of burden of surgical disease, developing an accurate estimate of existing need, deve...

Centerline extraction is important in a variety of visualization applications including shape analysis, geometry processing, and virtual endoscopy. Centerlines allow accurate measurements of length along winding tubular structures, assist automatic virtual navigation, and provide a path-planning system to control the movement and orientation of a virtual camera. However, efficiently computing c...

Building architectures for autonomous rational behavior requires the integration of several AI components, such as planning, learning and execution monitoring. In most cases, the techniques used for planning and learning are tailored to the specific integrated architecture, so they could not be replaced by other equivalent techniques. Also, in order to solve tasks that require lookahead reasoni...

Long-term robot autonomy requires reliable execution success. Execution success improves by modeling the real world accurately during planning time. Unfortunately, computing a full plan in highly accurate models is often intractable since accurate world models increase the dimensionality of the planning space. Additionally, planning in the highest model is unnecessary for simple uncluttered par...

ing Complexity for Design Planning David Wynn, Claudia Eckert and P John Clarkson Engineering Design Centre, Engineering Department, Trumpington St, Cambridge, UK. http://www-edc.eng.cam.ac.uk/people/dcw24 Abstract: This short paper is based on research carried out during an eight month case study at a large UK aerospace company. The focus of the study was to develop a more effective technique ...