BackgroundUltrasound is an effective tool for breast cancer diagnosis. However, its relatively low image quality makes small lesion analysis challenging. This promotes the development of tools to help clinicians in the diagnosis. MethodsWe propose a method for segmentation and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of lesions from ultrasound images acquired using the automated breast volume scanner (ABVS). Segme...
This study aimed to assess the technical efficiency (TE) of individual companies and their respective sectors that are traded on the Portuguese stock market. We accomplished this by combining the internal input variables (e.g., market value and return') with exogenous variables (e.g., interest income', depreciation', cost of goods', employees' and net sales') into a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model. The...
Phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (phi OTDR) is a simple and effective tool allowing the distributed monitoring of vibrations along single-mode fibers. We show in this Letter that modulation instability (MI) can induce a position-dependent signal fading in long-range phi OTDR over conventional optical fibers. This fading leads to a complete masking of the interference signal recorded at certain ...
A dual-core fiber in which one of the cores is doped with germanium and the other with phosphorus is used as an in-line Mach-Zehnder dispersive interferometer. By ensuring an equal length but with different dispersion dependencies in the interferometer arms (the two cores), high-sensitivity strain and temperature sensing are achieved. Opposite sensitivities for high and low wavelength peaks were also demonstrat...
The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. The resources that enable that process (social web sites, blogs, media objects, etc.) present growing complexity and, collectively, weave an ever more intricate web of relationships. Current technology for declaring those relationships is predominantly implicit, ambiguous and semantically poor. As a consequence, their automatic assessment is ...
In this article, we present a holistic framework for the integration of electric vehicles (EVs) in electric power systems. Their charging management and control methodologies must be optimized to minimize the negative impact of the charging process on the grid and maximize the benefits that charging controllability may bring to their owners, energy retailers, and system operators. We have assessed the performan...
Today, manufacturing is moving towards customer-driven and knowledge-based proactive production. Shorter product life cycles lead to increased complexity in areas such as product and process design, factory deployment and production operations. To handle this complexity, new knowledge-based methods and technologies are needed to model, simulate, optimize and monitor manufacturing systems. Product lifecycle mana...
A key issue in video object tracking is the representation of the objects and how effectively it discriminates between different objects. Several techniques have been proposed, but without a generally accepted method. While analysis and comparisons of these individual methods have been presented in the literature, their evaluation as part of a global solution has been overlooked. The appearance model for the ob...
In this paper, we investigate a two-stage lot-sizing and scheduling problem in a spinning industry. A new hybrid method called HOPS (Hamming-Oriented Partition Search), which is a branch-and-bound based procedure that incorporates a fix-and-optimize improvement method is proposed to solve the problem. An innovative partition choice for the fix-and-optimize is developed. The computational tests with generated in...