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Due to the extreme environmental conditions, speech recognition in the rescue operation domain is a complex and difficult task. Various types of noise and speaker stress represent the main problems for the recognition engine. Within the SHARE project, a dedicated domain specific training corpus was recorded to improve the robustness of the audio indexing service. An experimental evaluation showed that a speech recognition model trained with a small amount of domain specific data outperforms models based on a large set of already available data from other domains. Using the domain specific models, the number of false alarms produced in a noisy testing environment could be reduced by 80%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of emergency response actions usually concentrates on failures as a means to improve future procedures and emergency plans. In this paper we adopt a resilience approach that focuses on the analysis of successful actions. We use group storytelling to recall the actions performed by emergency teams during an incident. A method aimed at recognizing resilient actions is proposed and its application is illustrated in a real case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At emergency services around the world, the use of IT is oftentimes still limited to the stationary HQ dispatch system. This paper suggests how to overcome this limitation by introducing a Mobile Information and Communi cation System for Emergency Services, MIKoBOS, that digitally links the emergency site with the central dispatch system. For use in the situation room and beyond, digLT is presented, a digital situation table with Fovea-Tabletts®, allowing a team of experts to more easily develop a common picture of major emergency situations they are to manage. An actual emergency response sce nario is used to discuss how these technologies may be applied and integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During disaster response, networks can become overloaded and are susceptible to complete failure in the disaster area. This disables mobile communication, hindering response efforts from mobile users. Mobile users make use of various heterogeneous devices and require infrastructure to facilitate the communication of distributed information. Communication flow among mobile users is disorganized as it is either too strong and hierarchical or too flexible and dynamic. We have designed ubiquitous mobile infrastructures to match the response environment's communication flows and telecommunications, and produced a ubiquitous mobile communication system (ubimobcom). The design standardizes the information exchanges between mobile users. In this paper, we show that ubimobcom makes cooperation and coordination among mobile users possible at the disaster. Using ubimobcom, mobile users can be coordinated and can cooperate in outdoor areas, besides; they can continue connected with their disaster operation center. We describe the ubimobcom system to illustrate the use of communication by mobile users to disasters that may range from minor to catastrophic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed a system that uses radio frequency identification (RFID) tags both as the source of location information and as data storage units to record messages or information in disaster situations. Our system uses hybrid RFID tags, which consist of a passive (non-battery) tag and an active (battery-driven) tag. The system has been evaluated in disaster prevention trainings by local communities and rescue teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proetex is a European Integrated Project dedicated to micro- and nano-technology-based wearable equipment for emergency operators. During the first year of work, a careful analysis of several emergency scenarios has been carried out and has resulted in the design of a complete "smart" uniform for fire-fighters and emergency rescuers. These garments aim at monitoring both physiological parameters, position and posture of the operators and the presence of external potential sources of danger and to send these data to a remote coordinating unit. In the following, the main issues of the design flow will be described and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coordinated reaction to a large-scale disaster is a challenging research problem. The Robocup rescue simulation league addresses this research problem but is currently lacking an interface to real-world real-time data to test the validity of both simulation and simulated reactions. In this paper, we describe a wearable-computing-based real world interface to the Robocup Rescue simulation software and provide some updated results of preliminary evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach of using game-like techniques to engage firemen from the Paris Fire Brigade into a participatory design process of wearable computing for emergency response. The approach is motivated by explaining the specific difficulties of the domain and technology and by explaining how to address them in a user-centered design approach featuring multiple prototyping steps. A multiplayer virtual reality computer game is one of these techniques. The paper shows how the design of the computer game is informed and validated by other techniques and how it can be used successfully to simulate certain characteristics of the domain and the technologies that are relevant for design. As such we present it as a tool to mediate and facilitate the collaboration of technology providers and users, empowering end-users to leverage their domain expertise to explore, assess and design well-fitting solutions in a creative, reflective and enjoyable collaborative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AMIRA provides a multi-modal solution that significantly improves the accessibility and resources available for supporting urgent and critical decisions that must be taken by mobile workers, operating individually or in multi-discipline collaborations, at their point of intervention in an event. By integrating reusable search components and collaboration methods, the AMIRA platform has been used to create various multi-modal applications for use by mobile workers operating in safety or business critical situations in the field. The analysis of proof-of-concept applications tested in the field produced evidence demonstrating that AMIRA added value to the decision making process by providing information that is not currently available through existing support mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the potential of Mobile Spatial Interaction for Emergency Response Technologies is presented. The following basic advantages compared to traditional location awareness technologies have been identified: meaningful interaction with real-world objects, efficient selection and access, continuous interplay of virtual and spatial information, and accurate match with the user's task goals. The technical background for mobile spatial interaction as well as implications for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of resources is a great challenge for commanders in Search and Rescue operations and has a strong impact on all areas of operation control, as command-and-communication structure, geo-referenced information, and operational tasks are inter-connected with complex relations. During an operation these are subject to dynamic changes. For an efficient operation control commanders need access to up-to-date information in their mobile working environment. This paper presents a new approach to manage resources and their relations in an operation. It is based on ontologies to build a model of an operation and Description Logic reasoning to provide enhanced decision support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes ongoing work and research perspectives for integrating cartographic presentations into decision-support systems for crisis management and resource planning in emergency situations. The spatial visualizations shall improve the communication and analysis of the situation at different decision levels. The information has to be adequately prepared and presented according to the user's role, position and utilized device. The outstanding characteristics of the presented solution are (1) a context-dependent selection and visualization of data through location-based services and (2) a visualization of the situation at different perspectives. This reduces the amount of presented data and improves the understanding of the user's current environment. The paper describes an application prototype designed for the European project SHARE and outlines perspectives by introducing time as another information dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of easy-to-use mobile systems for collecting and handling emergency medical care data in the field can significantly improve the effectiveness of rescue operations. In particular, this paper focuses on the design and evaluation of a mobile application that replaces ambulance run paper sheets. First, we discuss the limitations of traditional ambulance run paper sheets. Then, we present the PDA-based system we have developed. Finally, we discuss in detail the usability study we have carried out with first responders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main priorities of emergency medicine are to rescue lives and to limit the damage to life and limb of the patient as much as possible. The emergency physician analyzes the situation at the accident scene and chooses the appropriate first aid methods as well as the follow-on medical techniques at the hospital. The goal of CANIS - the Carinthian Notarzt (emergency physician) Information System - aims at the establishment and optimization of the information stream between the emergency rescue vehicle (ERV) or emergency rescue helicopter (ERH), and/or the receiving hospital. To achieve this, a feasible hardware setup must be established which meets the challenging requirements of an emergency situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider disaster management as the coordination of resources in space and time, and contrast this with the Joint Operational Picture (JOP) used in military planning. The basic premise is that the processes involved in the collection and management of information could interfere with the priorities of dealing with immediate demands on ‘rescuers' and their managers. Thus, we explore ways in which collaboration could be made as implicit as possible. The paper includes small-scale user trials of prototypes to highlight potential benefits and shortcomings. The paper concludes with consideration of how brokering approaches to coordination could be realized using the prototypes described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe emergency physicians are still using paper-based emergency report forms to document medical procedure at accident scenes. The forms are quite similar, but they differ in certain parameters or attributes. There are ongoing endeavours to combine the paper-based protocols and then transfer this new protocol standard into a software-based Emergency Patient Care Report Form (EPCRF). However during the transformation from a paper-based to an electronic solution, many problems occur. To keep the users' acceptance of the emergency medical services personnel, it is crucial that electronic EPCRF supports the central process efficiently. Therefore key elements within the emergency report form are the anatomical diagrams and the chronological sequence diagrams. These diagrams allow the emergency physician to track and record patient's parameters in a very fast and understandable and user friendly way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving our knowledge of and capabilities to handle disasters and crises is not simply a matter of more information processing and more reliable communication and computation. It needs the exchange of information between many different scientific and technology disciplines and a much better understanding of engineering complex C4I systems-of-systems. This discussion paper will address the need for and purpose of an international community and how to obtain focus and transfer of scientific results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of motion in PET/CT studies results from the fact that the PET images are formed over an elongated period of time whereas the CT acquisition takes only a few seconds. Additionally, the CT images are also used for attenuation correction of the PET data. The spatial discrepancy between the two sets of images, however, may lead to wrong attenuation and thus to wrong quantification of the radioactive uptake. We present a solution to this problem by respiratory-gating the PET data and correcting the PET images for motion with a multiresolution optical flow algorithm. Our algorithm is based on the combined local and global optical flow algorithm with modifications to allow for discontinuity preservation across organ boundaries and for application to 3D volume sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on three dimensional echocardiography sequences, a new technique using connected equi-length curve angle chain (CELCAC) model for reconstruction and dynamic analysis of mitral annulus is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the boundary points of mitral annulus of the mitral annulus is extracted by interactive method and ordered according to their positions. Then, the three dimensional mitral annulus visualization model is established based on non-uniform rational B - spline algorithm. Finally, dynamic analysis of mitral annulus presented by the CELCAC model is suggested. The presentation is invariant to rotation, scaling, and translation. Results show that the reconstruction and analysis method proposed in this paper is feasible to assess the geometry and analyze the motion of mitral annulus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a gradient direction edge enhancement based contour (GDEEBC) detector to segment the nucleus and cytoplasm from each cervical smear image. In order to eliminate noise from the image, this paper proposes a trim-meaning filter that can effectively remove impulse and Gaussian noise but still preserve the edge sharpness of an object. In addition, a bi-group enhancer is proposed to make a clear-cut separation for the pixels lying between two objects. Finally, a gradient direction (GD) enhancer is presented to suppress the gradients of noise and to brighten the gradients of object contours as well. The experimental results show that all the techniques proposed above have impressive performances. In addition to cervical smear images, these proposed techniques can also be utilized in object segmentation of other types of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tongue diagnosis is a distinctive and essential diagnostic measure in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and chromatic information is its most decisive characteristic which is utilized to unearth pathological changes for identifying diseases. In this paper, a computerized medical biometrics scheme is established which classify all pixels in tongue into various color classes. For train specimens, both a forward and a backward selection are employed to pick up the correct labeled pixel specimens and screen out the wrong, and then various pixels of diversified colors are classified for the tongue color analysis. The experimental outcomes are more applicable to tongue color analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tumor segmentation in Breast MRI image is difficult due to the complicated galactophore structure. The work in this paper attempts to accurately segment the abnormal breast mass in MRI(Magnetic resonance imaging) Images. The ROI (Region of Interest) is segmented using a novel DP (Dynamic Programming) based optimal edge detection technique. DP is an optimal approach in multistage decision-making. The method presented in this paper processes the object image to get the minimum cumulative cost matrix combining with LUM nonlinear enhancement filter, Gaussian preprocessor, non-maximum suppression and double-threshold filtering, and then trace the whole optimal edge. The experimental results show that this method is robust and efficient on image edge detection and can segment the breast tumor area more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now a days all medical imaging equipments give output as digital image and non-invasive techniques are becoming cheaper, the database of images is becoming larger. This archive of images increases up to significant size and in telemedicine-based applications the storage and transmission requires large memory and bandwidth respectively. There is a need for compression to save memory space and fast transmission over internet and 3G mobile with good quality decompressed image, even though compression is lossy. This paper presents a novel approach for designing enhanced vector quantizer, which uses Kohonen's Self Organizing neural network. The vector quantizer (codebook) is designed by training with a neatly designed training image and by selective training approach .Compressing; images using it gives better quality. The quality analysis of decompressed images is evaluated by using various quality measures along with conventionally used PSNR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dual-energy mammography can suppress the contrast between adipose and glandular tissues and improve the detectability of microcalcifications (MCs). In the published papers, MCs were calibrated by aluminum and identified by their thickness. However, the variety of compositions of MCs causes the variety of attenuation differences between MCs and MC calibration material which bring about huge calculation errors. In our study, we selected calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate as the most suitable MC calibration materials and the correction coefficient was reasonably determined. Area density was used as MC indicator instead of thickness. Therefore, the calculation errors from MC calibration materials can be reduced a lot and the determination of MCs will become possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tongue image matching is an important part for a tongue diagnosis system. Unlike common pattern recognition problems, it is hard to define the ground truth for tongue image matching because visual inspection of tongue by doctors is determined by the experience and knowledge of them. Here we propose to use, Mean Rank, as an objective and scientific criterion to evaluate matching performance. Instigating from color demosaicking, a new color texture operator, Primary Difference Signal Local Binary Pattern is proposed. The matching performance is evaluated on color, gray-scale and color texture, and fusion of color and texture features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Osteoporosis is a disease characterized by decreased bone mass and progressive deterioration of the microstructure, affecting both mineral density and bone's fragility. Current diagnoses are only measuring apparent bone mineral density (AppBMD). Using our newly developed scanning confocal acoustic diagnostic (SCAD) system, we evaluated the ability of quantitative ultrasound in noninvasively predicting bone's quantity and quality on 19 human cadaver calcanei. Results show that ultrasound attenuation image on intact calcaneus represents bone mass distribution. High correlation (R=0.82) exists between SCAD determined broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA) and DXA determined AppBMD at the calcaneus, as well as in the AppBMD result at femoral neck (R=0.81). SCAD determined BUA and ultrasound velocity (UV) are highly correlated with the micro-CT and mechanical testing determined bone quantity and quality parameters. These results suggest that image-based quantitative ultrasound is able to identify ROI and predict both bone mass and strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an novel approach for automatic gridding of cDNA microarray images based on histogram representation. The approach constructs histogram representation to characterize microarray images and use it, instead of raw signal intensities used in previous gridding methods, to identify spots. The histogram representation can efficiently reduce noise and the influence from low raw signal intensities and local contaminations. The proposed approach is successfully tested on different types of microarray images and is compared with several previous algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new interactive method for analyzing 4D Computed Tomography (4DCT) datasets for patient care and research. Deformable registration algorithms are commonly used to observe the trajectories of individual voxels from one respiratory phase to another. Our system provides users with the capability to visualize these trajectories while simultaneously rendering anatomical volumes, which can greatly improve the accuracy of deformable registration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), pinhole and cone-beam collimators are used for small object imaging. It is accepted that a pinhole collimator should be used if the object is very small, and the cone-beam collimator should be used if the object is larger. This paper presents criteria to determine which collimation geometry is more advantageous in terms of spatial resolution and detection sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Osteoporosis is a systemic skeletal disease, which is characterized by low bone mass and micro-architectural deterioration of bone tissue, leading to bone fragility. Finding an effective method for prevention and early diagnosis of the disease is very important. Several parameters, including broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA), speed of sound (SOS), and stiffness index (STI), have been used to measure the characteristics of bone tissues. In this paper, we proposed a method, namely modified contour deformable model (MCDM), bases on the active contour model (ACM) and active shape model (ASM) for automatically detecting the calcaneus contour from quantitative ultrasound (QUS) parametric images. The results show that the difference between the contours detected by the MCDM and the true boundary for the phantom is less than one pixel. By comparing the phantom ROIs, significant relationship was found between contour mean and bone mineral density (BMD) with R=0.99. The influence of selecting different ROI diameters (12, 14, 16 and 18 mm) and different region-selecting methods, including fixed region (ROIfix), automatic circular region (ROIcir) and calcaneal contour region (ROIanat), were evaluated for testing human subjects. Measurements with large ROI diameters, especially using fixed region, result in high position errors (10-45%). The precision errors of the measured ultrasonic parameters for ROIanat are smaller than ROIfix and ROIcir. In conclusion, ROIanat provides more accurate measurement of ultrasonic parameters for the evaluation of osteoporosis and is useful for clinical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cytologic screening has been widely used for controlling the prevalence of cervical cancer. Errors from sampling, screening and interpretation, still concealed some unpleasant results. This study aims at designing a cellular image analysis system based on feasible and available software and hardware for a routine cytologic laboratory. Totally 1814 cellular images from the liquid-based cervical smears with Papanicolaou stain in 100x, 200x, and 400x magnification were captured by a digital camera. Cell images were reviewed by pathologic experts with peer agreement and only 503 images were selected for further study. The images were divided into 4 diagnostic categories. A PC-based cellular image analysis system (PCCIA) was developed for computing morphometric parameters. Then support vector machine (SVM) was used to classify signature patterns. The results show that the selected 13 morphometric parameters can be used to correctly differentiate the dysplastic cells from the normal cells (p<0.001). Additionally, SVM classifier has been demonstrated to be able to achieve a high accuracy for cellular classification. In conclusion, the proposed system provides a feasible and effective tool for the evaluation of gynecologic cytologic specimens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy (MRI/MRS) plays a unique role in multiple sclerosis (MS) evaluation, because of its ability to provide both high image contrast and significant chemical change among brain tissues. The image contrast renders the possibility of quantifying the tissue volumetric and texture variations, e.g., cerebral atrophy and progressing speed, reflecting the ongoing destructive pathologic processes. Any chemical change reflects an early sign of pathological alteration, e.g., decreased N-acetyl aspartate (NAA) in lesions and normal appearing white matter, related to axonal damage or dysfunction. Both MRI and MRS encounter partial volume (PV) effect, which compromises the quantitative capability, especially for MRS. This work aims to develop a statistical framework to segment the tissue mixtures inside each image element, eliminating theoretically the PV effect, and apply the framework to the evaluation of MS with cognitive impairment. The quantitative measures from MRI/MRS neuroimaging are strongly correlated with the qualitative neuropsychological scores of Brief Repeatable Battery (BRB) test on cognitive impairment, demonstrating the usefulness of the PV image segmentation framework in this clinically significant problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, tomographic images are used in medical applications more and more. To support physicians in diagnosis and treatment, a registration of two images taken at different points in time or under different conditions is needed. As the structure of the vessel or airway trees is relatively stable between two image acquisitions, they provide a good basis for the automatic determination of landmarks. In this work, a hierarchical tree search algorithm is proposed, which efficiently computes a matching between branchpoints of anatomical trees, which can be used as landmarks for an elastic registration. The algorithm is designed to be general and robust in order to be applicable to a variety of different datasets, which are acquired by different sensors or under different conditions. The validation of the algorithm against manually created ground truth data leads to a 80.9% rate of correctly matched branchpoints. Allowing a tolerance of 5 mm, the rate increases to 89.9%. The runtime for 50-700 vertices is about 1-45 seconds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of diabetes that damages the eye's retina. Recognition DR as early as possible is very important to protect patients' vision. We propose a method for screening DR and distin-guishing Prolifetive Diabetic Retinopathy (PDR) from Non-Prolifetive Retino-pathy (NPDR) automatatically through color retinal images. This method evaluates the severity of DR by analyzing the appearnce of bright lesions and retinal vessel patterns. The bright lesions are extracted through morphlogical re-consturction. After that, the retinal vessels are automatically extracted using multiscale matched filters. Then the vessel patterns are analyzed by extracting the vessel net density. The experimental results domonstrate that it is a effective solution to screen DR and distinguish PDR from NPDR by only using color retinal images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appling computer aided techniques in iris image processing, and combining occidental iridology with the traditional Chinese medicine is a challenging research area in digital image processing and artificial intelligence. This paper proposes an iridology model that consists the iris image pre-processing, texture feature analysis and disease classification. To the pre-processing, a 2-step iris localization approach is proposed; a 2-D Gabor filter based texture analysis and a texture fractal dimension estimation method are proposed for pathological feature extraction; and at last support vector machines are constructed to recognize 2 typical diseases such as the alimentary canal disease and the nerve system disease. Experimental results show that the proposed iridology diagnosis model is quite effective and promising for medical diagnosis and health surveillance for both hospital and public use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tongueprints are fissile texture on tongue and one of observational contents of tongue diagnosis, which is an important diagnostic method in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). With deep researches on tongueprints, three basic problems emerge: (1) TCM has always held that healthy individuals do not exhibit tongueprints, but in the recent years some medical researchers have found some healthy individuals in their small sample (< 1000 cases) tongue image database do exhibit tongueprints. How about do tongueprints in a large amount of healthy individuals (> 2000 cases)? (2) If about a third of a large amount of healthy individuals have tongueprints, mainstream diagnosis by inspecting tongueprints should lead to an over-diagnosis problem and some healthy individuals are diagnosed mistakenly as unhealthy individuals because it holds tongueprints themselves declare publicly diseases. Thus it is necessary to diagnose definitely a tongueprint image belong to an unhealthy individual based on tongueprint features. This is a basic problem and is of theoretical and practical importance for diagnosis by inspecting tongueprints. And which features of tongueprints can be used to diagnose definitely a tongueprint image belong to an unhealthy individual? (3) Actually, the second problem is recognition and classification of tongueprints in healthy and unhealthy individuals. To further promote the modernization process of the traditional tongue diagnosis Chow are the researches done on automatic classification of tongueprints in healthy and unhealthy individuals? After further making sure there appear tongueprints in healthy individuals and finding which features of tongueprints can be used to diagnose definitely a tongueprint image belong to an unhealthy individual by statistic analysis on a large database of tongue images (more than 3000 cases), this paper do the researches about automatic classification of tongueprints in healthy and unhealthy individuals based on the large database. Firstly tongeprint regions are extracted by multi-direction synthetic tongueprint extraction. Then a SVM classifier is used to recognize a tongueprint image belong to a healthy or unhealthy individual based on tongueprint features. Recognition accurate rate of tongueprints in healthy and unhealthy individuals respectively are 75.81% and 74.61% based on the large database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a health care context, the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identi- fication) technology can be employed for not only bringing down health care costs but also to facilitate automatic streamlining patient identification processes in health centers and assist medical practitioners in quick and accurate diagnosis and treatments. In this paper, we outline a describe design and application of RFID-based Real-time Intelligent Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment Support System (ICDTS) in health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]