Giant extinct caiman breaks constraint on the axial skeleton of extant crocodylians.

The number of precaudal vertebrae in all extant crocodylians is remarkably conservative, with nine cervicals, 15 dorsals and two sacrals, a pattern present also in their closest extinct relatives. The consistent vertebral count indicates a tight control of axial patterning by genes during development. Here we report on a deviation from this pattern based on an associated skeleton of the giant caimanine , a member of crown Crocodylia, and several other specimens from the Neogene of the northern neotropics.

A robot-assisted imaging pipeline for tracking the growths of maize ear and silks in a high-throughput phenotyping platform.

Background: In maize, silks are hundreds of filaments that simultaneously emerge from the ear for collecting pollen over a period of 1-7 days, which largely determines grain number especially under water deficit. Silk growth is a major trait for drought tolerance in maize, but its phenotyping is difficult at throughputs needed for genetic analyses.

Results: We have developed a reproducible pipeline that follows ear and silk growths every day for hundreds of plants, based on an ear detection algorithm that drives a robotized camera for obtaining detailed images of ears and silks.

Non-Additive Imprecise Image Super-Resolution in a Semi-Blind Context.

The most effective superresolution methods proposed in the literature require precise knowledge of the so-called point spread function of the imager, while in practice its accurate estimation is nearly impossible. This paper presents a new superresolution method, whose main feature is its ability to account for the scant knowledge of the imager point spread function. This ability is based on representing this imprecise knowledge via a non-additive neighborhood function.

Toward accurate volumetry of brain aneurysms: combination of an algorithm for automatic thresholding with a 3D eraser tool.

The present study describes a new approach for aneurysm volume quantification on three-dimensional angiograms, which focuses on solving three common technical problems: the variability associated with the use of manual thresholds, the irregular morphology of some aneurysms, and the imprecision of the limits between the parent artery and the aneurysm sac. The method consists of combining an algorithm for automatic threshold determination with a spherical eraser tool that allows the user to separate the image of the aneurysm from the parent artery. The accuracy of volumetry after automatic thresholding was verified with an in vitro experiment in which 57 measurements were performed using four artificial aneurysms of known volume.

NIBART: a new interval based algebraic reconstruction technique for error quantification of emission tomography images.

This article presents a new algebraic method for reconstructing emission tomography images. This approach is mostly an interval extension of the conventional SIRT algorithm. One of the main characteristic of our approach is that the reconstructed activity associated with each pixel of the reconstructed image is an interval whose length can be considered as an estimate of the impact of the random variation of the measured activity on the reconstructed image.