Environmental effects of ozone depletion, UV radiation and interactions with climate change: UNEP Environmental Effects Assessment Panel, update 2017.

The Environmental Effects Assessment Panel (EEAP) is one of three Panels of experts that inform the Parties to the Montreal Protocol. The EEAP focuses on the effects of UV radiation on human health, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, air quality, and materials, as well as on the interactive effects of UV radiation and global climate change. When considering the effects of climate change, it has become clear that processes resulting in changes in stratospheric ozone are more complex than previously held.

Sensory Threshold Studies of Picrocrocin, the Major Bitter Compound of Saffron.

This study is part of a wider project on the bitter taste of saffron and its preparations. A deeper knowledge on the taste perception of picrocrocin is necessary in order to develop products that satisfy consumer senses and provide them with adequate amounts of saffron major constituents, also appreciated for bioactivity. A systematic approach on the bitterness of picrocrocin, the major responsible compound, was conducted.

Designing the user interfaces of a behavior modification intervention for obesity & eating disorders prevention.

The recent immense diffusion of smartphones has significantly upgraded the role of mobile user interfaces in interventions that build and/or maintain healthier lifestyles. Indeed, high-quality, user-centered smartphone applications are able to serve as advanced front-ends to such interventions. These smartphone applications, coupled with portable or wearable sensors, are being employed for monitoring day to day health-related behaviors, including eating and physical activity.

Selection of dominant NSLAB from a mature traditional cheese according to their technological properties and in vitro intestinal challenges.

Isolates (47) of lactobacilli from 5 different productions of Melichloro cheese were examined for potential use as adjunct cultures. The sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) of whole-cell proteins classified 29 isolates as L. paraplantarum and 18 as L.

A theoretical study for determination of quality equivalent points for volume average quality evaluation in conduction heating canned foods.

In the present study, a set of quality equivalent points, that is, points where the retention of a particular quality attribute at the end of a thermal process is equal to the volume average quality retention, was determined for conduction heating products in cylindrical containers. For this, initially, the temperature distribution inside the product during the thermal process was numerically calculated, assuming uniform initial product temperature, constant heating and cooling medium temperatures, and infinite heat transfer coefficient between the cylinder walls and the heating or cooling medium. Next, remaining concentration data at the end of the process were obtained at various points within the container for a heat labile quality factor following 1st-order degradation kinetics.

Topotecan-carboplatin-etoposide combination as 1st line treatment in patients with small cell lung cancer.

Purpose: To test toxicity, tolerability, time to progression, survival and response rate in the 3-day administration of topotecan (T) followed by carboplatin (C), and then etoposide (E) in a study for small cell lung cancer (SCLC) treatment.

Patients: 44 chemotherapy-naive patients with SCLC (median age 63.5, PS 0-1).

Hybrid image segmentation using watersheds and fast region merging.

A hybrid multidimensional image segmentation algorithm is proposed, which combines edge and region-based techniques through the morphological algorithm of watersheds. An edge-preserving statistical noise reduction approach is used as a preprocessing stage in order to compute an accurate estimate of the image gradient. Then, an initial partitioning of the image into primitive regions is produced by applying the watershed transform on the image gradient magnitude.

A generalized fuzzy mathematical morphology and its application in robust 2-D and 3-D object representation.

In this paper, the generalized fuzzy mathematical morphology (GFMM) is proposed, based on a novel definition of the fuzzy inclusion indicator (FII). FII is a fuzzy set used as a measure of the inclusion of a fuzzy set into another, that is proposed to be a fuzzy set. It is proven that the FII obeys a set of axioms, which are proposed to be extensions of the known axioms that any inclusion indicator should obey, and which correspond to the desirable properties of any mathematical morphology operation.

Varying fitness functions in genetic algorithm constrained optimization: the cutting stock and unit commitment problems.

We present a specific varying fitness function technique in genetic algorithm (GA) constrained optimization. This technique incorporates the problem's constraints into the fitness function in a dynamic way. It consists of forming a fitness function with varying penalty terms.

Hierarchical representation and coding of surfaces using 3-D polygon meshes.

This paper presents a novel procedure for the representation and coding of three-dimensional (3-D) surfaces using hierarchical adaptive triangulation. The proposed procedure is based on pyramidal analysis using the quincunx sampling minimum variance interpolation (QMVINT) filters. These are reduced pyramids with quincunx sampling applied to the parametric representation of the surface, chosen so as to minimize the variance of the interpolation error, and thus, when combined with the appropriate encoding of the coefficients, optimize the compression of the mesh information transmitted.

Frontal face authentication using morphological elastic graph matching.

A novel dynamic link architecture based on multiscale morphological dilation-erosion is proposed for frontal face authentication. Instead of a set of Gabor filters tuned to different orientations and scales, multiscale morphological operations are employed to yield a feature vector at each node of the reference grid. Linear projection algorithms for feature selection and automatic weighting of the nodes according to their discriminatory power succeed to increase the authentication capability of the method.

Construction of optimal subband coders using optimized and optimal quantizers.

A method is presented for the optimization of arbitrary quantizers by use of a compensating postfilter. It is shown that the resulting optimized quantizers fit the model of a linear time-invariant filter followed by additive noise uncorrelated with the input which also characterizes the optimal (Lloyd-Max) quantizers. On the basis of this model, an expression for the variance of the error of a subband coder using optimized quantizers is explicitly determined.

A finite-element mesh generator based on growing neural networks.

A mesh generator for the production of high-quality finite-element meshes is being proposed. The mesh generator uses an artificial neural network, which grows during the training process in order to adapt itself to a prespecified probability distribution. The initial mesh is a constrained Delaunay triangulation of the domain to be triangulated.

Predictive modular neural networks for unsupervised segmentation of switching time series: the data allocation problem.

In this paper, we explore some aspects of the problem of online unsupervised learning of a switching time series, i.e., a time series which is generated by a combination of several alternately activated sources.

A recurrent fuzzy-neural model for dynamic system identification.

This paper presents a fuzzy modeling approach for identification of dynamic systems. In particular, a new fuzzy model, the Dynamic Fuzzy Neural Network (DFNN), consisting of recurrent TSK rules, is developed. The premise and defuzzification parts are static while the consequent parts of the fuzzy rules are recurrent neural networks with internal feedback and time delay synapses.

Asymptotically optimal detection for additive watermarking in the DCT and DWT domains.

Most of the watermarking schemes that have been proposed until now employ a correlation detector (matched filter). The current paper proposes a new detector scheme that can be applied in the case of additive watermarking in the DCT (discrete cosine transform) or DWT (discrete wavelet transform) domain. Certain properties of the probability density function of the coefficients in these domains are exploited.

Advanced glycosylation end products and nutrition--a possible relation with diabetic atherosclerosis and how to prevent it.

Advanced glycosylation end product (AGE) levels are elevated in diabetic patients and may contribute to the excessive cardiovascular disease in this population, promoting oxidant stress and chronic vascular inflammation. AGEs in people with diabetes mellitus are formed mainly by protein and lipid glucosylation in an environment of chronic hyperglycemia and also by prolonged thermal food processing (diet derived AGEs). This brief review summarizes current literature about food derived AGEs and their relationship with diabetic vascular disease and supports the importance of low AGE diet as an essential preventive or therapeutic intervention against atheromatosis progress.

Nonlinear characteristics of wheezes as seen in the wavelet higher-order spectra domain.

The aim of this study was to capture and analyze the nonlinear characteristics of asthmatic wheezes, reflected in the quadrature phase coupling of their harmonics, as they evolve over time within the breathing cycle. To achieve this, the continuous wavelet transform was combined with third-order statistics/spectra. Wheezes from diagnosed asthmatic patients were drawn from a lung sound database and analyzed in the time-bi-frequency domain.

Nonlinear analysis of heart murmurs using wavelet-based higher-order spectral parameters.

The aim of this study was to reveal and analyze the nonlinear characteristics of heart sounds, reflected in the quadrature phase coupling of the contained frequencies, as they evolve over time. To achieve this, the continuous wavelet transform was combined with third-order statistics/spectra in order to analyze their non Gaussian character, taking into account their non-stationarity. Heart sounds from patients with several pathologies that exhibit murmurs were drawn from a heart sound database and analyzed in the time-bi-frequency domain.

Indicators of sleepiness in an ambulatory EEG study of night driving.

Driver sleepiness due to sleep deprivation is a causative factor in 1% to 3% of all motor vehicle crashes. In recent studies, the importance of developing driver fatigue countermeasure devices has been stressed, in order to help prevent driving accidents and errors. Although numerous physiological indicators are available to describe an individual's level of alertness, the EEG signal has been shown to be one of the most predictive and reliable, since it is a direct measure of brain activity.

Evaluation of surface EMG features for the recognition of American Sign Language gestures.

In this work, analysis of the surface electromyogram (sEMG) signal is proposed for the recognition of American sign language (ASL) gestures. To this purpose, sixteen features are extracted from the sEMG signal acquired from the user's forearm, and evaluated by the Mahalanobis distance criterion. Discriminant analysis is used to reduce the number of features used in the classification of the signed ASL gestures.

Linear discrimination of transmembrane from non-transmembrane segments in proteins using higher-order crossings.

Identification of transmembrane segments in protein sequences is an important issue in the field of bioinformatics. In this study, a method is proposed for linear discrimination between transmembrane and non-transmembrane segments, combining chemical and statistical features of the proteins with higher-order crossings analysis for protein segment classification. The method was tested on human proteins extracted from public available databases and the results have shown a remarkable efficiency of the proposed algorithm to correctly classify the sequence segments under study into two linearly separated classes, for a wide range of transmembrane segment lengths.

Adaptive LMS L-filters for noise suppression in images.

Several adaptive least mean squares (LMS) L-filters, both constrained and unconstrained ones, are developed for noise suppression in images and compared in this paper. First, the location-invariant LMS L-filter for a nonconstant signal corrupted by zero-mean additive white noise is derived. It is demonstrated that the location-invariant LMS L-filter can be described in terms of the generalized linearly constrained adaptive processing structure proposed by Griffiths and Jim (1982).

Multichannel transforms for signal/image processing.

This paper presents a novel approach to the Fourier analysis of multichannel time series. Orthogonal matrix functions are introduced and are used in the definition of multichannel Fourier series of continuous-time periodic multichannel functions. Orthogonal transforms are proposed for discrete-time multichannel signals as well.

Hierarchical partition priority wavelet image compression.

Image compression methods for progressive transmission using optimal hierarchical decomposition, partition priority coding (PPC), and multiple distribution entropy coding (MDEC) are presented. In the proposed coder, a hierarchical subband/wavelet decomposition transforms the original image. The analysis filter banks are selected to maximize the reproduction fidelity in each stage of progressive image transmission.