Temporal and Spatial Denoising of Depth Maps.

This work presents a procedure for refining depth maps acquired using RGB-D (depth) cameras. With numerous new structured-light RGB-D cameras, acquiring high-resolution depth maps has become easy. However, there are problems such as undesired occlusion, inaccurate depth values, and temporal variation of pixel values when using these cameras. In this paper, a proposed method based on an exemplar-based inpainting method is proposed to remove artefacts in depth maps obtained using RGB-D cameras. Exemplar-based inpainting has been used to repair an object-removed image. The concept underlying this inpainting method is similar to that underlying the procedure for padding the occlusions in the depth data obtained using RGB-D cameras. Therefore, our proposed method enhances and modifies the inpainting method for application in and the refinement of RGB-D depth data image quality. For evaluating the experimental results of the proposed method, our proposed method was tested on the Tsukuba Stereo Dataset, which contains a 3D video with the ground truths of depth maps, occlusion maps, RGB images, the peak signal-to-noise ratio, and the computational time as the evaluation metrics. Moreover, a set of self-recorded RGB-D depth maps and their refined versions are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Effect of surface Si redistribution on the alignment of Ge dots grown on pit-patterned Si(001) substrates.

Thermally activated redistribution of Si surface atoms is found to be a crucial factor for the growth of aligned Ge dots on pit-patterned Si(001) substrates. A phenomenon of Si accumulation around the edge of pits significantly alters the substrate surface morphology. As the pit spacing is reduced to below 100 nm, a convex morphology developed between adjacent pits causes a chemical potential distribution that drives the Ge dots into the pits. In addition, the pits of an etching depth greater than 60 nm will evolve into truncated inverted pyramids with sharp base corners that provide deep potential wells for the confinement of Ge dots. Perfectly aligned Ge dots are obtained on pit-patterned Si substrates with this range of pit spacing and etching depth. We also find that the initial geometric shape of the pits does not affect the spatial arrangement of Ge dots.

Anticipative QoS Control: A Self-Reconfigurable On-Chip Communication.

A self-reconfigurable Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture that supports anticipative Quality of Service (QoS) control with penetrative switch ability is proposed to enhance the performance of bidirectional-channel NoC communication while supporting prioritized packet transmission services. The anticipative QoS control not only allows each communication channel to be dynamically self-configured to transmit flits in either direction for a better channel utilization of on-chip hardware resources, but also enhances the latency performance for QoS services. The proposed anticipative control is based on penetratingly observing channel direction requests of routers that is two hops away from the current one. The added ability enables a router to allocate high-priority packets to a dedicated virtual channel and then rapidly bypass it to the next destination router. The provided flexibility of packet switch promises better channel bandwidth utilization, lower packet delivery latency, and furthermore guarantees the high-priority packets being served with a better QoS. Accordingly, in this paper, an enhanced NoC architecture supporting the hybrid anticipative QoS, penetrative switch, and bidirectional-channel control, namely Anticipative QoS Bidirectional-channel NoC (AQ-BiNoC) is presented. Tested with cycle-accurate synthetic traffic patterns, significant performance enhancement has been observed when the proposed AQ-BiNoC architecture is compared against conventional NoC designs.

An agile enterprise regulation architecture for health information security management.

Information security management for healthcare enterprises is complex as well as mission critical. Information technology requests from clinical users are of such urgency that the information office should do its best to achieve as many user requests as possible at a high service level using swift security policies. This research proposes the Agile Enterprise Regulation Architecture (AERA) of information security management for healthcare enterprises to implement as part of the electronic health record process. Survey outcomes and evidential experiences from a sample of medical center users proved that AERA encourages the information officials and enterprise administrators to overcome the challenges faced within an electronically equipped hospital.

Application of tele-ultrasound in emergency medical services.

In emergency medical services, portable ultrasound scanners have the potential to become new-age stethoscopes for emergency physicians. For trauma cases in particular, portable ultrasound scanners can scan the chest and abdomen of emergency patients both rapidly and conveniently. This study describes the development of tele-ultrasound for pre-diagnosis in a medical emergency setting as a part of the updated Mobile Hospital Emergency Medical System (MHEMS). An emergency medical technician can provide an emergency physician with a patient's ultrasound images and medical information during the patient's pre-hospitalization and transportation period using a combination of the MHEMS, the portable ultrasound scanner, and the onboard 3G communication capabilities. The MHEMS includes a Dispatch and Mission Control Center that facilitates the communication between the Emergency Department of a specified hospital, the systems aboard the ambulance. Early receipt of information relevant to the patient will enhance pre-diagnosis options for on-duty emergency physicians and allow for a hospital's emergency department to promptly prepare necessary surgical instruments or beds. Furthermore, emergency medical technicians can also obtain instructions from on-duty physicians to enhance damage and disaster control ability in critical moments.

RTWPMS: a real-time wireless physiological monitoring system.

This paper demonstrates the design and implementation of a real-time wireless physiological monitoring system for nursing centers, whose function is to monitor online the physiological status of aged patients via wireless communication channel and wired local area network. The collected data, such as body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate, can then be stored in the computer of a network management center to facilitate the medical staff in a nursing center to monitor in real time or analyze in batch mode the physiological changes of the patients under observation. Our proposed system is bidirectional, has low power consumption, is cost effective, is modular designed, has the capability of operating independently, and can be used to improve the service quality and reduce the workload of the staff in a nursing center.

Automatic Wheezing Detection Based on Signal Processing of Spectrogram and Back-Propagation Neural Network.

Wheezing is a common clinical symptom in patients with obstructive pulmonary diseases such as asthma. Automatic wheezing detection offers an objective and accurate means for identifying wheezing lung sounds, helping physicians in the diagnosis, long-term auscultation, and analysis of a patient with obstructive pulmonary disease. This paper describes the design of a fast and high-performance wheeze recognition system. A wheezing detection algorithm based on the order truncate average method and a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) is proposed. Some features are extracted from processed spectra to train a BPNN, and subsequently, test samples are analyzed by the trained BPNN to determine whether they are wheezing sounds. The respiratory sounds of 58 volunteers (32 asthmatic and 26 healthy adults) were recorded for training and testing. Experimental results of a qualitative analysis of wheeze recognition showed a high sensitivity of 0.946 and a high specificity of 1.0.

A seamless ubiquitous telehealthcare tunnel.

Mobile handheld devices are rapidly using to implement healthcare services around the World. Fundamentally, these services utilize telemedicine technologies. A disconnection of a mobile telemedicine system usually results in an interruption, which is embarrassing, and reconnection is necessary during the communication session. In this study, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is adopted to build a stable session tunnel to guarantee seamless switching among heterogeneous wireless communication standards, such as Wi-Fi and 3G. This arrangement means that the telemedicine devices will not be limited by a fixed wireless connection and can switch to a better wireless channel if necessary. The tunnel can transmit plain text, binary data, and video streams. According to the evaluation of the proposed software-based SCTP-Tunnel middleware shown, the performance is lower than anticipated and is slightly slower than a fixed connection. However, the transmission throughput is still acceptable for healthcare professionals in a healthcare enterprise or home care site. It is necessary to build more heterogeneous wireless protocols into the proposed tunnel-switching scheme to support all possible communication protocols. In addition, SCTP is another good choice for promoting communication in telemedicine and healthcare fields.

Interlayer bit allocation for scalable video coding.

In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of the distortion in multilayer coding structures. Specifically, we analyze the prediction structure used to achieve temporal, spatial, and quality scalability of scalable video coding (SVC) and show that the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of SVC is a weighted combination of the bit rates assigned to all the streams. Our analysis utilizes the end user's preference for certain resolutions. We also propose a rate-distortion (R-D) optimization algorithm and compare its performance with that of a state-of-the-art scalable bit allocation algorithm. The reported experiment results demonstrate that the R-D algorithm significantly outperforms the compared approach in terms of the average PSNR.

Usability evaluation of mobile medical treatment carts: another explanation by information engineers.

Healthcare services integration is a critical task as it attempts to reform the user practices. In response to the request of facilities upgrade, we perform a usability evaluation of the mobile medical treatment carts (MMTC) installed in the Emergency Medicine Department of our healthcare enterprise. A survey conducted in August 2006 identified that our experimental area needs some improvements to support the MMTC adoption. For example, the MMTC can accompany with several popular nursing care items. Follow-up several undertaken investigations indicated that our expectation of the MMTC solution had been reached. Given the evident heterogeneity of viewpoints, it is imperative for a healthcare enterprise to broadly ascertain the requirements of end users before investing in any information technologies.

A conceptual persistent healthcare quality improvement process for software development management.

This paper illustrates a sustained conceptual service quality improvement process for the management of software development within a healthcare enterprise. Our proposed process is revised from Niland's healthcare quality information system (HQIS). This process includes functions to survey the satisfaction of system functions, describe the operation bylaws on-line, and provide on-demand training. To achieve these goals, we integrate five information systems in National Taiwan University Hospital, including healthcare information systems, health quality information system, requirement management system, executive information system, and digital learning system, to form a full Deming cycle. A preliminary user satisfaction survey showed that our outpatient information system scored an average of 71.31 in 2006.