Initial Grid Research Articles

Development and validation of the FRAGIRE tool for assessment an older person's risk for frailty.

BackgroundFrailty is highly prevalent in elderly people. While significant progress has been made to understand its pathogenesis process, few validated questionnaire exist to assess the multidimensional concept of frailty and to detect people frail or at risk to become frail. The objectives of this study were to construct and validate a new frailty-screening instrument named Frailty Groupe Iso-Ressource Evaluation (FRAGIRE) that accurately predicts the risk for frailty in older adults.MethodsA prospective multicenter recruitment of the elderly patients was undertaken in France. The subjects were classified into financially-helped group (FH, with financial assistance) and non-financially helped group (NFH, without any financial assistance), considering FH subjects are more frail than the NFH group and thus representing an acceptable surrogate population for frailty. Psychometric properties of the FRAGIRE grid were assessed including discrimination between the FH and NFH groups. Items reduction was made according to statistical analyses and experts’ point of view. The association between items response and tests with “help requested status” was assessed in univariate and multivariate unconditional logistic regression analyses and a prognostic score to become frail was finally proposed for each subject.ResultsBetween May 2013 and July 2013, 385 subjects were included: 338 (88%) in the FH group and 47 (12%) in the NFH group. The initial FRAGIRE grid included 65 items. After conducting the item selection, the final grid of the FRAGIRE was reduced to 19 items. The final grid showed fair discrimination ability to predict frailty (area under the curve (AUC) = 0.85) and good calibration (Hosmer-Lemeshow P-value = 0.580), reflecting a good agreement between the prediction by the final model and actual observation. The Cronbach's alpha for the developed tool scored as high as 0.69 (95% Confidence Interval: 0.64 to 0.74). The final prognostic score was excellent, with an AUC of 0.756. Moreover, it facilitated significant separation of patients into individuals requesting for help from others (P-value < 0.0001), with sensitivity of 81%, specificity of 61%, positive predictive value of 93%, negative predictive value of 34%, and a global predictive value of 78%.ConclusionsThe FRAGIRE seems to have considerable potential as a reliable and effective tool for identifying frail elderly individuals by a public health social worker without medical training.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12877-016-0360-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Control the cost, touch and step voltages of the grounding grids design

In this study, an evolutionary strategy is presented to get the optimal grounding grid design to minimise the design cost, the touch and step voltages of the grounding grid to ensure the economical constraint as well as the safety conditions. The proposed technique is used for one and two-layer soil. This technique is based on the comparison between the quality factors of the initial grid dimension according to the cost, touch and step voltages with the other quality factors obtained from new generations (offspring) of the grid dimensions. Effects of top layer thickness, number of grid meshes, vertical rods number and length, and the soil resistivity of the top and bottom layers on grounding resistance (R g) and earth surface potential are studied. Different case studies are introduced to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique and to provide the knowledge about the grid dimensions that is substantial for the economical design of the grounding grids.

A Fast Superpixel Segmentation Algorithm for PolSAR Images Based on Edge Refinement and Revised Wishart Distance.

The superpixel segmentation algorithm, as a preprocessing technique, should show good performance in fast segmentation speed, accurate boundary adherence and homogeneous regularity. A fast superpixel segmentation algorithm by iterative edge refinement (IER) works well on optical images. However, it may generate poor superpixels for Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images due to the influence of strong speckle noise and many small-sized or slim regions. To solve these problems, we utilized a fast revised Wishart distance instead of Euclidean distance in the local relabeling of unstable pixels, and initialized unstable pixels as all the pixels substituted for the initial grid edge pixels in the initialization step. Then, postprocessing with the dissimilarity measure is employed to remove the generated small isolated regions as well as to preserve strong point targets. Finally, the superiority of the proposed algorithm is validated with extensive experiments on four simulated and two real-world PolSAR images from Experimental Synthetic Aperture Radar (ESAR) and Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AirSAR) data sets, which demonstrate that the proposed method shows better performance with respect to several commonly used evaluation measures, even with about nine times higher computational efficiency, as well as fine boundary adherence and strong point targets preservation, compared with three state-of-the-art methods.

Numerical simulation of deformation and fracture of a material with a polysilazane-based coating

The paper studies the localization of plastic deformation and fracture in a material with a porous coating. A dynamic boundary value problem in the plane strain formulation is solved. The numerical simulation is performed by the finite difference method. The composite structure corresponds to the experimentally observed one and is specified explicitly in the calculation. A generation procedure of the initial finite-difference grid is developed to describe the coating structure with adjustable porosity and geometry of the substrate-coating interface. Constitutive equations for the steel substrate include an elastic-plastic model of an isotropically hardening material. The ceramic coating is described by a brittle fracture model on the basis of the Huber criterion which accounts for crack nucleation in triaxial tension zones. It is shown that the specific character of deformation and fracture of the studied composite results from the presence of local tensile regions in the vicinity of pores and along the coating-substrate interface, in both tension and compression of the coated material. The interrelation between inhomogeneous plastic flow in the steel substrate and crack propagation in the coating is studied.

Fast Autonomous Three-Axis Constrained Attitude Pathfinding and Visualization for Boresight Alignment

A new algorithm suitable for fast onboard implementation is presented for designing attitude maneuver paths that achieve desired boresight alignment in the presence of multiple three-axis attitude constraints. It is based on a recently proposed algorithm in which possible attitudes are discretized in a three-dimensional distortion-minimizing projected space. In that space, grid points are enumerated and graph search pathfinding algorithms are employed to find the shortest constrained path between selected initial and target grid points. The new algorithm extends this approach from a single target point to a continuum of target points, representing all possible attitudes that maintain the desired boresight alignment. It augments the original algorithm with the transformation that makes it possible to assign a single value to estimated distances for the whole continuum of target points. This, in turn, allows the pathfinding algorithms to efficiently determine the shortest overall path to the whole continuum, which corresponds to the shortest attitude maneuver path that achieves the desired boresight alignment.

Upscaling of solute transport in disordered porous media by wavelet transformations

Modeling flow and solute transport in large-scale (e.g.) on the order of 103 m heterogeneous porous media involves substantial computational burden. A common approach to alleviate the problem is to utilize an upscaling method that generates models that require less intensive computations. The method must also preserve the important properties of the spatial distribution of the hydraulic conductivity (K) field. We use an upscaling method based on the wavelet transformations (WTs) that coarsens the computational grid based on the spatial distribution of K. The technique is applied to a porous formation with broadly distributed and correlated K values, and the governing equation for solute transport in the formation is solved numerically. The WT upscaling preserves the resolution of the initial highly-resolved computational grid in the high K zones, as well as that of the zones with sharp contrasts between the neighboring K, whereas the low-K zones are averaged out. To demonstrate the accuracy of the method, we simulate fluid flow and nonreactive solute transport in both the high-resolution and upscaled grids, and compare the concentration profiles and the breakthrough times. The results indicate that the WT upscaling of a K field generates non-uniform upscaled grids with a number of grid blocks that on average is about two percent of the number of the blocks in the original high-resolution computational grids, while the concentration profiles, the breakthrough times and the second moment of the concentration distribution, computed for both models, are virtually identical. A systematic parametric study is also carried out in order to investigate the sensitivity of the method to the broadness of the K field, the nature of the correlations in the field (positive versus negative), and the size of the computational grid. As the broadness of the K field and the size of the computational domain increase, better agreement between the results for the high-resolution and upscaled models is obtained.

Irregular Morphing for Real-Time Rendering of Large Terrain

The following paper proposes an alternative approach to the real-time adaptive triangulation problem. A new region-based multi-resolution approach for terrain rendering is described which improves on-the-fly the distribution of the density of triangles inside the tile after selecting appropriate Level-Of-Detail by an adaptive sampling. This proposed approach organizes the heightmap into a QuadTree of tiles that are processed independently. This technique combines the benefits of both Triangular Irregular Network approach and region-based multi-resolution approach by improving the distribution of the density of triangles inside the tile. Our technique morphs the initial regular grid of the tile to deformed grid in order to minimize approximation error. The proposed technique strives to combine large tile size and real-time processing while guaranteeing an upper bound on the screen space error. Thus, this approach adapts terrain rendering process to local surface characteristics and enables on-the-fly handling of large amount of terrain data. Morphing is based-on the multi-resolution wavelet analysis. The use of the D2WT multi-resolution analysis of the terrain height-map speeds up processing and permits to satisfy an interactive terrain rendering. Tests and experiments demonstrate that Haar B-Spline wavelet, well known for its properties of localization and its compact support, is suitable for fast and accurate redistribution. Such technique could be exploited in client-server architecture for supporting interactive high-quality remote visualization of very large terrain.

Irregular Morphing for Real-Time Rendering of Large Terrain

Abstract. The following paper proposes an alternative approach to the real-time adaptive triangulation problem. A new region-based multi-resolution approach for terrain rendering is described which improves on-the-fly the distribution of the density of triangles inside the tile after selecting appropriate Level-Of-Detail by an adaptive sampling. This proposed approach organizes the heightmap into a QuadTree of tiles that are processed independently. This technique combines the benefits of both Triangular Irregular Network approach and region-based multi-resolution approach by improving the distribution of the density of triangles inside the tile. Our technique morphs the initial regular grid of the tile to deformed grid in order to minimize approximation error. The proposed technique strives to combine large tile size and real-time processing while guaranteeing an upper bound on the screen space error. Thus, this approach adapts terrain rendering process to local surface characteristics and enables on-the-fly handling of large amount of terrain data. Morphing is based-on the multi-resolution wavelet analysis. The use of the D2WT multi-resolution analysis of the terrain height-map speeds up processing and permits to satisfy an interactive terrain rendering. Tests and experiments demonstrate that Haar B-Spline wavelet, well known for its properties of localization and its compact support, is suitable for fast and accurate redistribution. Such technique could be exploited in client-server architecture for supporting interactive high-quality remote visualization of very large terrain.

Aeroelastic analysis of bridge deck flutter with modified implicit coupling method

An effective time-domain aeroelastic framework for bridge deck flutters is presented based on a modified implicit coupling algorithm with grid deformation techniques. The grid deformation is accomplished by radial basis function interpolation as well as by the rigid movement of the initial grid. In this paper, for computational efficiency, a coupling frequency control technique is adopted for the implicit coupling algorithm. To verify the time-domain aeroelastic framework by using the grid deformation technique, the vortex-induced vibration of the cylinder and H-section bridge deck flutter are computed, and the results are compared with published results. The effect of the coupling frequency with the grid deformation technique is presented for the flutter analysis of the Great Belt East Bridge suspension girder section.

A Mobile Sensing System for UrbanPM2.5Monitoring with Adaptive Resolution

This paper develops a mobile sensing system, the first system used in adaptive resolution urban air quality monitoring. In this system, we employ several taxis as sensor carries to collect originalPM2.5data and collect a variety of datasets, including meteorological data, traffic status data, and geographical data in the city. This paper also presents a novel method AG-PCEM (Adaptive Grid-Probabilistic Concentration Estimation Method) to infer thePM2.5concentration for undetected grids using dynamic adaptive grids. We gradually collect the measurements throughout a year using a prototype system in Xiasha District of Hangzhou City, China. Experimental data has verified that the proposed system can achieve good performance in terms of computational cost and accuracy. The computational cost of AG-PCEM is reduced by about 40.2% compared with a static grid method PCEM under the condition of reaching the close accuracy, and the accuracy of AG-PCEM is far superior as widely used artificial neural network (ANN) and Gaussian process (GP), enhanced by 38.8% and 14.6%, respectively. The system can be expanded to wide-range air quality monitor by adjusting the initial grid resolution, and our findings can tell citizens actual air quality and help official management find pollution sources.

Grid Quality and Resolution Effects for Aerodynamic Modeling of Ram-Air Parachutes

This work provides an overview of the grid quality and resolution effects on the aerodynamic modeling of ram-air parachute canopies. The computational-fluid-dynamics simulations of this work were performed using the Cobalt flow solver, which is a three-dimensional code, but it was run in a two-dimensional mode for canopy sections with open and closed inlets. Previous simulation results of these geometries showed that grid independence is achieved for the closed and open airfoils with grids containing around half a million and 2 million cells, respectively. Previous grids were either hybrid with prismatic layers near the walls or multiblock structured using algebraic grid generators. The results presented in this work show that grid independence of both geometries can be achieved with much coarser grids. These grids, however, were generated with good smoothness, wall orthogonality, and skewness qualities. The results show that the grid quality value is mainly related to the grid smoothness and does not depend on the grid skewness or the wall orthogonality. Although a smooth grid improves the quality value, and therefore the solution convergence, it does not always lead to an accurate solution. For example, the unstructured grids with anisotropic cells near the wall have very good grid quality; however, they have the worst accuracy among all grids considered because of the poor skewness at the walls. The results also showed that, in comparison to the closed inlets, the open geometry solutions are less sensitive to the initial grid spacing and number of constant spacing layers at the outside airfoil walls. Finally, the open inlet solutions do not change with the inside airfoil grid resolution and type.

Initial condition maps of subsets of the circular restricted three-body problem phase space

The six-dimensional phase space of the circular restricted three-body problem offers opportunities to exploit dynamics commonly found in the Solar System for unique spacecraft trajectories. Poincare first introduced the idea of reducing the phase space by observing a surface of section, or a Poincare map. In this paper, we show an alternate map parameterization that classifies trajectories according to their qualitative end state and reflects their status onto an initial condition grid. While this method does not allow a visualization of the entire phase space at once, it does allow insight into reduced regimes of the phase space.

A Fully Automatic Method for Gridding Bright Field Images of Bead-Based Microarrays.

In this paper, a fully automatic method for gridding bright field images of bead-based microarrays is proposed. There have been numerous techniques developed for gridding fluorescence images of traditional spotted microarrays but to our best knowledge, no algorithm has yet been developed for gridding bright field images of bead-based microarrays. The proposed gridding method is designed for automatic quality control during fabrication and assembly of bead-based microarrays. The method begins by estimating the grid parameters using an evolutionary algorithm. This is followed by a grid-fitting step that rigidly aligns an ideal grid with the image. Finally, a grid refinement step deforms the ideal grid to better fit the image. The grid fitting and refinement are performed locally and the final grid is a nonlinear (piecewise affine) grid. To deal with extreme corruptions in the image, the initial grid parameter estimation and grid-fitting steps employ robust search techniques. The proposed method does not have any free parameters that need tuning. The method is capable of identifying the grid structure even in the presence of extreme amounts of artifacts and distortions. Evaluation results on a variety of images are presented.

Assessment of dynamic adaptive grids in Volume-Of-Fluid simulations of oblique drop impacts onto liquid films

Grid spacing dependence in three-dimensional numerical simulations of non-normal drop impact onto thin liquid films is assessed for different impingement angles and grid refinement levels. To describe the liquid phase dynamics, the Navier–Stokes equations are coupled to a Volume-Of-Fluid (VOF) model. Numerical simulations are performed with a modified version software OpenFOAM over a structured grid of hexaedra. Grid adaptation is carried out using an edge subdivision technique which results in non-conformal meshes. Grid convergence is assessed by monitoring integral parameters describing the dynamics of the post-impact free-surface waves. Starting from an initial grid spacing between D/8 and D/5, with D drop diameter, a refinement level of three is found to be sufficient to describe the diverse flow feature and to identify the splashing regime.

Optimal Collocation Nodes for Fractional Derivative Operators

Spectral discretizations of fractional derivative operators are examined, where the approximation basis is related to the set of Jacobi polynomials. The pseudo-spectral method is implemented by assuming that the grid, used to represent the function to be differentiated, may not be coincident with the collocation grid. The new option opens the way to the analysis of alternative techniques and the search of optimal distributions of collocation nodes, based on the operator to be approximated. Once the initial representation grid has been chosen, indications on how to recover the collocation grid are provided, with the aim of enlarging the dimension of the approximation space. As a results of this process, performances are improved. Applications to fractional type advection-diffusion equations, and comparisons in terms of accuracy and efficiency are made. As shown in the analysis, special choices of the nodes can also suggest tricks to speed up computations.

Caracterização da variabilidade espacial do índice relativo de clorofila na cultura do trigo

A aplicação localizada de nitrogênio, baseada no índice relativo de clorofila das folhas, pode proporcionar inúmeros benefícios econômicos e ambientais, no entanto, o conhecimento sobre a metodologia de amostragem ainda é incipiente. Nesse sentido, este estudo objetivou avaliar o uso de diferentes malhas amostrais na caracterização da variabilidade espacial do índice relativo de clorofila das folhas da cultura do trigo e na confecção de mapas temáticos para a aplicação localizada de nitrogênio. Para determinação do índice relativo de clorofila, utilizou-se clorofilômetro CFL 1030, em uma malha amostral regular de 10 m x 10 m, com 472 pontos amostrais. A partir da malha amostral inicial, pela técnica de eliminação de pontos, realizou-se a simulação da utilização das seguintes malhas: 10 m x 20 m; 20 m x 20 m; 20 m x 30 m; 30 m x 30 m; 30 m x 40 m; e 40 m x 40 m. O aumento da malha amostral promoveu redução na acurácia do diagnóstico do índice relativo de clorofila, nas folhas de trigo. À medida que se aumentou a malha amostral, os mapas tornaram-se mais generalistas e informações da variabilidade espacial do índice relativo de clorofila foram perdidas. Malhas amostrais menores ou iguais a 20 m x 20 m mostraram-se eficazes para a detecção da variabilidade espacial do índice relativo de clorofila em folhas de trigo e para a confecção de mapas temáticos de aplicação localizada de nitrogênio.

An adaptive wavelet collocation method for solving optimal control problem

A sequential solution approach based on an adaptive wavelet collocation method is proposed for solving optimal control problems. By expanding the state and control variables with wavelet multi-resolution decomposition, an original optimal control problem can be transcribed into a nonlinear programming problem that can be solved by general methods. In the proposed framework, an iterative algorithm starts from an initial coarse grid with few collocations. Subsequent solutions can thus be obtained on a dynamically refined grid by an adaptive wavelet collocation method, while the previous coarser level solution can be taken as the initial guess for the next iteration. Consequently, the computational grid for direct numerical optimization method is able to automatically adapt to any irregularities or discontinuities in the solution. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm are verified by two typical examples.

Simple hydraulic conductivity estimation by the Kalman filtered double constraint method.

This paper presents the Kalman Filtered Double Constraint Method (DCM-KF) as a technique to estimate the hydraulic conductivities in the grid blocks of a groundwater flow model. The DCM is based on two forward runs with the same initial grid block conductivities, but with alternating flux-head conditions specified on parts of the boundary and the wells. These two runs are defined as: (1) the flux run, with specified fluxes (recharge and well abstractions), and (2) the head run, with specified heads (measured in piezometers). Conductivities are then estimated as the initial conductivities multiplied by the fluxes obtained from the flux run and divided by the fluxes obtained from the head run. The DCM is easy to implement in combination with existing models (e.g., MODFLOW). Sufficiently accurate conductivities are obtained after a few iterations. Because of errors in the specified head-flux couples, repeated estimation under varying hydrological conditions results in different conductivities. A time-independent estimate of the conductivities and their inaccuracy can be obtained by a simple linear KF with modest computational requirements. For the Kleine Nete catchment, Belgium, the DCM-KF yields sufficiently accurate calibrated conductivities. The method also results in distinguishing regions where the head-flux observations influence the calibration from areas where it is not able to influence the hydraulic conductivity.

Second order symmetry-preserving conservative Lagrangian scheme for compressible Euler equations in two-dimensional cylindrical coordinates

In applications such as astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion, there are many three-dimensional cylindrical-symmetric multi-material problems which are usually simulated by Lagrangian schemes in the two-dimensional cylindrical coordinates. For this type of simulation, a critical issue for the schemes is to keep spherical symmetry in the cylindrical coordinate system if the original physical problem has this symmetry. In the past decades, several Lagrangian schemes with such symmetry property have been developed, but all of them are only first order accurate. In this paper, we develop a second order cell-centered Lagrangian scheme for solving compressible Euler equations in cylindrical coordinates, based on the control volume discretizations, which is designed to have uniformly second order accuracy and capability to preserve one-dimensional spherical symmetry in a two-dimensional cylindrical geometry when computed on an equal-angle-zoned initial grid. The scheme maintains several good properties such as conservation for mass, momentum and total energy, and the geometric conservation law. Several two-dimensional numerical examples in cylindrical coordinates are presented to demonstrate the good performance of the scheme in terms of accuracy, symmetry, non-oscillation and robustness. The advantage of higher order accuracy is demonstrated in these examples.

A geometry-based adaptive unstructured grid generation algorithm for complex geological media

In this paper a novel unstructured grid generation algorithm is presented that considers the effect of geological features and well locations in grid resolution. The proposed grid generation algorithm presents a strategy for definition and construction of an initial grid based on the geological model, geometry adaptation of geological features, and grid resolution control. The algorithm is applied to seismotectonic map of the Masjed-i-Soleiman reservoir. Comparison of grid results with the “Triangle” program shows a more suitable permeability contrast. Immiscible two-phase flow solutions are presented for a fractured porous media test case using different grid resolutions. Adapted grid on the fracture geometry gave identical results with that of a fine grid. The adapted grid employed 88.2% less CPU time when compared to the solutions obtained by the fine grid.