Seamless Processing Research Articles

Overcoming Dietary Assessment Challenges in Low-Income Countries: Technological Solutions Proposed by the International Dietary Data Expansion (INDDEX) Project.

An increasing number of low-income countries (LICs) exhibit high rates of malnutrition coincident with rising rates of overweight and obesity. Individual-level dietary data are needed to inform effective responses, yet dietary data from large-scale surveys conducted in LICs remain extremely limited. This discussion paper first seeks to highlight the barriers to collection and use of individual-level dietary data in LICs. Second, it introduces readers to new technological developments and research initiatives to remedy this situation, led by the International Dietary Data Expansion (INDDEX) Project. Constraints to conducting large-scale dietary assessments include significant costs, time burden, technical complexity, and limited investment in dietary research infrastructure, including the necessary tools and databases required to collect individual-level dietary data in large surveys. To address existing bottlenecks, the INDDEX Project is developing a dietary assessment platform for LICs, called INDDEX24, consisting of a mobile application integrated with a web database application, which is expected to facilitate seamless data collection and processing. These tools will be subject to rigorous testing including feasibility, validation, and cost studies. To scale up dietary data collection and use in LICs, the INDDEX Project will also invest in food composition databases, an individual-level dietary data dissemination platform, and capacity development activities. Although the INDDEX Project activities are expected to improve the ability of researchers and policymakers in low-income countries to collect, process, and use dietary data, the global nutrition community is urged to commit further significant investments in order to adequately address the range and scope of challenges described in this paper.

Standardization Approaches of Cooperative Intelligent Transport System

Objectives: The autonomous vehicle and driverless research is an interesting issue. Even companies like Google are participating in and leading led this project and research. This paper describes examples of connected vehicle project and it is required to review connected vehicle activity, and analysis characteristics for eCall service and standards of cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), V2X communication. Methods/Statistical Analysis: This paper is used to methods such as standardization research and project trend for analysis. The topic of project for ITS is included and analyzed in safety, mobile services, views of use fee, driving implementation, future internet and mobile service, eCall service and pilot, energy efficiency, dynamic information and applications for assured mobile service and so on. This paper approach and analyzed in the viewpoint about connected vehicle projects and activities according to area and country. The C-ITS standardization are categorized of architecture and general issues, application, data sharing – message sets – dictionary, communication, ITS station and communication management, and security. Findings: Also there are contained issues about connected cruise control, safety pilot driver clinics, efficient travel information, transportation activity, connected test bed, the way transport telematics, automatic driving application and technology, and automated vehicle activities. The projects and activities show vehicle research characteristics and technology level. Among research issues, security and safety are centered to focus on driverless technology implementation and customization. For successful deployment, issues of the C-ITS is support solutions, such as flexibility, application abstraction, scalability, collision controllability, seamless protocol processing, trust and privacy, access control, and so on. Improvements/Applications: We find issues and trend of research project and standardization for C-ITS, activities and standardization specification. In order to increase the stability of driverless autonomous driving, it is still remains a challenge from the research of each country and area.

GazeStereo3D

Producing a high quality stereoscopic impression on current displays is a challenging task. The content has to be carefully prepared in order to maintain visual comfort, which typically affects the quality of depth reproduction. In this work, we show that this problem can be significantly alleviated when the eye fixation regions can be roughly estimated. We propose a new method for stereoscopic depth adjustment that utilizes eye tracking or other gaze prediction information. The key idea that distinguishes our approach from the previous work is to apply gradual depth adjustments at the eye fixation stage, so that they remain unnoticeable. To this end, we measure the limits imposed on the speed of disparity changes in various depth adjustment scenarios, and formulate a new model that can guide such seamless stereoscopic content processing. Based on this model, we propose a real-time controller that applies local manipulations to stereoscopic content to find the optimum between depth reproduction and visual comfort. We show that the controller is mostly immune to the limitations of low-cost eye tracking solutions. We also demonstrate benefits of our model in off-line applications, such as stereoscopic movie production, where skillful directors can reliably guide and predict viewers' attention or where attended image regions are identified during eye tracking sessions. We validate both our model and the controller in a series of user experiments. They show significant improvements in depth perception without sacrificing the visual quality when our techniques are applied.

High-throughput process development of purification alternatives for the protein avidin.

With an increased number of applications in the field of the avidin-biotin technology, the resulting demand for highly-purified protein avidin has drawn our attention to the purification process of avidin that naturally occurs in chicken egg white. The high-throughput process development (HTPD) methodology was exploited, in order to evaluate purification process alternatives to commonly used ion-exchange chromatography. In a high-throughput format, process parameters for aqueous two-phase extraction, selective precipitation with salts and polyethylene glycol, and hydrophobic interaction and mixed-mode column chromatography experiments were performed. The HTPD strategy was complemented by a high-throughput tandem high-performance liquid chromatography assay for protein quantification. Suitable conditions for the separation of avidin from the major impurities ovalbumin, ovomucoid, ovotransferrin, and lysozyme were identified in the screening experiments. By combination of polyethylene glycol precipitation with subsequent resolubilization and separation in a polyethylene glycol/sulfate/sodium chloride two-phase system an avidin purity of 77% was obtained with a yield >90% while at the same time achieving a significant reduction of the process volume. The two-phase extraction and precipitation results were largely confirmed in larger scale with scale-up factors of 230 and 133, respectively. Seamless processing of the avidin enriched bottom phase was found feasible by using mixed-mode chromatography. By gradient elution a final avidin purity of at least 97% and yield >90% was obtained in the elution pool. The presented identification of a new and beneficial alternative for the purification of the high value protein thus represents a successful implementation of HTPD for an industrially relevant purification task.

GLONASS ambiguity resolution of mixed receiver types without external calibration

GLONASS processing from mixed receiver types is typically subject to unmodeled inter-frequency phase biases which prevent carrier phase ambiguity parameters from converging to integers. Receiver-dependent values have been proposed to mitigate the contribution of these biases, but are still subject to a number of issues, such as firmware updates. Recent studies have demonstrated that the origin of inter-frequency biases is a misalignment between phase and code observations, and could be calibrated to first order by manufacturers. In this contribution, a calibration-free method for GLONASS ambiguity resolution is presented in which ambiguities naturally converge to integers. A mandatory condition is that two GLONASS satellites with adjacent frequency numbers are observed simultaneously, although this condition can be relaxed once a fixed solution has been obtained. This approach then permits the integration of different receiver types and firmware versions into seamless processing.

Clickmd: An Intuitive Web-Oriented Molecular Dynamics Platform

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are broadly used to reproduce protein motions at an atomic level of detail. Running MD simulations is generally considered an expert-driven task. ClickMD provides an integrated web-oriented platform for processing and analyzing the time-dependent behavior of a biomolecular system in an MD workflow. ClickMD is freely available online and can be easily integrated into the drug-design process, in particular in combination with molecular docking simulations. ClickMD has the potential to reduce the shuffling among various software applications and to facilitate the seamless processing of the MD trajectories.

Pneumatic handling of droplets on‐demand on a microfluidic device for seamless processing of reaction and electrophoretic separation

Sequential operations of pre-separation reaction process by picoliter droplets and following electrophoretic separation process were realized in a single microfluidic device with pneumatic handling of liquid. The developed device consists of a fluidic chip made of PDMS, an electrode substrate, and a temperature control substrate on which thin film heater/sensor structures are fabricated. Liquid handling, including introduction of liquid samples, droplet generation, and merging of droplets, was implemented by pneumatic manipulation through microcapillary vent structures, allowing air to pass and stop liquid flow. Since the pneumatic manipulations are conducted in a fully automated manner by using a programmable air pressure control system, the user simply has to load liquid samples on each liquid port of the device. Droplets of 420 pL were generated with an accuracy of ± 2 pL by applying droplet generation pressure in the range of 40-100 kPa. As a demonstration, a binding reaction of a 15 mer ssDNA with a peptide nucleic acid oligomer used as an oligoprobe followed by denaturing electrophoresis to discriminate a single-base substitution was performed within 1.5 min. By exploiting the droplet-on-demand capability of the device, the influence of various factors, such as reaction time, mixing ratio and droplet configurations on the ssDNA-peptide nucleic acid binding reaction in the droplet-based process, was studied toward realization of a rapid detection method to discriminate rapid single-base substitution.

Fast image mapping of endoscopic image mosaics with three-dimensional ultrasound image for intrauterine fetal surgery

This paper describes a fast image mapping system that integrates endoscopic image mosaics with three-dimensional (3-D) ultrasound images for assisting intrauterine laser photocoagulation treatment. Endoscopic laser photocoagulation treatment has a good survival rate and a low complication rate for twins. However, the small field of view and lack of surrounding information makes the identification of vessel anastomosis difficult. We have developed an extended visualization system with the fusion of endoscopic image mosaics with a 3-D ultrasound-image model. Fully automatic and fast calibration is used for endoscope calibration in fluid. The 3-D spatial position of the endoscopic images and the ultrasound image are tracked by a 3-D position tracking device. The mosaiced endoscope images are registered to the surface of the 3-D ultrasound placenta model by using a fast GPU-based image rendering method and a seamless multi-images processing. Experimental results show that the system may provide an improved and efficient way of planning and guidance in laser photocoagulation treatment.

Reengineering websites into stateful resources for grid service oriented evolution

Grid services have emerged by combining Web services and Grid computing to perform a seamless information processing system across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic virtual organisations that the user can access from any location. The Web service Resource Framework (WSRF) is a new way for manipulating to perform Grid services. It defines the concept of and how they can be discovered, queried and manipulated via Web services. This paper proposes a service-oriented reengineering approach to create stateful resources from conventional HTML Websites. This approach applies hierarchical cluster techniques to extract and translate Website resources. It supports service identification and packaging, and also achieves Website evolution into Grid service environment by exploiting WSRF.