Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Automatic Classification Of Epilepsy Lesions, Junwei Sun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Epilepsy is a common and diverse set of chronic neurological disorders characterized by seizures. Epileptic seizures result from abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Seizure types are organized firstly according to whether the source of the seizure within the brain is localized or distributed. In this work, our objective is to validate the use of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) for localizing seizure focus for improved surgical planning. We apply computer vision and machine learning techniques to tackle the problem of epilepsy lesion classification. First datasets of digitized histology images from brain cortexes of different patients are obtained …

Automatic Foreground Initialization For Binary Image Segmentation, Wei Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Foreground segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision. A popular approach for foreground extraction is through graph cuts in energy minimization framework. Most existing graph cuts based image segmentation algorithms rely on user’s initialization. In this work, we aim to find an automatic initialization for graph cuts. Unlike many previous methods, no additional training dataset is needed. Collecting a training set is not only expensive and time consuming, but it also may bias the algorithm to the particular data distribution of the collected dataset. We assume that the foreground differs significantly from the background in some unknown feature space …

A New Web Search Engine With Learning Hierarchy, Da Kuang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most of the existing web search engines (such as Google and Bing) are in the form of keyword-based search. Typically, after the user issues a query with the keywords, the search engine will return a flat list of results. When the query issued by the user is related to a topic, only the keyword matching may not accurately retrieve the whole set of webpages in that topic. On the other hand, there exists another type of search system, particularly in e-Commerce web- sites, where the user can search in the categories of different faceted hierarchies (e.g., product types and price …

Preoperative Planning Of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery Under Uncertainty, Hamidreza Azimian

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, a computational framework for patient-specific preoperative planning of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery (RAMICS) is developed. It is expected that preoperative planning of RAMICS will improve the rate of success by considering robot kinematics, patient-specific thoracic anatomy, and procedure-specific intraoperative conditions. Given the significant anatomical features localized in the preoperative computed tomography images of a patient's thorax, port locations and robot orientations (with respect to the patient's body coordinate frame) are determined to optimize characteristics such as dexterity, reachability, tool approach angles and maneuverability. In this thesis, two approaches for preoperative planning of RAMICS are proposed that …

Game Challenge: A Factorial Analysis Approach, Ian J. Fraser

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Video games that customize to a player's experience level and abilities have the potential to allow a broader range of players to become engaged and maintain interest as they progress in experience level. A game that uniquely customizes the player's experience could attract additional demographics to gaming, which will result in a distinct edge in marketability and potential revenue. This thesis examines a subsection of adaptive gaming systems from the perspective of identifying game factors that alter the level of difficulty. Our focus is to provide a solution useful to both research and commercial gaming communities by developing a system …

3d Velocity Retrieval And Storm Tracking Using Multiple Radars, Yong Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Severe weather forecasting is one of the most important and urgent tasks in the meteorology field. This thesis builds on previous work by Barron and Mercer and their graduate students, concerning the use of 3D optical flow to retrieve 3D wind velocity from 3D Doppler radial velocity datasets and tracking 3D severe weather storms using fuzzy points realized as ellipsoids to represent storms and a fuzzy algebra machinery in a relaxation labeling framework to track storms in Doppler precipitation datasets.

We first extend the original 3D optical flow (both least squares and regularization methods) for recovering 3D wind velocity from …

Multi-Core Unit Propagation In Functional Languages, Jonathan Alexander Leaver

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Answer Set Programming is a declarative modeling paradigm enabling specialists in diverse disciplines to describe and solve complicated problems. Growth in high performance computing is driving ever smarter and more scalable parallel answer set solvers. To improve on today's cutting-edge, researchers need to develop increasingly intelligent methods for analysis of a solver's runtime information. Reflecting on the solver's search state typically pauses its progress until the analysis is complete. This work introduces methods from the domain of parallel functional programming and immutable type theory to construct a representation of the search state that is both amenable to introspection and efficiently …