Engineering Commons^™

Opensourcepacs: An Extensible Infrastructure For Medical Image Management, John David N. Dionisio, Alex A T Bui, Craig Morioka, David B. Johnson, Usha Sinha, Siamak Ardekani, Ricky K. Taira, Denise R. Aberle, Suzie El-Saden, Hooshang Kangarloo

Computer Science Faculty Works

The development of comprehensive picture archive and communication systems (PACS) has mainly been limited to proprietary developments by vendors, though a number of freely available software projects have addressed specific image management tasks. The openSourcePACS project aims to provide an open source, common foundation upon which not only can a basic PACS be readily implemented, but to also support the evolution of new PACS functionality through the development of novel imaging applications and services. openSourcePACS consists of four main software modules: 1) image order entry, which enables the ordering and tracking of structured image requisitions; 2) an agent-based image server …

On Optimal Survivability Design In Wdm Optical Networks Under Scheduled Traffic Models, Tianjian Li

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are widely viewed as the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone with the potential to fulfill the ever-growing demands for bandwidth. WDM divides the enormous bandwidth of an optical fiber into many non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which may operate at the rate of 10 Gigabit per second or higher. A failure in a network such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous loss of data. Therefore, survivability is a very important issue in WDM optical networks. The objective of this dissertation is to address the survivability provisioning problem in WDM …

Role-Based Access Control For The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access And Integration (Ogsa-Dai), Anil L. Pereira

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Grid has emerged recently as an integration infrastructure for the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. In this dissertation, role-based access control (RBAC) systems for heterogeneous data resources in Data Grid systems are proposed. The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) is a widely used framework for the integration of heterogeneous data resources in Grid systems.

However, in the OGSA-DAI system, access control causes substantial administration overhead for resource providers in …

Data Mining And Analysis On Multiple Time Series Object Data, Chunyu Jiang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Huge amount of data is available in our society and the need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge is urgent. Data mining is an important field addressing that need and significant progress has been achieved in the last decade. In several important application areas, data arises in the format of Multiple Time Series Object (MTSO) data, where each data object is an array of time series over a large set of features and each has an associated class or state. Very little research has been conducted towards this kind of data. Examples include computational toxicology, where each …

Xml Integrated Environment For Service-Oriented Data Management, Marwan Younes Maarouf

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of XML as a family of related standards including a markup language (XML), formatting semantics (XSL style sheets), a linking syntax (XLINK), and appropriate data schema standards have emerged as a de facto standard for encoding and sharing data between various applications. XML is designed to be simple, easily parsed and self-describing. XML is based on and support the idea of separation of concerns: information content is separated from information rendering, and relationships between data elements are provided via simple nesting and references. As the XML content grows, the ability to handle schemaless XML documents becomes more critical …

High Performance Text Document Clustering, Yanjun Li

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Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in database (KDD), is the process to discover interesting unknown knowledge from a large amount of data. Text mining is to apply data mining techniques to extract interesting and nontrivial information and knowledge from unstructured text. Text clustering is one of important techniques of text mining, which is the unsupervised classification of similar documents into different groups.

This research focuses on improving the performance of text clustering. We investigated the text clustering algorithms in four aspects: document representation, documents closeness measurement, high dimension reduction and parallelization. We propose a group of high performance …

An Analysis Of Neutral Drift's Effect On The Evolution Of A Ctrnn Locomotion Controller With Noisy Fitness Evaluation, Gregory Robert Kramer

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This dissertation focuses on the evolution of Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as controllers for control systems. Existing research suggests that the process of neutral drift can greatly benefit evolution for problems whose fitness landscapes contain large-scale neutral networks. CTRNNs are known to be highly degenerate, providing a possible source of large-scale landscape neutrality, and existing research suggests that neutral drift benefits the evolution of simple CTRNNs. However, there has been no in-depth examination of the effects of neutral drift on complex CTRNN controllers, especially in the presence of noisy fitness evaluation. To address this problem, this dissertation presents …

Computational Methods For The Objective Review Of Forensic Dna Testing Results, Jason R. Gilder

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Since the advent of criminal investigations, investigators have sought a "gold standard" for the evaluation of forensic evidence. Currently, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology is the most reliable method of identification. Short Tandem Repeat (STR) DNA genotyping has the potential for impressive match statistics, but the methodology not infallible. The condition of an evidentiary sample and potential issues with the handling and testing of a sample can lead to significant issues with the interpretation of DNA testing results. Forensic DNA interpretation standards are determined by laboratory validation studies that often involve small sample sizes. This dissertation presents novel methodologies to address …

Summaritive Digest For Large Document Repositories With Application To E-Rulemaking, Lijun Chen

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Large document repositories need to be organized and summarized to make them more accessible and understandable. Such needs exist in many applications, including web search, e-rulemaking (electronic rulemaking) and document archiving. Even though much has been done in the areas of document clustering and summarization, there are still many new challenges and issues that need to be addressed as the repositories become larger, more prevalent and dynamic. In this dissertation, we investigate more informative ways to organize and summarize large document repositories, especially e-rulemaking feedback repositories (ERFRs), so that the large repositories can be managed and digested more efficiently and …

Comparative Microarray Data Mining, Shihong Mao

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As a revolutionary technology, microarrays have great potential to provide genome-wide patterns of gene expression, to make accurate medical diagnosis, and to explore genetic causes underlying diseases. It is commonly believed that suitable analysis of microarray datasets can lead to achieve the above goals. While much has been done in microarray data mining, few previous studies, if any, focused on multiple datasets at the comparative level. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by developing tools and methods for set-based comparative microarray data mining. Specifically, we mine highly differentiative gene groups (HDGGs) from given datasets/classes, evaluate the concordance of datasets …

A Hybrid Approach To Retrieving Web Documents And Semantic Web Data, Trivikram Immaneni

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The Semantic Web has been evolving into a property-linked web of RDF data, conceptually divorced from (but physically housed in) the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents. Data Retrieval techniques are typically used to retrieve data from the Semantic Web while Information Retrieval techniques are used to retrieve documents from the Hypertext Web. Conceptually unifying the two webs enables the exploitation of their interconnections resulting in benefits to both data and document retrieval. Towards this end, we present the Unified Web model that integrates the two webs and formalizes the structure and the semantics of their interconnections. We present a …

Distributed Resource Participation In Local Balancing Energy Markets, Judith Cardell

Engineering: Faculty Publications

In response to the new and potentially conflicting economic and technical demands of independent, distributed resources, the power system requires a new means for coordinating system and market operations. Price signals are one mechanism available to coordinate the operation of a power system in the emerging competitive markets. This paper discusses the integration of distributed resources into the operations of the power system by means of organizing the resources into microgrids and allowing them to participate in local electricity markets through responding to price signals. The simulations of price signals proposed in this paper successively expand upon the current open …

Demonstration Of Magnetoelectric Scanning Probe Microscopy, Jason R. Hattrick-Simpers, Liyang Dai, Manfred Wuttig, Ichiro Takeuchi, Eckhard Quandt

Faculty Publications

A near-field room temperature scanning magnetic probe microscope has been developed using a laminated magnetoelectric sensor. The simple trilayer longitudinal-transverse mode sensor, fabricated using Metglas as the magnetostrictive layer and polyvinylidene fluoride as the piezoelectric layer, shows an ac field sensitivity of 467±3μV∕O_e in the measured frequency range of 200Hz–8kHz. The microscope was used to image a 2mm diameter ring carrying an ac current as low as 10⁻⁵A. ac fields as small as 3×10⁻¹⁰T have been detected.

Rapid Structural Mapping Of Ternary Metallic Alloy Systems Using The Combinatorial Approach And Cluster Analysis, C. J. Long, Jason R. Hattrick-Simpers, M. Murakami, R. C. Srivastava, I. Takeuchi, V. L. Karen, X. Li

Faculty Publications

We are developing a procedure for the quick identification of structural phases in thin film composition spread experiments which map large fractions of compositional phase diagrams of ternary metallic alloy systems. An in-house scanning x-ray microdiffractometer is used to obtain x-ray spectra from 273 different compositions on a single composition spread library. A cluster analysissoftware is then used to sort the spectra into groups in order to rapidly discover the distribution of phases on the ternary diagram. The most representative pattern of each group is then compared to a database of known structures to identify known phases. Using this method, …

Multi-Phase Flow Analysis In Oil And Gas Engineering Systems And Its Modelling, Orlando F. Ayala, Luis F. Ayala, Orlando M. Ayala

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Two-phase flow is very common in industrial processes and its applications were already in use in ages as remote as the era of Archimedes. At the present time, many industrial processes rely on multi-phase phenomena for the transport of energy and mass or for material processing. During the last century, the nuclear, chemical and petroleum industries propelled intense research activity in the area. Their efforts have been aimed at the demystification of the mechanisms taking place during this complex flow situation.

Iterated Weaker-Than-Weak Dominance, Shih-Fen Cheng, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce a weakening of standard gametheoretic δ-dominance conditions, called dominance, which enables more aggressive pruning of candidate strategies at the cost of solution accuracy. Equilibria of a game obtained by eliminating a δ-dominated strategy are guaranteed to be approximate equilibria of the original game, with degree of approximation bounded by the dominance parameter. We can apply elimination of δ-dominated strategies iteratively, but the for which a strategy may be eliminated depends on prior eliminations. We discuss implications of this order independence, and propose greedy heuristics for determining a sequence of eliminations to reduce the game as far as possible …

Modeling Redox-Based Magnetohydrodynamics In Three-Dimensional Microfluidic Channels, Hussameddine S. Kabbani, Aihua Wang, Xiaobing Luo, Shizhi Qian

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research

RedOx-based magnetohydrodynamic MHD[1] flows in three-dimensional microfluidic channels are investigated theoretically with a coupled mathematical model consisting of the Nernst-Planck equations for the concentrations of ionic species, the local electroneutrality condition for the electric potential, and the Navier-Stokes equations for the flow field. A potential difference is externally applied across two planar electrodes positioned along the opposing walls of a microchannel that is filled with a dilute RedOx electrolyte solution, and a Faradaic current transmitted through the solution results. The entire device is positioned under a magnetic field which can be provided by either a permanent magnet or an electromagnet. …

Decoupling And Disturbance Rejection Control For Target Circulation, Jian Ma, Joon S. Lee, Woosoon Yim

Reactor Campaign (TRP)

In 1998, the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (IPPE) and Experimental and Development Organization “Gidropress” in Russia, began the design and construction of a prototype lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) accelerator target, the Target Complex 1 (TC-1), under the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) project #559 (“Pilot Flow Lead-Bismuth Target of 1 MW Power for Accelerator Driven Systems”) in support of the international efforts to develop accelerator-driven spallation systems for nuclear transmutation and other applications.

During the thermal and engineering test of the TC-1 in 2005 at UNLV, it was observed that the existing control algorithm led to a very …

Modeling And Design Algorithms For Electromagnetic Pumps, Daniel P. Cook

Reactor Campaign (TRP)

Electromagnetic (EM) induction pumps are used in a number of nuclear energy related applications, such as circulation of molten lead-bismuth eutectic alloys in neutron targets, and circulation of liquid sodium metal in Gen IV Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors (SFR). Because EM pumps have no moving parts which can fail, they are considerably more reliable than conventional mechanical pumps for molten metal usage, and thus EM pumps are favored over mechanical pumps even though their pumping efficiency is lower and their initial cost is higher when compared to mechanical pumps of similar flow rates.

The research objectives of this task are:

• A …

Thermal Transient Flow Rate Sensor For High Temperature Liquid Metal Cooled Nuclear Reactor, Yingtao Jiang

Reactor Campaign (TRP)

In nuclear power plants and accelerator driven system (ADS) for nuclear waste treatment, it is important to monitor the coolant flow rate in the reactor core and pipe-line. In such a strong irradiation, high pressure and temperature environment, no accurate local flow measurement technique is readily available. Electromagnetic (EM) flow meter is popular in low temperature application as it is a non-intrusive technology. However, additional voltage will be produced due to temperature, flow, pressure, the chemical properties of the liquid metal and surface condition of the steel walls. In addition, the non-definite wetting behavior of liquid lead-bismuth to the electrically …

University Of Nevada, Las Vegas Transmutation Research Program Annual Report Academic Year 2006-2007, Anthony Hechanova, Rebecca Arbour

Transmutation Research Program Reports (TRP)

It is my pleasure to present the UNLV Transmutation Research Program’s sixth annual report that highlights the academic year 2006-2007. Supporting this document are the many technical reports and theses that have been generated over the past five years.

In the sixth year of our program, we continued to see growth in the Radiochemistry Ph.D. program with a total of 13 students in the third year of the program (we anticipated eight in the program proposal). Since our inception, the program has sponsored to their conclusion 42 M.S. and 4 Ph.D. degrees. The program supported 39 graduate students, 17 undergraduates, …

Combined Radiation Detection Methods For Assay Of Higher Actinides In Separation Processes, Denis Beller, Warnick Kernan

Safeguards Campaign (TRP)

The ultimate objective of this project is to develop technology to detect and accurately measure quantities of higher actinides in processing systems without taking frequent samples. These systems include used fuel receipt, separations batches, and pipelines. A variety of measurements may be combined to calculate flow rates of actinide elements with a to-be-determined precision. Nuclear and decay characteristics of materials during processing will be acquired, conceptual designs of monitoring systems will be developed, radiation transport studies will be conducted to develop an understanding of operational regimes, and experiments will be performed to confirm performance. Radiation transport and scoping studies will …

Use Of Positron Annihilation Spectroscopy For Stress-Strain Measurements, Ajit K. Roy

Transmutation Sciences Materials (TRP)

During the past academic year, this project was focused on the characterization of residual stress in welded specimens consisting of austenitic and martensitic stainless steels using an activation technique based on the Positron Annihilation Spectroscopic (PAS) method. The extent of residual stress was expressed in terms of three line-shape parameters (S-, W- and T-). Further, efforts were made to characterize linear lattice defects such as dislocations in the vicinity of Fusion-Line (FL), Heat-Affected- Zone (HAZ), and the base material of the welded specimens using Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The metallurgical microstructures at these three regions have also been evaluated by …

Fundamental And Applied Experimental Investigations Of Corrosion Of Steel By Lbe Under Controlled Conditions: Kinetics, Chemistry Morphology, And Surface Preparation, John Farley, Allen L. Johnson, Dale L. Perry

Transmutation Sciences Materials (TRP)

Advanced nuclear processes and facilities (e.g., transmutation of nuclear waste, fast reactors, and spallation neutron sources) impose special demands on materials, which must withstand high temperatures, high radiation fields, and chemical corrosion. Proposed schemes for transmuting nuclear waste require a nonmoderating coolant such as lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE). While LBE corrodes most steels, small amounts of oxygen in the LBE greatly reduces the corrosion rate, and could ideally re-grow a damaged oxide layer in-situ. The protective oxide layer would thus be self-healing. However, the fundamental understanding of the role of oxygen and passivating oxide layers is presently incomplete.

During the present …

Effect Of Silicon Content On The Corrosion Resistance And Radiation- Induced Embrittlement Of Materials For Advanced Heavy Liquid Metal Nuclear Systems, Ajit K. Roy

Transmutation Sciences Materials (TRP)

This task is focused on the evaluation of the effects of silicon content on both the corrosion behavior and radiation-induced embrittlement of martensitic stainless steels having compositions similar to that of modified 9Cr-1Mo steel, also known as T91 grade steel. T91 grade steel was selected to be a candidate structural material to contain molten lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE), which can act both as a target material and a coolant during the spallation process. The operating temperature during this process may range from 420-550 °C. Thus, moderate tensile strength of the containment material (T91) is a major requirement.

The beneficial effects of …

Theoretical Modeling Of Protective Oxide Layer Growth In Non-Isothermal Lead Alloy Coolant Systems, Yitung Chen, Jinsuo Zhang, Jichun Li

Transmutation Sciences Materials (TRP)

The goal of the proposed research project is to provide basic understanding of the protective oxide layer behaviors and to develop oxide layer growth models of steels in non-isothermal lead-alloys (lead or lead-bismuth eutectic) coolant systems. Precise studies and simulations of all hydrodynamics with thermal conditions encountered in practical coolant loop systems by use of different flowing conditions in the laboratory are difficult and expensive, if not impossible. Therefore it is important and necessary to develop theoretical models to predict the protective oxide layer behaviors at the design stage of a practical lead-alloy coolant system, to properly interpret and apply …

Development Of Nanostructure Based Corrosion-Barrier Coatings On Steel For Transmutation Applications, Biswajit Das

Transmutation Sciences Materials (TRP)

Advanced transmutation systems require structural materials that are able to withstand high neutron fluxes, high thermal cycling, and high resistance to chemical corrosion. The current candidate materials for such structures are ferritic and ferritic-martensitic steels due to their strong resistance to swelling, good microstructural stability under irradiation, and the retention of adequate ductility at typical reactor operating temperatures.

In parallel, lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) has emerged as a potential spallation target material for efficient production of neutrons, as well as a coolant in the accelerator system. While LBE has excellent properties as a nuclear coolant, it is also highly corrosive to …

Development Of Integrated Process Simulation System Model For Spent Fuel Treatment Facility (Sftf) Design, Yitung Chen, Sean Hsieh

Separations Campaign (TRP)

The major objectives will lead to a creation of framework that combines all the strengths of AMUSE’s complicated calculations, well-established commercial system process package and ISOPro’s flexible parameter optimization modules. Development of the process simulation code can be done using the solvent extraction process at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with the research team from Mechanical Engineering Department at UNLV.

Research accomplishments:

• Integrated the ASPEN-Plus process model with the ISOPro system engineering modeling package, developed by the UNLV team.
• Tested the simplified system process integration using the ISOPro package.
• Generated complete version of the ISOPro package user manual and tutorial. …

Separation Of Technetium From Uranium And Waste Form Synthesis, Kenneth Czerwinski

Waste Forms Campaign (TRP)

In this project, systematic investigations on the Tc-Zr binary metal system will be evaluated for the first time. The synthesis of metallic Tc as well as its alloys with Zr will be evaluated. In order to provide valuable data to AFC R&D, the thermodynamic equilibrium phases, as well as their performance under repository conditions, will be examined.

Evaluation Of Cs/Sr Waste Form For Long Term Storage And Disposal, Gary Cerefice, Longzhou Ma

Waste Forms Campaign (TRP)

The goal of this project is to examine two potential concerns regarding the long-term performance of a proposed cesium/ strontium waste form. To facilitate long-term storage, up to 300 years, the disposal containers will need to be able to survive for the entire storage interval. The first aspect of the project will explore the potential interaction of the aluminosilicate waste form with the storage canister materials to determine if there is any corrosion or chemical interaction concerns for the storage of the materials.

At the end of the storage interval, most of the 137Cs in the waste form will have …