Abstract
Purpose: The subjective evaluation of aesthetic results in conservative breast cancer treatment has largely been used without questioning the observer's skills. The aim of this study was to evaluate interobserver agreement of the aesthetic results of breast cancer conservative treatment in three groups of observers with different levels of experience. Methods and Materials: Photographs were taken of 55 women who had undergone conservative unilateral breast cancer treatment and 5 control women with no breast disease. The images were then distributed to 13 observers who were divided into three groups according to their experience in breast cancer treatment: experienced, medium experienced, and inexperienced. They were first asked to distinguish the patients from the controls and for the patients to identify the operated side. Subsequently, they were asked to classify the aesthetic result as excellent, good, fair, or poor. The accuracy in identifying controls, patients, and side of treatment was calculated individually for all observers. The interobserver agreement for the aesthetic result was calculated using observed agreement and multiple K statistic (K) in each of the three groups. Results: Inexperienced observers performed significantly worse than experienced observers in identifying controls, patients, and the side of treatment. Agreement of the aesthetic result was significantly greater in the group of experienced observers (kappa = 0.59) than in the medium experienced (kappa = 0.35) and inexperienced (kappa= 0.33) observers. Conclusion: Previous experience in breast cancer conservative treatment should be considered a prerequisite for the evaluation of the aesthetic results. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc.

Abstract
The implementation of fast dedicated processor for block matching motion estimation based on cumulants matching criteria implies the optimization of all of its components. Special care should be spent with the multiply-accumulate unit that is the core of many digital signal processing systems. Therefore, its optimization may be of outmost importance, specially if a significative number of such units are present in the platform. In this paper, the minimization of the size of one such unit is provided for a specific application, although the results have relevance in other scenarios.

Abstract
Image segmentation plays a major role in a broad range of applications. Evaluating the adequacy of a segmentation algorithm for a given application is a requisite both to allow the appropriate selection of segmentation algorithms as well as to tune their parameters for optimal performance. However, objective segmentation quality evaluation is far from being a solved problem. In this paper, a generic framework for segmentation evaluation is introduced after a brief review of previous work. A metric based on the distance between segmentation partitions is proposed to overcome some of the limitations of existing approaches. Symmetric and asymmetric distance metric alternatives are presented to meet the specificities of a wide class of applications. Experimental results confirm the potential of the proposed measures.

Abstract

Abstract
We propose a schedulability analysis for a particular class of time division multiple access (TDAM) networks, which we label as TDAM/SS. SS stands for slot skipping, reflecting the fact that a slot is skipped whenever it is not used Hence, the next slot can start earlier in benefit of hard real-time traffic. In the proposed schedulability analysis, we assume knowledge of all message streams in the system, and that each node schedules messages in its output queue according to a rate monotonic policy (as an example). We present the analysis in two steps. Firstly, we address the case where a node is only permitted to transmit a maximum of one message per TDMA cycle. Secondly we generalise the analysis to the case where a node is assigned a budget of messages per TDMA cycle it may transmit. A simple algorithm to assign budgets to nodes is also presented.

Abstract
Computational methods have been used with great application to biomedical optics. The events created by the interaction of radiation with biological materials can easily be translated to computer languages with the objective of producing simulation techniques to be used prior to physical intervention. The addition of biocompatible and hyper osmotic agents to several types of biological tissues has proven the enhancement of transparency to radiation flux by reduction of material's optical properties. The evolutionary behavior of the agent's action in the tissue samples before saturation has been observed by numerous researchers but has never been described mathematically. In the present work we will describe the application of Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the evolutionary states of optical transparency of biological tissues when immersed in an osmotic solution. We begin our study with typical values for the optical properties of rabbit muscle and proceed by reducing the absorption and scattering coefficients independently and simultaneously. The results show the number of transmitted, absorbed, scattered and reflected photons in different stages of the action of a generic osmotic agent over a small and well defined tissue sample.