Abstract
Minimally invasive cardiovascular interventions guided by multiple imaging modalities are rapidly gaining clinical acceptance for the treatment of several cardiovascular diseases. These images are typically fused with richly detailed pre-operative scans through registration techniques, enhancing the intra-operative clinical data and easing the image-guided procedures. Nonetheless, rigid models have been used to align the different modalities, not taking into account the anatomical variations of the cardiac muscle throughout the cardiac cycle. In the current study, we present a novel strategy to compensate the beat-to-beat physiological adaptation of the myocardium. Hereto, we intend to prove that a complete myocardial motion field can be quickly recovered from the displacement field at the myocardial boundaries, therefore being an efficient strategy to locally deform the cardiac muscle. We address this hypothesis by comparing three different strategies to recover a dense myocardial motion field from a sparse one, namely, a diffusion-based approach, thin-plate splines, and multiquadric radial basis functions. Two experimental setups were used to validate the proposed strategy. First, an in silico validation was carried out on synthetic motion fields obtained from two realistic simulated ultrasound sequences. Then, 45 mid-ventricular 2D sequences of cine magnetic resonance imaging were processed to further evaluate the different approaches. The results showed that accurate boundary tracking combined with dense myocardial recovery via interpolation/diffusion is a potentially viable solution to speed up dense myocardial motion field estimation and, consequently, to deform/compensate the myocardial wall throughout the cardiac cycle. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
An estimated 214 million cases of malaria were detected in 2015, which caused approximately 438 000 deaths. Around 90% of those cases occurred in Africa, where the lack of access to malaria diagnosis is largely due to shortage of expertise and equipment. Thus, the importance to develop new tools that facilitate the rapid and easy diagnosis of malaria for areas with limited access to healthcare services cannot be overstated. This paper presents an image processing and analysis methodology using supervised classification to assess the presence of P. falciparum trophozoites and white blood cells in Giemsa stained thick blood smears. The main differential factor is the usage of microscopic images exclusively acquired with low cost and accessible tools such as smartphones, using a dataset of 194 images manually annotated by an experienced parasilogist. Using a SVM classifier and a total of 314 image features extracted for each candidate, the automatic detection of trophozoites detection achieved a sensitivity of 80.5% and a specificity of 93.8%, while the white blood cells achieved 98.2% of sensitivity and 72.1% specificity. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Abstract
Widespread adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) could bring social and economic benefits. The effort of promoting the use of EVs in transportation is indispensable to meet the climate change related targets and to reduce the dependency on the ever unstable prices of diminishing fossil fuels. However, there are still many uncertainties in the market regarding the acceptability of EVs by the final consumers. As a new contribution with respect to earlier studies, this paper assesses the impact of EV charging load on the dielectric oil deterioration of two real Power Distribution Transformers (PDTs), one residential and one industrial, located in the insular grid of Sao Miguel. A PDT thermal model is used to estimate the hot-spot temperature given the load ratio. Real data are used for the main inputs of the model, namely, the daily residential load curve, the daily private industrial client load curve, the PDT parameters, time-of-use rates and EV parameters.

Abstract
A new microstructured optical fiber is presented as a sensor of acetone evaporation. Sensing is performed by observing the time response of the reflected signal at 1550 nm when the device is dipped in acetone or a 50% acetone-50% water mixture. The sensor consists on a caterpillar-like microstructured fiber spliced to a single-mode fiber, where the spliced end of the sensor has a transversal microfluidic channel etched using focused ion beam. Upon heating, different behaviors are visible between the dipping and the evaporation of acetone. The sensor is able to track the evaporation of acetone and to distinguish between pure acetone and a 50% acetone-50% water mixture. The sensor is also able to detect when the acetone in a mixture with water is fully evaporated. The detection of water vapor with no particular orientation of the sensor is achieved due to the presence of the microfluidic channels. (c) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.