A Method for Improving Renogram Production and Detection of Renal Pelvis using Mathematical Morphology on Scintigraphic Images

Dynamic renal scintigraphy is a well-established imaging technique in nuclear medicine, used to detail both the organ's anatomy and function. However, the quality of the produced scintigrams provides an often unreliable diagnostic tool because of a rather bad signal-to-noise ratio and the fact that in certain occasions the regions of interest are too concentrated making it difficult for physician evaluation. The goal of this paper is to achieve a more accurate production of the renal activity graph, by avoiding the inclusion of image artifacts in the detection process. This is achieved by treating pixels as points in a two-dimensional Euclidean space, and exploiting set-theoretic properties and morphological operators. The evaluation of the method in a number of real patient’s scintigrams obtained in a depth of 5 years, showed that, in the majority of the cases, it is feasible to produce a more accurate renogram, for both kidneys and the renal pelvis region, that was helpful for the interpretation of the findings

An Extension to a UML Activity Graph from Workflow

This chapter proposes an extension to the activity graph of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to support the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) standard. The definition of a business process has been standardized by the WfMC with the purpose of satisfying the need of interaction and connectivity between process definition tools and different workflow systems. Here, the WfMC meta-model is explained. The UML activity diagrams, used for the business process modeling, support less detail than the WfMC standard. In this chapter, an extension of the UML’s activity graph meta-model is proposed, and its formalization using the workflow meta-model is defined. The purpose of this chapter is to obtain an extension of UML to support the workflow process definition without changing the standard with the same expressive power as the WfMC. It increments the expressive power of the activity diagrams so that the business processes modeled with the UML notation can be executed by a workflow engine.

Disruption Management With Rescheduling of Trips and Vehicle Circulations

This paper introduces a combined approach for the recovery of a timetable by rescheduling trips and vehicle circulations for a rail-based transportation system subject to disruptions. We propose a novel event-based integer programming (IP) model. Features include shifting and canceling of trips as well as modifying the vehicle schedules by changing or truncating the circulations. The objective maximizes the number of recovered trips, possibly with delay, while guaranteeing a conflict-free new timetable for the estimated time window of the disruption. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach through experiments for real-life test instances of relevant size, arising from the subway system of Vienna. We focus on scenarios in which one direction of one track is blocked, and trains have to be scheduled through this bottle-neck. Solving these instances is made possible by contracting parts of the underlying event-activity graph; this allows a significant size reduction of the IP. Usually, the solutions found within one minute are of good quality and can be used as good estimates of recovery plans in an online context.