Sharif Digital Repository

The ideal simulator for Endoscopic Sinus and Skull Base Surgery (ESSS)training must be supported by a physical model and provide repetitive behavior in a controlled environment. Development of realistic tissue models is a key part of ESSS virtual reality (VR)-based surgical simulation. Considerable research has been conducted to address haptic or force feedback and propose a phenomenological tissue fracture model for sino-nasal tissue during surgical tool indentation. Mechanical properties of specific sino-nasal regions of the sheep head have been studied in various indentation and relaxation experiments. Tool insertion at different indentation rates into coronal orbital floor (COF)tissue is... 

Background: The development of endoscopic sinus surgery (ESS) training simulators for clinical environment applications has reduced the existing shortcomings in conventional teaching methods, creating a standard environment for trainers and trainees in a more accurate and repeatable fashion. Materials and methods: In this research, the validation study of an ESS training simulator has been addressed. It is important to consider components that guide trainees to improve their hand movements control in the orbital floor removal in an ESS operation. Therefore, we defined three tasks to perform: pre-experiment learning, training, and evaluation. In these tasks, the critical regions introduced in... 

Image-Adaptive watermarking systems exploit visual models to adapt the watermark to local properties of the host image. This leads to a watermark power enhancement, hence an improved resilience against different attacks, while keeping the mark imperceptible. Visual models consider different properties of the human visual system, such as frequency sensitivity, luminance sensitivity and contrast masking. Entropy masking is another human visual system's characteristic, which rarely has been addressed in visual models. In this paper we have utilized this masking effect to improve the robustness of Image-Adaptive watermarks while keeping their transparency. Experimental results show a significant... 

Viscous fingering (VF) at the interface of two immiscible fluids can have disruptive effects in many technological applications. Therefore finding methods for reducing it with an effective and simple approach plays a significant role. A proposed solution that restrains the expansion of such complex morphologies, is the time-dependent injection rate. This proposed solution is often done either analytically or by numerical simulations which need to be experimentally proven. In this study, we perform multiple experiments of low viscosity fluid injection into high viscosity fluid in order to study the formation of VF and find injection rates or protocols that reduce VF at the onset of the... 

Blood cell segmentation is a crucial part of many medical and laboratory procedures such as cell counting and blood cell disorder diagnosis. Among different types of blood cells, white blood cells are the most important clinically, as they suffer greatest from blood disorders. In this paper we propose a method for automatic segmentation of white blood cells nucleus. A distinctive function is used in YCbCr color space to segment the white blood cells nucleus. Next, the sub-images are extracted which contain the whole body of white blood cell nucleus. Then an active contour method is applied to the sub-images extracted from the previous step to accurately segment the cell nucleus boundary. Our... 

An algebraic closed-form solution for locating a moving target using a distributed multiple-input multiple-output radar system is proposed. The position and velocity of the target are estimated by presenting a two-stage weighted least squares algorithm. In contrast to existing research, the proposed estimator is shown analytically to be approximately unbiased and its variance is equal to the Cramer-Rao lower bound. Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical studies and demonstrate the superiority of this algorithm over the existing methods. © 1997-2012 IEEE  

In this paper, an adaptive channel estimation algorithm is proposed for the multi-user robust relay beamforming problem. We propose a norm-bounded channel uncertainty model for all of the channels. We employ the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) for joint estimation of channel coefficients and beamforming weights, and propose a Markov model for source-relay and relay-destination channels as well as the beamforming weights in the relays. The channel coefficients and bemforming weights are shown to be well-estimated in order to minimize the total relays power transmission subject to worst-case signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) criterion at each...