Sharif Digital Repository

Computed tomography (CT) simulators are versatile tools for scanning protocol evaluation, optimization of geometrical design parameters, assessment of image reconstruction algorithms, and evaluation of the impact of future innovations attempting to improve the performance of CT scanners. Computational human phantoms (CHPs) play a key role in simulators for the radiation dosimetry and assessment of image quality tasks in the medical x-ray systems. Since the construction of patient-specific CHPs can be both difficult and time-consuming, nominal standard/reference CHPs have been established, yielding significant discrepancies in the special design and optimization demands of patient dose and... 

Detecting emotions directly from a speech signal plays an important role in effective human-computer interactions. Existing speech emotion recognition models require massive computational and storage resources, making them hard to implement concurrently with other machine-interactive tasks in embedded systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight fully convolutional neural network for speech emotion recognition in systems with limited hardware resources. In the proposed FCNN model, various feature maps are extracted via three parallel paths with different filter sizes. This helps deep convolution blocks to extract high-level features, while ensuring sufficient separability.... 

Hydro collapsible soils are of kinds of problematic soils which show high shear strength at low degrees of saturation but due to wetting, their Meta stable structure collapses and will be subjected to large deformation. In this study by applying isotropic triaxial loadings to undisturbed samples, mechanical behavior of a highly collapsible loessial soil has been assessed. During tests, matric suction of the samples was controlled as well as the mean net stress, and the variation of the degree of saturation was monitored continuously. Two types of stress paths were conducted on the samples namely "Isotropic induced collapse" under applying constant matric suctions and "wetting induced... 

It is well understood that patients with different diseases may have a variety of specific proteins (e.g., type, amount, and configuration) in their plasmas. When nanoparticles (NPs) are exposed to these plasmas, the resulting coronas may incorporate some of the disease-specific proteins. Using gold (Au) NPs with different surface properties and corona composition, we have developed a technology for the discrimination and detection of two neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and multiple sclerosis (MS). Applying a variety of techniques, including UV-visible spectra, colorimetric response analyses and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, we found the corona-NP... 

Our purpose was to determine whether perfusion MR imaging can be used for malignancy determination of tumors. Relative cerebral blood flow (rCBF) is a commonly used perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique for the evaluation of malignancy. The goal of our study was to determine the usefulness of this parameter in malignancy determination of tumors using Independent Component Analysis (ICA)  

The placement of the Last Level Cache (LLC) banks in the GPU on-chip network can significantly affect the performance of memory-intensive workloads. In this paper, we attempt to offer a placement methodology for the LLC banks to maximize the performance of the on-chip network connecting the LLC banks to the streaming multiprocessors in GPUs. We argue that an efficient placement needs to be derived based on a novel metric that considers the latency hiding capability of the GPUs through thread level parallelism. To this end, we propose a throughput aware metric, called Effective Latency Impact (ELI). Moreover, we define an optimization problem to formulate our placement approach based on the... 

We report follow-up observations of 477 program Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) using nine telescopes of the EURONEAR network having apertures between 0.3 and 4.2 m. Adding these NEAs to our previous results we now count 739 program NEAs followed-up by the EURONEAR network since 2006. The targets were selected using EURONEAR planning tools focusing on high priority objects. Analyzing the resulting orbital improvements suggests astrometric follow-up is most important days to weeks after discovery, with recovery at a new opposition also valuable. Additionally we observed 40 survey fields spanning three nights covering 11 square degrees near opposition, using the Wide Field Camera on the 2.5 m...