Improved spiral sense reconstruction using a multiscale wavelet model
SENSE has been widely accepted and extensively studied in the community of parallel MRI. Although many regularization approaches have been developed to address the ill-conditioning problem for Cartesian SENSE, fewer efforts have been made to address this problem when the sampling trajectory is non-Cartesian. For non-Cartesian SENSE using the iterative conjugate gradient method, ill- conditioning can degrade not only the signal-to-noise ratio, but also the convergence behavior. This paper proposes a regularization technique for non-Cartesian SENSE using a multiscale wavelet model. The technique models the desired image as a random field whose wavelet transform coefficients obey a generalized Gaussian distribution. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated by in vivo experiments.

title: REGULARIZED SENSE RECONSTRUCTION USING ITERATIVELY REFINED TOTAL VARIATION METHOD
abstract: SENSE has been widely accepted as one of the standard reconstruction algorithms for parallel MRI. When large acceleration factors are employed, the SENSE reconstruction becomes very ill-conditioned. For Cartesian SENSE, Tikhonov regularization has been commonly used. However, the Tikhonov regularized image usually tends to be overly smooth, and a high-quality regularization image is desirable to alleviate this problem but is not available. In this paper, we propose a new SENSE regularization technique that is based on total variation with iterated refinement using Bregman iteration. It penalizes highly oscillatory noise but allows sharp edges in reconstruction without the need for prior information. In addition, the Bregman iteration refines the image details iteratively. The method is shown to be able to significantly reduce the artifacts in SENSE reconstruction

title: Joint estimation of image and coil sensitivities in parallel MRI
abstract: Parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using multichannel receiver coils has emerged as an effective tool to reduce imaging time in various dynamic imaging applications. However, there are still a number of image reconstruction issues that have not been fully addressed, thereby limiting the level of speed enhancement achievable with the technology. This paper considers the inaccuracy of coil sensitivities in conventional reconstruction methods such as SENSE, and reformulates the image reconstruction problem as a joint estimation of the coil sensitivities and the desired image, which is solved by an iterative algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method especially when large acceleration factors are used

title: JOINT ESTIMATION OF IMAGE AND COIL SENSITIVITIES IN PARALLEL SPIRAL MRI
abstract: Spiral MRI has received increasing attention due to its reduced T 2*-decay and robustness against bulk physiologic motion. In parallel imaging, spiral trajectories are especially of great interest due to their inherent self-calibration capabilities, which is especially useful for dynamic imaging applications such as fMRI and cardiac imaging. The existing self-calibration techniques for spiral use the k-space center data that are sampled densely in the accelerated acquisition for coil sensitivity estimation. There exists a trade-off in choosing the radius of the center data: it must be sufficiently large to contain all major spatial frequencies of coil sensitivity, but not too large to cause significant aliasing artifacts due to undersampling below Nyquist rate as the trajectory moves away from the center k-space. To address this tradeoff, we generalize the JSENSE approach, which has demonstrated success in Cartesian case, to spiral trajectory. Specifically, the method jointly estimates the coil sensitivities and reconstructs the desired image through cross validations so that the sensitivities are estimated from the full data recovered by SENSE instead of the center k-space data only, thereby increasing high frequency information without introducing aliasing artifacts. We use experimental results to show the proposed method improves sensitivities, which leads to a more accurate SENSE reconstruction

title: Robust content-based image indexing using contextual clues and automatic pseudofeedback
abstract: In this paper we present a robust information integration approach to identifying images of persons in large collections such as the Web. The underlying system relies on combining content analysis, which involves face detection and recognition, with context analysis, which involves extraction of text or HTML features. Two aspects are explored to test the robustness of this approach: sensitivity of the retrieval performance to the context analysis parameters and automatic construction of a facial image database via automatic pseudofeedback. For the sensitivity testing, we reevaluate system performance while varying context analysis parameters. This is compared with a learning approach where association rules among textual feature values and image relevance are learned via the CN2 algorithm. A face database is constructed by clustering after an initial retrieval relying on face detection and context analysis alone. Experimental results indicate that the approach is robust for identifying and indexing person images.

title: An Intelligent Differential Evolution Algorithm for Designing Trading-Ratio System of Water Market
abstract: As a novel optimization technique, neural network based optimization has gained much attention and some applications during the past decade. To enhance the performance of Differential Evolution Algorithm (DEA), which is an evolutionary computation technique through individual improvement plus population cooperation and competition, an intelligent Differential Evolution Algorithm (IDEA) is proposed by incorporating neural network based search behaviors into classic DEA. Firstly, DEA operators are used for exploration by updating individuals so as to maintain the diversity of population and speedup the search process. Secondly, a multi-layer feed-forward neural network is employed for local exploitation to avoid being trapped in local optima and improve the convergence of the IDEA. Simulation results and comparisons based on well-known benchmarks and optimal designing of trading-ratio system for water market demonstrate that the IDEA can effectively enhance the searching efficiency and greatly improve the searching quality.

title: Rule interestingness analysis using OLAP operations
abstract: The problem of interestingness of discovered rules has been investigated by many researchers. The issue is that data mining algorithms often generate too many rules, which make it very hard for the user to find the interesting ones. Over the years many techniques have been proposed. However, few have made it to real-life applications. Since August 2004, we have been working on a major application for Motorola. The objective is to find causes of cellular phone call failures from a large amount of usage log data. Class association rules have been shown to be suitable for this type of diagnostic data mining application. We were also able to put several existing interestingness methods to the test, which revealed some major shortcomings. One of the main problems is that most existing methods treat rules individually. However, we discovered that users seldom regard a single rule to be interesting by itself. A rule is only interesting in the context of some other rules. Furthermore, in many cases, each individual rule may not be interesting, but a group of them together can represent an important piece of knowledge. This led us to discover a deficiency of the current rule mining paradigm. Using non-zero minimum support and non-zero minimum confidence eliminates a large amount of context information, which makes rule analysis difficult. This paper proposes a novel approach to deal with all of these issues, which casts rule analysis as OLAP operations and general impression mining. This approach enables the user to explore the knowledge space to find useful knowledge easily and systematically. It also provides a natural framework for visualization. As an evidence of its effectiveness, our system, called Opportunity Map, based on these ideas has been deployed, and it is in daily use in Motorola for finding actionable knowledge from its engineering and other types of data sets.

title: Tight Bounds on the Estimation Distance Using Wavelet
abstract: Time series similarity search is of growing importance in many applications. Wavelet transforms are used as a dimensionality reduction technique to permit efficient similarity search over high-dimensional time series data. This paper proposes the tight upper and lower bounds on the estimation distance using wavelet transform, and we show that the traditional distance estimation is only part of our lower bound. According to the lower bound, we can exclude more dissimilar time series than traditional method. And according to the upper bound, we can directly judge whether two time series are similar, and further reduce the number of time series to process in original time domain. The experiments have shown that using the upper and lower tight bounds can significantly improve filter efficiency and reduce running time than traditional method.

title: Dealing with different distributions in learning from
abstract: In the problem of learning with positive and unlabeled examples, existing research all assumes that positive examples P and the hidden positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experimental results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.