I have been to the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference 2007 held in San Diego, California to give a presentation about breast lesion classification, and extended it with a pleasure trip around California with a couple of friends.
Yesterday, I received an email from Marko van Eekelen, president of the AIA Awards jury that I won the AIA Masters Award of the academic year 05/06 for my Master Thesis! I’m very honored, and this award mades me even more proud of my work. At December 15th there will be an official ceremony where I present a part of my thesis.
Some sources that published the press release:
Radboud University newsitem (dutch)
Press Center (dutch)
Breast cancer is the most common life-threatening type of cancer affecting women in The Netherlands. The success of the treatment of breast cancer largely depends on the stage of a tumor at the time of detection. Therefore, early detection of breast cancer is essential. Although mammography screening is currently the most effective tool for early detection of breast cancer, up to one-fifth of women with invasive breast cancer have a mammogram that is interpreted as normal, i.e., a false-negative mammogram result. To overcome such limitations, Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems for automatic classification of breast lesions as either benign or malignant are being developed. CAD systems help radiologists with the interpretation of lesions, such that they refer less women for further examination when they actually have benign lesions. In this thesis we constructed several types of classifiers, i.e., Bayesian networks and support vector machines, for the task of computer-aided diagnosis of breast lesions.
Classification of Breast Lesions in Digital Mammograms, Master Thesis (1.3 MB PDF)
I spent three weeks visiting the United Arabic Emirates and Oman with a good friend from 20 May to 10 June 2006 arriving in Dubai and travelling to Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Umm al-Qaiwan and Abu Dhabi. The second half of our trip took us to the hottest capital of the world: Muscat, Oman. Here is the travel report from day to day, with links to the photos. And the full gallery is here.
Here a some photos of my 2 weeks vacation to Egypt with a good friend of mine. While having a great time, we also experienced some of the bad aspects of Egypt. We were walking at the back of the Egyptian museum, just 50 meters away from the bridge where a suicide bomber decided to blow himself up. We heard a small explosion and saw a big pile of smoke and thought a gas tank or something was exploded. The authorities stayed very calm when it happened and started to increase security and errected road blocks around the scene, to avoid panic under tourists. And if that was not enough missery, we saw a tremendous fire close to the famous al-Khalili tourist bazaars, burning down 120 shops. Witnessed a car accident, where a man crossed the road and got hit by a car, flying some meters through the air.We agreed that was enough sensation for one vacation and were glad to be back in The Netherlands again :)
Digital images have become an important source of information in the modern world of communication systems. Thinks about FBI fingerprints, MRI scans, ECG data, digital camera photos, building plans etc. In their raw form, these images require an enormous amount of memory. With the introduction of multimedia computing, the demand for processing, storing and transmitting images has increased exponentially. In the last two decades a considerable amount of research has been devoted to tackle the problem of image compression.
During the Research Lab 4 course, I wrote a paper about the similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of the two well known compression techniques: Fourier and Wavelets. JPEG, JPEG2000, DiVX and MPEG, all of them are based on one of these two techniques.
Research Paper (3.8 MB PDF) (5.5 MB PS)
Presentation (1.9MB PPT) (2.2MB PDF) (HTML)
Currently, hypercomputation is still very theoretical and there is still enough to discuss. Hypercomputation concerns the study of computation beyond that defined by the Turing machine. It is a multi-disciplinary research area across a wide variety of fields, including computer science, philosophy, physics, electronics, biology and artifical intelligence.
For a seminar to be given at the university, I’ve written with two fellow students a paper about the pre-hypercomputation history, explanation of hypercomputation and the philosphy of hypercomputation and artificial intelligence.
Paper (DUTCH) (518 KB PDF) (1.1 MB PS)
Presentation (ENGLISH) (1.6 MB PPT) (744 KB PDF)
During a marketing high tech products class I participated in a group project and did some observational research on self promoting television sets for Philips Consumer Electronics. Our goal was to deliver ideas to Philips Consumer Electronics for the promotion of televisions in television shops by observing people who are buying a new TV set.
Paper (142 KB PDF)