Blockchain technology, with its unique decentralized and tamper-resistant features, is being utilized to address the issue of information silos in traditional electronic healthcare. However, as healthcare data sources become increasingly complex and numerous, the limited scalability and transaction throughput of traditional blockchains result in challenges such as slow processing efficiency and vulnerability to attacks in modern healthcare blockchain systems. To address these issues, we propose a Dynamic Security Resource Configuration scheme based on Medical Consortium Blockchain (MC-DSC). This scheme allows for dynamic blockchain configuration based on the varying urgency levels of data, enhancing data processing efficiency. It ensures the security of the data processing process through identity control and data encryption methods. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing blockchain configuration algorithms (SsHealth and Medge-Chain), the proposed scheme achieves approximately a 15% performance improvement by dynamically configuring the blockchain for three data types (secure, urgent, and normal). Additionally, the security module accounts for only 7% of the total time overhead, efficiently safeguarding the security of healthcare data while effectively handling data with different urgency levels.

By leveraging the strengths of virtual reality (VR) technologies, we have created a prototype reservoir model analysis VR tool aimed to advance reservoir analysis workflows beyond conventional methods by improving how one understands, analyzes, and interacts with reservoir model visualizations. We present and discuss the results of a usability study conducted with reservoir engineering experts to evaluate this tool and help determine in what ways virtual reality may offer an improved experience over conventional approaches when performing three common reservoir model analysis tasks: the spatial filtering of model cells using movable planes, the cross-comparison of multiple models, and well path planning. The study found that accomplishing these tasks with our VR tool was generally regarded as easier, quicker, more effective, and more intuitive than traditional model analysis software while maintaining a feeling of low task workload on average. Overall, participants provided positive feedback regarding their experience with using VR to perform reservoir engineering work tasks and found VR improved multi-model cross-analysis and rough object manipulation in 3D, indicating the potential for VR to be better than conventional means for some work tasks. They also expressed they could see it best utilized as an addition to current software to assist reservoir model analysis workflows, however, there were some concerns voiced that would be best addressed before VR was fully adopted into their work.

Abstract Applying standard software engineering practices to neural networks is challenging due to the lack of high-level abstractions describing a neural network’s behavior. To address this challenge, we propose to extract high-level task-specific features from the neural network internal representation, based on monitoring the neural network activations. The extracted feature representations can serve as a link to high-level requirements and can be leveraged to enable fundamental software engineering activities, such as automated testing, debugging, requirements analysis, and formal verification, leading to better engineering of neural networks. Using two case studies, we present initial empirical evidence demonstrating the feasibility of our ideas.

Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) algorithms are based on the component tree and are used to detect invariant regions. OpenCV MSER, the most popular MSER implementation, uses a linked list to associate pixels with ERs. The data-structure of an ER contains the attributes of a head and a tail linked node, which makes OpenCV MSER hard to be performed in parallel using existing parallel component tree strategies. Besides, pixel extraction (i.e. extracting the pixels in MSERs) in OpenCV MSER is very slow. In this paper, we propose two novel MSER algorithms, called Fast MSER V1 and V2. They first divide an image into several spatial partitions, then construct sub-trees and doubly linked lists (for V1) or a labelled image (for V2) on the partitions in parallel. A novel sub-tree merging algorithm is used in V1 to merge the sub-trees into the final tree, and the doubly linked lists are also merged in the process. While V2 merges the sub-trees using an existing merging algorithm. Finally, MSERs are recognized, the pixels in them are extracted through two novel pixel extraction methods taking advantage of the fact that a lot of pixels in parent and child MSERs are duplicated. Both V1 and V2 outperform three open source MSER algorithms (28 and 26 times faster than OpenCV MSER), and reduce the memory of the pixels in MSERs by 78%.