A topology preserving skeleton is a synthetic representation of an object that retains its topology and many of its significant morphological properties. The process of obtaining the skeleton, referred to as skeletonization or thinning, is a very active research area. It plays a central role in reducing the amount of information to be processed during image analysis and visualization, computer-aided diagnosis, or by pattern recognition algorithms. This paper introduces a novel topology preserving thinning algorithm, which removes simple cells-a generalization of simple points-of a given cell complex. The test for simple cells is based on acyclicity tables automatically produced in advance with homology computations. Using acyclicity tables render the implementation of thinning algorithms straightforward. Moreover, the fact that tables are automatically filled for all possible configurations allows to rigorously prove the generality of the algorithm and to obtain fool-proof implementations. The novel approach enables, for the first time, according to our knowledge, to thin a general unstructured simplicial complex. Acyclicity tables for cubical and simplicial complexes and an open source implementation of the thinning algorithm are provided as an additional material to allow their immediate use in the vast number of applications arising in medical imaging and beyond.

Solving lossy multiconductor transmission line (MTL) equations is of fundamental importance for the design and signal integrity verification of interconnections in VLSI systems. It is well established that the critical issue is the efficient and accurate electrical characterization of the MTLs through the determination of their per-unit-length parameters. In this respect, the so-called complementarity has the potential to become a fast and accurate method for the extraction of these parameters. Besides the value of the parameters, in fact, complementarity provides rigorous error bounds for them. Despite this important feature, commercial software do not use complementarity yet, due to the fact that there are unsolved theoretical issues related to the nonstandard formulation based on the electric vector potential. Some attempts to fill this gap have been already reported. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by introducing a general formulation based on the electric vector potential highlighting the advantages of complementarity with respect to the standard first- and second-order finite element formulations.