Millimeter-wave bands are gaining popularity for high data rate wireless communication systems due to the wide available bandwidth. However, oscillator phase noise also increases as the carrier frequency increases. Methods of phase noise mitigation are therefore crucial for future millimeter-wave systems. In this work, we propose to adopt analog phase noise mitigation using an RF-pilot tone, which reduces both phase and frequency impairments of an arbitrary millimeter-wave signal at the expense of reduced spectral efficiency. The method is verified experimentally at carrier frequency of 28 GHz and E-band 73 GHz showing a 20 dB noise reduction up to 100 kHz offset. Since the method relaxes phase noise requirement it is attractive for phase noise sensitive technologies at high carrier frequency, such as OFDM used in LTE. As indicated by the simulation results, the reduced phase noise enables a LTE signal on a millimeter-wave carrier with marginal performance impact.

Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) is commonly used in clinical routine for diagnosing vascular diseases. The procedure involves the injection of a contrast agent into the blood stream to increase the contrast between the blood vessels and the surrounding tissue in the image data. CTA is often visualized with Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) where the enhanced image contrast is important for the construction of Transfer Functions (TFs). For increased efficiency, clinical routine heavily relies on preset TFs to simplify the creation of such visualizations for a physician. In practice, however, TF presets often do not yield optimal images due to variations in mixture concentration of contrast agent in the blood stream. In this paper we propose an automatic, optimization-based method that shifts TF presets to account for general deviations and local variations of the intensity of contrast enhanced blood vessels. Some of the advantages of this method are the following. It computationally automates large parts of a process that is currently performed manually. It performs the TF shift locally and can thus optimize larger portions of the image than is possible with manual interaction. The method is based on a well known vesselness descriptor in the definition of the optimization criterion. The performance of the method is illustrated by clinically relevant CT angiography datasets displaying both improved structural overviews of vessel trees and improved adaption to local variations of contrast concentration.

The use of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) in current and future mobile communications relies on accurate channel estimates. In OFDM based systems such as LTE (Long Term Evolution), the channel estimation can be successfully designed with processing in a transform domain, both for uplink and downlink. One such popular transform is to use the IDFT (Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform), window the channel estimate in the time domain and then use DFT to transform back to the frequency domain again. This channel estimate is distorted in the band edges leading to a biased channel estimate. One suggested solution to this problem is to use a DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) based channel estimator, such that this distortion is reduced. However, as discussed in the current paper, the DCT based channel estimate suffers more from cyclically shifted reference signals, as used for MIMO in LTE for uplink, than the DFT based channel estimator. In order to overcome band edge problems with the DFT based channel estimate, a method is proposed of de-biasing over-sampled DFT based channel estimate by using digital sinc functions. Simulation results indicate that the de-biased DFT based channel estimate is more robust against interference from cyclic shifted reference signals than DCT based channel estimates.

Medical imaging plays a central role in a vast range of healthcare practices. The usefulness of 3D visualizations has been demonstrated for many types of treatment planning. Nevertheless, full access to 3D renderings outside of the radiology department is still scarce even for many image-centric specialties. Our work stems from the hypothesis that this under-utilization is partly due to existing visualization systems not taking the prerequisites of this application domain fully into account. We have developed a medical visualization table intended to better fit the clinical reality. The overall design goals were two-fold: similarity to a real physical situation and a very low learning threshold. This paper describes the development of the visualization table with focus on key design decisions. The developed features include two novel interaction components for touch tables. A user study including five orthopedic surgeons demonstrates that the system is appropriate and useful for this application domain.

A new language, Feldspar, is presented, enabling high-level and platform-independent description of digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms. Feldspar is a pure functional language embedded in Haskell. It offers a high-level dataflow style of programming, as well as a more mathematical style based on vector indices. The key to generating efficient code from such descriptions is a high-level optimization technique called vector fusion. Feldspar is based on a low-level, functional core language which has a relatively small semantic gap to machine-oriented languages like C. The core language serves as the interface to the back-end code generator, which produces C. For very small examples, the generated code performs comparably to hand-written C code when run on a DSP target. While initial results are promising, to achieve good performance on larger examples, issues related to memory access patterns and array copying will have to be addressed.

In many applications of Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) the importance of a certain material or feature is highly dependent on its relative spatial location. For instance, in the medical diagnostic procedure, the patient's symptoms often lead to specification of features, tissues and organs of particular interest. One such example is pockets of gas which, if found inside the body at abnormal locations, are a crucial part of a diagnostic visualization. This paper presents an approach that enhances DVR transfer function design with spatial localization based on user specified material dependencies. Semantic expressions are used to define conditions based on relations between different materials, such as only render iodine uptake when close to liver. The underlying methods rely on estimations of material distributions which are acquired by weighing local neighborhoods of the data against approximations of material likelihood functions. This information is encoded and used to influence rendering according to the user's specifications. The result is improved focus on important features by allowing the user to suppress spatially less-important data. In line with requirements from actual clinical DVR practice, the methods do not require explicit material segmentation that would be impossible or prohibitively time-consuming to achieve in most real cases. The scheme scales well to higher dimensions which accounts for multi-dimensional transfer functions and multivariate data. Dual-Energy Computed Tomography, an important new modality in radiology, is used to demonstrate this scalability. In several examples we show significantly improved focus on clinically important aspects in the rendered images.

Direct Volume Rendering has proved to be an effective visualization method for medical data sets and has reached wide-spread clinical use. The diagnostic exploration, in essence, corresponds to a tissue classification task, which is often complex and time-consuming. Moreover, a major problem is the lack of information on the uncertainty of the classification, which can have dramatic consequences for the diagnosis. In this paper this problem is addressed by proposing animation methods to convey uncertainty in the rendering. The foundation is a probabilistic Transfer Function model which allows for direct user interaction with the classification. The rendering is animated by sampling the probability domain over time, which results in varying appearance for uncertain regions. A particularly promising application of this technique is a "sensitivity lens" applied to focus regions in the data set. The methods have been evaluated by radiologists in a study simulating the clinical task of stenosis assessment, in which the animation technique is shown to outperform traditional rendering in terms of assessment accuracy.

This paper presents an extension for adaptive transmission of a multi-user scheduling algorithm to a cellular environment. In an effort to manage inter-cell interference, scheduling between neighboring base stations is coordinated. To this end, the amount of buffered data at each base station is exchanged within a small group of base stations. More precisely, the sectors that illuminate each cell form inter-sector scheduling groups. We divide the scheduling into two separate operations, inter and intrasector scheduling, that are performed separately. From a comparison against a scheme with a static frequency reuse of three we observe a 20-50% reduction in average packet delays, depending on the traffic model used.

The high complexity of Transfer Function (TF) design is a major obstacle to widespread routine use of Direct Volume Rendering, particularly in the case of medical imaging. Both manual and automatic TF design schemes would benefit greatly from a fast and simple method for detection of tissue value ranges. To this end, we introduce the a-histogram, an enhancement that amplifies ranges corresponding to spatially coherent materials. The properties of the a-histogram have been explored for synthetic data sets and then successfully used to detect vessels in 20 Magnetic Resonance angiographies, proving the potential of this approach as a fast and simple technique for histogram enhancement in general and for TF construction in particular.

This paper presents a procedure for virtual autopsies based on interactive 3D visualizations of large scale, high resolution data from CT-scans of human cadavers. The procedure is described using examples from forensic medicine and the added value and future potential of virtual autopsies is shown from a medical and forensic perspective. Based on the technical demands of the procedure state-of-the-art volume rendering techniques are applied and refined to enable real-time, full body virtual autopsies involving gigabyte sized data on standard GPUs. The techniques applied include transfer function based data reduction using level-of-detail selection and multi-resolution rendering techniques. The paper also describes a data management component for large, out-of-core data sets and an extension to the GPU-based raycaster for efficient dual TF rendering. Detailed benchmarks of the pipeline are presented using data sets from forensic cases.

Space- and airborne SAR have a potential for providing timely information of forest storm damage. In this paper, we compare Envisat, Radarsat and CARABAS with aerial photography and field observations after a severe storm event. The spaceborne C-band images were not able to detect the storm- damaged areas due to unfavorable frequency band and coarse resolution. The airborne CARABAS VHF SAR, on the other hand, detects most storm-damaged forest areas and even partly damaged which are often not detected in the aerial photography.

This paper presents a novel unified analysis for the bit-error rate in the downlink of convolutionally coded and single-user detected multicarrier code-division multiple access (CDMA), multicarrier direct-sequence CDMA, time and frequency-domain spreading CDMA, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access. Performance is analyzed under the assumption of Hadamard spreading codes, equal-gain chip combining, and a highly correlated frequency-selective Rayleigh-fading channel. Closed-form expressions are presented for the cumulative distribution function, probability distribution function, and moment-generating function for the signal-to-noise plus interference ratio after despreading. The presented results assume error-free channel estimates, a perfectly synchronized receiver, and are found to reasonably well agree with simulation results.