University of Patras

About: University of Patras is a education organization based out in Pátrai, Greece. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Catalysis. The organization has 13372 authors who have published 31263 publications receiving 677159 citations. The organization is also known as: Panepistímio Patrón.

Breast Cancer Diagnosis: Analyzing Texture of Tissue Surrounding Microcalcifications

Abstract: The current study investigates texture properties of the tissue surrounding microcalcification (MC) clusters on mammograms for breast cancer diagnosis. The case sample analyzed consists of 85 dense mammographic images, originating from the digital database for screening mammography. mammograms analyzed contain 100 subtle MC clusters (46 benign and 54 malignant). The tissue surrounding MCs is defined on original and wavelet decomposed images, based on a redundant discrete wavelet transform. Gray-level texture and wavelet coefficient texture features at three decomposition levels are extracted from surrounding tissue regions of interest (ST-ROIs). Specifically, gray-level first-order statistics, gray-level cooccurrence matrices features, and Lawspsila texture energy measures are extracted from original image ST-ROIs. Wavelet coefficient first-order statistics and wavelet coefficient cooccurrence matrices features are extracted from subimages ST-ROIs. The ability of each feature set in differentiating malignant from benign tissue is investigated using a probabilistic neural network. Classification outputs of most discriminating feature sets are combined using a majority voting rule. The proposed combined scheme achieved an area under receiver operating characteristic curve (Az) of 0.989. Results suggest that MCspsila ST texture analysis can contribute to computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer.

Masonry confinement with fiber-reinforced polymers

Abstract: The application of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) as a means of increasing the axial capacity of masonry through confinement, a subject not addressed before, is investigated in this study. Four series of uniaxial compression tests, with a total of 42 specimens, were conducted on model masonry columns with these variables: number of layers, radius at the corners, cross-section aspect ratio, and type of fibers. It is concluded that, in general, FRP-confined masonry behaves very much like FRP-confined concrete. Confinement increases both the load-carrying capacity and the deformability of masonry almost linearly with the average confining stress. The uniaxial compression test results enabled the development of a simple confinement model for strength and ultimate strain of FRP-confined masonry. This model is consistent with the test results obtained here but should attract further experimental verification in the future to account for types of masonry materials other than those used in this study.