Biomedical image analysis has become a major aspect of engineering sciences, and radiology in particular has become a dominant player in the field. Recent developments have made it possible to use biomedical imaging to view the human body from an anatomical or physiological perspective in a non-invasive fashion. Computer-aided diagnosis consists of developing algorithms and intelligent software components that can automatically process images and spot potential irregularities in the health chain.

The aim of this book is to explain the process of biomedical imaging, from image acquisition to automated diagnosis. This process consists of three thematic areas. The first is dedicated to the acquisition process and the underlying properties of images from a physics-oriented perspective. The second part addresses the dominant state-of-the-art methodologies behind content extraction and interpretation of medical images. The third section presents an application-based example, which develops solutions to address the particular needs of various diagnoses.

This complete volume is an exceptional tool for radiologists, research scientists, senior undergraduate and graduate students in health sciences and engineering, and university professors. This book offers a unique guide to the entire chain of biomedical imaging, explaining how image formation is done, and how the most appropriate algorithms are used to address demands and diagnoses.

In this remarkable collection of 22 essays, the award-winning author of The River Why braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. Photos.

Like the animal it's named for, Mac OS X Panther is beautiful, sleek, superbly efficient, dangerously alluring, and all muscle under the surface. Beneath its appealing interface, it's a hard-working machine. Those coming to Mac OS X from previous incarnations of the operating system recognize much of the friendly face of the Macintosh they're used to, but they're also plunged into a whole new world. Unix converts to Mac OS X find a familiar FreeBSD-like operating system at the core and many of the command-line applications that they're familiar with: it's like an open invitation to roll up their sleeves and hack.

"Mac OS X Panther Hacks" brings together the perfect combination of tips, tricks, and tools to help serious Mac users--regardless of their background--get the most from their machines. This revised collection reflects the real-world know how of those well-steeped in Unix history and expertise, sharing their no-nonsense, sometimes quick-and-dirty solutions to administering and taking full advantage of everything a Unix desktop has to offer: Web, Mail, and FTP serving, security services, SSH, Perl and shell scripting, compiling, configuring, scheduling, networking, and hacking. Add to that the experience of die-hard Macintosh users, customizing and modifying their hardware and software to meet their needs. The end result is cool stuff no power user should be without.

The hacks in the book range from the quick and easy to the more complex. Each can be read easily in a few minutes, saving countless hours of searching for the right answer. "Mac OS X Panther Hacks" provides direct, hands-on solutions in topics such as:

User Interface

Accessories (iPod, USB devices, mobile phones, PDAs, etc.)

Wired and wireless networking (Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.)

Email (servers and clients)

Web (servers and clients)

Messaging (iChat and associated apps)

Printing and Faxing (sharing printers, fax server, etc.)

Multimedia

If you want more than your average Mac user--you want to explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on your own--this book will set you on the right track. Written for users who need to go beyond what's covered in conventional manuals--"Mac OS X Panther Hacks" will bring your Mac to its full potential.

The ugly truth about dams is about to be revealed.  During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century’s big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.             The estimated 800,000 dams in the world can’t be blamed for destroying the earth’s entire biological inheritance, but they play an outsized role in that destruction. Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Crazy World is a kind of speed date with the history of water control -- its dams, diversions and canals, and just as importantly, the politics and power that evolved with them. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in an arid world—growing increasingly arid under the ravages of climate chaos—is well beyond the benefits furnished. Success stories from Patagonia and the Blue Heart of Europe point to a possible future where rivers run free and the earth restores itself. 

Reflecting the revival of interest in a social theory that takes place and space seriously, this book focuses on geographical place in the practice of social science and history. There is significant interest among scholars from a range of disciplines in bringing together the geographical and sociological 'imaginations'. The geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one, concerned with determining the nature of places, and classifying them and the links between them. The sociological imagination aspires to explanation of human activities in terms of abstract social processes. The chapters in this book focus on both the intellectual histories of the concept of place and on its empirical uses. They show that place is as important for understanding contemporary America as it is for 18th-century Sri Lanka. They also show how the concept can provide insight into 'old' problems such as the nature of social life in Renaissance Florence and Venice. The editors are leading exponents of the view of place as a concept that can 'mediate' the geographical and sociological imaginations.

Writes of Passage explores the interplay between a system of "othering" which travelers bring to a place, and the "real" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, Duncan and Gregory and a team of leading internationa contributors focus primarily upon travelers from the 18th and 19th Centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - wit the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece.

Edward Said's oft cited claim that Orientalists past and present have spun imaginary geographies where they sought ground truth, has launched a plethora of studies of fictive geographies. Representations often reveal more about the culture of the writer than that of the people and places written about. Yet the study of imaginary geographies has raised many questions about Western writers' abilities to provide representations of foreign places; there is now much interest in Western mis-representations of places (imaginary geographies). This text explores the interplay between a system of "othering" which travellers bring to a place, and the "real" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, James Duncan and Derek Gregory and a team of international contributors focus primarily upon travellers from the 18th and 19th centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - with the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece. This book presents a unique contribution from geographers - with their sensit

Reflecting the revival of interest in a social theory that takes place and space seriously, this book focuses on geographical place in the practice of social science and history. There is significant interest among scholars from a range of disciplines in bringing together the geographical and sociological 'imaginations'. The geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one, concerned with determining the nature of places, and classifying them and the links between them. The sociological imagination aspires to explanation of human activities in terms of abstract social processes. The chapters in this book focus on both the intellectual histories of the concept of place and on its empirical uses. They show that place is as important for understanding contemporary America as it is for 18th-century Sri Lanka. They also show how the concept can provide insight into 'old' problems such as the nature of social life in Renaissance Florence and Venice. The editors are leading exponents of the view of place as a concept that can 'mediate' the geographical and sociological imaginations.

We are pleased to present this set of peer-reviewed papers from the ?rst MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support. The MICCAI conference has been the ?agship conference for the m- ical imaging community re?ecting the state of the art in techniques of segm- tation, registration, and robotic surgery. Yet, the transfer of these techniques to clinical practice is rarely discussed in the MICCAI conference. To address this gap, we proposed to hold this workshop with MICCAI in London in September 2009. The goal of the workshop was to show the application of content-based retrieval in clinical decision support. With advances in electronic patient record systems, a large number of pre-diagnosed patient data sets are now bec- ing available. These data sets are often multimodal consisting of images (x-ray, CT, MRI), videos and other time series, and textual data (free text reports and structuredclinicaldata). Analyzing thesemultimodalsourcesfordisease-speci?c information across patients can reveal important similarities between patients and hence their underlying diseases and potential treatments. Researchers are now beginning to use techniques of content-based retrieval to search for disea- speci?c information in modalities to ?nd supporting evidence for a disease or to automatically learn associations of symptoms and diseases. Benchmarking frameworks such as ImageCLEF (Image retrieval track in the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum) have expanded over the past ?ve years to include large m- ical image collections for testing various algorithms for medical image retrieval and classi?cation.

When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a time when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes, nothing is ordinary. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to the glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size or renown, and brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." In a time when wonder seems to be in short supply, Your One Wild and Precious Life, Doyle and Duncan invite readers to experience it in the most ordinary of moments, and allow themselves joy in the smallest of things.

The 8th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2005, was held in Palm Springs, California, USA, at the Riviera Resort, October 26-29, 2005. MICCAIhasbecomeapremierinternationalconferencewithin-depthpapers on the multidisciplinary ?elds of medical image computing, computer-assisted interventionandmedicalrobotics. Theconferencebringstogetherclinicians,b- logicalscientists, computer scientists, engineers,physicists and other researchers and o?ers them a forum to exchange ideas in these exciting and rapidly growing ?elds. The impact of MICCAI increases each year and the quality and quantity of submitted papers this year was very impressive. We received a record 632 full submissions (8 pages in length), an increase of 22% from 2004, from 36 di?erent countries and 5 continents (see ?g. 2). Based on a decision of the MICCAI board, this year's conference employed a double-blind review procedure on a trial basis. Our Program Committee was made up of 11 area chairs, each of whom supervised the review of almost 60 papers. Four reviews were generated for each paper from 262 reviewers and the area chairs. A ?nal paper selection meeting took place during two days in early June 2005 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We are especially grateful to Elizabeth Bullitt, Polina Golland, David Haynor, Rasmus Larsen, Greg Hager and Daniel Ruc .. kert, who attended this meetingandhelpedusmakethe?nalselections. MartinStynerprovidedvaluable help with information management and the Web-site, and James Stewart is acknowledgedforreliableandtimelysupportoftheWeb-basedreviewingsystem. Wearegratefultoeveryonewhoparticipatedinthe reviewprocess;theydonated a large amount of time and e?ort to make these volumes possible and insure a highlevelofquality.