A numerical model for describing bipolar charge transport and storage in polyethylene has been developed recently. The present paper proposes a comparison of the model outputs with experimental data in three different direct current (DC) voltage application protocols (step field increase and polarization/depolarization schemes). Three kinds of measurement have been realized for the three different protocols: space charge distribution using the pulsed electro-acoustic method, external current and electroluminescence. Simulation under AC stress has also been attempted on the basis of the model parameters that were derived from the DC case. Model limitations and possible improvements are discussed.

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The mechanisms of charge injection, transport and trapping in low-density, high-density and cross-linked polyethylene (LDPE, HDPE and XLPE) are investigated in this paper through charging-discharging current measurements and space-charge observations. The conductivity of LDPE is much larger than that of XLPE and HDPE. The threshold for space-charge accumulation and that for a space-charge-limited current mechanism, coinciding for the same material, are almost identical for LDPE and HDPE, while the threshold of XLPE is higher. However, HDPE accumulates more charge than the other two materials. The depolarization space-charge curves and the conduction current versus field characteristics indicate that the mobility of LDPE is larger than that of XLPE and HDPE, which supports the significant difference in conductivity. The lower mobility, as well as the nature, depth and density of trap sites, can explain the difference in space-charge accumulation and thresholds.

The classification of 3 common breast lesions, fibroadenomas, cysts, and cancers, was achieved using computerized image analysis of tumor shape in conjunction with patient age. The process involved the digitization of 69 mammographic images using a video camera and a commercial frame grabber on a PC-based computer system. An interactive segmentation procedure identified the tumor boundary using a thresholding technique which successfully segmented 57% of the lesions. Several features were chosen based on the gross and fine shape describing properties of the tumor boundaries as seen on the radiographs. Patient age was included as a significant feature in determining whether the tumor was a cyst, fibroadenoma, or cancer and was the only patient history information available for this study. The concept of a radial length measure provided a basis from which 6 of the 7 shape describing features were chosen, the seventh being tumor circularity. The feature selection process was accomplished using linear discriminant analysis and a Euclidean distance metric determined group membership. The effectiveness of the classification scheme was tested using both the apparent and the leaving-one-out test methods. The best results using the apparent test method resulted in correctly classifying 82% of the tumors segmented using the entire feature space and the highest classification rate using the leaving-one-out test method was 69% using a subset of the feature space. The results using only the shape descriptors, and excluding patient age resulted in correctly classifying 72% using the entire feature space (except age), and 51% using a subset of the feature space.

Propagation in random media is a topic of great interest, whose application fields include, among others, the so-called last mile problem as well as the modeling of dense urban area radio communication channels. In this paper, a simple scenario for this issue is considered, with an optical-ray propagation across a medium of disordered lossless scatterers. The propagation medium behaves like a percolating lattice and the goal is to characterize statistically the propagation depth in the medium as a function of the density q of scatterers and of -the ray incidence angle. To the best of our knowledge, this approach is totally new. The problem is mathematically formulated as a random walk and the solutions are based on the theory of the martingale random processes. The obtained (approximate) analytical formulas have been validated by means of numerical simulations, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed model for a wide range of the global parameters q and . We believe that our results may constitute a promising first step toward the solution of more complicated propagation models and a wide class of communication problems.Index Terms-Last mile problem, propagation in random media, urban area communications.