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MASIF is a standard for mobile agent systems which has been adopted as an OMG technology. It is an early attempt to standardize an area of industry that, even though popular in the recent past, still has not caught on. In its short history MASIF has raised interest in industry and academia. There are already a number of projects pursuing MASIF reference implementation. MASIF addresses the interfaces between agent systems, not between agent applications and the agent system. Even though the former seem to be more relevant for application developers, it is the latter that impact interoperability between different agent systems. This paper describes two sets of interfaces that constitute MASIF: MAFAgentSystem and MAFFinder (the acronym MAF is used for historical reasons). MASIF extensively addresses security. The paper provides a brief description of MASIF and its interfaces, data types and data structures.

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SUMMARYHigh intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has been developed as a noninvasive therapeutic option. HIFU simulations are required to support the development of the HIFU device as well as the realization of noninvasive treatments. In this study, an HIFU simulator is developed that uses voxel data constructed from computed tomography scan data on the living human body and signed distance function (SDF) data to represent the object. The HIFU simulator solves the conservation equations of mass and momentum for mixtures with the equation of state for each medium. The numerical method is the finite-difference timedomain method. A high-order finite-difference method based on Lagrange interpolation is implemented to reduce numerical phase error. This approach reproduces wave propagation to an nth order of accuracy. Representation of the sound source by volume fraction, which is obtained from the SDF using a smoothed Heaviside function, provides around 1.66th order of accuracy in the spherical wave problem. As a realistic application, transcranial HIFU therapy for a brain tumor is modeled, where tissue inhomogeneity causes not only displacement of the focal point but also diffusion of the focused ultrasound. Even in such cases, focus control using phase delays, which are pre-computed based on the time-reversal procedure, enables correct focal point targeting as well as improved ultrasound focusing.

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