No abstract

The Japanese Home-health Apparatus Industrial Association is an official independent organization comprising ten departments. That concerned with home electronic sphygmomanometers, which has seven participants from different Japanese manufacturers, has already undertaken and is currently involved in various activities related to voluntary standards for performance validation and quality assurance. Because Japanese companies form a large proportion of manufacturers, these activities are important in terms of autonomic regulation. Although many improvements have been made to home electronic sphygmomanometers, some problems still remain unresolved, especially in terms of measurement reliability and easy operation by lay people. Another aspect of the department's work relates to making proposals on major validation standards, such as those of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, the British Hypertension Society and Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN). Clinical validation should be discussed in order to define a more accurate standard method of measurement using auscultation and more appropriate criteria that are unaffected by primary blood pressure variation.

An iterative inverse-scattering approach to reconstruction of electrical parameter distributions of a three-dimensional object by using time-domain field data is presented. The approach is the extension of the forward-backward time-stepping algorithm previously proposed for a two-dimensional object. Numerical examples of simulation data are given to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

II. METHODS T M NQ(p) = 1J; [;IVm(p;rn,t)-vm(rn,tWdt (I) A. FBTS ImagingIn the FBTS technique, errors between measured and simulated microwave scattering measurements are compared in the time-domain and minimized utilizing conjugate gradient optimization. For nonmagnetic inverse scattering problems, the error functional for an assumed set of electrical property parameters pis where V m (p; rn, t) describes the calculated time-domain electric field at receiving position n due to a pulse radiated by a transmitter m, and v m (rn , t) describes the corresponding measured field. Errors between simulation and measurement are summed for multiple transmitter/receiver combinations and are integrated over a time period from t = 0 to t = T. It can be shown that the gradient of this error functional with respect to p can be calculated utilizing a forward finite-difference timedomain (FDTD) computation followed by a corresponding adjoint FDTD computation in which residual received signals Abstract-Forward-backward time-stepping is a unique approach for solving electromagnetic inverse scattering problems in the time domain. In this paper, the technique is applied to a realistic, heterogeneous breast model. The ability to detect a 5-mm diameter malignancy and provide substantial quantitative information about the breast's composition is demonstrated.Index Terms-Cancer, electromagnetic scattering inverse problems, medical diagnosis, microwave imaging.

A swarm of autonomous flying robots is implemented in simulation to cooperatively gather situational awareness data during the first few hours after a major natural disaster. In computer simulations, the swarm is successful in locating over 90% of survivors in less than an hour. The swarm is controlled by new sets of reactive behaviors which are presented and evaluated. The reactive behaviors integrate collision avoidance, battery recharge, formation control, altitude maintenance, and a variety of search methods to optimize the coverage area of camera and heartbeat locator sensors mounted on the robots. The behaviors are implemented in simulation on swarms of sizes from 1 to 20 robots. The simulation uses actual location data, including post-disaster satellite imagery, real locations of damaged and inundated buildings, and realistic victim locations based on personal interviews and accounts. The results demonstrate the value of using behavior-based swarming algorithms to control autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles for post-disaster search and assessment. Three examples of algorithms that have been effective in simulation are presented.